Posted by Tale of the Four Winds by Scott Kay
The story kicks off with a genuinely compelling hook: the Archangel Michael executing a group of angels who have transgressed against humanity by teaching them forbidden acts. While Michael didn’t intend to reduce his kin to ash, the consequences are disastrous; as the ashes fall to Earth, any unsuspecting human who gets hit with the ash transforms into monsters.
We follow the main character, Joshua, as he realizes he’s actually a witch who descends from a long line of witches and his magic is just waking up. I’d say Josh is a pretty easy character to root for, he’s a decent dude who tries to do what’s right, and has been dealt a bad hand at life with all the loss he’s suffered.
However, I struggled a little with the pacing. Plot points and characters moved across the pages so rapidly that it became difficult to engage and care about what was going on. The protagonist’s backstory is delivered so quickly that I didn’t have a moment to connect with any of it — within the first few pages, we learn his father went to prison for killing a man in a bar fight, his mother abandoned them before dying of cancer, and the aunt who raised him passed away as well. Because these life-altering events are “told” in quick succession rather than “shown” through the narrative, it takes a while to feel truly invested in the characters.
That said, this book offers something for everyone—there are angels, demons, vampires, necromancers, and more. It’s an ambitious mix that will especially appeal to readers who enjoy stories centered on “found family” and the slow process of healing from trauma.
Curse of the Claimed by Slater Hamilton
This was just chaos from the start. I mean honest to god we have pirates on solar-powered surfboards in the first chapter. Lol, excuse me? The world was very ocean-focused, as you’d expect, with a lot of water-related magics, the language and diction of the people were all very water-based as well, with “drowned” being used as a curse word. This book also uses one of my favorite world-building delivery systems if you have a lot of details to tell me, but it doesn’t fit neatly into the world in a natural kind of way — give me short snippets of history at the start of a chapter. It keeps it out of the dialogue and keeps things flowing in the scene so we don’t have to stop and get a history lesson.
There’s a mixed lore/mythos in this book as well, which is neat; there are clear nods to German lore but also some Greek mythos going on as well. There’s an element of cyberpunk as well with this being set in a more modern type of world, where there are also pirates, so there’s just a LOT going on!
If this sounds good to you, I’d recommend picking it up — bear in mind this is a pirate book and so violence and gore apply!
The Fifth Branch by Kate Samuels
This is another modern era book; I seem to have gotten a bunch of those this year! This one is about a Canadian exchange student, Marlene, who lives at a magical university and has roommates… but this can be a low-key dangerous situation, these roommates don’t always label their experiments in the fridge. This became problematic when she went to boil an egg and ended up hatching a dragon. In this world, dragons aren’t rare, so this shouldn’t have been that big of a deal. However, it’s not just any dragon; it’s a rare red dragon. One of those hasn’t been hatched in hundreds of years, and at first, the girls were super stoked that they were clearly going to pass their class, but things turned sour when the red dragon became of interest to everyone in Wales. It turns out he’s going to be bought and sold by the highest bidders, and this doesn’t sit right with the girls that hatched him, since they’re worried about his level of care… so they try to go on the run with him.
This was a fun light read, but it didn’t have enough oomph to bump one of my semifinalists off the top spot. I’d recommend this to folks who like dragons, college aged shenanigan’s and adventures, and animal-rights focused MCs 🙂