Villains & Virtues: Throne in the Dark

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While I absolutely adored the scenic and mouth-watering excursions around Taiwan that was Taiwan Travelogue, with bookclub postponed for a month, it should come as no surprise that I dove right back into fantasy the first moment I got. I was gifted A.K Caggiano’s Throne in the Dark by a very dear friend back in June and now having finished it I am keen to get her on the phone for a little bookclub to hear her thoughts on it.

Watching films and reading books that are recommended by close friends is another unique and fascinating experience that humans get to enjoy and navigate. Of course it’s different for everyone, but I personally find that my reading experience is already shaped a little by the fact that I’m diving into a book that a friend with similar tastes has read and enjoyed enough to share with me. There’s a sense of obligation to put in the effort and read the whole thing, even if you struggle or find that the writing is not working for you. Then there are character and narrative choices that you can’t help but wonder, ‘did she like this bit or also find it predictable?’.

Damian Maleficus Bloodthorne is a powerful bloodmage who has just completed his life’s work, to create the most powerful talisman of enthrallment history has ever known. With it, he can finally fulfil his destiny to release his demonic father from imprisonment so that darkness and villainy can cover all the world. Well, that was the plan until he runs into a pretty little thief called Amma who accidentally becomes the harbouring vessel for the talisman. Stuck dragging Amma across the land and trying to find a way to remove the talisman, Damien’s concrete plans have started to crumble. Even more so when Amma’s caring nature and bubby demeanor starts to stir up feelings in Damien that contend with the usual ones of villainy and malevolence.

It’s worth nothing that reading the Author’s Note at the end of the book can sometimes help to alleviate the negative feelings you have about the work or help you to better understand what the author was trying to achieve. This was certainly the case for me with this book. I originally thought that this was going to be another YA fantasy romance to join the ranks of the Scholomance or Little Thieves trilogies in my library, when actually it’s a little bit closer to Once Upon a Broken Heart (though not as enthralling). According to Caggiano’s note at the end, Throne in the Dark was supposed to be a standalone parody, but became something bigger as, “the sincerity of the story insisted on seeping through the cracks in the absurdity”.

Knowing this made it a lot easier to understand some of the tonal choices that were made throughout the prose and helped to alleviate some of the annoyance that I had with it. Unlike Once Upon a Broken Heart where the writing is so overloaded with syrupy adjectives that it can’t be anything BUT a piss-take, the prose in Throne in the Dark is blunt and descriptive with smarmy and whimsical asides that break up the narrative flow to ensure the reader is in on the joke. There are many moments in which the author’s voice can be clearly heard making metafictive remarks on the genre, not to mention the vague, summarizing chapter names. While I can appreciate the intent behind these choices, I personally felt that it didn’t really add anything to the story, merely stopped its trajectory for a breather.

Then we have the caricatured characters of Damiel and Amma. Their central romance story is pretty predictable and even though Amma’s motives remain a mystery until the third act, I still picked what was coming pretty early on. The chapters flip between the perspectives of Amma and Damien while still being written in the third person omniscient. This works perfectly well, but I would have liked it if there was a little more insight into their characters. Annoyingly, we don’t really get a sense of who these characters are and what they feel, their story is sort of written in a hand-wavey way that rides on them being token genre pieces.

Because the humour does not really come across as obviously or early as one would like, these tonal choices and the caricature protagonists just prove to be a little bit annoying and make it easy to put the book down. Had I known from that start that it’s meant to be a parody, I might not have felt as strongly – though probably still a little annoyed because it now feels a little bit lazy to let everything ride on, ‘ah but that’s the joke’.

Image credit: Penguin Books Australia

Having said this, the story itself is actually kind of compelling and I am definitely interested in the fantasy world that Caggiano has created. There are supporting characters that are truly fascinating and a whole bunch of lore that only gets hinted at throughout the tale. While I realise that the exposition dump is not a preferable means of learning about the world, there are ways in which to make them more interesting and when used to educate readers about the world they find themselves in, they can make stories even more compelling. It's also a very visual world and story: honestly, it would probably do very well as an anime.

