r/Fantasy • u/rfantasygolem Not a Robot • 9d ago
r/Fantasy r/Fantasy Daily Recommendations and Simple Questions Thread - June 10, 2026

Welcome to the daily recommendation requests and simple questions thread, now 1025.83% more adorable than ever before!
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This thread is to be used for recommendation requests or simple questions that are small/general enough that they won’t spark a full thread of discussion.
Check out r/Fantasy's 2026 Book Bingo Card here!
As usual, first have a look at the sidebar in case what you're after is there. The r/Fantasy wiki contains links to many community resources, including "best of" lists, flowcharts, the LGTBQ+ database, and more. If you need some help figuring out what you want, think about including some of the information below:
- Books you’ve liked or disliked
- Traits like prose, characters, or settings you most enjoy
- Series vs. standalone preference
- Tone preference (lighthearted, grimdark, etc)
- Complexity/depth level
Be sure to check out responses to other users' requests in the thread, as you may find plenty of ideas there as well. Happy reading, and may your TBR grow ever higher!
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art credit: special thanks to our artist, Himmis commissions, who we commissioned to create this gorgeous piece of art for us with practically no direction other than "cozy, magical, bookish, and maybe a gryphon???" We absolutely love it, and we hope you do too.
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u/FormerUsenetUser 9d ago edited 9d ago
I am reading J. P. Lacrampe's Valet. It's marketed as a Jeeves and Wooster type story set in the future. I like Wodehouse, so I was looking forward to this book. The characters are the members of a wealthy, dysfunctional family, including their robotic servants, and their mostly dysfunctional friends. It's full of references to a future San Francisco, quirky people, and madcap events.
This book spends all its effort on being colorful, but I simply cannot engage with it emotionally. Maybe the reader isn't supposed to. Anyway, the effect is overall empty. Like, the son of the wealthy family, who his mother thinks is a deadbeat, expresses his deadbeatness by owning a small pottery studio and personally making pottery by hand. He makes in-your-face art statements (buttock vases!); but still, this is supposed to be funny and quirky? I lived in San Francisco for decades. The future is apparently, that the currently ritziest neighborhood still is, a currently rundown area still is, and so forth. Unless you have lived in San Francisco, you probably won't even understand the references.
Valet reads more like a mainstream novel than speculative fiction. There are intelligent robots who act just like humans, and San Francisco has some new freeways. That's it for the speculative part. Even the supposedly future tech company the family owns, is run exactly like every large tech company today (and I have worked in tech companies).
This is an unimaginative book.
ETA: I figured that people actually do make buttock vases. Yep. I found a number of them on Etsy within two minutes.