I learned about r/Fantasy Book Bingo in early 2020, and this is the sixth consecutive year that I have filled out two cards. My first one is themed, and my second is cobbled together from whatever is left. 

For the last couple years, I’ve been rabble-rousing in the Bingo threads for a square that I think would be a lot of fun: Spot the Title. That is, the title of the book also appears somewhere within the text of the book. The kneejerk first reaction is often that the suggestion sounds too difficult to plan. And because I am nothing if not persistent (and maybe a touch petty), I decided to prove it could be done by filling out an entire Bingo card exclusively with Spot the Title books. That’s 25 books (by 25+ authors) for 25 different squares on the 2025 Bingo board, where every single one contains a title drop. And it’s not like I’ve done it merely by collecting short titles. A full 40% of my card has titles of more than two words, and there are a pair of six-word titles in the mix. 

On the whole, I was very happy with how this year’s Bingo turned out. My theme gave me an excuse to reread one of my all-time favorites, R.A. Lafferty’s Fourth Mansions, and I also had the opportunity to pick up some strong recommendations that I ended up adoring in Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven and Juliet Marillier’s Daughter of the Forest. 

One of my favorite things about Bingo is the way it churns the TBR, especially when I read a perfect Bingo title that I realistically would’ve never tried otherwise. It’s always a bit tough to evaluate what I would’ve read without Bingo, but Jon Bois’ 17776, Rachel Neumeier’s Tuyo, and Tracy Townsend’s The Nine were all long-time TBR items that I finally got around to after seeing how wonderfully they fit this year’s card. All three are really excellent. And after bouncing hard off Wild Seed, I feel confident in saying that Octavia E. Butler’s Clay’s Ark would’ve languished on the shelf for years if I hadn’t needed a Last in a Series pick. I’m so glad I gave that series another chance, as the final entry is my favorite of the lot. 

Other Bingo highlights include Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky, There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm, The Merge by Grace Walker, and as always, a curated selection of Five Short Stories that fit my theme. For more on those and the rest of my card, read on. Links in the headers go to full reviews of the individual entries, except for the Short Story square, where they go to full stories. 

Knights and Paladins: The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow

• Other 2025 Squares: A Book in Parts, Parents, Epistolary, Book Club. 

• Mini-Review: The readability and excellent prose are a given with Harrow, and there’s some compelling exploration of propaganda, despite a relatively flat villain. A bit too much fate driving the romance holds me back from a higher rating. 

• Rating: 16/20. 

Hidden Gem: The Nine by Tracy Townsend

• Other 2025 Squares: A Book in Parts (hard), Epistolary, Small Press, Gods and Pantheons.  

• Mini-Review: Truly the perfect fit for this square, delivering so many hallmarks of 2010s fantasy—grimy cities, myriad factions, thieving leads—with exemplary execution, yet bafflingly dropping entirely off the popular radar. 

• Rating: 17/20. 

Published in the 80s: Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones

• Other 2025 Squares: Impossible Places (hard), Book Club, Cozy. 

• Mini-Review: The lead taking entirely too much pleasure in the social expectations following her transformation into an old woman helps make this a whimsical delight in the first half, though an overly intricate plot tamps down the energy at the close. 

• Rating: 15/20. 

High Fashion: Daughter of the Forest by Juliet Marillier

• Other 2025 Squares: Stranger in a Strange Land. 

• Mini-Review: If you’d told me this was a romantic fairy tale retelling, I might not have tried it. And yet it was among my favorite reads of Bingo, with absolutely tremendous storytelling, a harrowing recovery arc, and shockingly good secondary characterization. 

• Rating: 18/20. 

Down With the System: Psychopomp by Maria Dong

• Other 2025 Squares: Author of Color, Small Press, Published in 2025. 

• Mini-Review: A compelling dive into the mind of a traumatized lead becomes muddled by a proliferation of subplots in a thriller without enough time to breathe. 

• Rating: 12/20. 

