For generations, in the world of this fun if familiar arranged-marriage romantasy from Kova (A Dance with the Fae Prince), one human queen has been chosen from among the young women in the town of Capton and sent to the elven lands to ensure the balance of magic. Luella, Capton’s only trained healer, feels she owes the town everything after the locals came together to send her to school. To pay them back, she’s hard at work trying to find a cure for the withering sickness known as the Weakness that is decimating Capton’s population. When the elf delegation arrives to claim their queen, almost everyone is shocked when they choose Luella and she must return with the elves to their land. There are hints of the Hades and Persephone myth in this setup, which Kova uses to great effect as she dives into Luella’s struggle to balance her newfound role with her deeply held values and lingering desire to do right by her people. Her blossoming relationship with the king, Eldas, is built on mutual discovery and respect as the pair work together to rebalance the worlds despite politics and generational trauma. The plot is fairly predictable, but Kova’s delicious attention to detail and elegant characterization keep the pages turning. The author’s fans will not be disappointed. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 03/06/2026 | Details & Permalink

Drawing from mythology and Elizabethan literature, Christopoulou’s ambitious but somewhat overwrought debut offers a muddled melange of romance and redemption. The heroines are two of drama’s most virulent criminals: Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth, who helped her husband murder his way to the Scottish throne, and Klytemnestra, whom Aeschylus showed rewarding her husband’s return from Troy by butchering him in his bathtub. After these canonical killings, Shakespeare’s weird sisters, here revealed to be one and the same as the Fates of Greek mythology, summon both women, now going by Anassa and Claret, respectively, and set them on a quest to save their souls by protecting innocents like Helen of Troy and Ophelia from meeting their tragic fates. After narrowly avoiding killing each other, the antiheroines fall into rapturous love as they travel as “partner[s] in penance” through shadowy realms of intersecting stories, encountering classic characters and overcoming sinister wraiths sent by the Mistress of the House of Books. Christopoulou packs her leads’ lightly episodic adventure, told in alternating first person, with classical allusions but doesn’t engage particularly deeply with her source material. The result is inconsistent characterization and occasionally clunky prose, especially in the dissonance between generally effective descriptive passages and jarringly contemporary-feeling dialogue. (At one point, Claret instructs Anassa to “Keep it together please” while Anassa bemoans “I’m such an idiot.”) Readers in it for the romance may be pleased, but others will long for more depth. (May)

Reviewed on 03/06/2026 | Details & Permalink

Hairston (Archangels of Funk) mixes a serial killer investigation with elements of urban fantasy and sci-fi to create a cozy, magical, and strikingly unique concoction. She pits a quirky cast—headlined by cleaner and aspiring detective Paula B. Queenie, podcaster An’qwenique Robinsin, and multiverse-traveling St. Bernard/poodle mix Oona—against a mysterious villain targeting a “necklace of picturesque New England towns.” Paula opens the story musing that “everybody is entangled in miracles and mysteries,” and Hairston demonstrates this aptly over the ingeniously constructed first section of the book. It toggles between Paula and An’qwenique, narrating from “today” and “yesterday,” respectively, as a neighbor is murdered and An’qwenique and many others become stranded at the mysterious Redemption Center, a crumbling mansion, with seemingly no way out. Oona and her magic red wagon lead everyone back to the where they belong, but not before the killer strikes again. Hairston balances a phantasmagoria of mystical and interdimensional elements with a cast of sharply drawn characters, creating very real-feeling people moving through a delightfully irreal world. The result is a lively and lovely tale of community triumphing over evil. (May)

