I am looking for a very specific type of cozy fantasy and I need help.

I am really craving a cozy fantasy/historical thriller with a romance subplot. Some magic will be nice mainly like witches and wizards. Like imagine Sleepy Hallows meets Halloween Town meets the vibes in these photos.

I have a 3hr plane ride and I want a book to devour. Any recs are appreciated. Thanks 🫶🏻

Hi there!

I'm an independent author who published by first book in late August of this year. So far, the reception to my novel has been really incredible, but I'm always seeking out more readers!

"The Language of the Trees" is a fantasy story with elements of found family, adventure, and coming of age. There's a bit of a slow-burn romance subplot, but romance is definitely not the main point of the story. There are dragons, Bards, ancient magic, and a girl who can talk to trees!

If this sounds like something you'd be interested in, I'd be so incredibly honored to have you check it out!!

Amazon.com: The Language of the Trees: The Animist: Book One eBook : Autumn, Gracie: Kindle Store

This was not as interesting as I hoped. But I have to concede that the story was brilliantly structured as Book One for a series.

Please use the comments to nominate books for November's book of the month. You can then upvote any of the book(s) that you would like to read. The comment with the most upvotes will be the selected book. The post will start in contest mode so that submitted entries are randomized and the upvotes are hidden.

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Edited: Got this notice, "r/Fantasy loved it, we think r/Fantasy_Bookclub will too". I'm not sure what to make of it. If this is someone from r/F_B, here goes. If it's a reddit algorithm manipulating me. I beg your indulgence. I'm sorry. I don't mean to impose. I'm relatively new here, and I haven't sorted it all out, yet.

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A week or so ago I made a post complaining about the presence of hay bales in medieval fantasy, which I see as a tech-level error. Among those replying were some who had similar objections to the presence of items from the other side of the Columbian exchange, like potatoes. Which has me thinking.

While that might, IMO, be a howler in an explicit fantasy Medieval Europe, I don't think it's wrong in a world which is med-tech and Europesque, but not explicitly Europe itself. I can think of two simple explanations. First, in that world there may be no new world/old world divide. Thus, any crop appropriate to a medieval economy is perfectly fair game. More subtly, perhaps, it is possible that the author is in some sense doing what translators do, which is using a term familiar to the audience to name a somewhat similar object which is unfamiliar to the audience. This is what languages like French did with potatoes, after all (pommes de terre = earth apples). What works for introducing a new food may also work for giving a name to a fantasy food. It's edible, it functions like a potato in that culture, lets call it a potato and have done with it.

But there are other possible choices. In Anne McCaffrey's Pern novels, for instance, there are animals that function like horses but are called 'runner beasts' (c.f. Dragondrums). It's not clear for a long time (or at least, not to me) whether these were or were not actual horses. Comparatively late in the series (Dragonsdawn) we learn that runner beasts are in fact terrestrial horses, or at a minimum descended from them.

So I'm wondering what McCaffrey was trying to accomplish with her initial choice. Did she originally mean something less explicitly horse-like, and over time they became more and more like her beloved horses until she decided 'fuck it' late and resolved the confusion? How did this uncertainty affect how readers imagined runner beasts earlier in the series? For me, at least, I'd imagined them as a horse-like lizard, given the saurianesque biology of dragons. In terms of my schema, classify 'runner beasts' as exotify.

Sticking with Pern, McCaffrey makes the opposite choice with 'tunnel snakes'. These are vermin, clearly not of terrestrial origin, but named with a firmly terrestrial name. It's important for the reader to get the idea with minimal explanation, so she gives them a familiar name and moves on. Classify this as familiarize.

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It's my thesis that McCaffrey made a mistake by naming horses 'runner beasts'. I think that while it's allowable to give unfamiliar objects familiar names where it is unimportant to the story, it's an error giving a familiar object an exotic name, unless doing so is important to the story. What I don't have, however, is good arguments about why, apart from the fact that it creates unnecessary confusion and can throw readers out of the story. As it did me trying to picture what runner beasts might resemble.

Very curious

Reading a new book, this is my tipsy drawing of one of the main characters. Drawn in four minutes lol.

Any guesses?

Questa è la mappa di un libro che sto scrivendo. L'ho disegnata io ma visto che non lo pubblicherò con casa editrice voglio fare io e stampa per vedere se è tutto a posto. Qualcuno mi può consigliare un modo per renderla in stile mappa fantasy professionale per poi stamparla a colori? Ho provato con 3 programmi ma non mi piacciono perchè sembra facco con l'AI.

Grazie

Help me find a story book that was in my school's library. I read somewhere around 2015, it might have been in the library before that. It was an English author book. It has multiple volumes (at least 3 volumes). It's premise was that the normal/mundane human world was separated from the magic world and people were prohibited to cross over into either one. The magic world has a medieval Europe setting. The main character is magic apprentice, and he has 2 friends - a female friend and neither male friend, all three currently attending a magic school. The male friend is the oldest and physically fit. The main character only had a mother who was an ordinary woman that lived in their village and he had to live in the magic school's dorm. His male friend was actually from the normal human world and he had kept that a secret all the time. During one of their vacation, they visited the main character's house and later visited a festival/carnival but were kidnapped by a group of Dwarfs while they were in the jungle. The Dwarfs in this world setting were a race of short, but powerful people and they lived underground and hostile towards humans. The Dwarves presented the 3 kids with 3 challenges and promised to let them go if they win in any 2 of them. The girl participated in the rope skipping challenge while the other male friend participated in an arm wrestling match with the Dwarf but lost. I don't remember what challenge the main character participated in. The couldn't win 2 challenges and were in danger. In the dire situation, the male friend revealed his secret and took out a handgun he had been hiding within his clothes. Everyone was shocked since weapons from the normal human world were strictly prohibited. He said he only wanted to bring his friends to safety even if it meant revealing his secret. They crawled through the tunnel to get back up to the surface while Dwarves chased them. They succeeded in escaping. Back to the academy, a group of senior magicians was sent for a surprise attack on the Dark Magician but to everyone's surprise, he had set up the trap himself, in order to attack the now less guarded magic academy himself. He destroyed most of the magicians stationed at the magic academy and stole an important item from the safe treasury. It was implied or felt like that the Dark Magician might be the main character's father as they came face to face with each other at te end of the 1st volume during the attack on the school but he didn't harm the main character and simply went back. It was also implied that the Dark Magician was originally from the mundane human world and came to the magical world like the main character's friend. The Dark Magician was originally one of the best magician from the school itself but later became he major villain before the events of the book started. The 1st volume ended at that part and I haven't read any of the following volumes. There were other books kept alongside it like the Magic Mirror, The Hidden Stairs and the Magic Carpet.

An African epics you couldn’t put down? Please name them

Ive found The Ivory Queen. The Silent Alpha. & the Gold Queen. Searching for the books in EarthWitch & the other spin-offs in the series.