Category: Swords and Spaceships

Jade Nguyen comes to Vietnam to visit her estranged father with one goal in mind: pretend to be straight, Vietnamese, and American enough to get the money for college tuition out of him that he’s holding over her head. But the French colonial house Ba is restoring has an eerie air and other plans for her, starting with strange noises and sensations, and soon escalating to a ghostly bride who gives her a simple but cryptic warning: Don’t eat. If Jade is brave enough, she may be able to save her family…this time.

In Simta, women’s magic is outlawed. The few who have the gift are called Nightbirds, and jealously guarded by the Great Houses thanks to their most important skill: the ability to gift their magic to another with a kiss. Nightbirds spend a year bestowing their magic on those who can pay well, and then are expected to be married into a Great House and settle down to become the mothers of the next generation before their lose their powers. But this Season’s Nightbirds find themselves at the center of a political plot that may well expose them to a church that would very much like to kill them — and reveals to them the deepest secret of the Nightbirds. There are more girls like them, and they are far more powerful than they’ve been allowed to discover.

Mar’s pirate father once made a wicked bargain with el Diablo, and when the devil comes calling to collect his due, not even this transmasculine, nonbinary teen’s secret and powerful magic that lets them manipulate fire and ice can stop the loss of his father’s soul and his ship. But the devil offers Mar a different bargain: their soul for their father’s. Mar, no fool, knows better than to take such a deal — but if they want to save their father, they’re going to need allies.

Daisy has enough problems, and then you add in that she can see dead people — and there are a lot of dead people wandering the streets of Toronto. The final straw, however, is when her boyfriend dumps her. So she leaps at the chance to go to a secluded mansion her mother just inherited in Ontario: it sounds like a great way to get away from her problems. But her mother has secrets she could have never guessed at, and there are things worse than just ghosts wandering the streets. As Daisy’s story unfolds, another girl, Brittney, enters the house ten years in the future to escape her abusive mother. In the end, only one of their stories can be told.

A girl raised in seclusion on a magical island hidden off the coast of Ireland longs to venture into the outside world where magic is all but extinct. When her guardian falls to return home one day, she finally gets her chance. But the truth about what caused magic’s decline — and her guardian’s escape to their magical island — is far more complicated than she ever could’ve imagined.

When Zawadi village in the heart of Kenya is threatened by outside forces, interested in a medical discovery called the Kuvu that could change humanity forever, she must give up the life she planned for herself in order to save herself and her people. Now, it’s a race against time to find the Kuvu before it’s destroyed — or before it destroys everything and everyone around it.

In a desert city parched for water, a boy makes a deal with his ruler: provide water for his dying mother and he will venture out into the Forever Desert to bring water back to the city. It’s an epic quest for salvation not only for himself and his mother, but his entire city as well.

In a world ripped apart by a virus, three women forever altered by the virus’s effects try to navigate the coming apocalypse in all its terrifying, eldritch glory. And as dark forces pull Erin, Savannah, and Mareva together, they discover just what it will take to survive this nightmare.

In Prohibition-era New York, the Revelle family’s fantastical show set on Charmant Island is full of magic and champagne. But as Prohibition threatens their livelihood, Luxe Revelle agrees to pose as the girlfriend of a wealthy scion as he vies for mayor in order to keep her family’s business afloat. It’s only when a desperate orphan begins delving into secrets about the island’s past that Luxe discovers just how dangerous a game it is to keep secrets from powerful people.

A magical pair of glasses passed down from her grandfather begins granting Winna’s wishes in this middle grade novel about family, Black history, and an incredible pair of spectacles. After wishing she could see ghosts, Winna meets the original owner of the spectacles: her great-aunt Estelle. She soon discovers her great-aunt had a brother who was kidnapped when their mother went north to escape slavery — and he’s still alive. Now, it’s up to Winna to track him down in order to break the family curse and make their family whole once again.

