Review: A House with Good Bones by T. Kingfisher

Review: A House with Good Bones by T. KingfisherA House with Good Bones by T. Kingfisher
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy, Gothic, horror, paranormal
Pages: 256
Published by Tor Nightfire on March 28, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBook DepositoryBookshop.org
Goodreads

A haunting Southern Gothic from an award-winning master of suspense, A House With Good Bones explores the dark, twisted roots lurking just beneath the veneer of a perfect home and family.
"Mom seems off."
Her brother's words echo in Sam Montgomery's ear as she turns onto the quiet North Carolina street where their mother lives alone.
She brushes the thought away as she climbs the front steps. Sam's excited for this rare extended visit, and looking forward to nights with just the two of them, drinking boxed wine, watching murder mystery shows, and guessing who the killer is long before the characters figure it out.
But stepping inside, she quickly realizes home isn’t what it used to be. Gone is the warm, cluttered charm her mom is known for; now the walls are painted a sterile white. Her mom jumps at the smallest noises and looks over her shoulder even when she’s the only person in the room. And when Sam steps out back to clear her head, she finds a jar of teeth hidden beneath the magazine-worthy rose bushes, and vultures are circling the garden from above.
To find out what’s got her mom so frightened in her own home, Sam will go digging for the truth. But some secrets are better left buried.

My Review:

“Mirror, mirror on the wall, I am my mother after all,” or so goes the sampler. Sam Montgomery is experiencing something even weirder and creepier – she’s watching her mother turn into her frightening and downright abusive grandmother – and it’s scaring them both to death.

Sam is worried that her mother is going through early-onset Alzheimer’s. Or some really bizarre stage of delayed grief over her grandmother’s death. Or that she’s just fallen off her trolley. And there’s just a bit of worry on Sam’s part that whatever is going on with her mother is genetic – and that someday it will happen to her.

Although channeling her mother – as she was before this whole thing started – wouldn’t not be all that terrible. Her mother was cool. Her grandmother, on the other hand, was cold as the grave even before she was put into one herself.

But still, Sam is an academic, specifically an archaeoentomologist. Research is what she does. So she does. Research, that is, into what is happening to her mother, when it started, how it’s progressing, and whether or not there is anything at all that Sam can do about it.

What she finds are a whole lot of secrets that really, truly should have remained buried. And that the house her mother inherited from Sam’s grandmother doesn’t just have good bones – it also has very strong teeth.

Escape Rating A-: I never expected to find a story at the intersection of gothic horror with “I am my mother after all” and “academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small” – but here is A House with Good Bones and that’s exactly where it sits. With a vulture circling over it.

At first, the horror is the kind that happens all the time. Sam comes home for a long visit when the dig she’s supposed to be on gets postponed, only to find that her mother isn’t quite right. As we reach middle age and later, if our parents are still with us at that point, we all come to realize that they aren’t quite what they used to be as time and possibly illness or tragedy take hold. As we see their mortality and we begin to feel our own.

And that’s what Sam fears most. At first. It’s a very real fear but it isn’t usually the kind that leads straight into gothic horror and then down into the depths of something even creepier. But this time it does. And does it ever!

As Sam digs deeper into the family history, she learns that that history wasn’t nearly as above-reproach or nearly as respectable – as her late Gran Mae made it out to be. There are some real skeletons in the family closet, and more than a few of them are still haunting the house.

Then again, so is Gran Mae.

Sam will have to dig deep, under the house and into her own reserves in order to lay all of the family skeletons to rest. One way or another.

Two things made this story for me. Actually three. One is that I will read anything T. Kingfisher writes, even in genres I don’t read much of – like horror. Second is that the initial horror is so very mundane and real, making it easy to get sucked into the story. Third is the character of Sam Montgomery herself, as in this book she represents the snarky, sarcastic and self-deprecating voice of the author.

Which is where that element of “academic politics” comes into the story. Sam is able to triumph over Gran Mae not because she’s all-knowing or all-powerful or any of those standard heroic tropes. Sam wins the day because she knows herself, in all her faults and all her virtues. Gran Mae’s insidious voice has no place of entry into Sam’s mind or heart because she’s survived so much worse in the bloody (not literally), hallowed (not exactly) halls of academe.

So I read – and loved – A House with Good Bones not for its horror but for Sam’s snarkcasm and the wry smiles and chuckles and occasional guffaws that it engendered. And it was terrific.

Review: Knightmaster by Anna Hackett

Review: Knightmaster by Anna HackettKnightmaster (Oronis Knights #1) by Anna Hackett
Format: eARC
Source: author
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: science fiction, science fiction romance, space opera
Series: Oronis Knights #1
Pages: 240
Published by Anna Hackett on March 16, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & Noble
Goodreads

She was sent to forge an alliance with the deadly Oronis knights…and instead finds herself framed for abducting their queen.

Xenoanthropologist Kennedy Black loves exploring new cultures with Space Corps. Everyone in her life has left her, so she happily fills the void with exciting adventures. When she’s assigned to escort the new ambassador to the planet Oron for an opulent ball, she’s thrilled to get an up-close look at the Oronis knights, and their culture of honor and duty to their knightqueen. But she never expected her reaction to cool, controlled Knightmaster Ashtin Caydor, head of the Oronis Knightforce.

And she really didn’t expect a savage alien attack that leaves the knightqueen missing and Earth fingered as the culprit.

Knightmaster Ashtin Caydor lives to protect his planet, his people, and his knightqueen. He came from nothing, and the code of knighthood is the cornerstone of his being. When Knightqueen Carys is abducted by their mortal enemies, the ferocious Gek’Dragar, he’s icily enraged, especially when he finds evidence that Earth, and the far too enticing Sub-Captain Kennedy Black, are involved.

But Kennedy vows to clear Earth’s name by helping Ashtin and his knights find the queen. As she and Ashtin embark on a risky mission to a dangerous jungle planet, they’re forced to rely on each other, and their sizzling chemistry is soon undeniable. But love can’t be an option, not for a knight bound only to his duty and a woman whose heart already has too many scars.

My Review:

We first met the Oronis Knights in Conqueror, the final book in the author’s totally awesome Galactic Kings series. That series ended with a big bang of a battle when Conqueror Graylan Taln Sarkany called on every single one of his friends and allies to finally bring his nemesis to heel. Among those friends and allies were a contingent of the Oronis Knights, and it’s here in the first book of this new series that we pick up the thread of their story.

And it’s a humdinger, as all of Anna Hackett’s stories are.

Earth needs allies. Its introduction to the wider intergalactic universe was a rough one, as the planet was targeted by the rapacious Kantos. But Earth eventually found common cause with the Eons – after a series of fairly rough starts as portrayed in Edge or Eon and the rest of the Eon Warriors series.

After the rough start to that alliance, Earth is being a bit more proactive, and sending diplomats to possible allies instead of kidnappers as they did in Edge or Eon. It’s been a bit of a process that has not always run smooth – to say the least!

