Books like Sorcery of Thorns

“Doors are very powerful things. Things are different on either side of them”’

I love this quote. There’s nothing like the threshold of a door when it comes to story magic! It’s steeped in tradition since long before Roman times. And Diana Wynne Jones is the underrated Queen of this whimsical genre. Her words flow so beautifully, and not only that, her characters are the cutest. I fell in love with Calcifer, the little fire demon, and the headstrong Sophie. 

In this series, the paladins are generally noble, honest, and wholesome – they are paladins, after all, even if their god is dead. But I don’t read these books for the paladins. What I most adore are the backdrop machinations of the Temple of the White Rat, a religious order interested in saving the world in the most sensible of all ways: with lawyers, doctors, social workers, and a sound understanding of economics.

At least once per book, the delightful – and very, dangerously practical–Bishop Beartongue will turn up to throw a wrench into events, and it delights me every time. I hope she gets her own book someday. Even if she doesn’t, I will continue to eat up this series like the most scrumptious chocolates.

I immediately loved this book for its alternate history, detailed folklore, and dark academic vibes. I connected with the complex characters and a strong female protagonist who was fearless of social expectations. The unique combination of folklore and an archaeology background that I share with the author Heather Fawcett was something I found familiarity with instantly.

I enjoyed the alternate history where dark academia met with the more traditional Gaslamp-style fantasy fiction to create something new. This combination of dark academia, marginalized voices, and alternate history is a style I enjoy delving into the past in new, unusual ways and revealing voices that otherwise remain unheard.  

This book should perhaps be classified as sci-fi, but hear me out: the bulk of this novella follows two characters, one who is technically supernatural (we just happen to call him an alien), as they break out of captivity and quest through a forest. That’s fantasy enough for me, and the syrupy sweetness of these two can overcome any hesitation over on-page, spacey jargon.

I’ve never read a book that so wholly gets into the head of a non-human species as this, and it also had me cracking up the entire time. Simmi, the alien in question, is a germaphobe, to put it lightly, but his partner in escaping, Aurora, is patient and kind with him, and the love that blossoms between them is kick-your-feet delightful.

This was a fun, quirky story with a captivating point-of-view character.

The story seamlessly wove together the magic of djinnis into a historical setting. The magic was interesting, though very simple: all magic came from djinnis, and magicians (humans) only had magic by controlling the djinnis.

Yet the story itself was hardly simple, and the society of djinnis and magicians was creative and brought history to life in a whole new way. One of the point-of-view characters is a djinni, Bartimaeus, and I loved his humorous narration the most.

The novel is the first in a series, and I’ve of course read the other books and would recommend them all!

The richness and depth of Cornish’s Half-Continent world are just amazing! I get the feeling that, like Tolkien, the author has spent a whole lifetime developing and living in this world before he ever thought of turning it into a novel.

Skolds, fulgars, the dark trades, gastrines, rever-men, gaulding, cruor, Cathar’s Treacle–the inventions just keep coming and coming. As real as if they’d always been there! And the language that goes with them is equally wonderful—Cornish’s love of words is on a par with Tolkien! For the sake of the story, Book 2, Lamplighter is a must-read—I loved the big reveal the whole story’s been leading up to.

I loved the medieval-type fight scenes in this series.

From knights in armor fighting from horseback to longbow experts using deadly archery skills to large battles with lots of cool tactics, this series has all that. It was clear to me that Flanagan did his homework or had some prior knowledge of this stuff, and that made all the fight scenes feel really authentic and credible, while still serving the story and not detracting from it.

I loved seeing how the characters have to learn to wield these weapons and watching them improve over time, then seeing them apply what they’ve learned in battle. 

This quiet and strange fairy tale is one of my favorite escape reads. I first read it while I was in high school, and it so accurately captured my own youthful confusion, my own reluctance to separate dreams from reality, that I felt a deep relief.

Another masterclass in storytelling, with lush worldbuilding and wonderfully awkward characters, the prose here is lyrical and sensory. Sand and tangled hair and the cold slap of waves. When I encountered them again, after moving to coastal Virginia, they felt familiar because I had already encountered them in this book.

To me, what’s most striking about this book, a queer retelling of “Snow White,” is that in addition to the POV of the Snow White character, Lynet, there’s also narration from Mina, the Evil Queen insert. Only in this retelling Mina isn’t a superficial villain.

In fact, she’s no villain at all. I find her to be a complex heroine, and her relationship with Lynet is equally rich and complicated. I was compelled by Lynet and Mina’s struggles under the weight of feminine and royal expectations. Despite their conflicts, they are more alike than they are different, and their journey to realizing this was so satisfying.

The sapphic romance between Lynet and a surgeon provides a lovely subplot that adds to, rather than distracts from, the main storyline. One of my all-time favorite sapphic retellings.

I thought this would be a typical thief turned rebel leader story, but this book really surprised me. The world is utterly unique, and the magic system adds a lot of humor with sentient keys and locks, literally arguing the laws of physics on whether to open it or not.

There’s a cool heist to go along with, as well as fun, diverse characters, but it was really the unique blend of science and magic that captivated me. The magic feels ancient, but there’s a razor-sharpness in how it’s implemented that is as exacting as any scientific discipline.