Throne in the Dark is not a bad book, it’s a solid fantasy story that has some very memorable scenes. But in a rapidly expanding subgenre like YA fanta-roms, a book that is mildly amusing with unsubstantial characters can fall into obscurity. It was interesting enough to get me through the entire thing (which is 500+ pages), but I didn’t experience any strong feelings while reading it and did find it easy to put down and walk away from. I have not decided if I will continue with series.

Author: A.K Caggiano, 2022-2025

Published: Sourcebooks, Casablanca, 2025

Throne in the Dark is the first book in A.K. Caggiano's Villains & Virtues series.

Taiwan Travelogue

Image credit: Scribe Publications

Well, after weeks of going heavy on the cosy, fantasy reads, we have finally travelled somewhere a lot closer to home and am now reveling in the heady jetlag that comes from closing the cover on an immersive book. Cutting it a bit fine, seeing as we are meeting to discuss this tomorrow, I have just closed the cover on this month’s bookclub read: Taiwan Travelogue by Yang Shuang-zi.

It is May 1938 and Japanese woman author Aoyama Chizuko has arrived in Taiwan, invited by the colonial government to write a series of travelogue essays, even though she is personally indifferent and sometimes against their agenda. She determines to experience and devour authentic island life in every sense of the word, but fears this will be impossible with her assigned assistant/interpreter. Expressing these concerns to her hostess, she is then introduced to the charming, meticulous, and incomprehensible Chizuru, who quickly becomes her interpreter and guide. Over meals of winter melon tea, braised minced pork, silver needle vermicelli, and leftover soup, Chizuko becomes infatuated with Chizuru, but is kept at arm’s length for reasons that only become apparent after a painful separation.

Disguised as a translation of a rediscovered text, Taiwan Travelogue is a gorgeous story about a beautiful relationship between two women while also being an immersive cultural exploration of history, language, power dynamics, and of course, food.  It’s an homage to the episodes of self-discovery that can occur only when you travel and stay with you for the rest of your life. I found it inspiring, engaging, and beautiful.

An accessible, academic, and yet poetic prose flavours the pages and completely envelopes the reader in the landscape as well as intimacies that come with sharing a meal. Each chapter is defined by a specific dish that accompanies a significant event in the story and the footnotes serve to cleanse the palette by breaking the narrative flow with academic flavours as well as further establishing the landscape in which we find ourselves.

Image credit: The Booker Prizes

Taiwan Travelogue is immersive and insightful and it very much has made me want to be more adventurous in the kitchen! It’s one of those books that makes you consider yourself a little more closely and from different angles, a truly beautiful and inspiring piece of fiction.

Author: Yang Shuang-zi, 2020

Translation: English translation from Mandarin by Lin King, 2024

Published: Springhill Publishing, Taiwan 2020. This edition published by Scribe Publications, ANZ, 2026.

Bookshops & Bonedust

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Still very much entrenched in the world of high fantasy and low stakes, I have just closed the cover of Travis Baldree’s prequel to Legends & Lattes: Bookshops & Bonedust – a cosy story of high fantasy about first loves and second-hand books.

Viv’s brutally glamorous career as a mercenary is just taking off. But it’s a fact of life that disaster always strikes just when things are getting good. Running with a renowned mercenary group called Rackham’s Ravens Viv is badly injured during a hunt for a fearsome necromancer, and she finds herself stranded in the sleepy seaside town of Murk to recuperate. Laid up with a bad leg and a growing fear that she might not be able to return to the action, what’s a thwarted soldier of fortune to do? Spending time in a struggling bookshop is certainly not how she would have imagined spending her time, but nevertheless when Viv discovers Thistleburr Booksellers she also discovers that adventure and excitement comes in different shapes like a fowl-mouthed rattkin proprietor, a flour-dusted dwarven baker, and a rambunctious gnome with a penchant for knives. Who knows? Maybe the action Viv craves is not as far away as she thinks.

