Since I'm so dreadfully behind on actually doing monthly wrap-ups this year, I thought it might be fun to branch out into some other types of content. Like, for instance, ranking all 30 of the 2024 releases I've read this year (and last year).
This list spans fantasy, sci fi, and contemporary romance (with a random YA thriller thrown in for good measure) so it may feel a little all over the place. But that's fine. Only boring people separate their ranking lists by genre!
Let's get into it.
30. Lady Macbeth ★☆☆☆☆
Given that Lady Macbeth is the only 2024 release I gave a flat one star rating to, it kind of had to end up at the bottom of this list. (Insincere) apologies to all Lady Macbeth fans but I do think the book is...bad. Probably Ava Reid's worst, although I only have A Study in Drowning and Fable for the End of the World to compare it to. I tend to have beef with retellings that don't have interesting things to say about their source material, and I just didn't feel like this book had much of interest to say about Macbeth.
(It would have still been bad with or without the Macbeth connection in my opinion).
29. The Darkness Within Us ★★☆☆☆
I knew this book would be bad and I read it anyway. This is a thing I do sometimes. It's not for everyone, but it's important for me. If I read good books all the time I wouldn't appreciate them as much! Reading half-baked fantasy romances like this one remind me to appreciate the good books that are out there.
Anyway, I got through this one more quickly than its predecessor, The Shadows Between Us, but it was still really bad in most of the same ways. I also really hated the execution of the romance between the girly-girl hyperfeminine FMC and the MMC. He starts off kind of stereotypically manly/tough/rugged, but then starts caring more about her interests and his own appearance over time...which is fine on its own, but there was also a "taming the beast" aspect to their relationship (because of a curse or something that the MMC is dealing with) that gave me the ick.
28. Four Letter Word ★★☆☆☆
Another bad book that I read on purpose because I kind of wanted to read a bad book. It's a YA thriller and its only twist is given away by the synopsis. I read the whole thing wondering if there would be some other twist at some point to provide some attempt at an interesting plot. I fear there was none.
Also, if you have your main character defeat your villain by shooting them in the chest several times with a glock and then throwing them into the ocean, you don't actually get to have a "But what if they're still out there and they want revenge?" moment at the end. They're super dead! Don't make me laugh!
27. The Last Dragon of the East ★★☆☆☆
This one I did actually try to like and just...didn't. The opening seemed promising, and I thought it would be a fun personal stakes-fantasy in an Asian setting. But then things got weirdly bloody and gory in a way that seemed at odds with the previously-established tone, and there was a reincarnation element in here that I had mixed feelings about, ESPECIALLY when the ending rolled around. Overall, I just didn't get what I was hoping for from this story. I think this will be for some people, but it just wasn't for me.
26. Lucy Undying ★★☆☆☆.
This is our second bad retelling on this list. But I put it higher because there's like, a somewhat entertaining book buried in the nonsense that is Kiersten White's interpretation of Dracula. If she had ditched the Dracula connection entirely and just written the Utah vampire MLM book that this book wanted to be, I think it would have been solid silly fun. Alas, this book had way too much Mina slander and an ultimately really boring take on Lucy.
25. Pride and Prejudice in Space ★★☆☆☆
The two positive things I can say about this book are, it's clear Alexis Lampley DEARLY loves Pride & Prejudice, and the art and production on this book is genuinely stunning. Unfortunately, neither of those things can excuse the fact that this is a "retelling" that abjectly refuses to change or retell the story. Instead, it's an almost exact copy of Pride & Prejudice...but in space. No worldbuilding is done for this space society, because it's all copied over from the original novel. But that doesn't work, really, because...we're in space!
This could have been really fun, so I was pretty disappointed that I didn't like this one. It's worth at least flipping through for the illustrations, though.
24. A Feather So Black ★★★☆☆
A Swan Lake-inspired fantasy that just fell kinda flat for me. It played too strongly into romantasy tropes that don't really interest me instead of exploring the things I did find interesting about the setting. My sister enjoyed it, though.
