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The Bitter Twins by Jen Williams

I’ve long been a fan of Jen Williams’ fantasy writing. She creates interesting worlds with characters who positively ooze character. That said, her second and current series, The Winnowing Flame, hasn’t captured my imagination as much as The Copper Cat, but that’s ...

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Blood of Assassins by RJ Barker

Blood of Assassins by RJ Barker

Age of Assassins was one of my favourite books of last year. It had everything you could want: great characters, tense mystery storyline, political machinations of the most Machiavellian kind… The question is whether debut author RJ Barker could sustain the ...

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Planetfall by Emma Newman

Planetfall by Emma Newman

I found Planetfall to be a confounding read. At first, I struggled to get into it and had some issues with the prose. Then I found I loved it, but still questioned the pacing. Leading up to the ending, I could not ...

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Genre Fiction and the Middlebrow

Literary fiction awards rarely go to works of science fiction and fantasy. We review a lot of genre fiction on Pop-Verse. Mainly science fiction and fantasy. These books might be lauded in their own fields but are, with some exception, ...

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Appreciating art without contextual bias

A Wrinkle in Time

When I was ten or so, my mother bought me the classic children’s book A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle. It sat on my shelf for twenty years. But with the film coming out in a few months, I decided it ...

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The Black River Chronicles: Level One

Black River Chronicles: Level One

If you enjoy Dungeons and Dragons and/or sword and sorcery stories, you should be reading The Black River Chronicles. The young adult series follows four students at an adventurer’s academy, where – you guessed it – they are all separated into ...

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Firestorm by Lucy Hounsom

Firestorm by Lucy Hounsom

I love discovering a fantasy series on my own – one that I come to without the influence of hype or expectations. It is rare these days, but it does happen. For me, this was Hounsom’s Worldmaker Trilogy, which has ...

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