Tantalizing Tales — April 2025 — Part Two

Hello, readers! Sorry everything’s been a bit chaotic this week. The funeral of my co-parent’s mom was yesterday and we’ve been doing a lot of family-wrangling, which has eaten up more of my time than anticipated. But at least there are books to escape to and relax in, including some of my most anticipated for the next few weeks!

First on this list is W A Simpson’s The Hatter’s Daughter, the third book in the Tales Of The Riven Isles dark fantasy series. In this speculative riff on Alice In Wonderland, the Mad Hatter and the Cheshire Cat rule, until the Rot threatens the sanity and lives of all.

There is more to the Vine than mortals and immortals know. It reaches its branches and tendrils into realms beyond the Riven Isles. On the night that Faith was born, her mother perished, but not before sending Faith to safety in Underneath. The Mad Hatter discovered the newborn Faith and took her home to raise as his own.

When the Rot invades, Faith is determined to fight it. Fortunately, she won’t have to fight alone. Her childhood friend Prince Rowan accompanies her as she returns to her birthplace to find a Legendary Heroine to help save the Riven Isles.

But Overland is dangerous, and the minions of the Rot are in hot pursuit. If Faith doesn’t succeed, the minions of the Rot will destroy everything that she and Rowan know and love.

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Another fun fantasy novel is Sarwat Chadda’s latest middle grade novel Storm Singer, an exhilarating tale of magic, adventure and non-stop action inspired by both Indian mythology and Dungeons & Dragons adventures.

In a land ruled by fierce winged warriors known as eagle garudas, twelve-year-old Nargis is just a poor, lowly human, a Worm who hates the garudas who killed her parents. But even though she can’t fly — and a childhood attempt to left her walking with a crutch — she is far from powerless. Nargis is a spirit singer: able to coax small bits of wind, water, fire, and earth to do her bidding through song… well, sometimes.

When Nargis loses control of her power during a high-stakes kite fight, she is exiled. Cast into the desert, she discovers Mistral, an injured boy who turns out to be an eagle garuda, the prince of her mortal enemies. He’s on a mission to take back his throne from a terrible vulture garuda. In spite of their mutual distrust, the two have no choice but to forge an unlikely alliance if they want to escape the desert alive.

As Nargis and Mistral battle dangerous assassins, befriend crafty sky pirates and sneak into the mysterious sky castle of Alamut, Nargis discovers that she carries a family secret, one that could bring Monsoon’s rains back to the desert. The catch is that she’s going to have to risk her life in the process…

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A different kind of fantasy concept lies at the heart of Katie Bayerl’s cross-genre Young Adult novel What Comes After, a darkly comical, heartfelt story that will appeal to fans of The Good Place.

No one could be more disappointed about sixteen year-old Mari’s sudden death than Mari herself. If she’d ever even thought about the afterlife, she certainly did not expect for it to turn out to be a suburban enclave called Paradise Gate. Worse, the biggest problem to plague her while she was alive has followed her into the great beyond: her recently deceased mother Faye, who greets her when Mari opens her eyes in the In Between. This, apparently, is the place where the newly dead with no religious affiliation come to work out the unfinished business of their lives so that they can ascend to whatever’s next.

Mari realizes quickly that Faye is her unfinished business. In order to ascend and join her loving grandparents, she’ll have to make peace with and forgive her dysfunctional mother for being no mother at all. But there’s too much to forgive: never holding down a steady job, never having a stable home, Mari having to constantly change schools and, in the end, Faye choosing her criminal boyfriend over Mari.

It’s a lot to sort through but Mari tries to keep her eye on the ball: attending Youga (lol) classes at the Center and sending grief scarves sailing in Expressive Arts, in order to move her vibe tracker from an angry unsettled red to an ascend-worthy green. Through it all, she’s trying to remember how she died and figure out how to deal with Faye, who, of course, is in danger of being kicked out of Paradise Gate altogether. But then Mari discovers that in addition to mother drama, there’s friend drama and boy drama to be found in the afterlife. None of this is good for her vibes. Even worse is the suspicion that Paradise Gate isn’t at all what it purports to be… and that revolution may very well be afoot.