The Oronis are allies of the Eons, the Eons are Earth’s allies, so there are high hopes riding on a diplomatic mission from Earth to Oronis under the aegis of the Eons. Space Corps zenoanthropologist Kennedy Black is guiding, guarding and shepherding a diplomatic mission that goes completely pear-shaped when the welcome ball is invaded by Oronis’ historic enemy, the Gek’Dragar.

The Oronis’ knightqueen is kidnapped, along with her bodyguard. The evidence left behind points to a plot between the Gek’Dragar and Earth. Tensions are high, suspicions are higher, blood is on the ground and in the air, and the Earth delegation is furious at being used by a people they’ve never even met.

The Oronis aren’t ready to see reason – not until Kennedy puts her own life on the line to help the Oronis follow the trail. That she’ll be working closely with an Oronis Knight she can’t seem to resist – and very much vice-versa – is only one of the many reasons that she is determined to see this mission through.

Whether her heart can handle it or not.

Escape Rating A-: Their hunt for the knightqueen’s kidnappers lead Kennedy and Knightmaster Ashtin Caydor from scummy space stations with even scummier information brokers to a jungle planet that seems designed to eat them both alive before they can discover the next clue. They’re in a race against time while not knowing their enemy’s true purpose or how much time they have left. If it isn’t already too late.

Both believe that the lives they have led up to this point mean that it’s too late for any relationship they might have had – no matter how badly both of them want it.

Ashtin is duty-bound to serve his knightqueen and his people. Kennedy is an officer in her own world’s Space Corps with her own duty to serve as well as a drive to explore the universe her people have just barely reached at such a high cost.

This is a quest story. Ashtin is searching for his knightqueen and her bodyguard – who is also his friend. He is praying for vindication of his initial trust in Kennedy and her people. Kennedy is searching for that same vindication, to prove to this man she has just met that her people are worthy of their trust. And that she is worthy of his.

They both believe that a relationship between them is impossible – even as they give into the temptation to taste what they cannot have. Or so they believe.

Not all quests are successful – and they never reach success easily. So even though Knightmaster comes to a close with hope for Ashtin and Kennedy’s personal future, everyone’s hope for the knightqueen’s rescue hangs in the balance.

The search continues, but Ashtin has responsibilities on Oronis in the knightqueen’s continued absence. His best friend, and that friend’s most implacable enemy, will have to work together, however reluctantly, to bring their knightqueen home. If they don’t kill each other first.

We’ll all see what happens in the second book in the Oronis Knights series, coming in July.

Review: The Sister Effect by Susan Mallery

Review: The Sister Effect by Susan MalleryThe Sister Effect by Susan Mallery
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, large print, ebook, audiobook
Genres: contemporary romance, relationship fiction, women's fiction
Pages: 416
Published by Hqn on March 7, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBook DepositoryBookshop.org
Goodreads

Beloved bestselling author Susan Mallery brings readers an emotional, witty, and heartfelt story that explores the nuances of a broken family’s complex emotions as they strive to become whole in this uplifting story of human frailty and resilience.
Finley McGowan is determined that the niece she’s raising will always feel loved and wanted. Unlike how she felt after her mom left to pursue a dream of stardom, and when the grandfather who was left to raise them abandoned her and her sister, Sloane, when they needed him most. Finley reacted to her chaotic childhood by walking the straight and narrow—nose down, work hard, follow the rules.
Sloane went the other way.
Now Sloane is back, as beautiful and as damaged as ever…and she wants a relationship with her daughter. She says she’s changed, but Finley’s heart has been burned once too often for her to trust easily. But is her reluctance to forgive really about Sloane or worry over losing what she loves the most? With the help of a man who knows all too well how messy families can be, Finley will learn there’s joy in surrendering and peace in letting go.
 

My Review:

Supposedly, “love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things and [it] never fails. But love is a feeling. It’s not the emotion that does anything. It’s PEOPLE who love and do all the other things in this famous list from the Bible.

In dysfunctional families such as the ones in this story, it’s the strongest members of the family who do most of that bearing and enduring – even after their hope is gone. The story in The Sister Effect (technically it should have been The Sibling Effect but that’s not nearly as catchy a title) is told from the perspective of that person in two initially separate families, that one who stands tallest and is supposed to forgive everyone else all their many and very real trespasses – even as they deal with the trauma that bearing inflicts. On top of dealing with the original trauma and the dysfunction and broken trust that followed it.

Jericho Ford is still grieving the sudden loss of his father as well as having to assume the helm of the family construction company a couple of decades before he thought he was ready. He thought his family had finally found their way to the other side of that grief when their dysfunction manifested in a way that honestly deserves its own episode of the Jerry Springer Show.

Jericho’s wife Lauren and his brother Gil didn’t just have an affair, they managed to fall in love and get pregnant. Jericho is supposed to forgive, forget, give his blessing AND be his brother’s best man. Jericho’s lack of grief over the end of his marriage is so easy to get past that he realizes that it had been over for a long time.

The way that his brother betrayed his trust is a LOT harder to get over. And he’s having a LOT of trouble over it. That betrayal cut deep, and he’s still righteously angry about the whole thing. His mother wants peace in what remains of her family, while Jericho wants to stop having to be the bigger man about damn near everything.

But Jericho’s righteous anger provides the lighter moments in this one. The bigger trauma, the larger betrayals, and the huge tragedy in the story belongs to Finley McGowan as she is forced to keep her own trauma and broken trust at bay every single day.

Because Finley’s sister Sloane is an alcoholic whose last great binge before entering rehab derailed all of Finley’s plans for a future that she was working damn hard for. At least until Sloane stole Finley’s pickup truck filled with $100,000 of supplies for the house she was flipping, sold off those supplies and wrecked the truck. Along with Finley’s credit rating, her job and her relationship with her fiance. (He turned out to be no great loss, but still…)

And left Finley, always the responsible one, to take guardianship of Sloane’s then 5-year-old daughter Aubrey while Sloane tried to accept both her alcoholism and the steps she’d need to take to deal with it for the rest of her life. An acceptance she’s having difficulty reaching no matter how hard or how faithfully she performs the steps to achieve it.

Like Jericho’s mother, Finley and Sloane’s mother expects Finley to accept the apologies and keep on believing that Sloane will turn her life around no matter how damn tired Finley is of having to pick up the pieces of the wreck Sloane makes of Finley’s life – over and over and over.

Both Finley and Jericho begin the story in a place of being resentful as hell. They’re both right. It’s not fair to them. They’re the ones who have to set their own emotions aside, over and over again, for the benefit of people they’re not really sure ARE sorry for what they’ve done. And they’re both really tired of their respective messes – which are SO not their fault.

But holding on to their anger and resentment isn’t doing either of them any good. It’s only when they reach out to each other that they find much, much better feelings to hold onto.

Escape Rating A-: So often, stories like this one focus on the journey of the person who has committed the wrong or is on the road to recovery from their issues. Stories that focus on redemption and healing. What I really liked about The Sister Effect was that instead of focusing on Sloane’s redemption arc or Gil’s transgression turned epic romance (not that both aren’t important parts of this story), the story instead focused on the people picking up the pieces of their destruction, Finley and Jericho.

