Noel Rappin Writes Here

So, this is wildly late. So late that it mocks the very concept of an end-of-year recap. And honestly, if I didn’t like going back to these things and re-reading them, I probably wouldn’t have finished it.

Couple of quick notes before getting to it:

The new thing this year is that I used The StoryGraph to rate all the books right after I finished them. You’d think that’d make it easier to get this list out, but apparently not. I’m not posting my actual star ratings because my actual star ratings are a little weird. (I can’t seem to give any book I actually finish less than a 3.5 out of 5, and so the whole thing is kind of off). Anyway, because of StoryGraph, I can say that reading broke down to about one-third fantasy, a quarter SF, a quarter tagged as romance, about one-fifth mystery and a smattering of other things (with the understanding that some books will tag as more than one of these).

Also, it’s been more than 18 months since I read some of these, some of the notes are a little spare.

One year, I’ll get my act together to put cover images on this thing. This is not that year.

As usual, don’t take the rankings too seriously, I liked all of these, and I hope this lets you know if you would like them too.

For the sake of grouping, call this group three…

These are mostly a 4.25 on my weird StoryGraph star scale, plus I think a couple lower ones that I wanted to write about.

37: Butcher and Blackbird by Brynne Weaver

Why did I read this? I think it was a BookTok thing

Elevator Pitch: A rom-com between two serial killers, what could go wrong?

Do The Math: Harry and Sally meet Dexter?

Recommended If You Like: Trigger Warnings… The book opens with a list as long as your arm.

Let’s start this off with a bang. Oh… pun not intended.

This is very much a Not For Everyone work.

Our main leads are both serial killers who like to kill other serial killers. Sure. They meet-cute when he rescues her from captivity from a different serial killer. Double sure. They become friends, having admired each other’s work, and set out on regular challenges where they try to discover and kill a particular serial killer. Triple sure. So it’s your standard friends to lovers story where they happen to share a hobby…

Some of you have noped out of this one already. Fair enough.

Anyway, eventually they get together romantically, with a strong, um, kink component…

Sometimes, I say about a book that if anything about the book seems compelling you should try it. This is kind of the opposite… if anything about the above makes you think that you are going to be squeamish about this, you probably will be.

That said, I mostly liked it – I liked the first half more than the second half, it’s got more of the dark and weird banter. (This is of a couple of rom-coms I read this year that lost momentum once the characters get together because the characters just keep wanting to hook up and, while that can be fun, it does slow the story down for a while. I guess it depends on what you are hoping to get out of the book…) I did not feel like I needed to stick around for the next book in the series.

36: Charlotte Illes Is Not a Teacher by Katie Siegel

Elevator Pitch Encyclopedia Brown grows up.

Sort of noted without comment. I like this series about a former teenage detective now somewhat aimless 20-something, but I don’t really have a lot to say about it. One thing that’s fun about this one is that Charlotte winds up going back to the school where she was a kid detective and learns, somewhat to her surprise, that her kid impressions about the faculty and what the faculty thought about her were not completely accurate.

35: A Novel Love Story by Ashley Poston

Elevator Pitch: It’s Shmigadoon, but for romance novels

I suppose it was inevitable that somebody would do this. Our main character goes off the beaten path and winds up in the fictional town that is the setting created by her favorite romance author. This author died with the series unfinished, so there are a few romantic pairings in the group that are unsettled. Including, I guess, our main character, who immediately gets in one of those classic do I or don’t I like him romance things with the bookstore owner, who turns out to be the only other person that knows the town is fictional.

If you are a “why does the fictional town exist” kind of person, this isn’t the book for you. If you can turn that switch off, this is one of those satires that is also a good example of the thing, which I have a soft spot for.

34: The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman

Elevator Pitch: What if you showed up at the round table just a bit too late…

Do The Math: In some ways, it’s King Arthur + two weeks. In another sense, it’s King Arthur + modern sensibility

The setup here is incredibly clever. Our main, but not only, viewpoint character, is a strapping young local lad who escapes a bad situation to run off to join the Round Table. Sadly, he arrives two weeks after the story we know has ended with Arthur’s death. Most of the, shall we say, A-Team, is either dead or actively working against Camelot. What’s left are basically the characters who are comic relief in other parts of the story, and they are trying to rebuild, or at least prevent a total collapse.