As is the case with any particular mood you get into with reading, it ebbs and flows. For the last couple of weeks I have been all about cosy fantasy reads that I can while away some sunlit afternoons with, but it seems this mood is now ebbing as I found Bookshops & Bonedust to just not be as cosy and enveloping as Legends & Lattes. It’s a sweet and relatable story of self-discovery and growth through finding new interests, with a slightly more dramatic, adventure-y twist in the third act.

The prose is simple, not particularly memorable, but it does transport us into the sleepy seaside town: though this could just be because we are so overexposed to this kind of setting in a plethora of genres that it’s very easy to be transported there with just a few words.

It’s interesting to read a prequel written after a book establishes the central character, mainly because we get to see a greener (no pun intended) and underdeveloped version of this character that we’ve previously come to know. In Viv’s case, she’s young, aggressive, and itching for a fight; devoid of the wisdom and appreciation for the less-stabby pleasures the world can offer. This brings a little humour to the book in the scenes where people raise their eyebrows when they see her reading a book but for the reader, it does deplete her character a little bit, which is fine for the story but meant that I found it a little harder to pick up the book again once I’d put it down.

Image credit: Fantasy-Hive

But with a supporting cast of colour characters, I’m not saying this book is devoid of appeal. Filled with action, romance, comedy, and cosy vibes, Bookshops & Bonedust is a fine little fantasy read if you have the time to while away.

Author: Travis Baldree, 2023

Published: Tor, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, London, 2023.

Bookshops & Bonedust is the prequel to Legends & Lattes.

Legends & Lattes

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Continuing on with cramming cosy fantasy reads before the book for July bookclub comes through, this week I travelled to Thune where I came across an adorable little café called Legends & Lattes.

“A novel of high fantasy… and low stakes” the front cover says, perfect for a cosy afternoon read.

Viv the orc barbarian has made the decision to hang up her sword, leave the life of the adventuring mercenary, and settle down to realise a new dream: opening the first ever coffee shop in Thune. While the locals have no idea what coffee is, this is not the only problem that Viv will face on her journey. A complete lack of business experience, the city’s shady criminal underbelly, and the arrival of a nettled old teammate threaten to turn Viv’s dream into a nightmare. But with hard work and the assistance of old friends and new, she might just be able to pull it off.

Written by audiobook narrator and videogame developer, Travis Baldree, Legends & Lattes is a cosy, low-stakes read for anyone who enjoys the recognisable fantasy tropes of Dungeons & Dragons and slice-of-life anime. A simple story with a sweet, heartwarming message about backing oneself, it’s a book that is transportive, immersive, and fun.

Written in a simple prose in the third-person register, Legends & Lattes takes the recognisable fantasy settings and characters of Dungeons & Dragons and brings a little modern twist to them in a way that is rather vague and hand-wavey but nevertheless completely acceptable, as the book’s laid-back and nonchalant tone does not call for any deep-seated and stoic lore. Coffee is a gnomish invention – perfectly reasonable and believable, no further questions.

Image credit: Fantasy-Hive

A motley and eclectic group of characters make up the central cast with Viv the hulking orcish barbarian turned café-owner, Tandri the reserved succubus with an artistic flair, Thimble the quiet rattkin who creates wondrous baked goods, Cal the stoic handy-hobgoblin, and Pendry the shy bard. While it’s fair to say the characters are a little two-dimensional, the overall cosy vibe of the book allows for this: there are enough generic cues that let your brain know exactly what type of book this is and how lightly or heavily you need to get emotionally invested in order to enjoy it, so the basic story, the simple characters, and the lack of drama are not problematic in the slightest.

Legends & Lattes is just a nice, cosy, fantasy read filled with tropes and triggers that allow your brain to hunker down for some smooth rundown time.

