6 Fantastic Fantasy Novels You Don't Want to Miss

by MK French

There is some great fantasy fiction coming out this month. This selection includes novels for adults, young adults, and middle-grade readers. Pick one or all of them - you won't regret it.

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The Scorpion and the Night Blossom by Amélie Wen Zhao

March 2025; Delacorte Press; 978-0593813843
audio, ebook, print (400 pages); YA fantasy

Nine years ago, the war between the Kingdom of Night and the Kingdom of Rivers devastated the land. Àn’yīng’s family was also destroyed, her mother was barely alive and with a baby sister. The mortal realm grows dark, and demonic mó eat humans and devour souls. Àn’yīng has trained with crescent blades and plans to enter the Immortality Trials. If she completes the trial, she can get a pill of eternal life to heal her mother. People usually die, but someone is helping Àn’yīng stay alive. Yù’chén is as secretive about his past as he is about his motives for protecting Àn’yīng. On top of this, it becomes clear that something has gone wrong in the immortal realm itself.

Àn’yīng witnessed a demon attacking her village when she was young, and one was in the process of eating her mother's soul when her father intervened. Though her father was killed, the mó left her and her sister behind, as well as their mother. With only half her soul, their mother is unable to feed or care for herself, and rarely speaks. Àn’yīng has been creating a tonic from special lotuses to prolong her mother's life a month per dose, but the pill of immortality will help her mother regrow the soul she is missing. The journey to the tournament is fraught with terrible creatures and practitioners willing to slaughter humans to increase their own chances of winning. Traumatized by the past, Àn’yīng still has mercy enough in her heart that she won't kill innocent humans or even the half-breed creatures that now exist.

Àn’yīng is a target for other contestants, but she also has allies in other ones. There are signs that things have gone wrong during the test, and there are significant issues that she sees within the Kingdom of Heaven. She's still determined to win, but so is everyone else. She must face her prejudices, her fears, and her traumatic history as she progresses through the trials. They're dangerous, and someone is killing other contestants in between trials. Yù’chén continues to help and protect Àn’yīng, even when his secret disgusts her. The two are still drawn to each other, and there are major revelations in the final third of the book. The war between realms and the challenge presented by the mó continues to heighten over the course of the book. I really enjoyed this, and hope we get a sequel. Àn’yīng has a lot more in store for her, and I would love to see it.

Buy The Scorpion and the Night Blossom at Amazon

The Winter Goddess by Megan Barnard

March 2025; Penguin Books; 978-0143137689
audio, ebook, print (304 pages); fantasy

Cailleach, goddess of winter, sees mortals as selfish and destructive and isn't terribly sorry when thousands die in a brutal winter. Her mother Danu, queen of the gods, disagrees. She strips Cailleach of her power and sends her to live with mortals to better understand them. Cailleach planned to live alone but eventually realizes she needs the help of mortals. Opening herself to humanity, she learns to live and love as mortals do and then hears a secret that will redefine what it means to be a god.

Cailleach loves the winter and the grove where she was given dominion over winter. As a child, she met humans and was close to one of them, but her mother Danu refused to intervene. Cailleach distanced herself, and the rage at her grove getting destroyed to house the dead created the destructive winter. She's sent to Earth multiple times, and can't survive on her own as a mortal. She doesn't understand love or friendship, and it takes several lifetimes to get it right. The anger at humanity and Danu is intense, which is why it takes so long. The attachments she finally makes really teach her about family, love and truly wanting the best for others. Gods are too distant, immortality blinding them to what humanity really is. I cried along with Cailleach at her significant losses. The writing is spare but evocative so that we feel what she does. It drew me in, and I couldn't put it down.

Buy The Winter Goddess at Amazon

The Serpent Called Mercy by Roanne Lau

March 2025; DAW; 978-0756419448
ebook, print (432 pages); fantasy

Lythlet and her only friend Desil are desperate for money, so they sign up as conquessors. Those are combatants who fight sun-cursed beasts in the seedy underworld of the city. While the match master Dothilos initially likes Desil’s brawling, he quickly takes Lythlet under his wing. Lythlet is ambitious, but she isn’t the only one. She will have to decide if sacrificing her honor and only friend is worth a fortune.

This is a Malaysian Chinese-inspired novel. We see the poor in the city, and how unscrupulous usurers are able to keep the citizens in debt. While it drives Lythlet and Desil to the games, it also keeps the different classes starkly separate. The touches of religion and myth behind the city dwelling and the monsters are dismissed by most, but not Lythlet. She's determined to learn more about the monsters and the world her. She relies on herself for the most part, which is partly what gets her drawn into the arena to fight, and also into the deceit under Dothilos. They have similar origins, and she's so starved for recognition that even his will do.

I enjoyed the little world-building details. The lightning bees provide light for the poor, the crafted bulbs for the rich, the city built over the bones of the old one, and the monsters themselves. Lythlet has difficulty with speaking, with crowds, and with dealing with people in general. At the same time, she's clever with numbers and money, reasons things out quickly, and remembers details without effort. She grew up with Desil, and we'd likely classify her as autistic if we had to label her. She has drive, and the early admission that she wants to be happy is at first brushed off as idiotic. But it's what drives people all the time, and the only difference between them is what makes them happy. For someone as poor as Lythlet, of course, she thinks it's coin in the beginning. She thinks she's alone, that she's a burden, and that no one cares for her unless she gives them something to like her for. This doesn't give away the ending, but I grew teary-eyed with the sequence of visits to friends and her parents. Each value and love her for herself, not what she could do for them. I loved that she heard that and saw it was true. We all need that.