Their anger, resentment and distrust felt oh-so-righteous. It’s a perspective that’s sometimes missing in redemption stories, that the people wronged are entitled to their feelings and that “sorry” doesn’t wipe it all away. Their trust has been abused and broken, and they have to process that loss before they can move on with their lives.

They both need to forgive, if not forget, for their own healing, but it’s a hard journey and the difficulty of it made the characters shine – even while they ranted and vented and cried.

While Finley’s story was so much more traumatic and heartbreaking, Jericho’s was a necessary part of the whole. The farcical nature of his family’s difficulty both managed to balance out the heavier nature of hers while giving them common ground for reaching their own happy ever after with their respective – and combined – dysfunctional families.

The Sister Effect turned out to be a wonderful story about the ties that bind – and sometimes strangle – within families that have been to hell and back together and separately and still manage to find a way forward – more or less together. That their journey resolves into just the right mix of hopeful ‘happy for now’ for Sloane’s on her journey while giving Finley and Jericho as well as Gil and Lauren the happy ever after they’ve finally earned.

Review: The Scarlet Circus by Jane Yolen

Review: The Scarlet Circus by Jane YolenThe Scarlet Circus by Jane Yolen, Brandon Sanderson
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: fairy tales, fantasy, fantasy romance, Romance, short stories
Pages: 256
Published by Tachyon Publications on February 14, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBook DepositoryBookshop.org
Goodreads

The Scarlet Circus, the fourth volume in Yolen’s award-winning short fiction series brings you passionate treasures and unexpected transformations. This bewitching assemblage, with an original introduction from Brandon Sanderson, is an ideal read for anyone who appreciates witty, compelling, and classic romantic fantasy.

A rakish fairy meets the real Juliet behind Shakespeare's famous tragedy. A jewelry artist travels to the past to meet a successful silver-smith. The addled crew of a ship at sea discovers a mysterious merman. More than one ignored princess finds her match in the most unlikely men.

From ecstasy to tragedy, with love blossoming shyly, love at first sight, and even love borne of practical necessity―beloved fantasist Jane Yolen’s newest collection celebrates romance in all its glory.

My Review:

This ended up being my Valentine’s Day review because, to paraphrase the author’s forward just a bit, while the stories contained within are not “Romances” with a capital R, each story does contain a romantic element – even if that element is not the center of the story and seldom results in anything like a happy ever after.

Then again, one does have to kiss a fair number of frogs – and a few outright toads – in order to find the person they’ve been looking for all along.

Many of the stories in this collection are twists on familiar themes – or at least they sound familiar upon reading. “San Soleil” is one of those. It sounds just like the kind of fairy tale we all used to read – with the same kind of sting in its tail about listening to warnings provided by witches and sorceresses. It starts as a love story but is also a bit of a ‘just desserts’ kind of story. Not that anyone is evil. A bit TSTL but not evil.

As the opening story in the collection, it certainly sets the tone for the many and varied ways that love can go off the rails.

I had a sneaking bit of admiration for “Dusty Loves” in the way it takes off on Romeo & Juliet. This is one where the ‘heroine’ really is Too Stupid To Live, and consequently doesn’t. Which is pretty much what happens in Romeo & Juliet which is, after all, a TRAGEDY and not a romance. That the teller of this particular version of the tale has their tongue very firmly in cheek as they relate it makes the whole thing work a bit better than it would on its own.

On that favorite other hand, in “Unicorn Tapestry” the heroine is really a heroine, and most definitely not TSTL. If you like stories where the underdog wins the day, then this one will be right up your reading alley. It certainly left me with a smile at the end.

My least favorite stories in the collection were “A Ghost of an Affair”, “The Sea Man” and “The Erotic Faerie”. “Ghost” because it had so much promise but ended a bit ‘meh’. I felt like I was set up for a better and happier ending than I got. “Sea Man” felt like it didn’t belong here, it gave me vibes of other, more horrific tales than fit in this collection. And “Erotic Faerie” was an interesting concept rather than an actual story, a concept I’ve seen done better in Kenneth Schneyer’s “Selected Program Notes from the Retrospective Exhibition of Theresa Rosenberg Latimer” in his Anthems Outside Time collection.

Those initial stories were interesting and fun but didn’t quite touch my heart – although “Dusty Loves” certainly tickled my funny bone a bit. These next ones, however, got a bit closer to the heart of the matter – or at least my heart.

“Dark Seed, Dark Stone” takes the idea of a warrior’s child picking up their weapons to defend their king and country and changes that child from the usual son to a daughter who uses more smarts than skills to defend her homeland. This one isn’t so much a romance as it is a story about duty and purpose – and I liked it better for that. It’s more a romance in the older meaning of the word than the current commercial definition, and I liked it all the better for it.

“Memoirs of a Bottle Djinn” takes the usual Aladdin-type story and gives it a twist that’s been seen before – but does it well. In this case, the savvy but desperate discoverer of the bottle is wary about spending his wish foolishly and without thought. At the same time, as a slave he’s all too able to empathize with the djinn’s plight. So he makes a wish they can both live with, happily ever after.

“Peter in Wonderland” was a delightful surprise. It’s clearly a takeoff on Alice in Wonderland, but shows that the real Alice Liddell still travels to Wonderland even in adulthood, and gives her a fellow-adventurer on her trip that leads to a happy ever after a bit different from the one she experienced in real life.

As much as I enjoyed the above stories, my two favorite entries in this Scarlet Circus were wonderfully entertaining indeed.

“Dragonfield” was wonderful because all of its characters are so very flawed in such human ways, and yet they manage to pull each other up and together to defeat the all too real dragon that is terrorizing the town and achieve a happy ever after that neither of them expected or thought they could ever deserve. It’s a romance and an adventure wrapped into one shiny, magical ball of a story and it’s just lovely.

Last, but not least, because the Matter of Britain can never be least of anything, is “The Sword and the Stone”, a much different story than The Sword in the Stone that you may remember from either the novel by T.H. White (part of The Once and Future King), or the Disney movie or even the episode of the British TV series Merlin. For an inanimate object, Excalibur sure does manage to get around.

This version of the tale is told from Merlin’s point of view, and he’s getting pretty jaded at this point in his long life of meddling with Britain. Arthur himself is also a bit older in this version than the more traditional versions of the tale. While he’s trying his best, he’s clearly better, and happier, at some things than others. To the point where he’d much rather fight the wars than wrangle the peace that he needs to secure and maintain. Merlin cooks up the idea of the sword in the stone to give Arthur’s rule the final stamp of popularity and legitimacy it needs. Arthur thinks it’s all mummery, magic and cheating, which it most definitely is. Until it isn’t.

Which makes the ending just that bit more magical.

