Fresh from an unexpectedly complicated job in Mexico, Lizbeth Rose is shepherding a mysterious crate from her native Texoma to the nation of Dixie when her train derails and her cargo is stolen. As the only member of her crew left alive and in fighting condition, she attempts to infiltrate the small town of Sally, with the unexpected aid of some old friends from Mexico. Lizbeth must now find her missing cargo, outwit a mysterious order of white supremacists and seek vengeance for the deaths of her crew members. And she must do so in Dixie, accompanied by a Russian wizard pretending to be her husband, and without her precious guns.

A Longer Fall, Charlaine Harris’ sequel to An Easy Death, is just as gritty as its predecessor. Harris’ prose is blunt and uncomplicated, matching Lizbeth’s general sensibility, and lending the novel a welcome readability. This straightforward style meshes well with the first-person narration, implying that the protagonist is relating events in her own words as she remembers them. Each character is filtered through Lizbeth’s biases, resulting in a refreshingly direct story, albeit one in which everyone uses roughly the same cadence and vocabulary and some of the plot twists are foreshadowed into predictability.

The most remarkable aspect of A Longer Fall, though, is the fluency of Harris’ alternate history. Her fractured United States features references to Alexei Romanov’s hemophilia, Russian and Coptic Orthodox theology and the racial dynamics of the Reconstruction-era American South, to name a few. While Texoma communities tend to write their own rules, both Dixie (the former South) and the Holy Russian Empire (California) operate under established hierarchies. In Dixie, these structures are founded on gender and race, while the Holy Russian Empire’s society revolves around religion, genealogy and magical ability. Lizbeth encounters these systems as an outsider both to these specific cultures and to the idea of a firmly hierarchical social structure in general, and her difficulties making sense of them form the central obstacles in both An Easy Death and A Longer Fall. Well, except for the people who keep trying to kill her, of course.

Karen O’Neil has already saved the world once. So when an old friend sends her a mysterious package from Havana at the start of W. L. Goodwater’s Revolution, she is reluctant to get involved in yet another magical mystery. But this time, a little girl has gone missing, and the arcane is unmistakably involved. And in her capacity as head researcher on theoretical magic for the Office of Magical Research and Deployment, she has a vested interest in new magical technologies unknown to the United States government. What she finds is a cauldron of incipient revolution, corrupt men with impossible dreams and few trustworthy colleagues, if any. And in the process, she may just have to save the world for a second time.

It would be easy, perhaps, to draw an analogy between Goodwater’s magically infused Cold War and other arcanely altered histories. Historical fiction with a dash of magicians is increasingly common, as evidenced by books authored by such luminaries as Susanna Clarke, China Mieville and Guy Gavriel Kay. Revolution falls squarely in this domain, but unlike the work of those writers, it is defined almost wholly by its taut, compelling plot, rather than by stylistic elements like Clarke’s flowery, Austenesque prose. Goodwater’s writing is direct and efficient, ideally suited to the thrillers he crafts, and adroitly gets out of its own way to allow the story itself to shine through.

Karen O’Neil’s travails in Cuba are great fun (for the reader, emphatically not for Ms. O’Neil), bringing to mind an Indiana Jones adventure with a little more moral ambiguity, a lot more incantations and much stronger female characters. Without exception, the women are smart, capable and independent, while the men tend towards greedy, corrupt or inept, which is a more than welcome change from the genre’s status quo. There are conspiracies, secret societies, guerrilla rebels, mob bosses, nefarious businessmen, Soviet spies, magic artifacts and disembodied voices galore. Goodwater’s ventures into Spanish names (a witch predictably named La Bruja) and dialogue (consisting mostly of single words or simple phrases before veering back into English) leave some verisimilitude behind, but this is a quibble, and does not distract from the book’s overall narrative drive. The cliffhanger ending ensures there will be further chapters in Karen O’Neil’s reluctant quest to save the world from its own worst impulses.

