A Necromancer Called Gam Gam is a semi-finalist in the first annual Speculative Fiction Indie Novella Championship (SFINCS), and it’s been on my TBR for a little while. But, as a fellow SFINCTER (lol), I couldn’t help but be curious about some of the other books in the contest. So I moved this one up, and I have to say, as someone who lost a parent at a young age, it made me cry.

Here’s my totally irreverent, irrelevant, and worst ever annual “Books of the Year” list for 2023! This is a terrible list of books. I mean, most of them aren’t even books. Why did I make this? I could’ve been playing Final Fantasy XVI, or hanging up the laundry, or literally anything else. But instead I am pleased to present to you my totally irreverent, irrelevant, list of awards to mark the end of the grand old year of two-thousand-and-twenty-three. And of course, it’s in a top-ten format.

I’m pretty happy with the amount of books I managed to read and review this year! So many were indie books, too, which was my goal. All in all, I read and reviewed 25 books up to the time of writing this post. Whenever I review books, in addition to this blog, I usually post them to Goodreads and Amazon, as well as sharing the link to the review on Twitter, Threads, Bluesky, Facebook, and sometimes Instagram (if I remember).

I picked up Daros during one of the big indie sales and oh boy was it a fun read. It’s been difficult picking between all the different books I grabbed during that one sale, and I’ve only swamped my TBR even more since then! But this isn’t supposed to be about my ever-growing TBR, even though at my average reading speed, it’ll take me over 3 years to get through. This is about Daros by Dave Dobson.

We are now halfway through 2023, and The Oath & Blood Price: Part One is my fourteenth book review of the year, most of which have, like this one, been indie or self-published books. I said before that this year I wanted to focus more heavily on indie books and support the indie writing community, and I had a really great time with Peter Shaun-Tyrell’s debut fantasy novel. It’s on the shorter side, so I was able to read through it quite quickly, but I will definitely be picking up Part Two sometime in the near future. Let’s talk about Part One.

I first heard of this book in the Twitter writing community, where I saw it being posted regularly in #writerslift threads and its premise immediately caught my attention. After a while I saw that the author, P.J. Sky, had the Kindle version up on a free promotion and I took the opportunity to claim it for later. And it has taken me quite a long time to get to, to be honest…

Right, first things first, I know this author personally - she’s a family member. So, feel free to take what I say with a pinch of salt or disregard entirely if you feel it’s inappropriate of me to review it. At the same time, I really want to support what this author is doing and get some more eyes on her work - plus my brain won’t allow me to not review every book I read anymore. I will be giving an honest review, however, and after having read Blanche Amour, I’m pretty confident that I would come to the same conclusions about it even if I didn’t know Charlotte, simply based on the type of reader I am. So let’s get into it.