These 2025 Books Deserved Their Own Award Categories

She is honestly the female character in fantasy that is written the way I love to see female characters written, especially when they are warriors. She's so well written, you guys. So well written.

I absolutely love the way these covers are designed. I love that it's minimalistic in terms of color and tone, but it has so much intricate detail in the cover and in the different motifs that take place across the series.

This cover is such a phenomenal example of how to do a typography based cover beautifully. It evokes the tone and the historical fantasy element of the story.

And I had a really good time overall with this book. I think that it is a actually surprisingly good classic for people who maybe aren't as familiar with classics because it grips you and it's very exciting right away in the beginning of the story.

The first one, of course, being Duma by Stephen King, which had me guessing pretty much all the way up until the end. And that ending, you guys, was such a mind-bending, crazy thing to experience.

And we have so many covers in sci-fi and fantasy that feature a main character on the front, but Hadrian just looks so incredibly imposing and it does really evoke the story inside the cover so well in my opinion.

This one, I can't say much because it's the third book in a series, but you guys, there is something that happens to one of the side characters in The Hod King that absolutely blew my mind and broke me at the same time that had been kind of building up in the background quietly for three books.

But there's a scene that happens to the main character, Hadrian, in this book that yeah, I did not DNF this book, but I almost did at this scene because it was so awful and awkward and I hated every minute of it.

Erdra is just such a cool dragon character, and the story in that novela, you guys. Oh, it's it's going to get you right in the fields.

Malice and Newcomer were both fantastic reads for me this year.

And as we were going around to the different families and discovering their family secrets and all of these things, like it was just so well done and they were so interesting as a group that I had to include them in the nominations for this award.

I don't even have words for how I felt when Young Nobby Nobbs showed up on the pages, you guys. I don't have words. It was so adorable.

Sam Vimes as a father is just the most delightful thing you'll ever see in your life and Young Sam is so full of all of the things that make young children magical. It's a beautiful relationship. I absolutely loved it.

My second nominee for this category is going to be Storm Front by Jim Butcher, which is funny because I actually really enjoyed the book overall a lot more than I thought I was going to. However, there's a specific character in this book named Bob.

There was a scene in this book, the whole book together was like really good. But there's a specific scene about two-thirds of the way through the book that just about made me put it down.

We get the entire story told through Nana's point of view and Nana's perspective on the world and humanity is so well written. It's incredible and that was that was an easy choice for me this year based on the list that I had.

Now, this story does have a crime that happens as kind of the central conflict, and there were just so many twists and turns throughout the book, and it's all told, of course, from the perspective of a young girl, which just makes it all the more tense.