Jacqueline Carey, author of the fantasy classic Kushiel’s Dart, weds her lyrical prose to one of Shakespeare’s most enigmatic plays in Miranda and Caliban. This haunting tale of innocence, sensuality and rebellion tells the story of the vengeful magician Prospero’s daughter, Miranda, and his servant, Caliban, before the events of The Tempest.

The novel begins when Prospero forces Caliban into his service. Miranda, still a young girl, quickly takes to Caliban, helping her father in his efforts to “civilize” him. As the narrative draws ever closer to the events of Shakespeare’s play, Miranda and Caliban struggle to define their lives outside of the roles preordained for them.

Carey clearly has great respect and affection for Shakespeare’s work, but is unafraid to engage with the text from a modern perspective. The corroding effects of colonialism and vengeance, themes that ran under the surface of the original play, have immediate and heartbreaking effects here. The world of Prospero’s island is as rich and vital as it is harsh and unforgiving, and Carey deftly navigates the growing maturity of her two main characters, imbuing the pivotal moments in Miranda and Caliban’s development with shocking beauty and deeply felt emotion.

Revisions and retellings of Shakespeare’s plays are frequent, but Carey reshapes The Tempest with an uncommon grace and startling clarity. She understands the devastating impact choices, no matter how innocent, can make.

This article was originally published in the February 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Drew Magary is a popular columnist for the sports blog Deadspin and correspondent for publications such as GQ. A recent study by the creators of Read It Later revealed his entertaining, brash articles as some of the most saved and shared across the web. His 2011 novel, The Postmortal, expanded his fan base by introducing him to the science fiction community. With his second novel, things get even stranger.

As a longtime fan of anything unusual and “weird,” I can easily conclude that The Hike is among the strangest books I have ever had the pleasure of reading. It begins normally enough: Our protagonist Ben checks into a hotel room for a business meeting and expects to be back in the arms of his loving family the next day. Of course, this doesn’t occur, and readers are sent along with Ben into the colorful (and sometimes horrific) imagination of Magary.

Ben starts walking a path, one that is as metaphorical as it is physical: a nightmarish fever dream of a quest that he must complete before being rewarded with a return to his former life. Styled after early video games and fantasy role-playing, the plot is generous with nods to its inspirational material. Fans of fantasy gaming will find something about which to smile knowingly on almost every page, but the book will appeal to any lover of colorful characters or an adventure stories. There are certainly deeper themes worthy of examination as well—questions of what is an “afterlife,” and just how much control humanity truly has over its own destiny.

While reading, I found myself repeatedly asking, “What the heck just happened?” before I took a moment to re-read, process and then accept that yes—this crazy thing had indeed just happened. True to its nature, the story stays unpredictable and weird right up to the climax. Magary’s book is a love letter to fans of gaming, fantasy and adventure, but above all, to open-minded readers who can relax and hang on for the ride.

Hidden in a warehouse, far removed from the trenches of war, Ginger Stuyvesant is holding hands with her circle and taking the final report from a soldier just returned from the front. The young private is relaying positions of the German artillery as he last saw them—just before the rounds from those guns killed him. It's 1916, and England has recruited Ginger and her fellow mediums as a formidable intelligence-gathering force, collecting postmortem reports from soldiers killed on the front lines. The Spirit Corps is England's secret weapon that is turning the tide of war in their favor.

The duty of communicating with the flood of souls reporting in before they pass beyond the veil is grim and exhausting, but Ginger finds refuge after hours with her fiancé, Capt. Benjamin Hartshorne, who is stationed near Spirit Corp operations. When Benjamin confides to Ginger that the Germans may have discovered the existence of the Spirit Corps, she fears the days are numbered for keeping their operation a secret. Her suspicions are confirmed when the murder of a soldier in camp reveals a German plot to discover the Spirit Corps' methods. When catastrophe soon follows, Ginger is propelled on a harrowing journey to the trenches of war to uncover the true nature of the enemy's mission against her and her fellow sensitives . . . and to resolve dangerously unfinished business.

Armed with three Hugo awards as well as multiple top-drawer accolades for her storytelling, Mary Robinette Kowal has knack for deftly integrating flavors of the fantastic into historical reality. This strength is highlighted as Kowal contrasts the honest perspective of departing souls, spirits unencumbered by convention, against the rigid military landscape and social hierarchies of the era. Ghost Talkers draws the reader through the shadows of death, into a world where service to your country sometimes extends beyond the grave.

