Review: Big Little Spells by Hazel Beck

Review: Big Little Spells by Hazel BeckBig Little Spells (Witchlore, #2) by Hazel Beck
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy, paranormal romance, urban fantasy
Series: Witchlore #2
Pages: 384
Published by Graydon House on August 29, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

Is her magic a threat to witchkind…or is she simply powerful enough to save the world?
Rebekah Wilde was eighteen when she left St. Cyprian, officially stripped of her magic and banished from her home. Ten years later, she’s forced to return to face the Joywood Coven, who preside over not just her hometown but the whole magical world. Rebekah is happy to reunite with her sister, and with her friends, but the implications of her return are darker and more dangerous than they could have imagined.
The Joywood are determined to prove Rebekah and her friends are a danger to witchkind, and her group faces an impending death sentence if they can’t prove otherwise. Rebekah must seek help from the only one who knows how to stop the Joywood—the ruthless immortal Nicholas Frost. Years ago, he was her secret tutor in magic, and her secret impossible crush. But the icy immortal is as remote and arrogant as ever, and if he feels anything for Rebekah—or witchkind—it’s impossible to tell.

My Review:

In Small Town, Big Magic, the first book in the Witchlore series, there was something rotten at the heart of small, witchy, St. Cyprian Missouri. But by the end of the story it seemed more than obvious that what was going wrong was a big and nasty disturbance at the confluence of the Mississippi, Missouri and the hidden Illinois river that gives the town all of its witchy power.

It seemed obvious because defeating the nasty in the confluence was the big, climactic battle that nearly ends the book – at least until after it’s been subdued. Which is when that first book ended, on the mic drop that the powers that be had shown up to bring the hammer down because they didn’t do it the ‘right’ way with ‘approved’ witches – even as they proceeded to gaslight the newly formed coven about whether the evil that was about to literally flood the town ever existed in the first place.

And that’s where this second book picks up the action, as the ruling coven of witchkind, the oh-so-inappropriately named ‘Joywood’, brings that hammer down in a way that is so petty and such an over-the-top attempt at belittling AND gaslighting that the new coven knows that whatever this is all about, it isn’t about what they did so much as who they are – even if they don’t know why. At least not yet.

They don’t have much time to find out, either. Ten years ago, back when Emerson and Rebekah Wilde were both eighteen, the sisters failed their coming of age ceremony and were supposed to be stripped of not merely their magic but their memories of it. Emerson emerged as kind of a shadow of her true self – at least until the events of the first book when she not only broke the block on her memory but reclaimed her powers as well.

Rebekah never forgot a thing, because she ran into exile instead. She couldn’t practice her magic, she couldn’t come home, and she couldn’t bear to keep in contact with the friends she left behind because her sister wasn’t really her sister anymore.

Now she’s back, doing her level best, which sometimes fails, to not fall back into the destructive behaviors of her adolescence. Because that’s just what Joywood wants and she’s able to focus her rebellious streak on denying them that above all things.

The one thing from those years that she can’t seem to let go of is her ‘crush’ on the cold, powerful, gorgeous and immortal asshole, Nicholas Frost. Back then, he secretly trained her power but abandoned her when she needed him most. This time around he’s playing the biggest game of ‘come here no stay away’ that has ever been played.

But Rebekah isn’t a teenager any more, and she’s tired of being played – by Nicholas, by Joywood and especially by a fate that has kicked her around for the last time – no matter what it takes to bring it and her powers to her command and no one and nothing else’s.

Escape Rating B+: In that opening bit of petty bullshit, I began wondering if the reason that nasty showed up in the river was either because Joywood summoned it themselves – or if they were just so corrupt that like called to like. I’m still debating that particular question – but hunting for the answer certainly kept me turning pages.

In fact, I liked this second book a bit better than the first, because I felt for Rebekah and her snarky rebellion in a way that Emerson’s partially-manufactured goody-two-shoes perfection did not touch. What I liked best about Rebekah was that she never fell for Joywood’s act. It’s all a setup and she knows it’s a setup and she never pretends otherwise to herself or her friends.

