Stephanie Burgis's Spellcloaked is a short story in her Harwood Spellbook series. Set after Thornbound, it's a sweet sapphic romance which manages to make the villain of Thornbound into a sympathetic heroine, and as delightful as the rest of the series has been.

Rowany De Vere and a Fair Degree of Frost is a Patreon-only novella by Chaz Brenchley, set in his Mars Imperial (Crater School) universe. It features Rowany De Vere, former Head Girl of the Crater School, now grown up and working for the Mars Colonial Office and undertaking a mission to escort a Russian defector through a snowy Marsport to a safe house. Fun spy hijinks with some extra worldbuilding for Imperial Mars thrown in.

C.A.T.S.: Cycling Across Time and Space is an anthology of feminist SFF stories featuring cats and bicycles. I particularly enjoyed Kathleen Jowitt's story, about a trade union organiser and her cat taking a cycling holiday, and Alice "Huskyteer" Dryden's business case study about why bicycle sales to a planet populated by felines are so low; other stories featured steampunk suffragettes, scientists on Mars, robots and many more. This was a lovely collection (and made me kind of want a bicycle, even though I can't actually ride a bike).

The second of Kim M. Watt's Beaufort Scales mysteries, Yule Be Sorry sees the Cloverly dragons and the Toot Hansell WI mixed up in a Christmassy caper involving missing postmen, exploding baubles, and a great deal of cake, while Beaufort himself also has to deal with the discontent of those members of the dragon community who object to closer relations with the humans and want to take a more isolationist stance. Fast-paced, daft and fun.

Tansy Rayner Roberts' Merry Happy Valkyrie is a Christmas novella set in the small Tasmanian town of Matilda, which is the only place in Australia guaranteed to have a white Christmas every single year. Weather forecaster Lief Fraser grew up in Matilda but left as soon as she could, and she isn't keen on being sent back to report on the strange phenomenon of the town's weather, especially as she will have to keep her bubbly camerawoman from sniffing out the town's other secrets while they're there.

Merry Happy Valkyrie is an entertaining mixture of Norse mythology and smalltown Australia, with a touch of sapphic romance added in. I liked this a lot, and definitely recommend it to anyone looking for festive comfort reads.

Australian author Freya Marske's debut novel is a m/m fantasy romance set in an Edwardian England where magical families have always existed, living a hidden life alongside everyday society. When an administrative error sees the thoroughly non-magical Robin Blyth assigned to the post of civil service liaison to the magical world, he finds that some rather unpleasant people are trying to find something that was hidden by his predecessor, and he has to team up with the cold and unfriendly Edwin Courcey, his counterpart from the magical bureaucracy, to try to find answers and lift a curse that could otherwise kill him.

The basic setup of A Marvellous Light, with a hidden magical society existing in parallel to the normal one, is a familiar enough scenario, but Marske's magic has some interesting aspects (spells in this world are "cradled", brought into existence by hand movements reminiscent of cat's cradle, and there's a strong emphasis on magical connections between land and its owners. Robin and Edwin are likeable characters and I enjoyed the romance element. This was an entertaining, fairly light read; the novel does stand on its own, but is the first of a planned trilogy and I certainly intend to read the other volumes when they're published.

I know a lot of people who love Robin Hobb's books, but I was always slightly daunted by just how many there are of them. Did I really want to embark on a 16-volume fantasy epic? I did, however, buy a copy of the first in the series, Assassin's Apprentice, a couple of years ago, thinking I probably should give it a try sometime.

Assassin's Apprentice is the story of Fitz, the illegitimate son of the heir to the throne of Buckkeep. Dumped with his father's people at the age of six, he grows up in the King's castle, never quite fitting in either as a stable-boy or once he begins to be taught the skills of the aristocracy and threatened by powerful people who hate him simply for who he is. The characters are interesting and engaging, and there's a lot of interesting court politics woven around Fitz's story. I enjoyed this a lot; enough that, at about 50% on the kindle edition, I logged on to Amazon and bought all 15 of the other books.

(I would note, though, that there is a recurring thing where Bad Things Happen To Good Dogs, so this might not be one to read if you're feeling particularly sensitive about dogs.)

I only discovered Alexis Hall's books last year, but he has already got to the stage of "would read his laundry list if he published it" for me, and even if that wasn't the case, Murder Most Actual is a cosy murder mystery with lesbians, and that is very definitely something I am Extremely Here For. Here For enough, in fact, not to be deterred by the fact that the book is a Kobo original and I only have a Kindle (I was prepared to read it on my phone in the Kobo app, but in fact I was able to convert it using Calibre and email it to my Kindle).

Murder Most Actual's heroines are true crime podcaster Liza and her financier wife Hanna. Taking a weekend break in a luxury hotel in the Scottish Highlands in the hope of repairing their failing marriage, they instead find themselves snowed in with a cast of eccentric characters and a rising body count. The novel is gloriously and unashamedly full of nods to both Golden Age detective fiction and Cluedo and the mystery kept me guessing right up to the Big Reveal, while Liza and Hanna's relationship struggles and tentative steps towards reconnecting with each other are played absolutely straight, in contrast to the campy excess of the rest of the novel. It's funny and heartwarming and definitely recommended to anyone else who's still on a comfort reading kick.