While The True Queen is the second in Zen Cho’s Sorcerer Royal series, in many ways it is more of a standalone novel than true sequel. It is true that readers who enjoyed Sorcerer to the Crown will delight in the reappearance of familiar characters and settings, as well as the expansion of Cho’s vision of a magical Regency England. But because The True Queen is told from the perspective of characters new to Prunella, Henrietta and Zacharias’s world, the novel gives incoming readers a smooth introduction to Cho’s complex and exciting creation. But be careful—once you’ve experienced Cho’s vision of the past, you will never want to leave.

The True Queen opens in the weeks after Muna and her sister Sakti found themselves on the shores of Janda Baik, a tiny (and fictional) island. Stripped of their memories by an unknown magician, the girls take refuge with the witch Mak Genggang. But as the weeks go on, Sakti and Muna learn that their memories may not be all that the curse took from them. Sakti is beginning to fade from existence, and the sisters’ only hope in lifting the curse is to travel to Britain and enlist the aid of the Sorceress Royal. But when Sakti gets lost in the Unseen Realm between Janda Baik and Britain, Muna must learn how to navigate the world of magicians without Sakti. In the process, she will learn exactly how far she’ll go to save her sister.

Purposefully or not, much of historical fiction and fantasy tends to show a whitewashed view of European history. In both Sorcerer to the Crown and The True Queen, Zen Cho reminds us that Britain was far from homogenous. And while Cho never strays into direct discussions of imperialism (at its core, The True Queen is a fairly light book), it is a constant presence. Its threat looms in Janda Baik as Mak Geggang struggles to keep the influence of the British from growing on the island. And while few are outright hostile towards Muna, she is treated as an exotic addition to society rather than a person of her own. These additions distinguish the novel from others of its genre, making The True Queen a book worth reading for lovers of historical fantasy and thoughtful historical fiction alike.

A three minute jaunt into your local bookstore will reveal a plethora of books detailing the lives of young, magically gifted girls, but no author marches her gifted protagonist through trials (and oppressive Russian winters) like Katherine Arden. From the beginning of her Winternight trilogy, Vasilisa Petrovna has been constantly bombarded with tragedy, and Arden’s conclusion, The Winter of the Witch, is no different. Quite literally burned, battered and cursed with broken ribs, Vasilisa has been thrust into the public spotlight. And contrary to the previous entries in the trilogy, she cannot escape the dangerous attention of men and chyerti this time around.

Finding a place to live in the world of Orthodox Russia has been difficult for Vasilisa, and her final quest for power and responsibility is marked with copious opposition. Even after emerging victorious over each foe she has encountered, Vasilisa must endure Bruce Willis in Die Hard-levels of abuse to reach her goals, with little to no reprieve. Seemingly in pace with her injuries, Vasilisa also exponentially expands in power, adding several spheres of power to her magical portfolio. Many of these tricks and explosive flashes come with particularly satisfying payoffs.

The Russian language can confuse Anglophone readers (looking at you, Doctor Zhivago), so Arden has added in several detailed notes about Russian names and a glossary of terms to help the unfamiliar. With a fluid incorporation of Russian diminutives and references, Arden wonderfully blends Russian culture into her novel. Conversations are brought to life in a realistic and relatable fashion, even when half the participants are devilish fey creatures.

Arden also embraces another commonly Russian trait in her writing: stoicism. Arden’s entire cadre of fictional actors constantly shrug off the weight of the horrors they bear, pushing themselves to a new edge. There is no commentary on the value of ignoring grief, no celebration of their grit. Just an acknowledgement of humanity’s inevitable tendency to ignore the wounds we incur, physical or otherwise. But when a character does, eventually, break down, they find themselves comforted, allowed to mourn. This respect for grief is rare, and well written in The Winter of the Witch. Seeing characters agonize over their past scars brings a true depth to even the most vile among them. While understanding a tragic backstory can help a reader sympathize, seeing a person or character truly suffer invokes empathy (even within my cold, dead heart).