Impossible Places: Fourth Mansions by R.A. Lafferty

• Other 2025 Squares: Gods and Pantheons, Hidden Gem (hard). 

• Mini-Review: There’s a lot of social commentary that has stayed relevant more than 50 years later, and it has symbolism for days, but ultimately this is a book that I love for the words. It’s just a rollicking good time in almost every scene. 

• Rating: 20/20. 

A Book in Parts: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

• Other 2025 Squares: Epistolary.

• Mini-Review: A multiple-timeline pandemic novel, this one flits back and forth between apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic, following a robust cast of perspective characters without ever feeling overwhelming or overstuffed. While not everyone is likable, their stories are all fascinating. 

• Rating: 19/20. 

Gods and Pantheons: The Fire-Moon by Isabel Pelech

• Other 2025 Squares: Self-Published (hard), Hidden Gem (hard). 

• Mini-Review: A short novella aimed at a younger audience, this hits a lot of classic fantasy tropes—albeit in a non-European setting—and handles them with aplomb. 

• Rating: 15/20. 

Last in a Series: Clay’s Ark by Octavia E. Butler

• Other 2025 Squares: Published in the 80s (hard), Parents (hard), Author of Color. 

• Mini-Review: About as bleak as they come, yet featuring characters who want to be better than they are. Even when the reader can see inevitable disaster, the tense struggle of characters fighting for control of their own mind makes it hard to look away. 

• Rating: 18/20. 

Book Club or Readalong: House of the Rain King by Will Greatwich

• Other 2025 Squares: Hidden Gem, Down With the System (hard), Impossible Places, A Book in Parts, Gods and Pantheons, Self-Published, LGBTQIA+ Protagonist. 

• Mini-Review: A fascinating story of a young acolyte becoming jaded with the religious authorities while remaining utterly convinced by the foundational texts. The dungeon crawl secondary plot isn’t quite as strong, but it all comes together nicely.

• Rating: 15/20. 

Parents: The Merge by Grace Walker

• Other 2025 Squares: A Book in Parts, Published in 2025 (hard).

• Mini-Review: A claustrophobic dystopian thriller that stands out for its portrayal of an Alzheimer’s patient and her daughter and the ways neither can fully trust the testimony of their own memories. 

• Rating: 17/20. 

Epistolary: The Phoenix Pencil Company by Allison King

• Other 2025 Squares: Published in 2025 (hard), LGBTQIA+ Protagonist (hard), Stranger in a Strange Land (hard), Author of Color. 

• Mini-Review: A fully epistolary, two-timeline story about the magical and digital preservation of private correspondence, with abuses and well-earned distrust but also a wholesome family story at its core. 

• Rating: 15/20. 

Published in 2025: Where the Axe is Buried by Ray Nayler

• Other 2025 Squares: Down With the System, A Book in Parts. 

• Mini-Review: A messy tale of revolution, with POVs scattered among totalitarian states and others governed by ostensibly objective algorithms. There’s an overarching plot here, but the core is the smaller stories that constitute it. 

• Rating: 16/20. 

Author of Color: The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

• Other 2025 Squares: I believe just Recycle a Square, which is essentially free. 

• Mini-Review: On its face, this is a story about fleeing from slavery via a literalized Underground Railroad, but its heart isn’t a harrowing chase but rather a series of alternate histories that show the myriad ways to reconstitute oppression. 

• Rating: 16/20. 

Small Press or Self-Published: Saint Elspeth by Wick Welker

• Other 2025 Squares: Hidden Gem. 

• Mini-Review: A post-apocalyptic tale that at times has too neat a plot but offers quality first-contact scenes and digs into both the noble and the ugly parts of humanity. 

• Rating: 15/20.

Biopunk: Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky

• Other 2025 Squares: Published in 2025, Stranger in a Strange Land. 

• Mini-Review: A harrowing survival tale on a hostile moon, offering some of Tchaikovsky’s best xenobiology and a strong anti-capitalist subplot. 

• Rating: 18/20. 