Even better, it doesn’t take much to convince her friends that she’s right. It is not paranoia if someone really is out to get you, and Joywood really does have it in for the Wilde sisters. Even if the why of it all is still a bit TBD (to be determined).

A question that has yet to be completely resolved by the end of Big Little Spells. The question that DOES manage to get itself resolved is the romantic question, the one about what’s really going on in that hot immortal asshole’s cold, cold heart when it comes to Rebekah. For that, at least, we get the whys and the wherefores, AND we get a resolution that deals at least partially with what would otherwise be a vast power imbalance.

And it was great to see some truly epic UST get resolved, along with the processing of a whole bunch of suppressed grief as well as a bit of a stand up and cheer moment from at least half the town.

So stuff happened. In fact, this book in particular was more about the stuff happening, the things being done – or attempting to be done – TO Rebekah and company than anything else. It was, in a peculiar way, more than a bit political. And I was all there for it. Some readers did not like this as much as Small Town, Big Magic because it was more about witchy small-town politics and the mean no-longer-girls in charge of them and less about the romance. Personally, I liked this one better for the shift.

But the things that did not get resolved, that are still hanging over the series like the proverbial Sword of Damocles – or more like Chekhov’s Gun on the mantel waiting to be fired – are the questions about the true motivations and the depths of the corruption that Joywood has sunk to in their quest for power.

The answers to those questions seem to be being dribbled out slowly so as to be able to give each of the romances their chances to shine – and to put together the steps necessary to defeat the evil that Joywood represents. I liked this particular droplet of that part of the story more than the first. There are intended to be two more books in the series to finish things – and hopefully the Joywood – off.

So far, at least, I’m in for another round, because this was better than the first. We’ll just have to see how that goes as the series continues.

Review: Jade Shards by Fonda Lee

Review: Jade Shards by Fonda LeeJade Shards (Green Bone Saga #0.75) by Fonda Lee
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: epic fantasy, fantasy, urban fantasy
Series: Green Bone Saga #0.75
Pages: 136
Published by Subterranean Press on July 31, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKobo
Goodreads

Fonda Lee returns to the acclaimed Green Bone Saga with four prequel short stories that delve into the personal histories of the Kaul and Ayt families.
The Witch and Her Friend. Before she was the ruthless leader of the Mountain clan, Ayt Mada was an orphan without friends at school except for one: Aun Ure, a teenage girl feared and renowned as an assassin but yearning for a simpler life.
Not Only Blood. Before he was the heir apparent of the No Peak clan, Kaul Lan challenged his grandfather and clan patriarch to help a boy who had lost everything.
Better Than Jade. Before they were married, Kaul Hilo and Maik Wen were a young couple facing long odds: the son of a top Green Bone clan in love with a stone-eye girl from a disreputable family.
Granddaughter Cormorant. Before she left and returned to Kekon, Kaul Shae was the apple of her grandfather’s eye…as well as a daring secret informer to a foreign country.
Contains an introduction and story notes by the author.

My Review:

Jade Shards isn’t a single story in the world of the Green Bone Saga, rather, just as the title indicates, it’s a series of little stories, shards if you will, of the magically beautiful big green stone that is the entire epic saga that begins with Jade City.

The stories in this collection feature the defining characters of Jade City, Jade War and Jade Legacy, but they are ‘before they were famous’ kinds of stories. In The Witch and Her Friend, we get to meet the towering figure of Ayt Mada on the very first steps of her journey to become the woman who set herself and her entire clan against the Kaul family.

Back when she was not a towering figure – and at that point in Kekon history had no hopes of becoming one. She was young, she was female, she was of unknown origin and she had been adopted into one of the two great families of Kekon. She was expected to be an asset to her new clan, but on the business side. She was never supposed to be the Pillar. WOMEN were not supposed to become Pillars. Period. But here we see the first inkling of the woman who did it anyway.

Ayt Mada was the powerful antagonist of the entire saga, but in that saga, she stood alone as her story does in this collection. The other stories dive deeply into the Kaul family, just as the other three stories here give us a peek into the early days of the three members of the Kaul family who drive the Green Bone Saga, Kaul Lan, Kaul Hilo and Kaul Shae.

