Seven Faceless Saints is a competent YA novel that successfully builds a compelling central dynamic between its main characters even if it forgets to properly develop the conflicts that define their world.

The story is set in Ombrazia, a city where people blessed with magic become disciples and live separate lives from the “unfavored”, as magic is considered a divine gift bestowed by the saints. While these disciples enjoy special protection and rights, never being compulsorily drafted to fight in the war, for example, the common people are not that lucky. The flames of rebellion, then, are already being kindled when one of the disciples is suddenly murdered in their Palazzo [...]

Between Two Fires is a powerful horror story set in medieval times. Its strength derives from its unhinged willingness to physically and morally test its main characters while playing with the religious beliefs of the time, displaying the horror of their tensions and contradictions.

The book opens with a tale about fallen angels, telling us how the great plague of the 14th century was a test intended not for men, but for God: a test to see if He would really allow his children to die horribly and haplessly. He does indeed, so the demons can only conclude that the world is unprotected and they can unleash all kinds of horrors onto the people.

The first chapter has a [...]

Dune Messiah is a fascinating sequel that perfectly evolves the thematic discussion of the first book, framing its protagonist as a complicated tyrant, whose conflicting characteristics make him both terrifying and tragic. It’s a novel that falters only in its very brief length, with a climax that comes too soon, leaving some of the important characters underdeveloped.

The epigraph that opens the book is fascinating. It asks us to see the main character, the Emperor Paul Muad’Dib, as a human being, disregarding his special powers and abilities. It’s urging us to strip him of whatever makes him supernatural, a character belonging to the realm of fantasy, and ground him in [...]

Shorefall offers a natural thematic progression from the great Foundryside, further expanding the link between technology and oppression while presenting a memorable antagonist that challenges the protagonist’s worldview, daring her to find a better solution for society than his tyrannical nihilism.

When she was a slave in a plantation, doctors experimented on Sancia. Scriving is the skill that alters the properties of an object through a series of written commands, but instead of an object, the doctors were attempting to create a scrived person: a slave with special attributes, extremely powerful but also incapable of disobedience. Sancia, however, was granted the ability to [...]

Stephen King’s Revival is a novel that experiments with cosmic horror to tell a story much less interested in providing cheap scares than in discussing how our search for order (and justice) in life leads us to embrace a religion. The real horror of its narrative is not crafted around the danger of eldritch beings, but how our concept of an afterlife shapes our worldview and dictates our actions: to pose the question “but what if we are wrong”, that way madness lies.

The book is narrated in the first person by Jamie Morton, an old man who begins to recall his childhood, beginning on the day the new Methodist minister, Charles Jacobs, arrived in his town and changed his life [...]

The Shadow of the Gods, the first book in The Bloodsworn series, is a competent Nordic-inspired fantasy that presents a fascinating world rife with monsters and violence, where characters learn to be brutal to survive. The novel, however, is let down by a problematic structure that makes some plotlines take too long to get moving, while others suffer from the lack of a proper conclusion.

The story starts with a hunt. While young Breca is preparing to throw a spear at a reindeer, his mother, Orka, teaches him that “Death is a part of life.” He misses the shot, however, because a wolf startles the deer: in The Shadow of the Gods, there will always be a creature lurking in the [...]