Moontangled is the fourth novella in Stephanie Burgis's Harwood Spellbook series. It moves away from the Harwoods themselves to focus instead on Juliana Banks, one of the students at Thornfell College of Magic, and her secret fiancée, Caroline Fennell. Although the opening of the college has finally enabled Juliana to begin working towards becoming a mage, and a suitable spouse for a politician like Caroline in the eyes of the society of Angland, since the college opened Caroline has become strangely distant. It will take a night lost in the woods surrounding Thornfell, at the mercy of the fey, to bring the two back together.

I love this series of Regencyesque fantasy romances; Moontangled is short, but very sweet, and I thought it was ideal comfort reading.

I think Ryka Aoki's Light from Uncommon Stars may be my favourite of the books I've read this year. I was so intrigued by the premise - 'Good Omens meets The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet in this defiantly joyful adventure set in California's San Gabriel Valley, with cursed violins, Faustian bargains, and queer alien courtship over fresh-made donuts' - that I bought it shortly after publication despite not having previously read any of Aoki's work, and it absolutely lived up to that promise.

Light from Uncommon Stars centres around three women: Shizuka Satomi, a violinist who has damned six students to hell and must find a seventh before her bargain with the devil is complete; Katrina Nguyen, a young trans runaway who becomes Shizuka's seventh student; and Lan Tran, a starship captain who fled her dying civilisation with her family and now runs a doughnut shop in greater Los Angeles. It blends fantasy and science fiction with vivid descriptions of music and food and a love letter to the culture and cuisine of the San Gabriel Valley. It's a trans coming of age story, a lovely slow-burn romance, and a meditation on the importance of changing and adapting and accepting new influences rather than trying to preserve things just as they were in the past. It's not exactly fluffy - Katrina's experiences as a young trans girl, in particular, are often traumatic and upsetting - but it's hopeful and kind and uplifting and just a bit silly and I loved it.

***

Lumberjanes is a graphic novel series co-written by N.D. Stevenson (creator of the new She-Ra. I downloaded the first volume for free some time ago and then discovered that it was impossible to read on a phone; having just bought a new tablet, I realised that I could actually read it now. It tells the adventures of five friends at a summer camp "for hardcore lady-types", as they keep finding themselves facing supernatural monsters and other weirdnesses. Fun, and very funny in places, but it didn't grab me quite enough for me to want to rush out and get the rest of the series.

Katherine Addison's The Angel of the Crows is, basically, Sherlock Holmes wingfic. Set in a world where humans live side by side with all manner of supernatural beings, it's narrated by Dr J.H. Doyle, a former Army surgeon invalided back home after a close encounter with a fallen angel in Afghanistan. Seeking a place to live that will be affordable on an Army pension, Doyle is introduced to Crow, an angel who is not fallen, but who nevertheless is not attached to a particular building as angels, in this world, normally are, and who is seeking someone to share lodgings in Baker Street. What follows is a rattle through various cases of the Holmes canon (principally A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of the Four, The Copper Beeches, The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Speckled Band, though there are also elements of other stories mixed in) with added supernatural elements (the Hound of the Baskervilles, for example, is an actual hell-hound) but generally adhering fairly faithfully to the original plots. Running alongside this, Crow and Doyle find themselves drawn into the investigations surrounding some of the notorious real-life murders which took place at the same time as the Holmes stories were published - the Whitehall murders and the Thames torso murders.

I found the sections dealing with real-life murders rather gory, and I think I would have preferred if Addison had stuck to the Holmes reworking, which I liked a lot. Crow and Doyle's relationship seemed to me to sit somewhere between the original and the BBC Sherlock version, sometimes reminding me more of one, sometimes of the other (or, in the case of Sherlock, perhaps more of A.J. Hall's Sherlock fic), and I really enjoyed this take on it, as well as the supernatural worldbuilding. I'd definitely read more of this (surely there's more than enough Holmes canon for more?).

Kathleen Jennings' debut novella, Flyaway, is a creepy Gothic fairytale set in Western Queensland, which blends mystery, folklore and horror in the interlocking narratives of nineteen-year-old Bettina's quest to uncover her lost past, and the stories the people she encounters have about weird and uncanny happenings in the woods surrounding the town of Runagate. The horror element was stronger than I was expecting, and made it quite an uncomfortable read, but I was drawn along by the mystery and even more fascinated by the folk-tale resonances of the stories within the stories. Jennings' prose is the real standout, though; her descriptions are so vivid that I really felt I could picture the struggling small towns and the endless wilderness of trees between them.

Flyaway is a weird, beautiful, immersive read. It wasn't quite what I was expecting but I liked it a lot.