This gothic fairy tale–inspired tale follows a husband and wife, whose relationship hinges on one promise: that the bridegroom never pries into his wife’s past. But when Indigo finds out her estranged aunt is dying, the two must return to her family home: the House of Dreams. And suddenly, this scholar of myths, this man obsessed with fairy tales, will have to choose between fiction and reality as the house slowly reveals his wife’s secrets, threatening their marriage — and their lives.

Noir detective mystery meets science fiction in this novel about an alternate United States where Argentina’s development of psychopigments that can be used to create almost any emotion have utterly changed the course of history. Now, an agent from the Psychopigment Enforcement Agency discovers a career-making case that forces her to face down a conspiracy as well as her family and her own emotions.

Lucky St. James is Métis and a millennial who is barely holding on when she gets the bad news that she’s about to be evicted from the tiny apartment in Toronto that she shares with her grandmother. But at night, she hears a strange call that causes her to burrow though a wall to find a tarnished silver spoon that connects her with a network of North American witches who hide behind the front company of VenCo and work to return women to their rightful power. They have an enemy, though: a witch-hunter who is older than he looks and will stop at nothing to keep VenCo from ushering in its new beginning.

Ea is a spinner dolphin only recently come of age, but she’s always felt like an outsider in her pod because she has a type of deafness that prevents her from spinning properly. When catastrophe strikes her family, Ea blames herself and leaves the pod, venturing into the vast, a place full of danger, where creatures are mutating, species of fish are simply disappearing, and demonic noises from above pierce the depths. But when she has just begun to build a new life as a hermit, she encounters a pod of bottlenose dolphins and the course of her destiny changes once again.

Victoria is a Wildblood, someone with magic that allows her to protect other from the natural and supernatural dangers of the Jamaican jungle. She was also kidnapped when she was six by the Exotic Lands Touring Company and manipulated into being a “tour guide” for them, and that’s all she’s known since: guiding tourists and commercial prospectors through danger. But when she gets a client who is kind in a way she’s never experienced, she has to decide was a promotion in the corrupt company that practically owns her is actually worth.

At 16, Dirt has already aged out of Bowing, the Isle’s elite, all-female fighting sport that mixes combat and dance. She spends her days coaching and mentoring the younger girls of Mud Fam and dreading her next birthday, when she will have to fully leave to find the destiny the gods have intended for her. But when a rival Fam attacks and leaves Mud without their top fighter, Dirt is the only one who can possibly step in to that position. She’s old, out of shape, and terribly afraid — but Dirt has never let fear get in the way of protecting her Fam.

The posthuman descendants known as alloys freely roam across the galaxy while humans themselves have been restricted to Earth. But when an Earth-like planet is found, the adopted human child of alloy parents has an opportunity to show what humanity can do — and that we deserve a place in the universe. Her goal of freeing her people from their collective past is noble, but her mission has been set up to fail…

The saints and their disciples rule the city of Ombrazia unchallenged, and there is little recourse for those out of their favor. Rossana’s father was murdered by members of the Ombrazian military, and she will do whatever it takes to dismantle the system, even if that means joining a rebellion, going up against the boy who broke her heart, or leaning fully into her powers as a disciple of Patience. But her father isn’t the only one recently murdered; a killer stalks the streets, and Rossana finds she must team up with the captain of Palazzo security for them to both get what they want.

The lives of vampires are not glamorous like we’ve been led to believe; there’s no murdering, no flying, no turning into a bat, none of that cool stuff. It’s just working night jobs to pay the rent and living off blood bags — and avoiding family, if you’re Louise Chao. What Louise does having going for her is decades of going to punk shows, and she finally might be able to join a band, if she can just keep her vampirism under wraps. But then her long-lost teenaged cousin Ian shows up at her door, and while she connects with him over a love of music, he’s also way too close to discovering all of her secrets.

Destry is a terraformer on the Environmental Rescue Team, the descendant of the terraformers who came to Sask-E and began the long task of building a new environment. She’s never questioned her mission, until she discovers an entire city of people hidden in a volcano.