Grossman has embedded in the story a more complex take on the competing politics trying to fill the power vacuum, and also a more complex set of identities available to the remaining knights. Since it is effectively an aftermath story, it can live and breathe on its own without really having to worry about contradiction with the earlier lore. I’m not really much for Arthur stories (I read this because of the author, not the topic), but I liked this one.

33: The Book of Love by Kelly Link

Elevator Pitch: I mean, the elevator pitch is that it’s a full length novel by Kelly Link…

Recommended If You Like: beautiful sentences, magical realism, journeys rather than destinations…

Award 2025 Nebula Nominee for Best Novel

Link is an extremely successful short story writer of horror/magic realism – wikipedia describes it as “slipstream” which is short for “we don’t know how to describe it”. Her short stories are known for her particularly gorgeous writing and for a very well honed sense of being unsettling.

In her first novel, a group of teenagers who disappeared/died mysteriously are brought back to life for reasons unknown, and are given a group of tasks to perform, with the strong implications that winners will get to stay alive and losers… won’t.

The book then goes on for 600+ pages back and forth through multiple viewpoints. It has particularly gorgeous writing and a very well honed sense of being unsettling. And I’ll say this – it’s incredibly good at setting a mood, and it’s tightly plotted – everything happens for a reason and all the reasons are exposed. It’s long though – the plot is complex, and there’s a lot of stuff to get established before things pay off. When it clicks, though, it really, really clicks.

32: Christa Comes Out of Her Shell by Abbi Waxman

Elevator Pitch: What if your dad was, like, Steve Irwin, only he faked his death?

Recommended If You Like: Linda Holmes or Emily Henry but funnier and with less romance

You can kind of trace the amount to which I’ve added romance and romance-adjacent books through the years (though I read a lot of romance books that score just below the cutoff to get listed here). Anyway, Abbi Waxman writes romance adjacent books (okay, fine, the marketing name was probably “chick-lit”) that are quirky and have a genuinely funny narrative voice. Like, her narration causes me to laugh multiple times a book, which is pretty rare.

This book, about a researcher who would really just like to stay on the literal tiny island where she studies animal behavior but has to face her famous father when he reveals that he’s not actually dead, is all those things. I liked it.

31: Death at Morning House by Maureen Johnson

Award Edgar Award nominee for best YA mystery novel

Recommended If You Like: This is sort of a Love/Like book with the Truly Devious series, in that if you loved those books, you will probably like this one.

This, like the Stevie Bell books, happens in two timelines, a historical mystery from the 1930 and a present day mystery that is probably influenced by the history. Unlike the Stevie Bell books, our main character isn’t a detective, she’s part of the staff of teens giving tours at Morning House, a mansion on one of the Thousand Islands. It’s a good place for her to get over the fact that she accidentally set a house on fire during a date with her crush.

Then, since this is a mystery novel, somebody dies.

This book has less of a whodunit feel and… closer to a haunted house feel in a way, it’s more vibes-based than the Stevie Bell mysteries. The sense of place is really strong.

30: Echo of Worlds by M. R. Carey

Elevator Pitch: It’s the sequel to Infinity Gate

Boy, did I want to like this one more than I did. It’s a sequel to Infinity Gate, which is best described as an epic space opera, where instead of going out into space, all the planets are different multiverse versions of Earth. It’s a great premise, and the first book sets up a really neat situation.

This book, while it has a lot of interesting stuff, to my mind kind of squanders the most interesting parts of the first book, there’s less of the really weird alternate worlds, and I want to say that it kind of breaks up the team that was built up in the first book, though honestly I don’t really remember. Anyway, still worth it, but I wanted it to shoot the moon and it just didn’t quite.

29: How to Solve Your Own Murder by Kristen Perrin

I really need to do a better job of remembering book I read nine months ago.