All three were the heirs of Kaul Sennington, one of the two great heroes of Kekon’s liberation, along with Ayt Mada’s adopted father Ayt Yugontin. But where Ayt Mada was always alone, and had to fight to become the Pillar, Kaul Lan was always the intended heir of the Kauls.

Their three stories, Not Only Blood, Better Than Jade and Granddaughter Cormorant bring us perspectives on their characters before they became leaders. It’s a view of Lan as he is growing into the person he should have become, Hilo as he takes the first steps on the road to who he will be, and Shae as she attempts to fly away from her destiny.

Everyone who was enthralled by Janloon and fell in love with the characters that truly do live in the pages of the Green Bone Saga will be thrilled to get this glimpse into their earlier lives. And on this last trip back to Kekon will be caught between the pillars of smiling because it happened, and weeping because it’s over.

Escape Rating A+: I’m giving this one an A+ because that’s how deeply I escaped back into the world of the Green Bone Saga, how much I loved going there one more time, and just how damn sad I am that this looks like the last time based on the author’s introduction and notes in the book.

Unlike the first prequel to the Green Bone Saga, The Jade Setter of Janloon, even though all the stories in Jade Shards take place before the opening of Jade City, this is not the kind of prequel that stands alone, nor can it serve as an entry point for Jade City in the way that The Jade Setter of Janloon could.

The story shards in Jade Shards require prior knowledge of both the characters and the setting to have the resonance necessary to make them work. In other words, you have to already care about these people to want to read how they got to be the towering figures they eventually become.

It’s not nearly as interesting to watch their early fumbles and stumbles if you don’t already know just how sure and certain they eventually became on the roads they had to, or chose to, walk. But if you do care, if you’ve already visited Janloon, then Jade Shards is a bittersweet delight from beginning to end.

I finished the Green Bone Saga in tears at the end of Jade Legacy. By the end I felt like I’d walked the road with these marvelous characters and was beyond sad to their story end. It was a right, proper and fitting ending, but I just wasn’t ready to leave this world behind.

And neither was the author, as she admits in the notes for Jade Shards that these stories are a case of her writing fanfiction in the universe that she created. IMHO it’s a universe that is made even richer by these portraits of the clan leaders as young men and women. So I’m glad she was able to put these out into the world and sad that it looks like these will be the last.

The Green Bone Saga gave me the biggest book hangover I can remember in a very long time, one that is still stuck in my brain now two years after I finished Jade Legacy. To the point where I’m highly tempted to start listening to the damn thing all over again.

If you’re still a bit stuck in Janloon and looking for a way to alleviate the ache of missing it, may I recommend Ebony Gate by Julia Vee and Ken Bebelle. It’s the first thing that has scratched even the tiniest bit of my itch to return to Kekon. If you have that same itch, it might do the same for you.

And if you don’t have that itch and you’ve read this review to the end, what are you waiting for? Take your very own trip to Jade City and prepare to be captured and captivated.

Review: Ebony Gate by Julia Vee and Ken Bebelle

Review: Ebony Gate by Julia Vee and Ken BebelleEbony Gate (Phoenix Hoard, #1) by Julia Vee, Ken Bebelle
Narrator: Natalie Naudus
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss, supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy, urban fantasy
Series: Phoenix Hoard #1
Pages: 448
Length: 14 hours and 7 minutes
Published by Macmillan Audio, Tor Books on July 11, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

Julia Vee and Ken Bebelle's Ebony Gate is a female John Wick story with dragon magic set in contemporary San Francisco’s Chinatown.
Emiko Soong belongs to one of the eight premier magical families of the world. But Emiko never needed any magic. Because she is the Blade of the Soong Clan. Or was. Until she’s drenched in blood in the middle of a market in China, surrounded by bodies and the scent of blood and human waste as a lethal perfume.
The Butcher of Beijing now lives a quiet life in San Francisco, importing antiques. But when a shinigami, a god of death itself, calls in a family blood debt, Emiko must recover the Ebony Gate that holds back the hungry ghosts of the Yomi underworld. Or forfeit her soul as the anchor.
What's a retired assassin to do but save the City by the Bay from an army of the dead?

