Nafiza Azad is a self-identified island girl. She has hurricanes in her blood and dreams of a time she can exist solely on mangoes and pineapple.
Born in Lautoka, Fiji, she currently resides in British Columbia, Canada where she reads too many books, watches too many K-dramas, and writes stories about girls taking over the world.
Azad's debut YA fantasy was the Morris Award–nominated
The Candle and the Flame.
The Wild Ones is her second novel.
At Tor.com she tagged
five titles featuring fantastic cities. including:
Elantra (and the surrounding fief cities) — Chronicles of Elantra by Michelle Sagara
First, let’s put aside the cast of characters and the plot of the Chronicles of Elantra and simply focus on the titular city. It feels too difficult to describe Michelle Sagara’s City of Elantra because of how vivid and real it is in my mind. It honestly feels like a place to be experienced more than to be discussed but alas, discuss it we must. Some of the buildings in this city are sentient and have their own minds; they 
decide who they want to shelter and who they simply don’t care for. A door in a ramshackle store on a popular street, governed by a crochety old man leads to a garden which contains the purest (and magical) forms of the elements that can easily destroy the city. Dragons rule Elantra and traffic noise often includes dragon roars. The dragon king lives in a palace which contains a library that is jealously guarded by one of the most interesting characters in the series. Humans share the city with Leontines (lion creatures), Aerians (winged creatures), Barrani (think Tolkien’s elves), and other supernatural races. Across the bridge from the city are the fiefs, cities in their own right but much more sinister and much more dangerous. The castles in each fief are alive and aware, functioning on a very inhuman scale. Magic in the fiefs is sudden and violent. In contrast, the streets of Elantra are safer because the dragons are jealous rulers. When you return the plot and the characters to the city, the story gets rolling very quickly. The City of Elantra is the kind of setting I look for in every fantasy novel I read so that even when the story is over, I can still feel it breathing within me, alive and waiting for the next tale to unfurl.
Read about
another entry on the list.
--Marshal Zeringue
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