Our heroine is called to a small English village because of the death of her great-aunt. Her great aunt received a fortune in 1965 that she would be murdered, and spent the rest of her life trying to preemptively solve the murder. Now she’s dead – murdered, as it happened – and our heroine needs to figure out what happened. It’s a pretty solid mystery premise and a pretty good execution.

28: Lady Eve’s Last Con by Rebecca Fraimow

Elevator Pitch: Leverage in Space!

I want Leverage in Space to happen so badly that I’ll read nearly everything that comes close to that description.

Our main character, Ruth, is a small time con artist working to avenge her sister’s breakup with a rich nerd. Naturally, she does this by posing as a debutante and breaking his heart in turn. Things get complicated when his more-on-the ball older sister starts to be suspicious and more complicated as Ruth starts to fall for her. This one is fun, it’s an SF setting that has a lot in common with your Regency-style romances what with the nobles and all, it’s got some Jewish rep – Ruth is Jewish and breaks into yiddish from time to time. I had fun.

27: A Ruse of Shadows by Sherry Thomas

Elevator Pitch: Book 8 of the Lady Sherlock Series

This is a series where I love the characters and most of the individual book plots but find the larger cross-book plot to be kind of impenetrable. This one has a little less to do with the overarching plot than some of the others, so the characters are back in the forefront.

26: Why We Love Football by Joe Posnanski

A countdown of 100 memorable football moments. Posnanski is a great writer, and a lot of the individual essays here are great. I don’t care as much about football as I do about baseball, but he nailed the Walter Payton essay and that pretty much was all I needed. If you didn’t grow up on Walter Payton, you’ll probalby be looking for a different essay here.

25: The Wings Upon Her Back by Samantha Mills

Do The Math Some Desperate Glory - spaceships + gods + wings

This is where doing these so late really hurts, because I wish I remembered this one in more detail. As the book starts, our main character has been unceremoniously exiled from her elite troupe of warriors who have mechanical wings fused to their backs. The world is a fantasy world with gods, and we eventually learn that she’s been a part of this warrior… troupe since she was a teenager, and that the higher-ups have been getting increasingly militaristic and fascist. She’s turned a blind eye to it, which gets much more challenging after she’s kicked out.

Anyway, this is a good book, with some interesting world-building and some definitely intended resonances with our actual timeline. It’s a pretty good double feature with Some Desperate Glory, with similar arcs of a character increasingly coming to understand what she’s pledged her life to.

24: A City on Mars by Kelly & Zach Weinersmith

Non-fiction, basically covering all the, shall we say, less headline grabbing things that would have to happen to colonize Mars. Legal issues, logistical issues, medical issues, all the stuff that SF (often) overlooks because it’s hard to make into a story, and all the stuff that the “colonize Mars” crowd ignores because it’s hard or unsolvable and not as much fun as big rockets.

It’s a fun book, especially if you don’t have much invested in eventually going to Mars (frankly, Mary Roach’s Packing For Mars disabused me of this possibility years ago).

23: Dreadful by Caitlin Rozakis

Wait for it…

22: Someone You Can Build a Nest in by John Wiswell

The Award For: 2025 Nebula and Hugo Award Nominee for Best Novel

Elevator Pitch: What if Odo and Kira, but in fantasy, and Odo wants to eat Kira and/or implant eggs in her…

There was a huge spate of books this year that were fantasy from the point of view of a misunderstood or nominally villainous character – these two, plus

• How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying, which just missed the list
• Long Live Evil, which we will talk about further up

In Dreadful, our hero wakes up with no memories from what appears to be some kind of magic spell failure. He discovers that he was an Evil Wizard, and decides that he does not want to be an Evil Wizard anymore.

But you can’t just quit evil wizarding without attracting the ire of the other evil wizards, so what follows is comic farce as our hero attempts to convince everybody that he’s still a powerful wizard while trying to stop the evil plan that he no longer remembers. It’s fun, a little breezy, but fun.

Nest has a little more body horror to go with the monster. The main character of this book is a shapeshifter that eats people, uses their organs to build her body and/or lay her eggs inside them. In normal fantasy parlance, a monster.