23. Tangled Up in You ★★★☆☆
This was a wildcard as far as my personal reading habits, haha. I don't normally read a lot of contemporary romance in general, and I think picking up a Disney-inspired one is extra out of character? That being said...look, I had fun with this! It felt pretty much like reading a modern!Tangled AU on AO3, and I thought it was pretty good when viewed through that lens.
The stakes do get kind of weird towards the end, though - it follows pretty much the original Tangled plot, but altered for a modern day setting, so we go from "quirky roadtrip shenanigans" to "FBI shootout" kind of awkwardly. It's just all a bit 0 to 11.
I also think the Mother Gothel character's relationship with the Rapunzel character is underdeveloped. This book tries to conceal from the reader whether Rapunzel starts off with her birth parents or Mother Gothel, so it doesn't show us the same obvious manipulation and emotional abuse that characterize Rapunzel and Gothel's relationship in the movie. But the consequence of that is that when we learn that the Gothel character Is, in fact, the Gothel character, she feels deeply underwhelming and underdeveloped compared to the movie character.
22. This World Is Not Ours ★★★☆☆
This book promised messed up polycules and just didn't quite deliver for me. I found it interesting, but I think it could have been pushed further, both on the polycule toxicity front and on the weirdness of the alien world. But if you like horror-tinged sci fi, this one is a quick read so it may be worth trying. I want to try Kemi Ashing-Giwa's sci fi debut at some point...if I recall correctly, it involves a teamaker being caught up in some sort of imperial politics, and sounded really interesting.
21. What Monstrous Gods ★★★☆☆
I rated this one a little more highly when I first finished it. It turns out the author has expressed some pretty adamantly pro-life, anti-birth control views in the past, and that made me feel kind of weird about the book in retrospect. I did find it interesting, though. It's kind of Sleeping Beauty-inspired and has some interesting freaky gods.
20. The Lies We Conjure ★★★☆☆
A YA fantasy mystery/thriller where two sisters agree to pretend to be some old lady's granddaughters, only to get trapped in a mansion where a magical murder has taken place. This was fine, but not exactly life-changing or memorable. Just decent 3 star fun. I was extremely lukewarm on the romance and I thought a couple of plot things were overly convenient.
19. A Crane Among Wolves ★★★☆☆
It saddens me to rank June Hur this low because I've really enjoyed a couple of her previous books (The Red Palace and The Silence of Bones) but this one just didn't work as well for me as the others. I think the mystery plot in this book just didn't mesh very well with the rebellion plot line, so as a result, the overall plot of the book felt a bit disjointed. I also wasn't super invested in the main couple and didn't really like the epilogue?
But I did appreciate the nuance of the main character's feelings towards her sister. The MC is a younger sibling and never really expressed her appreciation for her older sister until she was stolen away, at which point she sets out on a quest to get her back no matter what. Very realistic sister portrayal.
18. The Thirteenth Child ★★★☆☆
This book was fine, but I feel like my favorite Erin C Craig book is still the first one I read: House of Salt and Sorrows. I don't even know if House of Salt and Sorrows was that much better than this one, but still. The Thirteenth Child is a retelling of the obscure Grimm brothers' fairytale Godfather Death. It has some moral/philosophical weirdness that is somewhat intentional and somewhat unintentional, stemming from the fact that the main character is given the power to see which people she's "supposed" to save with her healing, and which she's supposed to let die for the greater good.
Anyways, worth trying if you like Erin Craig and YA dark fairytale retellings, but not my favorite of either category.
17. The Cottage Around the Corner ★★★☆☆
I read this mostly because I really loved Thief Liar Lady when I read it last year, and it made me determined to pay attention to what D.L Soria did next. This one is less directly up my alley than Thief Liar Lady was, but it was still an enjoyable small town contemporary fantasy romance. It's inspired by You've Got Mail, apparently, which I've never seen, but I don't think it's exactly the same...for one thing, the leads do have a pen pal thing going on, but they know that it's each other the whole time, so that's a bit different.