My Review:

When we first drop into Emiko Soong’s life, she has been living in San Francisco for two years trying to seem normal – leaving behind as much as possible that made her hated and reviled as the Blade of Soong, the Butcher of Beijing.

But assassins don’t get to retire, and members of high-ranking Hoard Custodian families don’t get to leave their clans or their pasts behind – no matter how much they might want to. Or need to.

Emiko’s San Francisco both is and is not the one we Waīrén – read as garden-variety, no-magical-talent, original recipe-type humans see. Because Emiko is a member of one of the clans descended from the Eight Sons of the Dragon, and she has talents that seem magical. Or at least the other members of her family and the rest of the clans do. Emiko is a dud, a disappointment to her parents and her clan.

Or so she believes. (I left the book wondering a whole lot about the truth of that, but that’s me wondering and nothing revealed – at least not in this first book in the trilogy. We’ll see.)

If you haven’t guessed, Ebony Gate is urban fantasy, in a setting that’s a bit like The Nameless Restaurant where the magic and magic-users are hidden in plain sight from the mundanes, but in a world where the danger is dialed up to the max due to both political skullduggery and outright violence.

(There are also touches (or more) of Nice Dragons Finish Last, The City We Became and Jade City if you get the same book hangover from Ebony Gate that I did and are looking for readalikes. I digress.)

Emiko is a woman caught between worlds, and destinies. Without power of her own, she’s been a pawn of everyone around her, from her parents to her clan to the rest of her people, the Jiārén to the primal forces at the heart of both her world and her adopted city.

At her heart she’s a protector – but she’s been molded into a killer through guilt and manipulation. San Francisco was her chance to start over, but her mother’s machinations have just pulled her back into the middle of everything she tried to set aside.

She can’t avoid the duty – because her powerful mother has put her in a position where taking up that obligation is the only way she can keep her beloved brother safe. So Emiko is back where she started, wading through blood and guts and hoping that her martial arts skills will be enough to beat back people with the power to create whirlwinds and tornadoes.

What awaits her if she fails is a fate that is, really, truly, worse than death. If she succeeds on the terms that everyone expects of ‘The Butcher of Beijing’ she might as well resign herself to an early death as her family’s vengeance blade.

But there’s a slim possibility that she can forge a path of her own – if she’s able to let go of enough of her own damage to accept a job that may still get her killed – but on her own terms and in a truly righteous cause.

Escape Rating A+: Hot damn but this was good. It had me hooked from the opening and I stayed engrossed until I turned the last page and kind of screamed because I wasn’t ready for it to be over. And it’s not as this is the first book of a trilogy but I want that second book NOW! Dammit.

Ebony Gate is one of those stories where I started in audio, and absolutely loved it, but switched to text because as much as I didn’t want this to end I was getting desperate to learn how this first book in the trilogy concluded.

That being said, I want to give a big shoutout to the narrator, Natalie Naudus, who also narrated Max Gladstone’s Last Exit. She was a terrific choice to narrate both books, as both are written in the first-person perspective of characters with the same attitude of take no shit, take no prisoners, get shit done no matter the cost to oneself and always, always keep one’s angst and insecurities and weaknesses on the inside where no one can take advantage of the weaknesses – but no one can help carry the burden, either.

While the urban fantasy thriller pace of Ebony Gate relentlessly keeps the reader turning pages, this is a story that leans hard on the personality of its protagonist – as do pretty much all of the characters she deals with along the way.

Everyone wants a piece of her. Everyone always has. She’s second and third guessing herself at every turn, as she always has and always does, because she’s never felt like she’s enough for any of the tasks laid before her. She plows on anyway. Always.