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Another very cool upcoming YA speculative fiction novel is F T Lukens’ latest paranormal romance Love At Second Sight.

Tired of being known as the artsy oddball, fifteen-year-old Cam Reynolds hopes to fly under the radar when he changes high schools as a sophomore. It shouldn’t be too hard considering that he’s a human going to school with kids who have super-cool paranormal powers, like his witch best friend Al and his longtime werewolf crush Miguel.

But then Cam has a psychic glimpse of the future in front of most of the student body, seeing a gruesomely murdered teen girl from the point of view of the killer. When Cam comes to, he knows two things: someone he goes to school with is a future murderer, and his life is about to change. No longer a mere human but a clairvoyant, one of the rarest of supernatural beings, Cam finds himself at the center of attention for the first time.

As the most powerful supernatural factions in the city court Cam and his gift, he’ll have to work with his friends, both old and new, to figure out whom he can trust. For the clock is ticking, and Cam and his friends must identify the girl in the vision, find her potential killer and prevent the murder from happening. Otherwise, the next murder Cam sees might be his own.

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Our next selection also features a clairvoyant with life and love troubles. Karen Swan’s The Midnight Secret is the third book in The Wild Isles series for adults. Inspired by the dramatic evacuation of the Scottish island of St. Kilda in the summer of 1930, this is a lush, romantic historical novel that concludes the series but can still be read as a standalone.

If there’s one thing Jayne Ferguson has learnt in her life, it’s that every blessing comes with a curse. She married the most handsome man on the isle of St Kilda but he’s a bully. She inherited her mother’s gift of second sight but only ever foresees her fellow islanders’ deaths. She has thus learned to keep to herself, treading in the shadows and shirking the highs for fear of the lows.

When a needless death strikes at the heart of her home, Jayne’s bad marriage becomes worse. She finds solace with an unlikely friend. Glimmers of happiness tantalize her, though there’s no possibility for anything more, especially once word comes of St Kilda’s evacuation.

But as evacuation day draws near, tensions on the island rise. Secrets are being forced to the surface, as passions and enmities erupt with equal violence. A man is killed, as Jayne knew he would be, and her closest friends Effie, Mhairi and Flora are each implicated in his death.

On the mainland, the villagers scatter into new lives, hoping that distance means refuge. But then Jayne has another prophetic dream and realizes that the past isn’t done with her or her friends just yet.

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Closer to me in both time and space is Sam Lumley’s debut novel How To Have A Killer Time In DC. A young, gay, autistic travel writer takes a head-spinning detour when murder and romance unbalance his well-planned life and career in this fun and quirky first-in-a-series mystery.

Autism is just another fact of life for twenty-four-year-old Oliver Popp. As long as he sticks to a comfortable itinerary planned well in advance, he gets by just fine as a staff writer for Offbeat Traveler magazine. But a curve ball is thrown into the trajectory of Oliver’s budding career when his first feature assignment takes him to Washington D.C. to chronicle the latest in tourism trends.

His freelance project photographer is Ricky Warner, a gregarious and impulsively adorable shot of adrenaline. If the flirty gay photographer wasn’t enough to unbalance shy Oliver from the get-go, there’s also an unsettling chance encounter with his old acquaintance, Elise Perkins. A congressional hearing, meanwhile, is shaking up both the Capitol and an entrepreneurial billionaire.

The unexpected distractions soon collide when a speeding car kills Elise. Funny how she just stared it down like she knew it was coming. Forget the National Mall and Mt. Vernon Square. Oliver and Ricky are game for something much more: solving a mystery and a murder.

As an unapologetic DC booster who loves exploring the city, this is definitely the book that intrigues me the most from this list!

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Let me know if you’re able to get to any of these books before I do, dear readers! I’d love to hear your opinions, and see if that will help spur me to push any of them higher up the mountain range that is my To Be Read pile.

And, as always, you can check out the list of my favorite books in my Bookshop storefront linked below!