Escape Rating A-: Like most collections, the stories are a bit all over the map. I adored a couple, liked quite a few more, and a small number just missed the mark for me in one way or another – as the above descriptions show. But overall I’m very glad I picked this up, and enjoyed the ways that it played with romances of many types and stripes and definitions. That “love is all there is is all we know of love” doesn’t have to mean that all loves are exactly the same type.

The author has published three previous collections in a similar vein to this one, not necessarily romances but rather whole entire circuses of fractured and reinterpreted fairy tales like How to Fracture a Fairy Tale, The Midnight Circus and The Emerald Circus. I’m sure I’ll be visiting those circuses the next time I’m looking for familiar tales with just a bit of a twist in their tails.

Review: The Fire Opal Mechanism by Fran Wilde

Review: The Fire Opal Mechanism by Fran WildeThe Fire Opal Mechanism (Gem Universe #2) by Fran Wilde
Format: ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: epic fantasy, fantasy
Series: Gem Universe #2
Pages: 208
Published by Tordotcom Publishing on June 4, 2019
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBook DepositoryBookshop.org
Goodreads

The Fire Opal Mechanism is the fast-paced and lively sequel to Fran Wilde's The Jewel and Her Lapidary
Jewels and their lapidaries and have all but passed into myth.
Jorit, broke and branded a thief, just wants to escape the Far Reaches for something better. Ania, a rumpled librarian, is trying to protect her books from the Pressmen, who value knowledge but none of the humanity that generates it.
When they stumble upon a mysterious clock powered by an ancient jewel, they may discover secrets in the past that will change the future forever.

My Review:

Information may want to be free, but there are always people and institutions working to keep it caged and under their control. At first, that argument seems to be the central tension in The Fire Opal Mechanism.

This turned out to be a whole lot more relevant to the present than I originally expected. Which was both wonderful and frightening, as it was published 4 years ago and therefore written several months at least before that.

But the impulses that move both the Pressmen’s and the Librarian Ania’s resistance to each other are always with us. Even more fascinating, those motives and that resistance turn out to be a bit of misdirection from the real problem that Ania and her reluctant ally-turned-friend, Jorit, need to resolve.

In whatever time period they can manage to solve it.

Escape Rating A-: At first, and for a rather long time thereafter, it seems as if the core of The Fire Opal Mechanism is about the freedom of information versus the censorship of it. And yet, at the beginning – the beginning that Ania and Jorit observe and not the place where they personally start – that wasn’t actually the case.

There’s more to unpack there than the reader initially has a clue about. The conflict seems so obvious. The Pressmen – the people who belong to the cult of the Great Press – have come to the last university in the Six Kingdoms to set information free by confiscating all the books and feeding them all to the machine that will literally chew them up and spit them out as part of the all-encompassing Compendium of Knowledge that the machine is producing.

That initial conflict turns out to be a bit too simplistic once Ania sees the Pressmen blow something into people’s faces that causes them to forget who they are. That the same substance erases text whenever it falls upon a book adds to those doubts. Which are stripped away entirely when someone picks up a copy of the Compendium and watches as the print turns from a faithful reproduction of an original – now consumed – work to an overtly propagandist interpretation that spouts the Pressmen’s view of history.

Which is when Ania, with Jorit tagging along, learns that the clock mechanism she has been clinging to for comfort and safety can take her and her companion back through time. Back to the origins of the Pressmen and their conflict with the universities.

Where she discovers that what she is experiencing in her present is a corruption of a past created by the Great Press that has been erased by that same object. And that the Great Press itself is the biggest and most dangerous corruption of all.

In this year of 2023, when book bans are everywhere and governments daily attempt to rewrite history to make their favored groups feel better about themselves in both the past and the present, it’s easy to become invested in the narrative of the brave librarian fighting the forces of evil repression the Pressmen represent – especially for a librarian.

But that’s far from the whole story. Just as The Fire Opal Mechanism loops Ania and Jorit back to the beginning of the conflict, it also wraps the story back to the history of the Gem Universe as a whole as experienced in the first book in the series, The Jewel and Her Lapidary.

That shifting and sifting through time changes the story from its initial, overt conflict about information wanting to be free to being a bit more of ‘the truth will set you free’ because it’s only once Ania and Jorit learn the truth about the Great Press and the origins of the Pressmen by traveling to the past that they are able to find the explosive and cathartic solution they very much need in the present.

That their harrowing journey together bonds Ania and Jorit in their own mutual truth is the sparkling icing on a very tasty and thought-provoking little book-cake.

I decided to read The Fire Opal Mechanism now because I just picked up a copy of the third book in the Gem Universe, The Book of Gems. I was planning to dive right into it, believing that I had already read the first two books in the series, only to discover that while I adored The Jewel and Her Lapidary, I hadn’t actually read this second book. So I immediately set out to rectify that situation and I’m very glad I did. The Book of Gems awaits!

Review: The Cat Who Saved Books by Sosuke Natsukawa

Review: The Cat Who Saved Books by Sosuke NatsukawaThe Cat Who Saved Books by Sōsuke Natsukawa, Louise Heal Kawai
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: books and reading, coming of age, fantasy, magical realism
Pages: 198
Published by HarperVia on December 7, 2021
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBook DepositoryBookshop.org
Goodreads

A celebration of books, cats, and the people who love them, infused with the heartwarming spirit of The Guest Cat and The Travelling Cat Chronicles.
Bookish high school student Rintaro Natsuki is about to close the secondhand bookstore he inherited from his beloved bookworm grandfather. Then, a talking cat named Tiger appears with an unusual request. The feline asks for—or rather, demands—the teenager’s help in saving books with him. The world is full of lonely books left unread and unloved, and Tiger and Rintaro must liberate them from their neglectful owners. 
Their mission sends this odd couple on an amazing journey, where they enter different mazes to set books free. Through their travels, Tiger and Rintaro meet a man who leaves his books to perish on a bookshelf, an unwitting book torturer who cuts the pages of books into snippets to help people speed read, and a publishing drone who only wants to create bestsellers. Their adventures culminate in one final, unforgettable challenge—the last maze that awaits leads Rintaro down a realm only the bravest dare enter...

My Review:

When we first meet Rintaro Natsuki, he has come to a fork in his road, at the point where he’s going to have to take it whether he wants to or not. He’s just been orphaned for the second time. When his parents died, he was still a child, and packed off to his grandfather without any choice or protest on his part.

At his grandfather’s death, Rintaro is in high school, even if he skips class a lot. He’s old enough to have a voice in his future – if he can come to terms with the reality of his loss. And if he can manage to reach out of his own social isolation to take it.

His legacy from his grandfather is a beautiful, marvelous and just barely profitable second-hand bookstore. A place that Rintaro has no desire to leave, but he seems to have no option to stay. At least not until the talking cat Tiger the Tabby swaggers out of the back of the bookstore and demands that Rintaro come with him on a journey to save books.

Rintaro loves books and reading. He also has nothing better to do and no motivation to do it. So he follows the cat through the suddenly endless book stacks and emerges into a labyrinth of wonder and danger. He’ll need not just courage and a bit of cunning, but every single drop of his love of reading to save the endangered books – and himself along the way.