But through her memories of her failures and her internal monologue of her thoughts, fears and frustrations, we’re able to experience her world through the eyes of someone who is an insider but who has always seen herself as being on the outside looking in. And whose fatal flaw isn’t, after all, her lack of power, but rather her inability to get her opponents to STFU. This is Emiko’s journey and we’re absolutely taking it with her and it’s fan-damn-tastic AND nail-biting every step of the way.

Before I stop the squee – and yes, I fully recognize I’m just squeeing all over the place at this point because I loved this one SO DAMN HARD – I have one more thing to add.

Ebony Gate is the first thing that has scratched even a tiny bit of the book hangover itch from Fonda Lee’s marvelous Green Bone Saga. Not that other books haven’t given me itches nearly as bad – I’m looking at you, Glass Immortals – but this is the first thing that has assuaged even the tiniest bit of that particular itch – even as it creates one of its very own. Which means I’m looking forward, rather desperately, to the next book in this series, Blood Jade, coming hopefully sometime next year

Review: The Nameless Restaurant by Tao Wong

Review: The Nameless Restaurant by Tao WongThe Nameless Restaurant (Hidden Dishes: Book #1) by Tao Wong
Narrator: Emily Woo Zeller
Format: audiobook
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: cozy fantasy, fantasy, urban fantasy
Series: Hidden Dishes #1
Pages: 168
Length: 3 hours and 10 minutes
Published by Dreamscape Media, Starlit Publishing on June 1, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

There is a restaurant in Toronto. Its entrance is announced only by a simple, unadorned wooden door, varnished to a beautiful shine but without paint, hidden beside dumpsters and a fire escape. There is no sign, no indication of what lies behind the door.
If you do manage to find the restaurant, the décor is dated and worn. Homey, if one were to be generous. The service is atrocious, the proprietor a grouch. The regulars are worse: silent, brooding, and unfriendly to newcomers. There is no set menu, alternating with the whim and whimsy of the owner. The selection of wine and beer is sparse or non-existent at times, and the prices for everything outrageous.There is a restaurant in Toronto that is magically hidden, whose service is horrible, and whose food is divine.This is the story of the Nameless Restaurant.

My Review:

“Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger,” or so the t-shirt goes. There’s a wizard’s corollary to this that goes, “Wizards should not meddle in the affairs of jinn, for they are not subtle at all and very capable of schooling foolish wizards who overstep while they are spooning up dessert along with the wizards’ deflated egos.”

But that dessert occurs at the end of this tasty meal of a book. There are plenty of delicious courses before you get there.

The story in The Nameless Restaurant is also the story of a day in the life of this nameless restaurant, a tiny, hole in the wall place hidden in downtown Toronto where the magic of delicious meals happens at the hands of the restaurant’s magically adept owner-chef.

That chef-owner’s day usually begins with prep for the evening meals for his usual, but mostly supernatural, customers. On this day, Mo Meng, has to alter his routine due to an interruption by a spoiled brat of a jinn demanding that he serve her and her wizard companion a meal, right that minute with whatever he might have on hand.

Mo Meng grumps about both the interruption to his routine and the overbearing willfulness of his “guest” but still complies with her request-couched-entirely-as-an-order. She doesn’t even bother to pay for her meal when she’s finished the best meal she’s ever had.

But the destruction she might leave in her wake if he calls her on it simply is not worth the trouble.

Not that trouble doesn’t follow her back to the restaurant that evening. And that’s where things get truly fascinating, as we hear not just the details of the mouth-watering dishes that Mo Meng prepares, but we also get a ringside seat for an epic confrontation between a jinn who has, in fact and really truly, seen it all and done it all for millenia, and a gaggle of human magic users who think they’re all that when they really, really aren’t. A fact which Lily is more than happy to school them ALL in while she savors her dessert.

Escape Rating A-: Anyone who loved Travis Baldree’s Legends & Lattes is going to eat The Nameless Restaurant up with the very same spoon. If you’re looking for something to tide you over until Bookshops & Bonedust comes out, The Nameless Restaurant is definitely it!

The format of this little chef’s kiss of a story is “a day in the life”, but what a day and what a life! At first, the fantasy aspects are pretty minimal. It’s clear from Mo Meng’s musings and grumblings that he is a magic-user of some kind, but the details are covered in the sauce of his meticulous descriptions of food preparation.