Author: Travis Baldree, 2022

Published: Tom Doherty Associates, 2022. First published in the UK by Tor and imprint of Pan Macmillan, 2022. Picture paperback edition published 2023

A Fellowship of Games & Fables

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On top of exposing me to books that I normally would not pick out for myself and unearthing other ways in which I can be interpreting the books that I read, being part of a book club has made me really appreciate the different reading experience I get when I read a book recreationally. It occurred to me recently that a lot of the books that I've consumed over the years have been as part of some sort of assignment: university, the 1001 project, and now book club. I have just closed the cover on J. P. Penner’s third instalment in the Adenashire series and, perhaps it’s been the winter weather, perhaps it’s been a stressful workweek, but the hours I was able to steal cosying up with this book that I was reading for me and no other reason have really been some of the most enjoyable.

Jez is not looking forward to the Adenashire Yule Games. She’s not a fan of the cold weather or the large crowds. She would much rather be allowed to sleep the entire Yule season away. But a drunken encounter lands her right in the middle of the festivities with a wager to beat a boastful human team. Not only that, but she must also fake a relationship with her friend Taenya, a woodland elf. Plagued by long-standing insecurities about her worth and a sense of pride that won’t let her back out of her mess, Jez tackles each Yule Game event with cold pragmatism. But the more time she spends with Taenya, the warmer her demeanour becomes. Could she be falling for the elf, and would a romance ruin a perfectly good friendship?

A Fellowship of Games & Fables is the third book in Penner’s Adenashire series: a collection of incredibly cosy fantasy reads that are best enjoyed with a cup of tea and some form of warm baked-good. Each book is a sweet little romance novel, following a trio of protagonists introduced in the very first instalment:  A Fellowship of Bakers & Magic. Book three follows Jez, an aloof and emotionally closed-off fennex and, similar to its predecessors, it chronicles a sweet and wholesome story of self-discovery and romance.

Similar to book one, in that the central drama is in the form of a competitive situation, where Games & Fables surpasses Bakers & Magic is in its solid establishment of drama. It could be that book one was Penner finding her feet with the series, but the low-stakes quickly went down to no-stakes and the thrill that should have come with a competitive setting just didn’t. This is not the case with book three. Penner works with the knowledge that readers are immediately going to side with Jez and uses that character misdirection to create a good sense of drama and suspense where the narrative requires it. It’s a fun play on the idea of the unreliable narrator, without the omniscient narrator doing any real misleading – just letting the reader do all the work based on their relationship with the character.

Image credit: Instagram

Written in a prose accessible to a wide audience-range, A Fellowship of Games & Fables is a delightfully cosy read filled with drama, romance, very cute scenes of social awkwardness, and complete with recipes in the back! I have since discovered that there are yet more instalments in this series and I am quite excited to get them on my shelf.

Author: J. P. Penner, 2024,2025

Published: Poison Pen Press, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Illinois, 2025

Mantle

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Part of the human condition is having the need to identify and label something so as to be better prepared for the type of experience you're about to have. This is why we love genre. When you go into a cinema to see a rom-com or horror movie, you are armed with the security of an unspoken generic contract; you’re going to experience warm and fuzzy feelings during the rom-com, anticipation and anxiety during the horror, etc. While genre and its contracts are present in literature, the security is not quite as apparent and there are many authors who deliberately muddle and mix the building blocks of genre to create new experiences for the reader. The blurb of a book can only give so much forewarning and often, the book will turn out to be way different to what you expected from the summary on the back. Case in point, Romy Ash’s Mantle.

Ursula travels to the cold and scenic wilds of lutruwita/Tasmania to be with her ailing more who is suffering from a strange and mysterious illness. What began as a rash has turned into something dangerous. And now Ursula has it too. With the illness spreading across the island and beyond, Ursula finds herself stranded in her mother’s house, entangled in a relationship with a younger man she met at the pub, and finding solace in the unknowable, wildness of nature. But just like her, nature is changing, shifting, and turning into something else.