Escape Rating A-: I picked this one up for the cat and the books, in that order. Which reminds me that the cat pictured on the US cover does not do Tiger the Tabby justice. The UK cover (pictured at left) does a much better job of giving Tiger his due.

But the story, of course, isn’t really about the cat. It is, however, at least in part about the way that cats – or any companion animals – can save us even from ourselves if we just let them. And the way that books and reading can give us time and space and tools to save ourselves if we let them into our minds just as the cats do when we let them into our hearts.

It’s also a bit of magical realism that leads into a very modern type of fairy tale. Tiger leads Rintaro into a series of labyrinths where books and reading are under assault in the guise of the love of books combined with bowing and scraping to market pressures and other distractions of modern life to save books by means that will, in the end, destroy them.

I think the story does conflate the love of the container – the physical book – with the love of what it contains and the experience of reading. I’m a bit concerned about that as I’m mostly an ebook reader because the genres I read are not widely represented in large print. If I were confined to the physical artifact I’d miss out on the thing I really want out of reading – the immersion in the story that the physical AND the electronic article contain and present for my enjoyment.

I digress just a bit.

What makes The Cat Who Saved Books such a lovely little read, however, is the totality of Rintaro’s journey. Not just the thoughtfully scary labyrinths where books go to die in the name of loving them, but Rintaro’s first steps on that path to adulthood. Because the story is about Rintaro’s chance to choose his life. To stay a socially withdrawn hikikomori, always dependent on someone else to deal with the world he has retreated from, or to take up the reins of the bookstore and his own life and learn to stand on his own. And that’s the part of the story that grabs the heart in its sharp, feline claws.

Because this is a book about books and reading, I can’t resist leaving this review without including a couple of readalikes. Any reader of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld will recognize that the way the back of the bookstore opens into endless shelves means that the store connects to ‘L’ space, the liminal place where all great libraries connect. The Discworld is not at all like The Cat Who Saved Books but that love of reading certainly exists in both places. The Girl Who Reads on the Métro by Christine Féret-Fleury is another lovely story about someone looking for a purpose who finds it in books and reading and loving them and the people she associates with them. And last but not least, more in tone than in specific, “All the World’s Treasures” by Kimberly Pauley, included in Never Too Old to Save the World, a story about a young woman inheriting a shop from her grandmother and discovering that there are connections to more places and infinitely more treasures than she ever imagined.

Review: Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett

Review: Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather FawcettEmily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries (Emily Wilde, #1) by Heather Fawcett
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy, fantasy romance, historical fantasy
Series: Emily Wilde #1
Pages: 336
Published by Del Rey Books on January 10, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBook DepositoryBookshop.org
Goodreads

A curmudgeonly professor journeys to a small town in the far north to study faerie folklore and discovers dark fae magic, friendship, and love, in this heartwarming and enchanting fantasy.Cambridge professor Emily Wilde is good at many things: She is the foremost expert on the study of faeries. She is a genius scholar and a meticulous researcher who is writing the world's first encyclopaedia of faerie lore. But Emily Wilde is not good at people. She could never make small talk at a party--or even get invited to one. And she prefers the company of her books, her dog, Shadow, and the Fair Folk to other people.
So when she arrives in the hardscrabble village of Hrafnsvik, Emily has no intention of befriending the gruff townsfolk. Nor does she care to spend time with another new arrival: her dashing and insufferably handsome academic rival Wendell Bambleby, who manages to charm the townsfolk, get in the middle of Emily's research, and utterly confound and frustrate her.
But as Emily gets closer and closer to uncovering the secrets of the Hidden Ones--the most elusive of all faeries--lurking in the shadowy forest outside the town, she also finds herself on the trail of another mystery: Who is Wendell Bambleby, and what does he really want? To find the answer, she'll have to unlock the greatest mystery of all--her own heart.

My Review:

Emily Wilde is writing/compiling an encyclopedia of all the faerie species in the world. That’s not exactly a spoiler as the title does rather give it away. But what is a surprise and a delight is the story that she tells about herself and her world in the process of researching what will be a weighty reference tome.

Emily’s story isn’t weighty or tome-like at all – even if it does very nearly lead her to her own tomb as she finds herself in the midst of one of the stories of the fae that she intended to merely tell and most definitely not participate in.

Although, considering the vast amount of research she has done in her speciality, she certainly should have known better.

Emily Wilde, PhD, MPhil, BSc, DDe is an Adjunct Professor of Dryadology at Cambridge in this slightly alternate, early 20th century story of fantasy and academe. The alteration to the world is that the study of faeries and the fae has become a real academic discipline, similar in many ways to anthropology and/or sociology, because the fae are real in this world. Hidden, elusive, all-too-frequently dangerous, but entirely real.

Studying them has been Emily Wilde’s lifework for half her life, since she arrived in Cambridge at 15 and is now 30. But the academic tropes feel all too real, as Emily’s trip to remote, frozen Ljosland to add one last chapter to the Encyclopedia on the subject of the equally remote and equally frozen native fae, the Hidden Ones.

The encyclopedia is not just a labor of love, or even just labor. The whole point is for Emily to publish what will be the foundational reference work of her speciality and gain tenure in the process so that she can, in future, remain comfortably in her rooms at Cambridge and study to her heart’s content.

She’s tired of field work, she’s tired of being the lowest person on the academic ladder (adjuncts still get no respect) and she’s tired of dealing with people outside of academic circles. So she goes off to Hrafnsvik, the remotest village in remote Ljosland to finish the work. Alone.

Really alone because she offends the villagers almost as soon as she arrives. Not intentionally, but she’s just not good with people. Or small talk. Or letting anyone help her.

Which is when her best friend, chief nemesis and fellow dryadology scholar, Wendell Bambleby, appears unannounced on her rather Spartan doorstep in very chilly Hrafnsvik and proceeds to turn both her world and her research upside down.

He’s there to protect her from his kin. His dangerous and deadly fae kin. As well as, more than a bit, from herself. And does she ever need it!

Escape Rating A-: Whether readers will fall in love with Emily Wilde’s story depends a lot on whether they fall in love with the meticulous, misanthropic genius that is Emily Wilde herself. This is her diary, so we view nearly all of the events from Emily’s sometimes-blinkered point of view. So if you like her voice, you’ll like her book.

Emily seems a LOT like Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter series. Both in her obsessive desire to learn ALL THE THINGS, her preference for getting lost in her books and her research, and especially for her inability to even see the real-life consequences of her actions – which I fully admit may come a bit more from fanfiction than from the actual books. But still, Emily is very much a Hermione grown up and slightly oblivious about other people.

Emily is also a bit of Regan Merritt from yesterday’s book, in that she’s not traditionally feminine and for the most part is totally okay with that. She’s used to taking care of herself and finding solutions for herself and most importantly, rescuing herself. She doesn’t fit into any of her society’s boxes that are labeled “female” and she’s at peace with that – if not always with her inability to deal with the unwritten social rules that provide a whole lot of lubrication in dealing with other humans.

