Oh, and to follow up, The Burning got me really invested in finding non-Euro-centric fantasy books so I finally started the Poppy War, which is this weird combo of interesting historical/cultural commentary but with some truly bad dialogue. It's a weird dichotomy.
Okay.. this is gonna make some people angry. I don't like The Poppy War. At all. I tried to like it. I really did. The more I read it, the more convinced I was that this gets such high marks specifically because it's fantasy NOT through the Medieval European lens and there's so little of that, especially backed up by a legit publisher rather than self-pub, that it just sort of gets a pass on not being very well-written or interesting.
I'd also argue it does a lot less to mask the real life history it's based on than something like Game of Thrones, so when you file off the fantasy elements you're just like.. 'oh, it's literally just this specific historical event.' Which can feel disappointing. If you don't know the history you may not notice/care.
Anyway... LOTS of people love the series. I'm well aware that I am a man on an island here.
For non-European fantasy I am having a really hard time finding anything good. Probably because so many people in the historical fantasy space came up from LotR and such, and that's what they want to write. It seems pretty rare to find someone legitimately writing outside of that. Especially new stuff (i.e. not going back to old Legend of the Five Rings novels or something).
Guy Gavriel Kay has some books based on other areas of the world. All the Seas of the World (?) is middle-eastern fantasy, for example. But I did not enjoy it very much. I LOVE his short fiction so far, to be fair. This is the first full novel I've read of his and I just didn't have a great time even by the half-way point.
But with all of his stuff he seems to pick a place and make a fantasy version of it. Like "Written on the Dark" is basically medieval fantasy France.
The series Between Earth and Sky (first book is called Black Sun) is fantasy medieval Americas, which sounds amazing but I haven't started it yet.
It Waits in the Forest is Caribbean mythology-based. I've heard good things but again, haven't started it yet. Goddess of the River is Indian mythology fantasy. And the Dandelion Dynasty series (first book is The Grace of Kings) is based on Chinese history/mythology but more in the medieval period than Poppy War's 20th century.
And I've gotta mention Elizabeth Bear. She's a terrific writer and she did a few series' based on Persian/Asian/Middle-eastern mythology/fantasy called the Lotus Kingdoms series and the Eternal Sky series.
Tried Gwynne's earlier series but I got kinda bored when I realized one of the characters was a 14 year old would-be hero. I kinda think books should come with a warning label: "this, too, has a plucky young hero, are you looking for a plucky young hero?" Cos i'm really in a grizzled old grump era right now.
I still like the plucky young hero, but I'm also very ready for something that isn't that and it seems like a lot of heroic fantasy is still very much that. Which is kind of surprising given how we were told that 'dad-beard Kratos' and Joel from Last of Us being MONUMENTALLY huge for the gaming world meant we were moving more toward fiction designed for cranky old men.
As we said in 2000, what's the dilly, yo?
With Evan Winter? Came out of the gate with his first novel being amazing. Got a book deal and published book 2 fairly quickly. Now he's kind of pulling a bit of a George Martin on getting the final book out and basically a small but horrible little gremlin section of his 'fans' are being atrocious to him on social media every day trying to force him to release the final book. At this point, I'm afraid buddy is going to go back to his very well-paying original job (making music videos) and tell us readers to kindly fuck off into the sun. And I wouldn't blame him.