It’s only when the pot of the story is fully on the boil, when the irregular regular denizens of the restaurant gather for what sounds like a spectacular meal (as all meals in that restaurant seem to be) that the reader gets some real hints about the nature of both the place and community it serves and why Mo Meng serves it.

Which is where both the fun and the tension come in. While everyone in the place is magical in one way or another except for Kelly the waitress, the Nameless Restaurant is warded to be a place where most of that magic gets left outside – except for Mo Meng’s cooking skills, of course.

So the tension in the story ratchets up slowly as the reader gets hints – and picks sides! – in the upcoming conflict. Which, when it comes, is explosive – but not in the way that the urban fantasy setting might lead one to believe.

This is, after all, a cozy fantasy. So what is brewing in that little place isn’t a battle – but it most definitely is going to be a takedown. With dessert. And leaves the diners eagerly anticipating another night at the Nameless Restaurant, while the reader is left salivating for the next installment in this delicious series!

One final word of caution. You are probably familiar with the warning about not going to the grocery store hungry, out of the very reasonable fear that you will attempt to buy the entire store because in your hunger it ALL looks good? This book takes that one step further, as it should be issued with a caution not to drive to the grocery store while listening, as not only will you be tempted to eat the entire store, but you’ll end up disappointed because nothing you consume will measure up to the temptations described in the story.

Review: For Love of Magic by Simon R. Green

Review: For Love of Magic by Simon R. GreenFor Love of Magic by Simon R. Green
Format: ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy, historical fantasy, urban fantasy
Pages: 240
Published by Baen on May 2, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

History isn’t what you think it is. It’s been rewritten to remove all the magic. Together, two people decide to put things right. A new novel of magic, history and true love from Simon R. Green.
When they fall in love, it’s magic!
History can change and has changed. Magic was and is real. 
Once upon a time, there was a forgotten era of magic and monster. But the remnants — and all memory — of the old world have been replaced by the sane, the scientific, and the rational. But sometimes the magical past isn’t content to stay past. That’s where Jack Damian comes in. It’s his joy to protect our present from the supernatural remnants of an earlier time, a different history.  It’s his job to make the past safe.
Jack is called to the Tate Museum, where dozens of people have disappeared beneath the surface of a painting. While investigating, he finds himself smitten with a mysterious art expert Amanda Fielding. But Amanda has plans of her own, and soon the two are traveling through time — back to the Roman Empire and then forward through history, from King Arthur’s court to Sherwood Forest. As they explore histories past as written and overwritten, the balance of magic and science shifts, and the choices the two make could change the world forever.

My Review:

The fun of For Love of Magic begins with the title, as there are SO MANY possible interpretations. And all of them are applicable and all of them are fascinating.

In the beginning, Jack Daimon doesn’t love magic. In fact, his job is to eliminate whatever bits of it sneak into our rational, scientific world. But he does fall head over heels in love with Amanda Fielding the moment he meets her – in the middle of closing up an abyss to an extremely nasty and highly magical place. And there’s more magic in that meeting – and in Amanda herself – than initially meets the eye.

Jack Daimon is the Outsider, the one person who exists outside of magic AND the various and sundry organizations and armies that are attempting to stamp it out. His job is to eliminate the chaos of magic whenever it appears.

He’s very, very good at his job. But his job requires that he have an open mind about pretty much everything. The people who don’t believe in magic tend to become gibbering wrecks whenever it appears – which in Jack’s line of work turns out to be frequently and often.

What Jack doesn’t know when we first meet him – and he first meets Amanda – is that magic is dying. Not of natural causes, but by being ruthlessly stamped out by some very mysterious secret masters of the universe who plan to control everything and everyone.

For fun, profit and their own benefit, of course.

Jack is magic’s – and Amanda’s – one last chance to set things right before it’s too late. But first he has to learn a lesson. Or two. Or ten. Whatever it takes to stand up and hold his ground in the face of everything he’s ever believed – and every force that has ever tried to remake the world in its own dry, humdrum, ruthlessly rational and utterly tyrannical image.