To readers of the previous books, there is no spoiler in revealing that the end is not perfectly happy. Arden does go out of her way to wrap nearly every loose end the series has set up, and therein lies my only criticism. Arden writes the mystical and mysterious forces of her fey world well, and keeps the reader engaged with its mysteries. But in answering almost every possible question I could have had, Arden removes that mysticism from the setting. Some readers may find they like a tidy ending, but for a book fraught with sacrifice and cost at every turn, I would have liked to see an ending just as messy.

However, The Winter of the Witch was a fantastic way to end my literary year (as this reviewer read it in the last weeks of 2018), and I would highly recommend it. Arden explores the line between paganism and Christianity in a way that lends respect and power to each, which is especially amplified in her impressive final installment of the trilogy. Vasilisa is a heroine worth rooting for and her final story is just as impressive.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Katherine Arden about The Winter of the Witch.

Irene is a Librarian, sworn to maintain the balance between order and chaos by carefully observing and, when necessary, stealing works of literature and history. Her Library stands apart from a vast array of alternate universes, and Irene travels between them to find and protect game-changing works of literature. She is (mostly) content with her typical daily duties of infiltrating the private libraries of brutal feudal lords and reading books so extraordinary, most mortals would never know they’d ever existed.

So when she is called to investigate a murder that could threaten that balance, Irene must apply her ingenuity and adaptability to preserve the most delicate of peaces and protect her Library while uncovering the truth. And if she and her friends and fellow investigators happen to stumble across a conspiracy or two along the way, they can only hope that any of the lawful and regimented dragons, chaotic Fae raconteurs, or suspicious and secretive senior Librarians will believe them.

Genevieve Cogman’s prose in The Mortal Word is characteristically light and witty, and filled with the kind of unexpected literary references one would expect from a book about magical librarians. Even more impressive, however, is Cogman’s ability to craft compelling standalone novels, while still using the developing relationships among her characters to tie the entire Invisible Library series together. Her series is reminiscent of the better, longest-running television serials, and the murder mystery aspect of The Mortal Word lends it the air of an unusually comedic episode of “Law and Order.”

The Library itself, and its relationship to humanity, is itself a fascinating take on an established literary tradition. Borges wrote of a Library of Babel, in which all possible writing was catalogued in an infinite and barely-navigable maze, but Cogman’s Librarians have more in common with Connie Willis’ time-traveling historians. They are not merely collectors, but have an explicit purpose in their behavior, and must be cautious when their activities in some world or historical era have unintended consequences. Cogman’s version of reality stands apart from its peers as one of the few versions of reality where, if the narrative lines up just right, anybody can be a knight in shining armor, a poem can bring down a dragon and a kiss really can bring back the dead.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Genevieve Cogman about The Mortal Word.

In many fantasy stories, making a deal with a demon starts out as a good idea. Maybe you end up with superhuman strength, riches beyond your wildest dreams or the admiration of those around you. But what do you have to give to receive these gifts? In the case of Molly Tanzer’s fun and atmospheric Creatures of Want and Ruin, two women from very different walks of life have to figure out what the demon wants before Long Island is swallowed by an evil they don’t understand.

The first character you meet is Ellie. It’s the height of Prohibition, and she smuggles liquor by boat to paying customers all over Long Island. When she discovers a wrecked ship stocked with bottles of a mysterious liquid, she naturally takes them for herself. Meanwhile, Fin, a socialite visiting the island to escape the city, feels disconnected from her husband and the rest of her friends from high society. She’s coaxed into hosting a party and enlists Ellie’s help to supply the all-important booze. Fin ends up taking a sip from one of Ellie’s unmarked bottles, and sees a vision: a man bowed before a monstrous thing, submitting to a dark will that she is unable to understand. Bound together by shared experience, Ellie and Fin must work together to find the source of the unholy presence gripping the island.

