The Summer War

This novella felt overly long, despite being under 150 pages.  It’s about interactions with faeries: their vengeance, their oaths, and complicated stratagems to bring peace between the two worlds.  This felt like a common fae trope: faeries take a human and the human escapes by convoluting the fae logic.  Novik made it more complex than that, in a good way, but the prose felt bloated and there was too much exposition to catch the reader up on the history of the situation.  This 2026 Hugo nominee for Novella is probably my least favorite of the list.  While I felt like it was a great turn on the trope, all the filler and background kept me from feeling like this book was up there with my other favorite nominees.

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