Anyway, Shesheshen, our monster, is nursed back to health in human form by Homily. At first, Shesheshen just wants to lay eggs in Homily, but eventually understands her feelings better and tries to find a plan where Homily also lives. Then we get kind of a cock-eyed enemies to lovers romance against the backdrop of some fantasy royal shenanigans with a curse that may or may not involve our monster. It’s all semi-satirical and you’ll probably like it unless the, like, eating people part bugs you. I think I liked what other people loved, but I still did like it quite a bit.

21: What Feasts At Night by T. Kingfisher

The Award For 2025 Hugo Nominee for Best Novella

Do The Math The mathematical average of, say, Edgar Alan Poe, and Bujold’s Brothers In Arms.

I’ve said this before, but Ursula Vernon (who writes adult fiction as T. Kingfisher) is a pretty good comp as this generations Bujold, if Bujold also wrote fractured fairy tales and adorable YA fantasy.

This book is the second novella in a series that is kind of “what if Miles Vorkosigan was a non-binary soldier for a fictional European country in the 1890sish and went around getting caught by weird supernatural stuff”. It’s creepy, but not too creepy, the world building of the fictional country is quite good, and the main character has good problem-solver vibes.

20: Bride by Ali Hazelwood

Do The Math I mean, it’s Twilight + pick your favorite Ali Hazelwood novel + fanfic

So I saw that Ali Hazelwood put out a paranormal romance between a werewolf and a vampire – pardon me, a vampyre, and that it’s at least partially based on an erotic fanfic universe, and I thought “maybe I can sit this one out”.

Then I started seeing very positive reviews, and I thought, “well, Libby is free”.

I’m glad I did, I enjoyed this one, assuming you are willing to accept whatever weird background politics that set up humans vs vampires – pardon me, vampyrs – vs werewolves as different… countries? The selling point here is the voice of the female main character and just a generally well-written bantery romance that uses the paranormal abilities of the characters but also makes the characters interesting in their own right.

This isn’t exactly a full change from the Ali Hazelwood pattern of “she’s quirky, smart, and sassy, he’s broody and uses a lack of emotional availability to hide how attracted he is to her”, but it’s definitely a way to put it in a different context, and I wound up liking it quite a bit.

Group Two

These are more or less a 4.5 on my scale, which again, means nothing.

19: Tidal Creatures by Seanan McGuire

Here’s the thing about McGuire. I think I’ve read all her novels, and if you look at her Wikipedia page, you know that’s not a small feat. And I really do like her work, even if I have become quite familiar with the, um, consistent patterns within.

Because, when she lines things up just right, as she has here, and as she has done very often the Wayward Children series, the results are great.

This is book three of the Alchemical Journey series, it’s about, I guess Air, and in particular about various aspects of various moon gods and goddesses being killed. Like a lot of McGuire’s books, this involves a number of characters who are constrained to behave a certain way because of certain rules. In this case, the interplay of the various moon gods really did work for me, there was a mystery, there were stakes, there was maybe less pure exposition than the previous book in the series.

18: Margo’s Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe

This is, I think the highest rated novel on this list that isn’t fantasy/sf/romance/mystery – which is as much about my tastes, I think, as anything else.

Margo of the title is 20 with a baby after a very ill-advised affair with a professor, and, as the title says, she’s got money troubles. She decides to start an OnlyFans account and with the help of her ex-wrestler dad, creates an online character and a compelling narrative, turns out she’s a natural at it. Shenanigans ensue.

There’s a version of this story that is darker, and either a more pointed satire, or just a darker view of the world Margo winds up in. The book as written has more of a “woman gets her act together, finds her passion and finds success” vibe, and honestly, I think it works better for that – the satire’s still there, but the book is more upbeat, and I think that tone is more enjoyable to read.

17: A Study In Drowning by Ava Reid

Do The Math Divine Rivals - The Front Page + Wuthering Heights?

At the time I read this, I think it was my favorite of the set of books that I picked up off BookTok recommendations. (It’s been surpassed in 2025, and you’ll just have to wait to find out. Fine. It was Will of the Many).