My initial thoughts upon reading the blurb were that this was going to be some sort of eco-horror, dystopian, contagion novel with heavy allusions and allegories to Covid, global warming, and the ways in which humans have destroyed the planet. And to an extent it is. The most intriguing thing about this book is the way in which Ash writes about horrific events but, rather than layer on the drama, doom-and-gloom, and scariness of the scenario in which the protagonist finds herself, the book reads as a tranquil journey of metamorphosis. Ash is an amazingly transportive writer: when you’re reading her descriptions of the pebbly beach or the windy, woody bushland, you can hear the wind, taste the salt, and feel the hard smoothness underfoot. The enrapture of Mantle is not in the story it’s telling or the scenes it describes, but in the sensory feelings it prompts as well as the many ideas and messages about the natural world and the nature of humankind that lines its pages.

Image credit: Melbourne Writers' Festival

Like a few of the books I have read in book club, this is not a story I would have picked for myself. And I certainly struggled with it in the beginning, as it did not read like the dystopian horror I had intoned from the blurb. The pace is slow and sauntering even though it's describing some truly disturbing things and the evolution of the narrative and acceptance of the reader is so gradual that it’s hard to pinpoint just where in the book I started to power through the pages. I guess this is reflective of the nature themes; ever-changing and sometimes going unnoticed.

Mantle is a truly provocative read. It’s one of the few books that I have been left feeling confused as to whether I liked it or not. Perhaps it warrants a second reading? Looks like I might need to keep it on the shelf next to Arborescence.

Author: Romy Ash, 2026

Published: Ultimo Press, an imprint of Hardie Grant Publishing, 2026

A Fellowship of Librarians & Dragons

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While we often think about curling up and reading as the ultimate form of cosy, there are many factors to consider when measuring the cosiness of a designated blanket, couch, bed, or tea reading session. Of course, the biggest is the type of book one is choosing to cosy up with. Having powered through the mellow, romantic, and no-stakes comfort of A Fellowship of Bakers & Magic, it seems the thing I really needed this week was more cosy comfort reading and so it was onto the next Adenashire instalment: A Fellowship of Librarians & Dragons.

After becoming best friends with Arleta Starstone at the Langheim Baking Battle, Doli Butterbuckle decides that moving to Adenashire is the next logical step for her. Peaceful, quiet living, being near her best friends, and spreading her infectious good humour through working in a bookstore seems like the ideal life. Plus, it’s away from the pressures of her overbearing family in Dundes Heights, where she’s never felt she could really be herself. But Doli’s quiet life gets shaken up when she inherits a dragon egg. Faced with a responsibility she’s not sure she’s ready for, Doli enlists the help of the newly-arrived gargoyle librarian, Sarson, to learn as much as she can before the egg hatches. Not only does her research uncover a myriad of potential challenges in dragon-rearing, but as she spends more time with him, Doli finds herself falling for Sarson.

Now that I have cottoned on to how these books are meant to be read, it was easier to simply fall into the enveloping warmth and cosiness of A Fellowship of Librarians & Dragons. Reading like a PG erotic romance, whilst simultaneously making fun of the fact that it knows it’s doing that, the second book in the Adenashire series is every bit as sweet and warming as its predecessor. It’s an adorable little tale of how relationships can help to shape one’s identity, as well as inspire ambition, passion, and strength that one never knew they had.

Image credit: Instagram

The romantic in me very much enjoyed the wholesome but still suggestive interactions between Doli and Sarson, and the dragon-lover in me was very satisfied with the cute and cheeky character of Evvy, a pink baby dragon with a penchant for mischief and an insatiable appetite. It also felt that there was more drama happening in this book than in the first one, taking it from no-stakes to low-stakes, which made the pages flip even faster.

Filled with romance, comedy, character growth, and just as many delicious-sounding recipes as the first book, A Fellowship of Librarians & Dragons is another perfectly cosy read.

 Author: J. Penner, 2024

Published: Poison Pen Press, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Illinois, 2025.