I’m so excited to participate in Wyrd and Wonder this year because, let’s be honest, I haven’t had a lot of time for blogging since my baby was born. Reading is going fine (thank the heavens and Vienna’s libraries for audiobooks!) but it’s the writing about the reading that is difficult. I’m counting evrery Wyrd and Wonder post as a small win.
So without further ado, let me tell you about my five favorite magic systems and/or spells from SFF literature:
Brandon Sanderson – Mistborn
This one’s kind of predictable, isn’t it? Sanderson is a master of magic systems, after all, and for good reason. The ones he creates are intricate, logical (which seems wrong when talking about magic, but who cares), and they are utterly immersive. The Mistborn series is my favorite when it comes to complex magic systems because although there’s a lot to learn about Allomancy, the learning curve is slow enough to get even fantasy newbies there. And once you’re a few hundred pages in, you are so into the jargon and mechanics of it all that you find yourself predicting which metal will have which effect, which superpower protagonist Vin should use in any given moment, and which of her metal flakes are running low. It’s a nerd’s paradise. Oh, and the story is pretty damn great too!
Heather Fawcett – Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries
This is a very recent one (January 2023) but the titular scholar Emily Wilde has worked hear way into my heart with her story. It’s not really a spoiler to tell you that Emily has learned exactly two spells from faeries (that’s special, you don’t just get spells left and right), one of which immediately stuck in my brain because it appears so useless as to be hilarious. It’s a spell that summons buttons. Yes, that’s right. Buttons from shirts or coats or what have you. Maybe I’d prefer a second-sock-finding variant of this spell, but I adore the idea and I adored the book even more.
And just to tease a little bit, the spell is obviously not useless, although I won’t tell you how clever Emily makes use of it.
R. F. Kuang – Babel
Another fairly recent book, this standalone historical fantasy has a unique magic system. It uses language in general – and the parts that get “lost in translation” in particular – as the source of magic. Pieces of silver are engraved with a word in two languages that, at first glance, have the same meaning. But there is always a small difference, as anyone who has learned a foreign language can tell you, a bit of nuance, a connotation or a hint of something that works in only one of the two languages. And that’s what fuels the magic in Kuang’s version of England. Only a fluent speaker of both languages can actually make the magic work, which makes bilingual people extremely valuable.The book has a lot more to offer, especially in terms of exploring colonialism, race, and social class. But the magic is cool, too.
Terry Pratchett – Discworld
Specifically, Granny Weatherwax’s “headology” which, you might argue, is no real magic at all. But it does work wonders when Granny uses it, and all without having to brew any stinky potions or learn complicated spells by heart. I don’t think I need to explain to anyone why the Discworld novels are great and that you should read them. But you know everyone has their favorite sub-series, right? While I’ve grown quite fond of the City Watch, the Witches of Lancre will always be my favorites. I want to be both Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg when I grow up (which is impossible, of course) but I also wouldn’t mind a little Tiffany Aching either. The Witches are just the best.
Nnedi Okorafor – The Nsibidi Scripts
Starting with Akata Witch, this series offers not only great YA stories about why being an outsider can be one’s particular strenght, but also comes with a highly useful magic system, where gaining knowledge – be it a new spell or learning a deep truth about yourself oder the world – gives you magical currency. Whenever new knowledge is attained, these coins (chittim) rain down from the sky. The more important your new skill/information, the bigger and more valuable the chittim will be. This system can’t be cheated, which is why I like it so much. Hard work gets rewards and that’s that.
And with that, I look forward to everyone else’s Wyrd and Wonder posts. May our TBRs grow ever bigger, may we discover new and interesting magic systems, and may our books be only five star reads! 🙂
This was a more pleasant type of book hangover. I absolutely adore the world Nnedi Okorafor has created and I just want to spend more time in it! The only reason I didn’t have a book hangover after the first book, 
It took me a while to find my way into this book. Stiefvater isn’t known for flowery language but nobody can create a three-dimensional character with just a few lines the way that she can. In this case, she has created not just a cast of wonderful characters but an entire island filled with tradition and myth and life. Once I had allowed myself to get fully immersed in this world I never wanted to come up for air again. The ending was a thing of singular perfection. I cried and wanted to start reading the entire book again.