16. Prince of Fortune ★★★★☆
This one is a bit difficult to describe. Downton Abbey meets Divine Rivals, and also it's M/M? It's about an introverted prince and his charming boyfriend (who is a noble, but only barely) and the war that breaks out between their country and a country that split off from theirs centuries ago. The magic in this one was interesting (there are seers and standard elemental magic but also an interesting take on nature magic) and it was kind of cool to see a fantasy world that leans more late 19th/early 20th century. Tonally, this feels like it could be slightly younger YA (it could probably be given to older middle grade readers who are looking for war/adventure fantasy with some romance). Overall I liked it well enough, but I don't know how long it will stick with me.
15. The Blood Orchid ★★★★☆
This is the sequel and conclusion to The Scarlet Alchemist, which was a standout for me last year amid a spate of mediocre reads. It was definitely weaker for me than the first book - the plot feels a bit more unfocused and messy, and I felt like we got more development of a side character being redeemed from book 1 than the actual main romantic relationship - but I'm glad I finished out the duology, and I liked it overall. This is a good duology to pick up if you liked some of the ideas in Iron Widow (Chinese history-inspired fantasy with a fierce and vengeful heroine) but wanted stronger execution.
14. A Dark and Drowning Tide ★★★★☆
I really liked this one, but I will freely admit that it is flawed. If you didn't like it...Yeah. No, like, I get it. I understand.
This book does a couple of things very well. It's atmospheric and gloomy and suffused with a kind of simmering, anxious resentment from our lead, who has always been an outcast in the world of academia because she's this world's equivalent of Jewish. And speaking of, I really liked the use of folktales throughout, particularly in how the folktales demonstrate how this world is steeped in prejudice against the Yeva/Jewish people. And personally! The romance more or less worked for me. I've seen mixed opinions on it, but I liked that it was a little weird and a little toxic but still somehow I rooted for it.
Where this book loses me is in setting up all of these political problems, many of them directly stemming from the current king on the throne and the recent, troubled unification of these disparate provinces, and then...never solving any of that! We spend much too much time setting up the politics of this world to just shunt them to the side so easily, and it really weakens what was otherwise a pretty enjoyable book for me. If this book wants to be a personal stakes book, we did not need so many political stakes. Not every character needed to be royalty/ruling a province for them to be bitchy childhood friends on a murderous expedition together!
13. Service Model ★★★★☆
This one is weird. Perhaps Adrian Tchaikovsky is weird in general. This is the second book of his I've read after City of Last Chances, and his books are definitely good and well written, but so far I haven't felt a super strong emotional connection to them. I really like what this book has to say thematically, and it was really genuinely funny to me a lot of the time, but I also feel like reading it was a liiiiittle bit of a chore at times. It's on the longer side, and there were points when I was like "Okay, so when do we find out what the point of it all is?" We got there in the end, but it was a journey.
12. Lost Ark Dreaming ★★★★☆
Another novella! This is a nearish future cli-fi (climate fiction) story set in a giant skyscraper where weird things have started happening and strange creatures are emerging from the ocean. The ending was a bit abrupt, but overall I really enjoyed this one.
11. ASAP ★★★★☆
It's a bit surprising that this one is so high on the list, because I really did not vibe with XOXO, which this book is a companion to. I don't know if this book is really so much better, but I enjoyed it way more. I think I connected with the main character of ASAP more (even though I was meh on her love interest) and having more Kpop knowledge also allowed me to appreciate the Kpop industry plotlines that much more. Overall, this was just fun and cute and I'm always going to root for a girl who loves cute stuffed animals.
Also, I think this was the first ARC I read on my kindle? So that's kind of fun.