The vision Tanzer paints of Long Island during Prohibition is nostalgic, tactile and just a little bit creepy. One can almost hear the creak of Ellie’s boat or the tinkle of Fin’s expensive champagne flutes as we float into and out of each character’s perspectives. That being said, the setting never overtakes the interplay between the characters. Both Ellie and Fin maintain complex, multidimensional relationships that ebb and flow as real relationships do. And, thankfully, not even Ellie and Fin are blameless in how they treat others. No one is perfect in this vision of the past.

The back-and-forth between the two heroines is worth celebrating. Ellie, the hard-nosed, what’s-it-to-you liquor smuggler balances perfectly with thoughtful, lonely, demure yet determined society maven Fin. The way they gain each other’s trust and play off one another’s strengths feels natural and unforced, a testament to Tanzer’s gifts with dialogue and pacing. Indeed, the book does a wonderful job of knowing when to lean into an action sequence (the climax gets a large chunk of time at the end of the story) and when to step back and let the characters inhabit the world.

Creatures of Want and Ruin is the second of a trilogy of books revolving around the impact of a demonic presence in a small community. How these communities are split by fear and hatred is telling and relevant in today’s divided public forum. It’ll be a sad day for readers when Tanzer’s trilogy is complete, but at least we didn’t have to sell our souls for such a fantastic journey.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Molly Tanzer.

Anyone who has read books about Soviet era espionage recognizes a certain kind of scene: intelligence agents meeting to exchange information—and occasionally prisoners—in the shadow of the Berlin Wall. Breach, the first book in W.L. Goodwater’s Cold War Magic series, uses this well-worn trope and amplifies it with the threat of magical annihilation, bringing a new edge to the traditional spy story.

In the waning hours of World War II, Soviet magicians conjured a wall of pure magic, dividing Berlin in two and protecting their hold on East Germany. While the world was aghast, there was little the West could do. The wall was impenetrable except at specific, predetermined crossing points like Checkpoint Charlie. Until now. The wall is failing, and to avoid World War III, the US needs to find out why—and try to reverse the process. The CIA calls on Karen, a young researcher from the American Office of Magical Research and Deployment. As she searches for a way to repair the wall, Karen quickly realizes that the truth is never straightforward in Berlin, especially when it comes to the story behind the Wall itself.

The characters of Breach shine as much as the plot and world do. Like the book itself, the characters are well-trodden archetypes that are given new life. There’s the young magician burnout-turned spy and his partner, the not-quite-recovering alcoholic chief, and the young spitfire determined to make her place in the world. If those sound familiar and even overdone, it’s because they are. But Goodwater takes those cardboard cutouts of what we would expect from a 1980s spy novel and turns them into three-dimensional characters that readers can actually root for. Far from being mere types, Karen and her compatriots are vibrant characters with complex inner lives. They go off-script from typical spy novels, making a world that could have been a parody of itself into one that readers will be eager to get back to.

Goodwater’s debut novel is tightly wound in the way that only good suspense stories can be. At any moment it seems that the fragile peace built between the West and East could fall apart with disastrous consequences, which is a testament to Breach’s overall success with dramatic timing. By the same token, however, if it’s possible to make a complaint about Breach, the only complaint to make is that at a few points the story felt rushed, with too many events being crushed into not enough space. While this fits with the frenetic pace of the scenes in question, it also made action sequences difficult to follow because so much was happening at once. However, the pleasure of the book as a whole more than made up for these slight pacing issues.

Breach combines the magical world building of The City & the City with the suspense of Cold War thrillers like Bridge of Spies, resulting in a cinematic suspense story that will keep readers on the edge of their seats until the very last page.

Lizbeth Rose is a “gunnie,” a crack shot with her bolt-action Winchester rifle and her pair of Colt handguns, who makes a living guarding people on their helter-skelter treks between towns in the Texoma desert. With the United States government in tatters after the assassination of Franklin Roosevelt and the continent subsequently swallowed up by Canada, Mexico, England and Imperial Russia, there is no such thing as an easy life. So when her crew is killed on a run, Lizbeth is forced to take whatever job comes along, even if it means following a dour pair of Russian wizards on their hunt for the last descendants of Rasputin. As their search takes them south, Lizbeth is drawn ever closer to a part of her past she would rather forget. At least she won’t be unarmed when she finds it.