This entire trilogy swept me off my feet, but the first book gave me a particularly tough book hangover. It was like the author had looked into my brain, picked all the things I like about stories and stuck them into this novel. Russian fairy tales, a brilliant heroine, lots of conflict, a compelling wintery setting and fantastic writing. How could I not love this? The problem was that I read this shortly after it came out, so I had to wait for the next book. In the meantime, all I could do was yearn for another novel that combined all of my favorite things as beautifully as this one did.
Nobody was more surprised than me when this little book completely destroyed me. It’s a reversed Little Mermaid retelling – where the human scientist wants to become a mermaid – that packs way more punch than you’d expect. I’m so glad I bought the physical book from Book Smugglers Publishing because this is a story I want on my shelf. As it’s a retelling, you do know what’s coming ahead of time, but nothing could prepare me for the emotional punch. I was devastated, I was shocked, and I was very impressed. Here it was not so much that I didn’t think anything could live up to this book again, but more a general feeling of depression because of the story.
You can always tell when writers are also poets because even when they write prose, there is something special about the way they use language. C. S. E. Cooney is one such poet and in this collection, she wrote nothing but stories that gave me hangovers. Seriously, after every single one I thought to myself “This was the best one yet, nothing can be better” and then I repeated this until I reached the end of the book. One story in particular hit me right in the heartstrings (the Rumpelstiltskin retelling) but all the others were gorgeous as well. I have since tried to buy everything I could find by this author and I hope we’ll get to read much more by her.
As a three-years-in-a-row Hugo winner for this particular trilogy, I probably don’t have to tell you how great this book is. I had read Jemisin’s work before and was already a big fan, but when The Fifth Season came out, it was clear that she had reached a whole new level of excellence. All the things that are important to me (characters, language, world-building, plot) exceeded my expectations, and then there is one of the best most surprising twists that I have ever come across. This deserves every award it has won and it still makes me doubt I’ll ever read anything quite as good again.
Here’s another short story writer that completely blew me away. Slatter’s short stories are interconnected (and also connect to her other collection Sourdough) so this didn’t feel so much like a story collection but rather like a mosaic novel. Fitting the pieces together, seeing how each story fits within the context of the others, was almost as much fun as the stories themselves. Slatter writes fantastic characters, putting women front and center. Her writing has a fairy tale vibe, all while doing completely her own thing.
There had to be a Valente novel on this list, didn’t there? It’s not surprising that my favorite writer also gave me one of my biggest book hangovers. In this retro futuristic novel, she combines so many styles and voices that at first I was most impressed with the writing. But then she also created this heartbreaking characters and tells an extraordinary story that I didn’t know what to love more. Reading this was truly an experience. This is a book you fall into like a dream and waking up feels just as painful as leaving loved ones behind.
So yeah, everybody who’s been raving about The Stormlight Archive for the last years, was absolutely right. It is the most epic of epic fantasies with characters you can actually care about and a world so large and so filled with history and mythology that it probably will take those 10 volumes to explore it all. While the first book was very much an introduction into this crazy world (although it didn’t feel like it at the time), this one digs a little deeper, grants the characters more powers (both magical and personality-wise), and shows a bit more of what the world holds in store for us. I can’t get over how much I love Kaladin, and his interactions with Shallan were my favorite bits of the book, although that probably makes me sound like a huge fangirl.
This was my surprise of the year. I never warmed to Taylor’s Daughter of Smoke and Bone series because the old-man-in-a-young-body falling in love with a teenage girl trope crept me the hell out. But this collection of three novellas absolutely blew me away. Taylor invents her own mythologies and plays with more well-known legends and tells beautiful stories within them. Whether you’d like to read a modern take on Goblin Market or read about how to deal with a devil, each story is beautifully told and has gorgeous illustrations. I am beyond happy to have a hardback copy of this on my shelf. Plus, this book convinced me to give Taylor’s other books another try.
1.Victoria Schwab – This Savage Song
3. Shirley Jackson – The Haunting of Hill House
4. Ian Doescher – William Shakespeare’s Star Wars
5. Amy Harmon – The Bird and the Sword
6. Leigh Bardugo – Siege and Storm
7. Brandon Sanderson – The Bands of Mourning
8. T. Kingfisher – Bryony and Roses
9. Kendare Blake – Three Dark Crowns
SFF Book Reviews 