10. Asunder ★★★★☆
This is my most recent read off this list! I liked it. A woman who has sold her soul for the power to speak to the dead impulsively binds a man to herself to save his life, but it turns out she's bound him to her shadow and one or both of them could end dead anyway if they can't get separated. There are dead gods and living gods (both as weird and freaky as fantasy gods should be), a very knowledgeable woman scholar, giant dimension-traveling spiders as transit, and a pretty cool magic system. I'll be keeping an eye out for any sequels to this one; it doesn't seem to be marked as a series opener, but I'll definitely be disappointed if there's no follow-up in the works.
9. A Sorceress Comes to Call ★★★★☆
T. Kingfisher wins again (for me at least). I have no idea why Tordotcom decided to market this as a Goose Girl retelling, because it really isn't one (change the horse's name, and the only connection would be the existence of geese), but what it IS is still a lot of fun to me. It's a dark but very warmhearted fantasy about people rallying together to rescue a girl from her abusive mother. It kind of gave me Tangled x Downton Abbey vibes. If that sounds fun to you, definitely give it a try! Content warnings for emotional abuse from a parent, of course.
8. The Gilded Crown ★★★★★
This one is a surprise favorite. My expectations were pretty low. I blame the extremely generic cover, in part. But I really liked this! It's atmospheric, folkloric, and overall a really enjoyable kind of coming-of-age for a protagonist who just wants to do the right thing but struggles to know what that is. I've already read an early copy of the sequel, and I didn't like it QUITE as much, but I do still like both of them and recommend the duology overall.
7. Metal From Heaven ★★★★★
Where to begin with Metal From Heaven...for starters, why haven't more people read this book? Why haven't specifically Locked Tomb fans flocked to this book en masse? A Gideon the Ninth comp is a difficult thing to live up to, and yet this book more than lives up to it. It's weird. It's gritty and industrial. It's gay (there are lesbians who ride motorbikes). It's about revenge and anti-capitalism and freaky magic metal and love! Read it!
6. Emily Wilde's Map of the Otherlands ★★★★★
My schedule for reading the Emily Wilde books is really off because I've read all three of them as ARCs, and they come out in January, so i tend to forget what year they actually come out in. This one was my least favorite of the three, but only by a small margin, and it's partly my own fault, because I imagined a scenario for the plot that just didn't end up happening. It is not this book's fault that it was never planning to do the thing that I thought would be cool for it to do. But I was a little disappointed, regardless. Still very good. Still highly recommend this series.
5. The Maid and the Crocodile ★★★★★
This book was a total delight. Speaking once again of retellings - this book does such a great job of pulling inspiration from Howl's Moving Castle while still being totally its own thing. You don't have to be familiar with HMC to appreciate the story and characters, but it's a fun little bonus for people who do. There are so many books drawing on Howl's Moving Castle for inspo right now, and frankly a lot of them are...not doing it that well. But this one is great! It's just a fantastic story about love, found family, labor rights, and coming into your own. I highly recommend, along with the Raybearer duology* that this is a spin-off of.
*(You can read them in either order, but Maid and the Crocodile does "spoil" the fate of a character introduced in Redemptor, so if you're a stickler for that kind of thing, publication order may be the way to go).
4. Sorcery and Small Magics ★★★★★
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, this book also delighted me a lot. For a lot of reasons. I was endeared to the main character almost immediately. He's the kind of charming, snarky disaster of a character that attracts me like catnip, so...of course I loved him at once. The other male lead was less up my alley, but I didn't dislike him. It's just that because he was more stoic and buttoned up, we didn't get to know him as well as Leo, since we're literally in Leo's head the whole time.
I also think this book is a great example of a book with personal stakes that doesn't fall into the trap of being so overly cozy that it lacks stakes entirely (I'm a little bit of a cozy hater). Plus, I thought the exploration of the curse that Leo is under was really thoughtful and interesting. He is gradually losing more and more autonomy as the curse progresses, and it genuinely terrifies him, which causes him to make some sort of bad decisions. This loss of autonomy isn't necessarily as immediately obvious or as obviously concerning to the other characters, which makes for some really interesting interpersonal conflicts. I'm speaking as someone who doesn't have a chronic illness, but it seemed like it could maybe act as an analogue for chronic illness or a progressive disability?