This is a decent double feature with Divine Rivals – it’s a similar WWI-ish tech level, and they both have very capable women as main characters who are fighting uphill battles due to sexism. In this book, our heroine travels to a remote I guess you’d call it a manor to research a book that is basically the country’s national epic novel. The book and its author are both shrouded in mystery, and our lead character has to content with another researcher who is determined to prove the author a fraud.

So, we get a nice rivals to lovers arc, and the manor setting is depicted with very high levels of brooding atmosphere. The book has atmosphere so think you can almost see it. And… I’m going to have to refresh my memory before the sequel comes out, aren’t I.

16: The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi by S. A. Chakraborty

The Award For: Hugo award nominee 2024

Do the Math Sinbad the Sailor + representation and a more coherent magic system

This is just purely delightful, it could maybe be higher, but there’s a lot of good stuff on this list.

Our title character is a retired pirate, a legend, but now she’s trying to raise a daughter. She’s offered the opportunity (well, offered a deal you can’t refuse…) to get the band back together to help save the daughter of a former crewmate. The beats here are a little familiar, there’s the one by one meeting with the old gang to convince them to do One Last Job. There’s the job itself, which of course isn’t as simple as it appears and eventually there’s magic and chaos and demonic exes and damsels maybe not really in distress.

It’s got great set pieces and charming characters, it moves like crazy.

15: Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford

The Award For Sidewise Award for Alternate History Long Form

Do The Math Yiddish Policeman’s Union - 80 years + thousands of miles west and south

It’s 1922. Sometime in the distant past, a smallpox epidemic was much less deadly than in our timeline, and as a result the US has a midwestern state of Cahokia, with its own Native American cultural and legal traditions and a stronger commitment to multiculturalism than most of the US in 1922.

As with so many alternate histories, a murder mystery is a great way to have somebody investigate the town and ramp up local tensions. This one explicitly uses noir detective tropes. Our cop hero is down on his luck, would rather be playing piano, and is an outsider even in Cahokia. The investigation turns out to uncover a plan to remove the Native traditions and government of Cahokia.

I really liked this one. An alternate history that I’d want to visit, a good mystery/thriller, and well-written.

14: The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles by Malka Older

I love the titles in this series. I love the sentence that the title comes from:

I looked again at the bare platform, empty of amenities, sparse of society, precarious in every way, and wondered again at our human tendency to romanticize the imposition of unnecessary obstacles into our lives.

One of the ways that I can tell that I’m locked into the writing of a book as writing is that I feel the strong tendency to repeat the words of the book aloud. I just did it right now, copying that sentence. I’m not normally a “look at those beautiful words” guy, but… look at those beautiful words, the rhythm, the image, the repeated soft sounds of “empty” “amentities”, “sparse”, “society”, followed by the hard sounds of “precarious”. It’s just gorgeous.

This book is 200 pages of sentences like that, about two wonderful characters trying to solve a mystery in an amazing setting – Jupiter, colonized by humans in habitats that orbit the planet and are ongoing works in progress. It’s amazing, I want Older to write these stories forever.

13: In Universes by Emet North

Do The Math: It’s got very strong Everything Everywhere All At Once Energy

In some ways, this was prep for a later, even odder structure of a later book, but that shouldn’t take away from what an accomplishment this book is.

This isn’t a single story as such, each chapter is the same characters, more or less, in a different universe. There’s usually a tie between adjacent chapters – the first chapter ends with the main character wishing that her crush cared about her as much as she cared, and in the next chapter they’ve been friends since they were kids.

Eventually, a story emerges about… well, it’s kind of vibes-based, but I read it as being about making choices, about being yourself, about regret. It’s quite unique, and very well done.

12: Keeping The Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation by Brenda Wineapple

I think this is our high non-fiction of the year, the true story of the Scopes Monkey Trial. As a longtime fan of play and movie Inherit The Wind (one of the few pop culture things that my father insisted I watch..), I learned a lot here.

The complexities of the actual case are obviously greater than you can do in a movie, but I was also struck at how much of the play/movie script was taken from court transcripts. The story is great, an always relevant story about fear of knowledge and how complex that fear becomes politically, plus the compelling stories of the flawed lawyers – Bryan and Darrow (I always have to be careful not to type Brady and Drummond, the Inherit the Wind names). I knew the trial was set up as a test case – Scopes may not have ever actually taught evolution in class. One thing I decidedly did not know, was how deep Bryan was with the KKK, and I also didn’t know how annoyed a lot of the ACLU people were with Darrow.