It’s obvious from the beginning that Wendell is following Emily because he loves her – even if it’s not obvious to her. At all. On that other hand, it’s been obvious to Emily for quite some time that Wendell is probably fae and in hiding. What makes their interactions so much fun to watch is that he charms everyone – and she resents just how easily people fall for his charm – but he never attempts to charm her. Their relationship, in all its push-pull banter, mutual annoyances and attraction to the opposite, is grounded in who they each really are and not a charmed or better version of themselves.

I particularly loved that this is an academic fantasy that isn’t about dark academe the way that The Atlas Six and Babel are – even though Emily would probably make an excellent ‘Babbler’. At the same time, the story is rooted in some of the darker things about academia in the real world, that place where the politics are so vicious because the stakes can be so damn small. That her world’s academia feels rooted in the real even though the world is not grounds the whole story and lets the reader fully get aboard its flight of dark fantasy.

Because there is darkness here. Not in academia, but in the way that the fae intrude upon and exploit Emily’s real world and the real people within it. What makes Emily’s journey into dark places drag us along with her is that the mistakes she makes that get her into so much trouble are so very human and so much a part of her personality.

So many characters in fiction literally seem ‘Too Stupid to Live’. That’s never Emily. What makes her so easy to empathize with, at least for this reader, is that she believes she’s too smart to be taken in. And she’s almost, but not quite, right.

I adored this as I was reading it. I was charmed from the very beginning and that charm didn’t leave me when I turned the final page. Howsomever, now that I’ve had some time to think about it I’m wondering a bit about exactly how Emily’s and Wendell’s relationship is going to work in the future. He’s essentially immortal and she’s absolutely not. Whether he’s remotely capable of being faithful is a seriously open question. There’s a significant power imbalance just on the academic side even without him being fae. So I’m left with a whole encyclopedia full of questions.

Which means that I’m very pleased that this is billed as the first book in an Emily Wilde series. Hopefully I’ll get to find out the answers to those questions in the not too distant future.

Review: The Keeper’s Six by Kate Elliott

Review: The Keeper’s Six by Kate ElliottThe Keeper's Six by Kate Elliott
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy, portal fantasy, urban fantasy
Pages: 208
Published by Tordotcom on January 17, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBook DepositoryBookshop.org
Goodreads

Kate Elliott's action-packed The Keeper's Six features a world-hopping, bad-ass, spell-slinging mother who sets out to rescue her kidnapped son from a dragon lord with everything to lose.
There are terrors that dwell in the space between worlds.
It’s been a year since Esther set foot in the Beyond, the alien landscape stretching between worlds, crossing boundaries of space and time. She and her magical travelling party, her Hex, haven’t spoken since the Concilium banned them from the Beyond. But when she wakes in the middle of the night to her son’s cry for help, the members of her Hex are the only ones she can trust to help her bring him back from wherever he has been taken.
Esther will have to risk everything to find him. Undercover and hidden from the Concilium, she and her Hex will be tested by dragon lords, a darkness so dense it can suffocate, and the bones of an old crime come back to haunt her.

My Review:

There’s a popular image in science fiction – fostered by pretty much all of Star Trek (apropos of yesterday’s book) where Earth and Earth humans seem to be the center of the galaxy no matter how many other races and species might populate it.

(And now I’m wondering if that attitude might have been at least part of the reason why Star Trek: Enterprise didn’t do so well. Because it showed us being on the back foot and under someone else’s thumb. I seriously digress.)

But in fantasy, when Earth gets connected to the rest of the ‘verse, whatever that ‘verse might be, we’re often considered a backward place whose population can’t be trusted to accept that we’re not alone, we’re not on top, and we don’t have anything like a manifest destiny at all.

We’re a protectorate – or at least a protected world of some kind. Because most of us can’t handle the truth that is out there and that we’re not in charge of it and never would be.

That’s the situation in the Wayward Children series, particularly in its most recent entry, Lost in the Moment and Found. And it’s very much the case in Ilona Andrews’ Innkeeper Chronicles, which the universe of The Keeper’s Six rather strongly resembles – and not just for that.

Daniel Green is a Keeper. Certainly his mother Esther and his spouse Kai would both agree. But in the context of this universe, being a Keeper is a specific and rather uncommon thing to be. Keepers maintain Keeps, and Keeps are the structures that straddle the line between the realm of that place’s “real” world and the dangerous and limitless Beyond that links the worlds together.

The Keeps and their Keepers are essential to maintaining trade routes between the worlds. But Keepers themselves don’t generally travel. Trade is conducted by special groups of talented magic users called Hexes because there are six specific talents required to navigate the Beyond. More than six in any single group invites death and destruction. Less is theoretically possible but likely to get itself killed because the group doesn’t have the necessary when the feces hits the oscillating device.

Esther Green is the Lantern, or light maker, of the freelance Hex that operates out of Daniel’s Keep. But she’s also Daniel’s mother. So when she gets a call that he’s been kidnapped, she drops everything – including the restriction against her Hex returning to the Beyond for ten years – to ride to his rescue.

A rescue that is going to be fraught with even more danger than Esther initially imagined – and she imagined a LOT.

But as Esther and the rest of her Hex get back together to storm the one place they’re not supposed to return to, we get to see just how this world does and doesn’t work, we get introduced to a fascinating group of people and an even more fascinating kind of magic.

While Esther has to go head-to-head and toe-to-toe with obstreperous bureaucrats, nefarious smugglers and villainous slave traders while chasing down old clues and new betrayals on her quest to rescue her son from the dragon who thinks that he’s running the show AND Esther.

He’s not. He just doesn’t know it – yet.

Escape Rating A-: Like the author’s previous novella, Servant Mage, The Keeper’s Six introduces us to a world that is much larger than the relatively small slice we get. Howsomever, very much unlike that previous book, The Keeper’s Six feels like it is just the right length for this story. It would be fantastic to have more, and there are certainly hints in what we have that there could be a more at some future point – but we don’t need that more to feel like this story doesn’t come to a lovely and satisfactory conclusion – because it absolutely does.

But this universe is fascinating and seems to have so much more to explore and I’d love to go back. To the point where this is my second reading of the book. I read this for a Library Journal review during the summer and liked it so much that I wanted to visit the world again and liked it even more on the second trip.

Part of what made me pick this back up again was that Esther would fit right into Never Too Old To Save the World, a collection of stories about people in midlife – or a bit later – who get called to be the ‘Chosen One’ for fantasy or SFnal worlds and how their change in fate melds and conflicts – sometimes at the same time – with the life they have already built.

(Never Too Old To Save the World will be out next month. I’ve already read it and it’s wonderful. Review to come!)