Reviewed on 03/06/2026 | Details & Permalink

The six sapphic tales of the supernatural in this anthology from Berman (editor of Final Curtain) feature consistently inventive plots but inconsistent writing. Ivy James delivers a second chance enemies-to-lovers romance in the plotty but rushed “Witch Touched,” as two feuding young witches reunite in search of a missing friend. In the familiar-feeling postapocalyptic America of Mia Dalia’s impactful “A Witch to Live,” a lonely folk healer must choose between her first love and the only family she’s ever known. An urban legend takes on new meaning in Audrey R. Hollis’s “Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary” when a young girl seeks connection with a historically misunderstood woman in the mirror. The remaining stories are somewhat less successful: Berman’s creepy and out of place “D Is for Delicious” delves into cannibalism; L.A. Fields’s unfocused “Hex en Pointe” follows a teenager seeking love and purpose at her combination ballet conservatory and witch training school; and the time skips in Joachim Heijndermans’s “It Not Being So Would Be Crazier” make its central monster-witch love story jarring. There are plenty of moments of quirky charm throughout, but as a whole this fails to coalesce. (May)

Reviewed on 03/06/2026 | Details & Permalink

Beckbessinger follows Girls of Little Hope with a darkly entertaining feminist satire that finds 44-year-old Londoner Ellie experiencing hot flashes, brain fog, and mysterious new body hair. A diagnosis of perimenopause adds stress to her life as she oversees the launch of a mental health app that delivers soothing meditation recordings. She’s stunned when she’s passed over for promotion and incensed when the “literal clown” of a new CEO takes credit for her ideas for the app. As the same time, she must care for the people around her, including her daughter, who has anorexia; her father-in-law, who has dementia; and her out-of-work brother. She pushes down her frustration and rage in the face of it all until the night of a full moon when she sprouts fangs, claws, and fur. In a parallel plot, 82-year-old curmudgeon Brenda finds her cat Melek—“the last living creature on this earth who’d have noticed if [she] was gone”—torn apart by the teeth of a huge animal and sets out to catch his killer. Despite a somewhat slow start, this tale of women’s rage against societal marginalization builds to a satisfying and bloody end, with Beckbessinger using the tropes of werewolf horror to provide her tough-as-nails heroines with a sense of power, retribution, and gratification. This has bite. (May.)

Reviewed on 02/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

Reality television goes galactic in Branham’s thrilling sapphic sci-fi debut. After poverty-stricken trash collector Artemis Ialan has an unfortunate public run-in with the prince and princess of the Expan empire, she’s invited to appear on Love Galaxy, a reality dating show that matches royals and others high in the empirical hierarchy with important people from other systems in the empire, like a diplomatic—and deeply propagandistic—version of The Bachelor. The prince, Nix, has taken a liking to Artemis, and the princess, Spielan, offers her a massive payout to join the contestants vying for his hand, money that could drastically improve Artemis’s circumstances and potentially save her mother’s life. As one of the few contestants from the fringe systems, Artemis has no idea what to expect from the show and quickly finds herself in over her head. When a fellow contestant turns up dead, it’s all she can do to stay afloat while dealing with a killer on the loose, intergalactic intrigue, and the combined attention of both royal heirs. Branham does a fantastic job weaving seemingly disparate threads together. The murder mystery is fairly clued and the antagonistic attraction that emerges between Ellie and Spielan feels real and heated. Fans of science fiction with a romantic edge should snap this up. (May)

Reviewed on 02/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

A meditation on morality and mortality, this sharp speculative WWII drama from Hugo Award winner Nayler (Tusks of Extinction) pits four young refugees against a host of hostiles, with their only aid coming from a murder of hyperintelligent crows. Neriya, a Jewish girl whose family summers in the Lithuanian countryside, is led away from the village by her best friend, Buster the crow, to escape the oncoming German invasion. Joining her in the woods are Czeslaw, a Polish man who defected from the Russian army; Kezia, a Roma woman who witnessed the murder of her family; and a nonspeaking young boy whose name the others do not know. Together, they try to survive in the forest despite the seesaw battles of frontline soldiers and backwoods partisans, relying on one another’s skills and help from their unexpected avian allies. Nayler weaves a tapestry of resilience and resistance as intricate and well-constructed as the braided twigs of a crow’s nest. In his compassionate hands, the distinction between human and animal blurs as, together, both groups thrive better than either could alone. It’s an impassioned paean to togetherness even in the midst of the chaotic isolation of war and to the power of storytelling to keep memory and hope alive. Agent: Seth Fishman, Gernert Co. (May)

