urban fantasy Archives - Literary Harbinger

BOOK REVIEW

Book: Golem for Broke
Genre: Magical Midlife Urban Fantasy
Author: Deborah Wilde
Rating: 4.5/5
Reviewer: Stavyah Vatsarah

Deborah Wilde’s Golem for Broke has a wonderfully wicked proposition: what if perimenopause came with not only hot flashes and brain fog but also magic? Tovah Silver is a fixer in her forties for Mad Queens Inc., in a Vancouver where magic skills, supernatural red tape, and everyday life all happily coexist. Her powers manifest as hot flashes, which is a silly idea until you find yourself in a situation where a well-timed wave of heat is just what you need. Wilde takes the joke without diminishing Tovah, using an unconventional heroine to explore power, aging, friendship, and the experience of being underestimated. The result is urban fantasy with lots of magical trouble, but much of its personality comes from women who refuse to quietly disappear into middle age.

Hot Flashes Turn Hotter

Tovah introduces herself immediately, with a narrative voice that’s sarcastic, self-deprecating, and seemingly incapable of wasting a good joke. The first line, “No woman woke up with a song in her heart and the words ‘What a great day for a mammogram!’ on her lips,” tells you exactly what kind of book this will be. Wilde continually contrasts the mundane with the magical, letting mammograms and wet boots, work frustrations, and the indignities of aging exist in the same universe as golems and magical crimes. Even when Tovah is in genuinely uncomfortable circumstances, her observations are still sharply comic. That humor makes her less a carefully constructed fantasy heroine and more a woman determined to meet absurdity with greater absurdity.

But the perimenopausal magic joke has a more serious idea behind it. Tovah points out that the powers of the Mad Queens are often treated as if they are symptoms of conditions the women are already suffering from, which she dryly calls “lady troubles.” Wilde turns that dismissal into a nice metaphor for how the experiences of middle-aged women can be trivialized or overlooked. Tovah herself notes the link between physical transformation and identity, writing that perimenopause can alter “how you experienced the world, the fucks you had left to give.” It’s funny, deliberately blunt language, but there is surprisingly perceptive thought behind it.

Long Live the Crazy Queens

Tovah is important, but what’s more important is the friendship at the core of Mad Queens Inc. Nisha, Margot, Su-Jin, and Tovah all have their own personalities and skills, but the way they work together makes the group feel lived in rather than cobbled together to give the protagonist a supporting cast. They tease, argue, eat, solve problems pragmatically, and instinctively care for each other in their conversations. Tovah at one point describes the feeling of being with the right people as if she “could finally do anything as long as I had the right team by my side.” This captures the emotional architecture of the novel without Wilde needing to sentimentalize the friendships.

The Mad Queens also flesh out the title and larger concept of the book. Their powers show up later than society expects. This is unusual in a magical culture where powers tend to manifest much earlier in life; middle age is not a last-ditch effort to reclaim youth for Wilde, but rather these women come to their new circumstances with experience, professional skills, complex histories, and hard-won confidence. Even their office reflects that mix of age and reinvention, described through “history, stubborn survival, and organized chaos.” In that sense, Golem for Broke does not view middle age as an epilogue but as another possible beginning.

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Magic With Rules and Red Tape

Wilde’s Vancouver is fun because magic hasn’t replaced bureaucracy or social hierarchy: it has only made them more complicated. The wealthy use golems, the police investigate magical crimes, protective wards are security, and supernatural powers are governed by laws and restrictions. Tovah’s work thus occupies a fascinating middle ground between formal authority and those who need problems solved outside of the usual channels. She defends Mad Queens Inc. as a business that serves members of the magical community whom official institutions might otherwise overlook. So the supernatural world appears woven into the fabric of everyday civic life rather than behind a curtain that is wholly other.

The golems are especially good worldbuilding elements because Wilde gives rules for their creation and composition. Tovah sees differences in the way they’re built, moved, in the clay, and in the inside. The people who make them know things, not some vague, unlimited power. The book also plays with familiar golem lore rather than simply reproducing it. Tovah dismisses the simple version of the legend by saying she could tattoo “emet” on a potato, and it still wouldn’t do her laundry. It’s a good example of Wilde using humor to deliver exposition without making the reader feel trapped in a supernatural instruction manual.

Queens Who Need to Prove Something

The prose is quick, fueled by Tovah’s commentary and Wilde’s love of banter. The characters also spar verbally almost as readily as they do with the magical problems, and the exchanges often reveal personality while keeping the story buoyant. Serious fantasy fans might think the jokes are relentless, but clearly Golem for Broke is not trying to be restrained. Its humor is part of its worldview, especially its refusal to treat older women as tragic, invisible, or humorless characters. Tovah can be vulnerable without losing the edge that makes her such a compelling narrator.