Esther is in her mid-60s in The Keeper’s Six. She’s been part of a Hex for most of her adult life, leading expeditions into untracked places, facing untold dangers, never knowing whether she’ll make it back or not. She’s addicted to the adrenaline of the work but aware that her days at it are numbered. The mind and spirit may be willing but time is taking its toll. Her quest has her between the proverbial rock and the opposing hard place. A dragon has kidnapped her son, and what that dragon wants in return is her son’s spouse and the co-parent of their four children.

This dragon eats books – literally not figuratively. But when he does, people – not necessarily humans but people – arise out of nowhere in the midst of his hoard as living representations of the books he’s consumed. I’m amazed and appalled in equal measure – and so is Esther.

There’s just so much going on in The Keeper’s Six. The way the Beyond is stable and unstable at the same time, keeps the Hex on their toes and the reader guessing what will come next. The juxtaposition of the Hex’ utter trust in each other with their interpersonal conflicts makes every situation precarious.

That there are wheels within wheels spinning around their suspension, this quest, the dragon’s questionable motives and their own group dynamics keeps all the plates spinning in their air in a way that kept me riveted through both readings.

The icing on this lovely little cake was that Esther is Jewish and that it wasn’t just window dressing. Her religion and her practice of it mattered both to the story and to the way she conducted herself within it. (That representation also mattered to me on a personal level.) That there is just a touch of romantic possibility between Esther and the dragon’s lieutenant, a man who seems to be the embodiment of the 14th Century Judeo-Persian poet Shahin who wrote about Queen Esther, the biblical queen for whom Esther Green was named provided just the right amount of rueful sweetness in the midst of all the danger and the necessary and important derring do required to fix it.

On top of everything else that made The Keeper’s Six so much fun was the way that it seemed to link to so many other wonderful books. Not just the previously mentioned Innkeeper Chronicles by Ilona Andrews, Never Too Old to Save the World and Lost in the Moment and Found by Seanan McGuire, but also Under the Whispering Door by TJ Klune and even a bit of The Merchant Princes by Charles Stross. Portal fantasy seems to be having a moment these days, and I’m absolutely here for it. Because I still want my own door to open.

In the end The Keeper’s Six was a terrific story set in a world that I’d love to visit again. But if that never happens I’ll still be very satisfied with the trip I did get to take.

Review: City Under One Roof by Iris Yamashita

Review: City Under One Roof by Iris YamashitaCity Under One Roof by Iris Yamashita
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: mystery, suspense, thriller
Pages: 304
Published by Berkley Books on January 10, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBook DepositoryBookshop.org
Goodreads

A stranded detective tries to solve a murder in a tiny Alaskan town where everyone lives in a single high-rise building, in this gripping debut by an Academy Award–nominated screenwriter.
When a local teenager discovers a severed hand and foot washed up on the shore of the small town of Point Mettier, Alaska, Cara Kennedy is on the case. A detective from Anchorage, she has her own motives for investigating the possible murder in this isolated place, which can be accessed only by a tunnel.
After a blizzard causes the tunnel to close indefinitely, Cara is stuck among the odd and suspicious residents of the town—all 205 of whom live in the same high-rise building and are as icy as the weather. Cara teams up with Point Mettier police officer Joe Barkowski, but before long the investigation is upended by fearsome gang members from a nearby native village.
Haunted by her past, Cara soon discovers that everyone in this town has something to hide. Will she be able to unravel their secrets before she unravels?"

My Review:

When teenage resident Amy Lin finds hacked off human body parts along the shore, it’s more than a bit gruesome but it’s not exactly unusual. It is for Amy personally, but not in the grand scheme of life on the Last Frontier. “Death by Alaska” is a real phenomenon, where people die by doing stupid things that might be survivable in the Lower 48 but just are not in a place where humans are often the prey of both the wildlife and the weather.

(We lived in Anchorage for three years. Reading a newspaper story about a missing person identified through bear scat was not an uncommon occurrence.)

Amy and a group of her friends only found one hand and one foot encased in a boot. Not enough to identify or to determine cause of death. It looked like death by misadventure, part of a string of such cases washing up on shore up and down the coast.

But Anchorage PD Detective Cara Kennedy looks at the report and sees something that might be a link to the tragic deaths of her husband and young son just the year before. She heads to Point Mettier with her scene of crime investigation kit to see the actual scenes of the crime and interview the people involved in this case that everyone in Point Mettier believes is open and shut and dead and buried.

Just like the case of Cara’s family.

Cara’s investigation throws a gigantic monkey wrench into what “everybody knew”. First she finds the dead man’s head, buried in a local woman’s barn. Now the local two-man (literally) police department has something that can be identified as well as a clear cause of death. Somebody shot whoever-he-was.

Now everyone wants to see the back of Cara after she’s just reopened this truly messy can of worms (not that worms have actually gotten to the head in the middle of an Alaska winter). Cara wants to put Point Mettier in her rearview mirror, believing that this case, as terrible and terribly confusing as it might be, has no relationship to her family’s deaths.

But the tunnel has been closed by a raging storm, and Cara is forced to remain in Point Mettier with all those people she’s just seriously pissed off – and most likely a murderer as well. If not a whole damn conspiracy of people who are never going to trust the outsider stuck in their midst.

Their distrust may be justified, but in their collective desire to keep Cara in the dark it becomes clear that something, or someone, is hiding in that darkness as well – and that they are way more dangerous than anyone wants to believe.

Escape Rating A-: There’s a real “City Under One Roof” – Whittier, Alaska. Which is intended to sound a lot like Point Mettier, Alaska, the setting of the story. If it all sounds vaguely familiar, that’s because there were several stories about it on TV after one of the residents posted a series of TikTok videos about life in Whittier that went viral in 2021.

While Point Mettier is explicitly NOT Whittier, it does sit in the same geographic position as the real town, has the same weather, and the same single-point of access via a tunnel that shuts down at night and when the weather gets really awful. So it isn’t the real place exactly, but perhaps its twin. Not its evil twin, but absolutely a twin where evil happens.

Which leads back around to this mystery thriller. Just follow Denny the moose as he’s led around town on his leash.

Although Cara certainly finds a lot more clues by following Denny’s person, Lonnie – including that sawed off head that kicks the whole case into gear – frozen or otherwise.

As unusual as the Point Mettier setting is, the mystery has a lot of the hallmarks of a more typical small-town mystery even if Point Mettier is not exactly a typical small town. Because in some ways it still very much is.

The 300 permanent residents all know each other, whether they like each other or not on any given day, week, or month. They literally live in each other’s pockets, think they know of all each other’s secrets, and certainly are entirely too familiar with each other’s quirks and foibles. They are also all up in each other’s business whether they want to be or not.

So it’s not a surprise, either to Cara or to the reader, that the local residents are keeping all kinds of secrets from the outsider. It’s not implausible that there’s a coverup going on, whether of the murder, of the disposal of the corpse, of something illegal but completely unrelated, or all of the above. Cara knows there are secrets, and is sure she’s going to have to watch and wait and hope that someone will finally trust her enough to let her in on the ones she needs to know before the killer strikes again.

