Riot New Media

This one may look very familiar to you, because it only came out a week and a half ago, but it is on this list because you bet your butt it is good. The Montoya family is one surrounded by inexplicable magic and mysteries they know better than to ask about. But when Orquídea Divina, the matriarch who refused to ever leave their home, even for weddings and baptisms, invites them to her own funeral, rather than answers or a direct inheritance, her transformation leaves them only with more questions. After seven years, this inheritance has manifested differently for each of her descendants… and put them in the line of fire of a mysterious enemy that seems determined to pick them off, one by one.

In a near-future America that labors under ever-more draconian border policies, immigrants and their children, whether documented or not, naturalized citizen or not, are tattooed to mark their status and tracked relentlessly by the machine of the state. In desperation, the “inked” form their own alliances and try to claim their home with ingenuity and resilience.

I love everything I’ve ever read that Anna-Marie McLemore has written, so it was hard to pick one book to put on this list. But ultimately, I picked this multi-award-winning book about two best friends who each have a strange magic to them and the four beautiful sisters even odder than them who are rumored to be witches who want their magic for themselves.

The Merry Maids are an elite black-ops team who work undercover to clean up the messes created by the Order all across the galaxy. With her newly honed abilities in telekinesis and movement, Alyvia has only just joined the team when her crew is sent to pick up the pieces of a dangerous artifact, scattered across the stars. But the person who hid them is still around, and they’ll do anything to destroy the artifact before Alyvia can complete it.

La Muerta Blanca is a mysterious dragon-like ghostly creature that’s been stalking Central America since the days of the Aztecs, eating hearts and spreading terror. Now, Miguel Reilly comes to modern-day New Mexico and falls in with a shaman named Tomás, who shows him that he’s not “pure” Irish-American while trying to train this innocent nerd into a dragonslayer. Along his journey, Miguel meets a Maya med student named Maritza who has survived a brush with the spectral monster and come away with her own ambitions to slay it. Náhuatl codices lead the two to Chichén Itzá for a final, fantastical battle to slay a dragon and find themselves.

A short fiction and poetry collection from the author of Infomocracy, which includes AI, the anthropology of a dying Earth, and a corps of fighting midwives.

A clanless young man hopes to escape life as an outcast by standing before the Eldest Throne so he can become an awakened guardian of humanity. But when he finally achieves that dream, he finds himself only with a fraction of the powers he should have been granted, not yet truly immortal. However, after the life he’s led, he’s used to doing more with less, and he isn’t going to let anything stop his ascension, even if he has to find his own path to do it.