Outcasts alienated by their peers, Patricia Delfine and Laurence Armstead found each other in junior high, forming a tenuous friendship. Patricia was a budding witch and Laurence was a tech whiz, successfully developing a two-second time machine and a potentially sentient computer. But after a painful parting of ways, the two assumed they would never see each other again.

Reunited unexpectedly as adults living in San Francisco, the pair discover they both now use their talents for the same cause: working to save the planet, each in their own way. Patricia attended a hidden academy for the world’s magically gifted and now works with a group of magicians to secretly fix the world’s problems, while Laurence is an engineering genius who works with a group trying to avert global catastrophe by technological intervention. Despite their separate paths, Patricia and Laurence keep being pushed together. Little do they realize that something bigger than either of them is determined to force them to work together to save the world.

Author Charlie Jane Anders, editor-in-chief of io9.com, seamlessly melds science fiction and fantasy in All the Birds in the Sky. Anders’ debut novel, Choir Boy, won the 2006 Lambda Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Edmund White Award. In All the Birds in the Sky, Anders adeptly twines magic, surrealism, technological innovation and machinery into a quirky story that, at its base, is about searching for common ground in a world of differences.

This article was originally published in the February 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Time and space are as fluid as water in Keith Lee Morris’ labyrinthine third novel, his first since 2008’s brutal The Dart League King. This time, a family road trip goes awry in the small town of Good Night, Idaho thanks to a hotel that rivals The Shining’s, a book with which Travelers Rest will inevitably be compared, though there are more definitive answers here.

The Addison family—mother, father, son and alcoholic uncle—are driving from Seattle to South Carolina when a snowstorm forces them to look for lodging in Good Night. The eponymous hotel, Travelers Rest, was once a palatial second home for the town’s high society, but fell into disrepair when the local mines dried up decades ago. After checking into the hotel, the Addisons quickly become separated in ways that are hard to describe, thanks to the shifting nature of time, space, memory, and dream in Good Night. The town is a lot like that grand staircase in Hogwarts, always rearranging itself depending on who enters and what they want.

Tonio, the father, wanders outside in the snow and follows a strange woman in silver shoes. Julia, the mother, finds an oddly familiar room on the third floor with an open roof, where she’s content to lie down and dream. Robbie, the uncle fresh out of rehab, bolts for the bar across the street, where he can’t tell if it’s the booze or the town that’s playing tricks on him. And Dewey, Julia and Tonio’s 10-year-old son, searches for his family, glimpsing them from a distance from time to time, but never quite able to reach them.

If you feel lost after the first 100 pages (and you will), don’t worry. The story is worth your confusion. In fact, it requires it. Proustian in theme but not in form, Travelers Rest is the definition of dreamlike prose. Morris’ writing is clean and cold as snow. The pages drift by just as effortlessly, lulling you into a quiet cocoon that you realize, too late, is actually something much more sinister.

In Radiance, Catherynne M. Valente crafts a lush, detailed alternate history of Hollywood and a complex re-imagining of our solar system . . . and that’s just the beginning. Against that landscape, full of secrets, scandals and sci-fi awe, Valente weaves a tale of fathers and daughters, stories and truths, love and loss that is as much about the act of telling a story as it is about its characters.

Severin Unck is the daughter of a legendary, passionate Hollywood filmmaker, but she rejects his lush, romantic fictions and becomes a documentarian. With her lover and her crew, Severin travels the human-colonized solar system, chronicling life on other planets—until she disappears during a shoot on Venus.

From there, the story branches out to include Severin’s father, her various surrogate mothers, her lover and a mysterious child who survived that final expedition. To add even greater depth, Valente opts to tell the story not through traditional prose, but through transcripts, diary entries, old gossip columns, remembrances and letters. 

It is striking that Valente—who is the author of several previous fantasy novels for adults and teens—managed to throw this many storytelling devices, themes and world-building quirks into a single novel and somehow make them all work, but what’s even more striking is how warm and human Radiance is. It feels cohesive and unified in its vision: the story of what a single life can mean.

RELATED CONTENT: Read our Q&A with Catherynne M. Valente.

This article was originally published in the November 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.