Buy The Serpent Called Mercy at Amazon

Isle of Ever by Jen Calonita

March 2025; Sourcebooks Young Readers; 978-1728277035
ebook, print (320 pages); middle grades fantasy

Everly "Benny" Benedict inherits a fortune a few days after her twelfth birthday, but in order to actually get it, she must play a game. She has two weeks to follow clues left behind by an ancestor to find an island that vanished a long time ago. If she's successful, she'll break a two-hundred-year-old curse. If she fails, the fortune will be forfeited. And if she's not careful, she'll cross paths with someone else who is after the island's secrets, and who will stop at nothing to get them.

Twelve-year-old Benny and her mother bounced from one place to another, which gives her only two weeks to find the hidden island. She gets riddles and journal entries outlining what happened in Greenport during the whooping cough outbreak. The island itself was difficult to find, with a buried treasure in it. It's this treasure that led another person to the island two hundred years ago and is now the reason why someone else wants to reach the island before her.

We don't learn about the other person until the very end, and the book is largely about Benny meeting Zara and Ryan, and making friends as she searches for clues in the house and historical society. With moving so much and not having money, suddenly living on an estate with the lure of a fortune is a driving force. She also loves games and puzzles, so this entire premise is wonderful. Exploring the town and learning about the town gives her and the reader clues as the deadline draws near. It's a fun read for middle-grade children, and there will be another book where Benny will unravel the secret of the island. 

Buy Isle of Ever at Amazon

The Deathly Grimm by Kathryn Purdie

March 2025; Wednesday Books; 978-1250873026
audio, ebook, print (400 pages); YA fantasy

Clara and Axel make it out of the forest and back into the village, but people are still lured there. The dangers they had faced were just a fraction of the true horrors within the forest. Now Clara and Axel must return to face an even greater danger, or there will be no village to return to.

This is the second half of the duology begun in the Forest Grimm, and you definitely must read that book first. Clara is haunted by the choices she made at the conclusion of that book, though it partially broke the curse over the town. The hard part is that the murder hasn't been solved yet, and the forest wants justice. This means Clara and Axel must return to the forest to find the other Lost Ones from the village if they can because one of them is the murderer and had stolen the page of the book they wished on. Though they resolve to trust only in each other, Lost Ones are dangerous, and Clara's visions of the past reveal some truths about that fateful night that neither really wants to face.

We have echoes of fairy tales here, including Jack the Beanstalk, the Frog Prince, the Twelve Dancing Princesses, and even a sprinkle of Snow White. In the midst of this is a murder mystery, and it's a sharp departure from the first half of the duology. It makes sense that the story was split in half this way. Each dip into the past reveals a little bit more, and the wedge between Axel and Clara means that they don't figure out the truth until it's the end and almost too late. Horror elements heighten the tension for them because there are very real stakes if they lose. Ultimately, it's trust, community, and family love that sees us through, just as some of that drove characters to create the curse in the first place.

Buy The Deathly Grimm at Amazon

Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales by Heather Fawcett

February 2025; Del Rey; 978-0593500224
audio, ebook, print (368 pages); romantic fantasy

Emily Wilde is now Wendell Bambleby's fiancée, and the two are trying to reclaim his throne in a long-lost faerie kingdom. She doesn't feel like she fits in there, just as she hadn't fit in within the human world. There's no time to fret about that, however. Wendell’s murderous stepmother placed a curse upon the land before vanishing without a trace. It will take all of Wendell’s magic and Emily’s knowledge of stories to unravel the mystery before they lose everything they hold dear.

Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales is the third book in the Emily Wilde series, following Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries and Emily Wilde's Map of the Otherlands. Definitely read those first, some prior characters show up in this one. Emily is still unapologetically a scholar first, even with Wendell taking on the responsibilities of King and trying to help reduce the curse. Tracts of land are decaying and the faerie residents get corrupted, causing them to attack or behave strangely. Because Faerie tends to operate in the manner of stories, Emily travels back and forth to English libraries to research old fairy tales for similar circumstances. The problem is, old stories aren't well documented, there are different versions, and Wendell's stepmother is half-human. Humanity has a way of changing how fairy tales work in Faerie, so things don't quite go according to plan. 

Emily has grown quite a bit from the first book. While she still thinks of journal entries, articles to write or books she can publish on Faerie, she isn't as solitary as before. She can be polite, and reaches out or accepts help. Wendell isn't as silly as he was before, having accepted the fact that there's danger in the kingdom and royalty has certain powers that tie them to the land itself. I love how Emily is committed to the stories she finds, and that she is able to reach out to others through them. While she doesn't see herself as brave, she takes incredible risks and faces frightening creatures without complaints. This is another fun installment in this alternative history series, and I'm sure there's potentially more to come for Emily and Wendell in Faerie. 

Buy Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales at Amazon

Born and raised in New York City, M.K. French started writing stories when very young, dreaming of different worlds and places to visit. She always had an interest in folklore, fairy tales, and the macabre, which has definitely influenced her work. She currently lives in the Midwest with her husband, three young children, and a golden retriever.

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