Elves and Dwarves: The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar

[Note for Bingo sticklers: the elfin characters here are classic Fae, but they are called elves at least twice.]

• Other 2025 Squares: Impossible Places, Book Club, Published in 2025, LGBTQIA+ Protagonist, Author of Color. 

• Mini-Review: A short novella that mashes up a Fae story with a murder ballad, an entertaining read that doesn’t really attempt much secondary characterization. 

• Rating: 15/20. 

LGBTQIA Protagonist: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V. E. Schwab

• Other 2025 Squares: A Book in Parts (hard), High Fashion, Epistolary, Gods and Pantheons (hard). 

• Mini-Review: A two-timeline Faustian bargain story that features a predictable-but-pleasant romance in one and an ambitious-but-unconvincing pursuit in the other. 

• Rating: 14/20. 

Five Short Stories: Liecraft by Anita Moskát, In My Country by Thomas Ha, An Even Greater Cold to Come by Rich Larson, Still Water by Zhang Ran, and Catch a Tiger in the Snow by Ray Nayler. 

• Other 2025 Squares: N/A.

• Mini-Review: As always, I’ve cherry-picked five of my favorite stories that fit the theme. They’re all great. “Liecraft” and “In My Country” will be on my Hugo ballot, and all five are on my 2025 Recommended Reading List. Worth noting that three of the five come from the absolutely tremendous April 2025 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine, so if you’re ever looking to go cover-to-cover on a single magazine issue, that’s a great shout. 

• Rating: 19/20.

Stranger in a Strange Land: Tuyo by Rachel Neumeier

• Other 2025 Squares: Small Press. 

• Mini-Review: A wonderful tale of building relationships across cultures, one that makes neither a caricature and doesn’t skimp on miscommunications. It all leads into a big fantasy conflict, but it’s a story about the build more than the climax. 

• Rating: 18/20. 

Recycle a Bingo Square (Eldritch): There is No Antimemetics Division by qntm

• Other 2025 Squares: A Book in Parts, Epistolary, Published in 2025. 

• Mini-Review: A fascinating conceit, featuring an organization dedicated to study of and protection against eldritch creatures who camouflage by interfering with the memory of all who notice them. Characters beginning each chapter with no recollection of what came before doesn’t leave room for much personal development, but the concept and plot-related tension make for a tremendous read all the same. 

• Rating: 18/20. 

Cozy SFF: Yours Celestially by Al Hess

• Other 2025 Squares: Self-Published (hard), Hidden Gem, Down With the System (hard), LGBTQIA+ Protagonist, Epistolary. 

• Mini-Review: This is cozy in the sense that it’s small-scale and there’s an overwhelming sense of pulling together for the common good, not in the sense that it lacks conflict. There’s addiction, abusive relationships, and a fair bit of death in the backstory, but main story is about finding a way forward, with the help of a couple queer romances and lots of friends made along the way. 

• Rating: 15/20.

Generic Title: The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper

• Other 2025 Squares: Recycle a Square.

• Mini-Review: A middle-grade fantasy about a child coming into his powers, this is quite straightforward from a plot perspective but makes up for it with incredible atmosphere, drawing the reader into both the wonders and terrors of a snowy midwinter. 

• Rating: 16/20. 

Not a Book: 17776 by Jon Bois

• Other 2025 Squares: N/A? 

• Mini-Review: Ostensibly about football, this is a web story that pulls in text, gifs, videos, and a handful of other things to talk about the search for meaning and the way great stories can be found anywhere. Come for the surrealist humor, stay for the surprisingly poignant themes. 

• Rating: 19/20. 

Pirates: Proliferation by Erik A. Otto

• Other 2025 Squares: Hidden Gem, A Book in Parts, Parents, Self-Published. 

• Mini-Review: A post-apocalyptic story featuring myriad factions trekking through a partially-drowned Pacific Northwest in search of the power behind the lost machine-run cities. Delivers some dramatic moments and fascinating philosophical discourse partially undercut by uneven pacing. 

• Rating: 12/20.