Reviewed on 02/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

This brilliant space opera from Lee (Untethered Sky) instantly immerses readers on the planet of Aquilo, whose population is divided between the reunionists, who believe all energy should be devoted to connecting with any other surviving humans, and the terraformists, who want to prioritize making Aquilo habitable. At present, surviving Aquilo’s atmosphere is only possible within a huge enclosed structure that retains oxygen and heat. Anyone deemed unnecessary is “retired,” or cast out beyond the protective airshield to die. Against this harsh backdrop, Isthmus Isako is a corporate samurai under exclusive contract to Forest Greves, a leader of the reunionists. It’s Isako’s job to inform Greves’s employees when they need to retire. But after Greves voluntarily retires himself as a gesture of protest against his rivals, Isako’s fate is uncertain. She’s given a chance to continue working—and living—by Savannah Minto, Greves’s triumphant opponent, though the opportunity comes with a catch. Lee enhances her vivid worldbuilding and riveting plot with evocative prose (“Freeday dawns crisp and cold, the sky a pale blue gray like the sclera of an anemic eyeball”). The story stands alone, but readers will be left hoping for future visits to this gorgeously crafted world. (May)

Reviewed on 02/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

Van Os’s equally eerie and tender first novel is a smart and off-kilter exploration of survival and queer intimacy. Through journal entries, a young woman named Ava describes how her hiking trip with office mates Chad and Megan goes slowly, catastrophically wrong. Several months later, Savannah, who has a long history of psychiatric hospitalizations, the last of which was prompted by a traumatic rift with her friend Michelle, awakens from a blackout next to Ava’s dead body and journal in the woods. Savannah begins to fantasize about Ava as she was when she was alive, reconstructing her personality through her journal, social media posts, and finally as a strangely corporeal ghost. Savannah is positioned as a classically unreliable narrator, whose version of events is interspersed with increasingly desperate entries from Ava’s notebook. Van Os skillfully captures the rising panic of getting lost in the woods, calling to mind survival horror like The Blair Witch Project and Yellowjackets, while her gloopy, visceral descriptions of decay are reminiscent of the kind of bodily unease relished by Ottesha Moshfegh. In spite of their grim circumstances, the characters are endearing, their queer relationships characterized by overwhelming compassion and leavened by a gentle dark humor. This is sure to win van Os many fans. (May)

Reviewed on 02/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

A far-future gang attempts an interstellar museum heist in this crafty sci-fi novella from Tanzer (Creatures of Charm and Hunger). Led by Tarquin Lennox, a wealthy human man affiliated with Earth’s last corporation, the crew also includes Arakachi Misora, “a set of sextuplets folded into a single body” acting as the team’s muscle; Jack Kirby, a powerful machine intelligence there to interface with the computer systems; Tchick-tchick, the insect-like alien hive mind captaining their space craft; and Fennel Tycho, Jack’s former attaché and the tale’s first-person narrator. Their mission: to liberate six masterpieces of Earth art from a distant Celerian museum and replace them with exact copies. In the 21st century, humanity allowed the Celerians to temporarily safeguard these pieces in exchange for technological solutions to Earth’s “multifarious” problems, but the aliens subsequently refused to return them. The mission gets off to a rocky start when the team learns they no longer have corporate support—Tarquin has gone rogue. As they forge ahead, Fennel recounts the wacky sequence of events that brought her and humanity to this point, complicating the otherwise straightforward adventure with poignant observations about the significance of original art and art history. This bite-size romp is a wild and thought-provoking ride. (May)

Reviewed on 02/27/2026 | Details & Permalink