I'm in the New York Times!

Hi all! Just wanted to put up a quick post to share that I recently wrote a book review for the New York Times! I was asked to review two British fantasy imports, The Song from Somewhere Else by AF Harrold and The Apprentice Witch by James Nicol. The two books were very different from one another, and it was a real challenge to find a way to tie them together with a single idea. Here's how I opened the piece:

The landscape of fantasy storytelling is changing rapidly. “World-building,” once the exclusive domain of fantasy novelists, is now a term more closely associated with movie and video game franchises. Special effects now rival anything we could imagine while reading on our own. And so perhaps fantasy literature will be forced to do what every medium must when challenged by something new: adapt. Just as the still camera set painting on a path toward abstraction, fantasy literature seems poised to move away from virtuosic world-building toward more interior and language-based storytelling — the sorts of things books do best.

To hear what I thought of the two books, I invite you to click the link to read the entire review. It was incredibly fun and far more challenging than I anticipated. I hope to do it again some time!