The Everlasting

 The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow, 320 pages.

Owen Mallory has been obsessed with Sir Una Everlasting, hero of Dominion and part of the nation's foundational legends, since he was a child. It was her face that sent him to war, and her story that drove him to study history. But when he is sent through time to preserve Dominion's history, he learns that the woman is not so simple as the legend. Una is a broken woman; her decades at war have left her scarred inside and out, and she wants nothing more than to abandon the story she is trapped in. Instead they must live out the end of her life: her final quest, a great betrayal, her noble death, again and again. Finding a different ending means breaking her myth, so they both have to decide what is more important: the woman or what she represents.

I liked this book so much it's hard to talk coherently about it. This book is doing so much at once, and it's doing it with balance, grace, and beautiful prose. This is partially a love story about knowing someone on a bone-deep level built through an uncountable amount of time. It's also a tragedy. It's also a scathing critique about how fascism needs to rewrite history to justify its own existence. I cried at the end and haven't stopped thinking of them since. I do believe this is my best book of the year. 

How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying

How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying by Django Wexler, 419 pages

For reasons unknown, Davi is stuck in a time loop wherein she is tasked with defending humankind against the Dark Lord, and after more than 200 unsuccessful tries (read: she literally died trying), Davi has had enough. On try 238, she decides to become the Dark Lord instead of fighting him/her/them, and while it takes her a few short lives to get the hang of it, Davi learns that she has a knack for leading a horde of orcs and other wild beings.

This is a fun, raunchy, irreverent fantasy novel, full of pop culture references and snarky humor. It may throw off those new to the genre (as there isn't really a great explanation for the Earth-centric pop culture references other than Davi musing that she "must've come from Earth at some point"), but for others, this is will be a welcome goofy adventure. Read it if you liked Dreadful, Soon I Will Be Invincible, Hench, or other novels with a fantasy antihero. 

Middlegame

 Middlegame by Seanan McGuire, 492 pages.

Rodger and Dodger have had the ability to communicate psychically and see through each other's eyes since they were both seven-year-old geniuses on opposite sides of the country (in language and mathematics, respectively).  This is because they are in fact twins created by an evil alchemist as part of an attempt to take control of the natural laws of the universe. Over the course of their lives Rodger and Dodger are repeatedly pushed together and torn apart throughout their lives both by the machinations of others and their own (extremely fragile) hearts. 

McGuire's work is excellent as usual, although this book had less of an impact on me than many of her others. The prose is stunning and Rodger and Dodger are both very engaging, but some of the rules of this setting get more then a little complex. I'm also not the biggest fan of time loop stories, which put me at a bit of a disadvantage.

Fun Fact: The Up and Under books, which McGuire is writing under the pen name A. Deborah Baker, are a major plot point in this book. A. Deborah Baker herself is also a character, which I find delightfully immersive.