What she finds isn’t what she expected – but if it was there wouldn’t be much of a story. And there most definitely is a compelling story. While there is much about Point Mettier that strikes similar chords to other small town mysteries, the claustrophobic, isolated nature of Point Mettier added plenty of unique twists and turns every single shivering step of the way to whodunnit.

One of the things that I both really enjoyed about the story and that drove me a bit crazy as it was happening was just how much of the story is wrapped around Cara simply getting to know the residents. It was necessary but it was also more than a bit of the showcase of the quirky. Everyone had a personal secret, everyone seemed to be marching to the beat of a drummer who was marching out of step with the outside world but really in tune locally. It seemed like Point Mettier had become a haven for people who didn’t quite fit into even the rest of Alaska, which itself is a bit of an off the beaten path place to live.

I particularly liked the way that the mystery managed to both hinge on the kind of outsider that everyone in a small town mystery WANTS to have been the perpetrator while at the same time also feeding into the whole small town covers each other’s secrets trope. That was particularly well done.

On my other hand, I’m not totally sure the slow burn romance between Cara and one of the local cops was completely necessary. The story was plenty compelling without wondering will they/won’t they.

And very much on my third, possibly frostbitten, hand, the explosive revelation at the end leaves the door open for more mysteries featuring Cara Kennedy as the detective – even if Point Mettier isn’t the setting. There’s plenty of room for another female detective in Alaska like Dana Stabenow’s Kate Shugak (start with A Cold Day for Murder). I’ll be very curious to see if Cara Kennedy will be back, and in the meantime I think I’ll check out what Kate has been up to.

Review: Lost in the Moment and Found by Seanan McGuire

Review: Lost in the Moment and Found by Seanan McGuireLost in the Moment and Found (Wayward Children, #8) by Seanan McGuire
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy, portal fantasy, urban fantasy, young adult
Series: Wayward Children #8
Pages: 160
Published by Tordotcom on January 10, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBook DepositoryBookshop.org
Goodreads

A young girl discovers an infinite variety of worlds in this standalone tale in the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning Wayward Children series from Seanan McGuire, Lost in the Moment and Found.
Welcome to the Shop Where the Lost Things Go.

If you ever lost a sock, you’ll find it here.If you ever wondered about favorite toy from childhood... it’s probably sitting on a shelf in the back.And the headphones that you swore that this time you’d keep safe? You guessed it….
Antoinette has lost her father. Metaphorically. He’s not in the shop, and she’ll never see him again. But when Antsy finds herself lost (literally, this time), she finds that however many doors open for her, leaving the Shop for good might not be as simple as it sounds.
And stepping through those doors exacts a price.
Lost in the Moment and Found tells us that childhood and innocence, once lost, can never be found.

My Review:

If you’ve ever wondered where the odd socks or the missing Tupperware lids go, well, that’s where Antsy finds herself on the other side of that door. The Shop Where the Lost Things Go. Which is completely, totally and utterly appropriate, because Antsy is certainly lost herself. And has lost herself, along with some things that she wasn’t aware of, like her belief that adults would keep her safe, along with her innocence of all the horrors the world has to offer.

In that shop she finds two “people”, the intelligent magpie Hudson and the old woman Vineta. She also finds safety, purpose and the joy of discovery, not just by helping in the shop but by venturing out into all the new doors that open every morning leading out of the shop to worlds of wonder.

It’s a good, happy, fulfilling life. It’s the life she might have chosen for herself, if only she knew it was available to choose. But she thinks she’s paying for her safety and her happiness, along with her room and board, through her work in the shop AND in venturing through the various doors to help keep it stocked.

And she is. But not in the way that she believes she is. Perhaps in a way she might have chosen anyway – perhaps not. But the choice was taken away from her because the magic of the Doors didn’t want her to know – and knows just how to punish her when she discovers the terrible truth.

Escape Rating A-: Considering that the author spoils this in an Author’s Note at the very front of the book, I don’t feel at all bad about doing it here as well. Because honestly, if she hadn’t told me up front that Antsy was going to rescue herself from the grooming, gaslighting monster in her own house I wouldn’t have made it through the first chapter.

Other strange, wondrous and terrible things happen to Antsy after she gets herself through that door marked “Be Sure”, but that particular horror is NOT among them. After all, this is a book about the Wayward Children and many of those children have passed through some very dark places. Antsy will not be an exception.

But be both warned and reassured – she will get herself out of that first, most terrible place. And all the terrible and wonderful things that happen to her in the story are able to happen because she was able to get herself out and onto the road that leads her to this story.

Antsy’s story is about everything having a price, a realization that is part of everyone’s loss of innocence. At seven, as Antsy is when she steps through that door, while her loss of some innocence is what made her run in the first place, she’s still naive enough not to realize that prices can be levied even when one is not aware that a bargain has been struck.

For an adult, the price of most things is often simply that we never get to know what might have been down the road less taken or the other leg of the trousers of time. Some costs are more explicit, whether it’s the choice of a profession of service that may cost one’s life, a decision to or not to have children, or even the famous one posited by Benjamin Franklin, that, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” But we generally know the bargain we’re making when we make it – or at least we think we do.

When Antsy opens the door to The Shop Where the Lost Things Go, and starts opening all the fascinating doors that open within the shop to all those fascinating places, she too is making a bargain and paying a price for it. But she’s only seven years old, she’s lost, alone and scared, and not nearly savvy enough to understand that the price she’s paying may or may not be something she’s willing to give.

But it’s not an unknown price. Both Vineta and Hudson are perfectly aware of what Antsy is giving away, even though she is not. They are all too aware that they are using her for their own purposes – and choose not to tell her, not even when she matures enough to understand.

In a way, the woman and the bird are using Antsy just as much as someone in her original world intended to use her. Which intent was worse or more heinous is one the reader will have to decide for themselves.

What’s fascinating about Antsy’s trip through the Doors is the way that the Doors are revealed to be much closer to full sentience than was apparent in the earlier stories. Antsy’s door took her to the Shop because that’s where the Doors wanted her to go. And they’ve deliberately obscured her awareness of what’s happening to her because the Doors want her to stay – no matter what it will cost her.

That they have the wherewithal to punish her when she tries to break free is a shock – both to Antsy and to the reader. It makes us rethink some of the events of the previous books in the series and quite possibly makes the whole thing more dark and even less of a lark than it previously appeared to be.

Which won’t stop me from reading the next book in the series, still untitled but scheduled for publication next January. In the meantime, I still have one previous book to read, Come Tumbling Down, and quite possibly a re-read of the whole marvelous thing now that I know a whole lot more about the Doors and their universe work – although I’m certain there’s more to discover.

This award winning series began with Every Heart a Doorway, which means it starts at the end of a whole bunch of the Wayward Children’s stories. Lost in the Moment and Found ends in the place if not the time where that story begins, and would be a perfect place to get into the series if you haven’t already found your way to the reading door that leads to it. Wherever you begin, it’s an awfully wonderful journey, particularly in the sense that it is chock-full of both awe and wonder.