Colleen Mondor

Castle of the Cursed, Romina Garber (Wednesday Books 978-1-250-86389-8, $21.00, 304pp, hc) July 2024.

The cover of Romina Garber’s Castle of the Cursed includes the line “The House is Always Hungry,” and readers should consider that a fair comment on the story within. As soon as recently orphaned Estela arrives at what she has only recently learned is her family’s “ancestral Spanish castle,” the house plays a huge part ...Read More

A Tempest of Tea, Hafsah Faizal (Farrar Straus Giroux 978-0-374-38940-6, hc, 336 pp) February 2024. Cover by Valentina Remenar.

Hafsah Faizal has written a banger of a caper novel with A Tempest of Tea. Her tale of thieves, forgery, and political malfeasance set in the town of White Roaring takes readers on a ride with twists and turns they can never expect. Reminiscent of 19th-century London, White Roaring ...Read More

Remedial Magic, Melissa Marr (Bramble 978-1-250-88413-8, $17.99, tp, 336 pp) February 2024.

Melissa Marr’s Remedial Magic, first in a series, is a romance novel involving multiple characters engaged in tricky relationships. Ellie is a librarian in a small town who lives with her aunt and en­gages in the rather unusual self-described hobby of researching missing persons cases. These are not people who are murdered by spouses or involved ...Read More

Dead Things Are Closer Than They Appear, Robin Wasley (Simon & Schuster 978-1-665-91460-4, $19.99, hc, 400pp) February 2024. Cover by Micaela Alcaino.

The tourist town of Llewellyn, AKA Wellsie, is famous for the magic that used to be there. Just like Springfield is the town where Lincoln was born, and Roswell is where aliens might have landed, Wellsie is where something happened once. It’s a town on a fault ...Read More

Twice Lived, Joma West (Tordotcom 978-1-250-81032-8, $26.99, hc, 256pp) February 2024. Cover by FORT.

Author Joma West explores the idea of parallel worlds in an unexpected way in her science fic­tion novel, Twice Lived. Canna and Lily are one person, a ‘‘shifter’’ who uncontrollably moves back and forth between the two worlds. Her mothers detected her nature when they were pregnant, as the fetus would disappear and reappear ...Read More

Forgotten Sisters, Cynthia Pelayo (Thomas & Mercer 978-1-662-51391-6, $16.99, tp, 284pp) March 2024. Cover by Olga Grlic.

Cynthia Pelayo’s Forgotten Sisters begins with a nightmare, then moves to a nuanced family history of sisters Jennie and Anna, who live in a historic bungalow on the Chicago River that was owned first by their grandparents, then their parents, and now is theirs to treasure and maintain. In the second chapter, ...Read More

The City of Stardust, Georgia Summers (Redhook 978-0-316-56148-8, $29.00, hc, 352 pp) January 2024.

The City of Stardust by Georgia Summers blends our recognizable world, mostly through the home of the Everly family in the English countryside, with the fictional city of Fidelis, a place of academics and magic that hides a horrific truth. (And that horror really is bad; we’re talking ritual-sacrifice-of-kidnapped-children kind of bad.) Violet Everly lives ...Read More

The Colliding Worlds of Mina Lee, Ellen Oh (Crown 978-0-593-12594-6, $19.99, hc, 295pp) January 2024. Cover by Audrey Mok.

In Ellen Oh’s The Colliding Worlds of Mina Lee, the title character has a big problem: She does not want to pursue the life her father has mapped out for her. High school senior Mina is an artist and desperate to follow in her deceased mother’s footsteps and attend ...Read More

The Frame-Up, Gwenda Bond (Del Rey 978-0-593-59773-6, $10.00, tp, 325pp) February 2024.

Author Gwenda Bond hit the NY Times best­seller list for the Stranger Things tie-in Suspicious Minds and prior to that authored several YA titles (including a trio about young Lois Lane). In recent years she has quietly been carving out a niche in magical romance and her latest, the art heist adventure The Frame-Up, fits nicely ...Read More

Diavola, Jennifer Thorne (Nightfire 978-1-250-82612-1, $27.99, hc, 304pp) March 2024. Cover by Judy Jung.