11: Long Live Evil by Sarah Rees Brennan

Award: I’m not noting every book that made an NY Times list, but this book was both an NYT 2024 Best of SF/Fantasy and Best of SF Romance

I came into this one with very high hopes – Brennan is the author of In Other Lands, which is maybe my favorite portal fantasy of all time.

Anyway this is probably the best of all the villain themed fantasy novels I read this year. In this one, our heroine is dying of cancer when she is dropped into the world of a series of fantasy novels she and her sister read together. She’s, of course, dropped into character as a minor villain of the piece, and immediately sets about upending the entire works.

Three quibbles: 1) it takes a while for all the ducks to line up and for the book to get going, 2) Brennan fiddles with the heroine’s specific knowledge of the underlying books in a way that is a little contrived, 3) the book doesn’t end on a cliffhanger exactly, but it does end on a major revelation.

All that said, this book is great – all of these villain viewpoints hit the line between “fantasy novel” and “parody of fantasy novel” but I think this one is the sharpest parody and the most well worked out fantasy world. It’s also the one where the main character’s personal life before the story begins plays the most impactful role, mostly, but not only, because she goes from sick to very healthy. (I do think calling it a “romance” is a stretch, at most it’s a parody of some romance tropes.). Book two just got pushed out to Feb 2026, though.

The Twyford Code by Janice Hallett

The Appeal by Janice Hallett

10: The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels by Janice Hallett

I went on a big Hallett kick at the end of the year, read all her extant novels in about three weeks. All of them are mystery novels based on what purports to be found material. In the case of The Appeal, it’s emails and texts among a community theater group in the months leading up to a murder. Twyford Code has a series of transcripts of voice messages left on a phone. In the case of Alperton Angels, you have access to all the notes gathered by a true crime writer investigating a cold case.

There’s no detective character, exactly (in some of the books you are perusing the materials alongside characters who occasionally comment), so the plot is completely manufactured by the order in which the materials are presented. (This is true of every mystery, but Hallett is doing the bare-brick exposed beams version of a mystery novel.)

I found all of these books very compelling – they just clicked with some puzzle-loving part of my brain. I also spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about what this format gains you and loses you versus a normal mystery novel. Hint: you can do very, very fun things with hiding information in plain sight – each of these books has some variation on a character that isn’t quite what they seem.

I recommend all of these – I liked Alperton Angels the most because I think the underlying plot is the most satisfying and also because the framing device has the most urgency behind it, but I liked them all.

9: A Sorceress Comes To Call by T. Kingfisher

Award 2025 Hugo Nominee for Best Novel Award 2025 Nebula Nominee for Best Novel

I don’t have a lot to say about this, actually. Or at least not a lot that I haven’t said about the seventy-umpteen other Kingfisher books I’ve written about in the last few years. This is Kingfisher in “dark fairytale” mode, the book is nominally a retelling of “The Goose Girl” and I guess that is true inasmuch as it contains a goose. Pretty much everything else is Kingfisher.

Our lead character is a girl who is literally under the thumb of her witch mother – definite trigger warning for abusive behavior here – where the mother can literally force her to do things, essentially magically controlling her body. The mother has plans but they eventually come into the orbit of some, like, normal people.

This is darker than some of Kingfisher’s other fairy tale stuff, but the dialog and voice are great and the ending is satisfying.

8: Wicked Problems by Max Gladstone

This is, I think, book eight in the Craft Sequence, and as such is probably not the greatest starting-off point. There’s a complicated triangle, where a dangerous force threatens the world, and two separate groups are trying to stop it, and also stop each other – there’s a lot to sum up. What Gladstone does very well is create a world that feels both modern and uncanny, with technology and magic and laws and gods and all kinds of things mixed together into a very distinct tone.

7: Shark Heart: A Love Story by Emily Habeck

Elevator Pitch: Just your typical boy gets girl, boy turns into shark, boy loses girl story

Here’s the plot: Lewis marries Wren and then is diagnosed with a condition that will cause him to turn into a shark. Lewis then turns into a shark.