There’s supposed to be magic in the world. It’s Jack’s job to stand his ground so that Amanda has the chance to bring it back. If he can. If he decides he should. If he can make up his mind – and his heart.

Escape Rating A-: I had a great time with For Love of Magic, but whether you will or not probably depends on how much you like snarky characters with even snarkier commentary – even though this Jack isn’t filled with nearly as much of the snark as some of the author’s previous protagonists.

Jack isn’t nearly as snarky as Gideon Sable or Eddie Drood, because Jack needs a sense of wonder to make his way through the magical mystery history tour that Amanda takes him on. Her plan is to convince Jack, or use Jack, or a bit of both, to bring the magic back before it – and she – are gone forever.

That’s where the fun of the whole thing comes in, as she takes Jack to the times and places where magic made life, well, magical – before the forces of rational science rewrote history for their own purposes.

She doesn’t work through logic, because that’s the enemy’s strategy. She grabs for the heart, both Jack’s and the reader’s, by going back to times and places that were filled with wonder. She makes this adventure a tour of what rational science has reduced to mythical Britain, and draws Jack to Camelot and Sherwood Forest. Not to show him that magic will make things perfect – because human beings are NOT perfectable. But by showing him that some things are worth fighting for and that one of those things is a world that is not reduced to humanity only.

So she gives him a dream – and she gives it to us too. All the better because it hits a few contemporary issues squarely on the nose – and promptly punches them several times.

Like much of this author’s work, it does borrow a bit from his vast canon, but not in any way that’s overt or requires previous familiarity. Personally, I saw elements of Shadows Fall and Hawk and Fisher, as well as the Nightside. But then I also felt like I was seeing bits of the Iron Druid’s perspective, and Amanda was often referred to by some of the same terms that that series uses for the Morrigan.

By throwing King Arthur and Robin Hood, Boudicca and Gloriana, Frankenstein and Faust, into the mix, it stirs up a heady brew of the possibilities of where magic in the world might take us – if we still have the chance to let it. And that always makes for a fantastic read!

Review: Wings Once Cursed and Bound by Piper J. Drake

Review: Wings Once Cursed and Bound by Piper J. DrakeWings Once Cursed and Bound (Mythwoven, #1) by Piper J. Drake
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: epic fantasy, fantasy, fantasy romance, urban fantasy
Series: Mythwoven #1
Pages: 304
Published by Sourcebooks Casablanca on April 11, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

For fans of Sarah J. Maas and Jennifer Armentrout comes a bold and captivating fantasy by bestselling author Piper J. Drake.
My wings unbound, I am the Thai bird princessThe kinnareeAnd no matter the cost,I will be free.
Bennet Andrews represents a secret organization of supernatural beings dedicated to locating and acquiring mythical objects, tucking them safely away where they cannot harm the human race. When he meets Peeraphan Rahttana, it's too late—she has already stepped into The Red Shoes, trapped by their curse to dance to her death.
But Bennet isn't the only supernatural looking for deadly artifacts. And when the shoes don't seem to harm Peeraphan, he realizes that he'll have to save her from the likes of creatures she never knew existed. Bennett sweeps Peeraphan into a world of myth and power far beyond anything she ever imagined. There, she finds that magic exists in places she never dreamed—including deep within herself.

My Review:

It’s fitting that Wings Once Cursed & Bound is the first book in the Mythwoven series, as it weaves beings and artifacts from myth and legend into a captivating story that mixes urban fantasy and found family with legends from around the world into a series that draws on familiar tropes and traditions while introducing plenty that is fresh and new.

This story opens when a vampire chases down an artifact from one of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales and finds himself falling in love with a being out of Thai mythology. (It’s a rare urban fantasy world when a vampire is the most mundane creature around.)

Kinnaree Statue in Chiang Mai – Thailand

The red shoes are designed to seduce humans into putting them on – at which point the shoes are wearing the human until that human is worn to death dancing at the shoes’ command. But Peeraphan Rahttana is more than just human. She’s a kinnaree, a Thai bird princess. She feels the compulsion, but once she becomes conscious of it she can resist.