There's also the fact that this book presents an actual slow burn in which the two main characters aren't in love/together by the end of the book. What a refreshing surprise, am I right? I'm really looking forward to news of the next book in this series.
3. The Tainted Cup ★★★★★
Me reading this book was me giving Robert Jackson Bennett another chance after I was really meh on Foundryside all the way back in 2021. And I'm really glad I listened to my friends who were recommending this and did give him that second chance, because this was really fun and intriguing! It's always good to read a fantasy book that reminds you that fantasy worlds are allowed to be weird and wacky and strange, and this one does that. Plus a little genre-blending here and there is always fun, and this blends a weird fantasy setting with a murder mystery plot. I was glad to see that this one is getting a sequel once I finished it (I may or may not have immediately emailed the publisher to beg for an ARC of A Drop of Corruption) because I'm very curious to know what kind of secrets there are in this world to be revealed in further installments.
I also was engaged with the mystery plot throughout and really liked Ana and Din as characters. There's a particular moment they have near the end of the book that actually made me tear up a bit. Read this one!
2. A Letter to the Luminous Deep ★★★★★
This was one of my most anticipated reads for this year, which is why I was actually terrified to read it! I think there's a chance I would still be putting off reading it, except that I suggested it to my book club so then I had no choice but to read it. This book sounded very up my alley - I mean, an epistolary novel that's also a fantasy of manners, and also has scholars and academia, and underwater society? I was like "Will I really be so lucky that this book not only sounds good, but is good? Won't I just be disappointed because my expectations are too high?"
But I'm pleased to report that I enjoyed A Letter to the Luminous Deep enormously, and the sequel is definitely high up on my list of anticipated 2025 releases (Which reminds me...should I do a list of anticipated 2025 releases? I fear I've already read a few of my MOST anticipated books thanks to bookseller privileges...). Hopefully the sequel is just as enjoyable for me. I'll definitely be keeping an eye out for future Sophie Cathrall projects as well.
1. The Wings Upon Her Back ★★★★★
This book...this book. I actually read this book after I'd already put this ranking list together, and I had to contend with the fact that it had skyrocketed to the top of my list. Is there a little bit of recency bias here? Maybe! Maybe. But I think The Wings Upon Her Back's place at the top of this list is mostly just because it's very well-deserved. Or as well-deserved as any ranking spot in a totally opinion-based list can be.
I'd really like to write a full review of this book at some point, but boiled down, this is a dual timeline book where we see two kind of opposite storylines come to fruition. In one, a young girl is desperately working to earn her place in a group of elite warriors who are divinely tasked with protecting their city-state, and she doesn't realize that she is also becoming increasingly groomed and radicalized by her emotionally abusive trainer/mentor. In the other timeline, she is a tired and disillusioned woman in her 40s who is cast out of that same group of elite warriors thanks to a single moment of mercy, and is taken in by a group of rebels who are trying to overturn the iron grip the winged have on the city. At first she plans to betray the rebels to earn back her wings, but this narrative is her slowly deciding to change sides and take responsibility for her role as an enforcer.
I read this book in a single sitting. The two timelines are expertly intertwined and I felt propelled through the story. I needed to know what would happen next. When I got to the last chapter, the juxtaposition of the final scene from each timeline actually made me tear up.
So in conclusion...this book is really good. Devastating and raw at times, but ultimately filled with a weary determination and hope. I believe it's Samantha Mills' first full-length novel, and I'm really curious to see what she does next.
There we have it! All of the 2024 releases I read this year and last year, tidily ranked in a list. I guess it could be noted that I did choose to exclude The Element of Fire and The Death of the Necromancer from this ranking. I read the revised and updated version for each of them, which means that technically they could be considered 2024 releases, but since they were originally published in the 90s, I felt like it made sense not to include them. Also, 30 is a nice round number.
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