This book is called magic realism or fantasy a lot, but, and I don’t really want to make a big deal out this, it’s science fiction. Really. Lewis is treated by doctors, there are medical procedures, his condition is not considered magical in-universe. Even though nobody else, even possibly the author, thinks this is science-fiction, by my definition, it clearly is.

Like the best science fiction, Lewis’ plight is both a metaphor and not a metaphor. It’s about dealing with terminal illness in the abstract, but it is also a concrete thing in the world that causes specific, non-metaphorical changes that he has to deal with, like growing gills or rough skin.

The book is unusual structurally, a series of short vignettes, some of which are written as screenplays, and doesn’t really have, like a smooth plot. But the story is just devastatingly beautiful.

Group One – These were all 4.75 or 5

6: The Teller of Small Fortunes by Julie Leong

Do The Math: Monk and Robot, but in a fantasy world, and with more plot

Another one that might not be for everybody (I’ve seen reviews that felt it was slow), this is basically a found family story. Our hero is a Teller of Small Fortunes, she travels from city to city to tell people mundane details about their immediate futures. She actually can tell larger futures, but that has lead to sadness in her past and now she avoids it.

This is a pretty standard, well-executed, found family story. The kind where our main character sees herself as alone and unloved, possibly even unlovable, but picks up a cohort of other like-minded people who perhaps have their own issues. There’s a quest – in this case to find the missing child of one of her new companions. There are family issues, and there’s a larger political context that plays a role, it’s clearly meant to mirror our world in some ways, but is still very much its own thing.

5: Warp Your Own Way by Ryan North and Chris Fenoglio

I read a lot of comics, they don’t always make it on this list for various reasons. Ryan North is easily my favorite comic writer of the last decade. I loved his Squirrel Girl run, he’s currently writing Fantastic Four, and it’s just wonderful – the best possible mix of modern characters and silver-age science weirdness.

And he writes this Star Trek: Lower Decks comic, another set of characters that I have come to love.

This is a graphic Lower Decks novel. It’s actually a graphic Choose Your Own Adventure Lower Decks novel. And it’s brilliant.

So, the first amazing thing North does here is that the story is basically a time-loop story. So doing it over and over again is literally the point of the story. Second, through some various means that I won’t spoil, North more or less guarantees that you will have a particular experience with the book – you have to go through the paths a few times before you can move forward.

He has somehow crafted a CYOA story that has full branchability and yet the entire meta experience of doing the story over and over again has a satisfying arc. And it’s true to the Lower Decks characters (mostly Mariner), and it’s funny. Just an amazing piece of work.

4: Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle

I did not expect to be in a world where Chuck Tingle was the author of a top-ten book two years in a row, but here we are. In this one, our hero Misha is a TV writer who is about to bring together the show’s two leads in a same-sex ship that the fans have long pushed for. Instead, he’s told to kill the characters off, because the studio, via an algorithm, says it will be better for ratings. When Misha refuses, he finds himself stalked by horror movie characters from his past.

This book is both genuinely creepy and also quite funny (granted, it’s a dark, satiric kind of funny). It works both in its character bits, and I also found the plot resolution very satisfying (though milage may vary on that point, you might find it too clever by half). Horror is not usually my thing, but pop-culture meta-commentary horror, apparently I can handle that.

3: The Mars House by Natasha Pulley

Elevator Pitch: What if Kim Stanley Robinson wrote Romantacy?

Do The Math: It’s the mathematical average of Red Mars and Winter’s Orbit

I’m honestly a little surprised this didn’t get more awards recognition. Our setup here is on Mars, basically post Earth’s environmental collapse. Earth-born settlers on Mars are regulated, though, because their greater mass and strength makes them dangerous to those raised under Mars gravity, in particular, they are often required to wear exoskeletons that limit their strength.

This book is blurbed as being “perfect for readers of Sarah Gailey and Tamsyn Muir”, which, I have to be honest, I have no idea what that means, except as a signal that the book is not going to be heteronormative.