In An Easy Death, Charlaine Harris’s fictionalized mid-century North America is enticingly familiar. Although she will win no prizes for eloquence, her blunt prose serves the first-person narration, as it matches Lizbeth’s personality and language. Seen through the gunnie’s eyes, what used to be the American Southwest is brutal and remorseless, but draped in a kind of honesty the reader is forced to respect. Lizbeth’s descriptions of the wizards, or “grigoris” as she derisively calls them, are studiously, sometimes hilariously devoid of flowery language. She is content to describe their methods of combat as “creative,” leaving it up to the reader’s own creativity to fill in the gaps.

The plot is predictable, sure, but it’s honestly refreshing to read an alternate history that doesn’t try to score any philosophical points and focuses on telling a complete story. Similarly, Lizbeth’s quest is to maintain the status quo, both in aiding her charges on their journey and in returning to the life she left to take this job. For her, it would be a triumph if nothing much changed. In a genre dominated by rags-to-riches stories of world dominance and great evils vanquished and old magics mastered, there’s more than enough room for a good story of normal people, just trying to stay alive.

At first glance, the town of Dubossary might appear to be a simple Jewish town at the edge of the woods. Pious and cheerful villagers bustle about in the snow, going to market and celebrating shabbas together. But for sisters Liba and Laya, who live in the forest outside of town, things aren’t quite as idyllic as they seem. Odd noises and rumors of wandering strangers suddenly make life in the woods a little less welcoming. Maybe the folk tales are true after all?

When Liba and Laya’s parents leave to visit a dying relative several towns away, they tell the girls two massive secrets. Both of their parents are shape-shifters—and so are they. Liba inherited her father’s bearlike shape and dark features; Laya has her mother’s swanlike beauty and light hair. These changes start to manifest as each sister’s feelings for each other, boys, tradition and temptation collide. When Laya is tempted by a group of young outsiders, Liba knows it’s up to her to protect her sister and, if necessary, call on the swan people to defend her and her sister from whatever lurks in the woods.

One very distinct stylistic choice separates Rena Rossner’s The Sisters of the Winter Wood from all of the other history-meets-legend tales out there. Liba’s perspective is written in prose and Laya’s in poetry. Throughout the book, the differences between Liba’s stalwart, rule-abiding nature and Laya’s strong-willed, rebellious character play out beautifully as the two styles Rossner employs perfectly reflect each sister’s emotions. I was particularly drawn to Laya’s airy yet intense chapters, which seem to fly by in an instant.

Equally intriguing is how Rossner evokes the sensation of breaking the strict rules that govern the sisters’ existence. Dubossary’s identity is based on a very strict interpretation of Orthodox Judaism, which forbids men and women to physically touch before they are a couple. When Liba finds herself just thinking the natural thoughts of an 18-year-old woman, the reader feels the push-and-pull through Rossner’s prose. Amplifying this conflicting feeling is the uncontrollable shape-shifting transformations each sister starts to undergo, a touching and painful representation of what it feels like to grow up.

Rossner’s family came to America as a way to escape the pogroms and hatred visited upon Jews in Eastern Europe. She mentions in the (highly recommended) author’s note that she heard her grandmother’s voice in her head as she wrote The Sisters of the Winter Wood. There’s a lived-in, folklore feeling to this story, a mystical and ominous glow you can’t shake. However, at its heart, this is a novel about two sisters loving and understanding each other during a difficult time in life. And luckily, we get to take that wonderful, strange journey with them. Rossner’s The Sisters of the Winter Wood is a dreamlike ode to sisterhood, mythology and family that you won’t be able to put down.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Rena Rossner.