In Jennifer Thorne’s hilarious, scary, brilliant, and all too easily identifiable novel, Diavola, advertising illustrator Anna is determined to be a good daughter, get along with everyone and do what it takes to make her family’s Italian vacation successful. Her parents have paid for two weeks in a villa near the tiny village of ...Read More

River Mumma, Zalika Reid-Benta (Penguin Canada 978-0-73524-476-4, C$24.95, 256pp, tp) August 2023. (Erewhon 978-1-645-66135-1, $27.00, 284pp, hc) March 2024. Cover by Rebecca Farrin.

So there you are, grad school completed, back home with degree in hand, and all your hopes and dreams must be shelved because the only job you can get entails a lot of folding clothes, cleaning up fitting rooms, and greeting bored customers. This is the ...Read More

The Girl, the Ring, & the Baseball Bat, Camille Gomera-Tavarez (Levine Querido 978-1-646-14265-1, $19.99, 391pp, hc) February 2024. Cover by Dotun Abeshinbioke.

The Girl, the Ring, & the Baseball Bat by Ca­mille Gomera-Tavarez is about navigating high school, finding true friends (and romance), and a magic jacket, magic ring, and magic baseball bat. (I’m not going to lie, while all of them are cool, the baseball bat really rocks.) ...Read More

The Book of Doors, Gareth Brown (William Morrow 979-0-063-35957-4, $30.00, 416pp, hc) February 2024.

Gareth Brown’s debut, The Book of Doors, manages to incorporate some time-travel surprises, (and not the ones readers might expect), into an exciting novel of suspense. Told from multiple points of view, readers initially meet Cassie, a clerk in a New York City bookstore, when she discovers a regu­lar customer has quietly died while ...Read More

The Fair Folk, Su Bristow (Europa Editions 979-8-889-66012-5, $18.00, tpb, 464pp) January 2024.

In her gorgeous new historical fantasy, The Fair Folk, author Su Bristow crafts the story of a particularly complex interaction between mortals and faeries. Opening in 1959, the novel follows the shifting relationship between then-eight-year-old Felicity and Elfrida, the apparent queen of a long-established fairy group ensconced in the woods near her home. At first, the ...Read More

Calamity, Constance Fay (Bramble 978-1-250-33041-3, $18.99, tpb, 320pp) November 2023.

Constance Fay’s debut, Calamity, is an SF ad­venture set on a distant planet amidst several groups and individuals all operating with their own conflicting purposes and totally willing to kill each other to achieve their goals. The heroes are the small crew of the somewhat dilapidated space vessel Quest, who scout out various planets for whatever their clients, ...Read More

The Warm Hands of Ghosts, Katherine Arden (Del Rey 978-0-593-12825-1, $28.99, 318pp, hc) February 2024.

As The Warm Hands of Ghosts opens, former field nurse Laura Iven is still reeling from the deaths of her parents following the catastrophic explosion of a cargo ship laden with explosives in the harbor of her hometown, Halifax, Nova Sco­tia. (This is based on a real event in 1917.) Laura was home after ...Read More

Tender Beasts, Liselle Sambury (McElderry Books 978-1-665-90352-3, $19.99, 404pp, hc) February 2024. Cover by Elena Masci.

I strongly advise you block out a weekend for reading Liselle Sambury’s Tender Beasts, because once you start down this multi-layered family drama, murder mystery, possible deal-with-a-demon cautionary tale, you are not going to be able to set it aside. At the center of the propulsive narrative are a lot (A LOT) of ...Read More

The Parliament, Aimee Pokwatka (Tordotcom 978-1-250-82097-6, $27.99, 320pp, hc) January 2024.

Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film The Birds was based, a bit, on a Daphne du Maurier short story of the same name which itself was inspired by du Maurier’s experience seeing a farmer attacked by a flock of seagulls. (If you never saw The Birds, head to YouTube for the phone booth scene.) Author Aimee Pokwatka takes the ...Read More