Uprooted by Naomi Novik was a perfect fantasy story/fairytale. It's got all the right parts (dark magic, regular magic, unimpressed heroine, ambivalent wizard, etc), but isn't terribly predictable, and forms real characters instead of sha

You know what? I had fun. There. Yeah, it's bleak. Yeah, I can't defend why I had fun with this one and not with, say, the similarly murdery Murderbot or the also try-hard narrator of Gideon the Ninth (though that one was more obnoxious!),

Very nice, if you're into Age of Sail, sparkling aristocrat bullshit. I happen to like that sort of thing. I like Dumas, ffs, so it should surprise absolutely nobody that "Master and Commander, but with dragons" works pretty well for me.