Dear Ms. Amara,
There’s a continuing discussion among fantasy circles about non-Western settings and non-Caucasian characters in fantasy. Or more to the point, the lack thereof. I confess I count myself among their number. I realize many people take it as a given that a fantasy setting should be faux medieval Europe but these days, the settings of different novels have gotten so generic as to be interchangeable. I know I often find myself sighing over the pseudo medieval setting in many a fantasy novel and then hoping something else in the book — the prose, the plot, characters, other aspects of the worldbuilding, anything — will make up for it. And then I read a book like this and I ask myself why I should even settle in the first place.
I think many people will pass this novel by because they’ll label it as “just” a gay fantasy published by a smaller, independent publisher. That’s a great disservice and those readers honestly have no idea what they’re missing. Because there’s another ongoing discussion in SF/F circles about the lack of non-white and/or queer characters, and if this book doesn’t fit the bill, I don’t know …


Tangle is an anthology featuring a variety of same-sex love stories. All the romances here have two heroes, most contain fantastical elements, and happily, I enjoyed the majority of them. Here are my impressions of each one:

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