Our main characters are January, a climate refugee new to Mars, and Aubrey, a politician who is the face of the “let’s regulate those Earthling maniacs” movement. (Aubrey is, if I remember correctly, never explicitly gendered in the book, not necessarily by their preference but because high Martian society considers public displays of gender to be gauche.)

Through shenanigans, January and Aubrey wind up in a political marriage, and we get an enemies-to-lovers story with a large number of unique beats. Pulley has an eye for making her Martian society feel just a little bit weird, so we get communication with animals, and also ubiquitous augmented reality, which has some interesting side effects.

This is fun – it’s got better SF tropes than a lot of SF Romance (can we get a good portmanteau like “romantasy”?). I think the romance basically works, it’s got a couple of bonkers in the best way scenes.

2: The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett

Do The Math: Holmes & Watson + Godzilla + Little Shop of Horrors. Let’s go with that.

Awards: 2025 Hugo nominee for Best Novel

I was genuinely surprised to see how much love I saw this book get online, I guess Robert Jackson Bennet isn’t my underrated discovery anymore.

The first sentence of the blurb for this book is “In Daretana’s greatest mansion, a high imperial officer lies dead–killed, to all appearances, when a tree erupted from his body” yep. A tree. And it’s murder. By magical fast-growing tree.

So there’s an empire. And the empire is beset annually by huge leviathans that rise up out of the sea and create havoc until they are killed. And so, the empire has learned how to use the leviathan blood and native plants to do all kinds of uncanny things. In particular, there are a whole class of augmented people with heightened senses or super strength or whatever.

And we have Ana, our detective. She’s probably augmented, and she’s so overwhelmed by patterns that she needs to be in sensory controlled spaces much of the time. And we have Din, her assistant. He’s augmented to have a perfect memory, and so he goes out and gathers facts, and she solves the mystery. Like how somebody might die from fast-growing tree.

The world building here is incredible. We’re at the outskirts of the Empire but Bennet makes it seem palpable, we see the pressures they are under, we see how just flat-out weird the magical augments are, and what they cost the augmented who bear them. The whole world feels squishy and menacing and just disturbing in the best way. And it’s a great mystery. (Book two is also great).

1: Remember You Will Die by Eden Robins

Elevator Pitch: I’m not sure I can beat the official “Sixty Protagonists, All of Whom Are Dead”

This is maybe my most idiosyncratic top choice ever. It’s not going to get awards love, I don’t see a million people talking about it on BookTok. As I write this, its average rating on StoryGraph is 3.52. Without checking, I’m going to bet that’s very close to the lowest of any book on this list. I may not be able to convince you to read this one.

And yet.

I picked up this book because Mary Robinette Kowal raved about it on social media, so maybe I came into it primed.

We start with a news article. Actually we start with some epigraphs, and they are unusually important, so read them. Anyway, we start with a news article dated 2102 about the death of a girl believed to have been named Poppy. We then get a brief note about the etymology of the word “poppy”. With sample sentences. Don’t overlook the sample sentences, they are important. We then get a seemingly unrelated news article from 1864, and the a further 2102 article that explains that Poppy was the only daughter of an AI construct named Peregrine.

That’s the rest of the book, we go back and forth across the timeline, mostly obituaries – a person will be mentioned in one obit, and then we’ll see the that character’s obit. The etymology sections are interspersed and so is some other found text. Sometimes what isn’t said is as important as what is – in one case we get multiple obits of the same person with different perspectives on what they can and can’t say. It’s also an alt-history in ways that I’m not going to give away – the book is even weirder than I’m hinting at.

As the reader, it eventually dawns on you to try and wonder why these articles are being presented in this order. There is an answer – or at least I think there is, it’s not quite spelled out in the book. Puzzling out the answer is part of the deal here. Over the course of the book, we get like 250 years of intertwined characters, and it’s inventive and beautiful and heartbreaking.

And look, I gasped aloud at one of the sample sentences (it’s in the etymology of “grief”), and I bought the book even though I originally got it through Libby, and I’m choking up a little just writing about it. But this book might not work for you – the rating average suggests it probably won’t. But, wow, did it work for me.