Beneath the golems, magical regulations, mysteries, and wisecracks is a story about who gets to be taken seriously and what happens when people refuse to play their allotted roles. Wilde grants middle-aged women the powers, friendships, messy lives, appetites, and adventures traditionally saved for younger protagonists in fantasy. Critically, before the heroines get to be formidable, the novel doesn’t make them become younger versions of themselves. Golem for Broke finds its magic in exactly the stage of life others might underestimate. These Mad Queens aren’t waiting to take back their crowns; they’ve already decided they belong on their heads.

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ENGAGE WITH LH | Click on the cover image of the book Golem for Broke and buy yourself a copy right off the bat!

BOOK REVIEW

Book: The Ascension
Genre: Mythic Urban Fantasy
Author: J M Shaw
Rating: 5/5
Reviewer: Stavyah Vatsarah

J M Shaw’s debut novel in the Callum Walker series, The Ascension, is a modern fantasy with an impressive scope of imagination and a focus on moral character. Callum Walker is the hero; he is a young man living quietly in Duncaster but with an extraordinary inheritance that makes him different from the ordinary world in which he abides. Shaw works to establish this duality: Callum is deliberately inconspicuous, but he has skills that make it increasingly difficult to remain anonymous. The imaginative tension of the novel is this contrast between his pedestrian life and the secret world that gradually opens before him.

A Well-Built Fantastical World

Shaw’s portrayal of Callum works particularly well since his powers don’t make him invulnerable. He is explicitly described as ‘not immune to fear,’ and he imperfectly masters his powers, so his encounters with the supernatural are a matter of nerve as well as of capability. His character is shaped not just by what he can do but by how he responds to challenges. Shaw embodies this principle in Callum’s statement: ‘It’s what we do despite it that defines us,’ a formulation that neatly captures the novel’s interest in courage as choice rather than temperament.

The speculative architecture is one of the novel’s most considerable strengths. Shaw creates a secret magical world called the Veil that exists alongside modern-day Duncaster, a world where the supernatural exists beyond ordinary human perception. The Veil is called ‘a world only accessible to those with magic,’ but Callum’s knowledge of mythology gives him the vocabulary to recognize beings that others dismiss as mere fantasy. The relationship between folklore and lived reality lends the novel a pleasing intertextual quality, for the mythical is not just invented but purposefully linked to traditions of storytelling and belief. Shaw also provides an internal discipline for magic, with words of power and specific types of knowledge; the use of magic can have physical consequences. The result is a fantasy system that is governed, not randomly deployed.

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The Ethics of Power

Shaw’s handling of the supernatural is especially lively, with monsters having unique physical and narrative existences. The novel places its fantastic creatures within a larger mythological vocabulary, allowing Callum’s study of mythology and folklore to become an important part of his understanding of the world around him. This is one of the novel’s more striking literary devices: mythology is knowledge, not decoration. Shaw thus creates a context in which old stories gain new imaginative vitality while retaining their connection with the modern world. It results in fantasy that is accessible but with a clear base in folklore.

The Ascension is very concerned with power and its uses under its supernatural premise. Shaw makes an important distinction between having power and using it responsibly, especially in Callum’s understanding of what it means to possess extraordinary abilities. This prevents the novel’s conflict from becoming a morally weightless spectacle. Shaw’s emphasis on conscience gives the fantasy an ethical dimension more compelling than any simple opposition between strength and weakness. In this novel, power becomes important in itself because its exercise requires judgment.

Trust and Human Connection

Callum’s emotional life adds another layer of substance to the novel. His isolation and fear drive his desire to stay out of the spotlight, not just a quirk, and Shaw allows this solitude to shape his relationships with others. His interactions with those around him gradually reveal how little company Callum allows himself. These details make his solitude more than a character trait; it becomes a central emotional condition. Thus, Shaw’s fantasy has an intimate countercurrent, asking what it means to live with extraordinary difference and to yearn for ordinary connection.

For this reason, The Ascension earns a 5/5 from me. Its strengths are cumulative: Shaw blends a vividly imagined supernatural world with grounded characterization and an evident concern for conscience. More significantly, the novel does not need its protagonist to stop being vulnerable to be compelling; Callum’s uncertainty serves to characterize him. ‘Everyone feels fear,’ he says, ‘but character is what you do when you feel that fear.’ This is a particularly effective distillation of the novel’s governing philosophy. Shaw’s achievement is to make fantasy serve character rather than oppose it; she produces a novel that is easy to read and morally aware, where the issue is not what power can do but what a person will do with it.

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ENGAGE WITH LH | Click on the cover image of the book The Ascension and buy yourself a copy right off the bat!