Not forever, but perhaps for long enough for vampire Bennet Andrews and the secretive Darke Consortium that he represents to find a way to get the damn things off her feet before it’s too late.

Neither the Darke Consortium nor Bennet Andrews himself knew about Peeraphan or her heritage – Bennet was on the track of the shoes. That’s what the Darke Consortium does, they hunt down powerful supernatural, mythical and legendary artifacts and store them safely out of reach. The Consortium reads like a supernatural version of Anna Hackett’s Treasure Hunter Security series or the TV series Warehouse 13.

Bennet Andrews may have found Peeraphan by accident – but those red shoes certainly did not. Someone wanted her dead or at least subdued, someone with unsavory motives and entirely too much money to in finding and even capturing supernatural creatures.

The Darke Consortium wants to put the shoes in a safe place. Peeraphan wants them off her feet before they kill her. Bennet Andrews isn’t quite willing to admit what he wants when it comes to the supernatural but probably not immortal woman with wings.

And someone is out to get them both.

Escape Rating A: This was my second read of Wings Once Cursed & Bound, as I read it several months ago for a Library Journal review and utterly adored it. I chose it in the first place because I loved the author’s science fiction romance back in the day (and it’s being re-released, YAY!), and was hoping this would be every bit as good if in a different genre.

Those hopes were most definitely realized.

What made this so much fun was the way that it was like “Old Skool” urban fantasy, Treasure Hunter Security and Simon R. Green’s Gideon Sable series had a book baby that blended all the familiar aspects of all those books and genres and mixed in fresh elements from classic fairy tales with new-to-me myths and legends with an otherworldly found family and a fantasy romance that eschewed the tried-too-many-times tropes and archetypes.

Bennet Andrews may be a vampire, but he’s not giving off any of that “I’m unworthy of love” vibe. Instead he’s heartbroken and grieving and not sure he can face another loss. That the Darke Consortium is run by a dragon is just too fantastic for words, especially when you acknowledge that the dragon, Bennet the vampire and Peerophan’s “cousin” Thomas the werewolf are the most mundane members of a rather eclectic household and crew.

The creepy villain is very creepy, and Peerophan’s situation gets very desperate, but in the end she rescues herself – which is always my favorite way for the heroine to get out of the jam the book has put her in.

There was just a lot to love in Wings Once Cursed & Bound, both in itself and as the opening of the Mythwoven series. I’m really looking forward to the author’s next forays into this magical version of our world. Her blog indicates that she has a novella series set in this world planned for later in 2023 and I’m highly hopeful for another magical read!

Review: Dead Country by Max Gladstone

Review: Dead Country by Max GladstoneDead Country (Craft Wars, #1) by Max Gladstone
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: fantasy, horror, urban fantasy
Series: Craft Wars #1, Craft Sequence #7
Pages: 256
Published by Tordotcom on March 7, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

Since her village chased her out with pitchforks, Tara Abernathy has resurrected gods, pulled down monsters, averted wars, and saved a city, twice. She thought she'd left her dusty little hometown forever. But that was before her father died.
As she makes her way home to bury him, she finds a girl, as powerful and vulnerable and lost as she once was. Saving her from the raiders that haunt the area, twisted by a remnant of the God Wars, Tara changes the course of the world.
Max Gladstone's world of the Craft is a fantasy setting like no other. When Craftspeople rose up to kill the gods, they built corporate Concerns from their corpses and ushered in a world of rapacious capital. Those who work the Craft wield laws like knives and weave chains from starlight and soulstuff. Dead Country is the first book in the Craft Wars Trilogy, a tight sequence of novels that will bring the sprawling saga of the Craft to its end, and the perfect entry point for this incomparable world.

My Review:

Home may be the place that when you have to go there, they have to take you in. But just because they have to take you in, it doesn’t mean they have to let you stay. As Tara Abernathy discovered back when she was young and desperate, scared and hurting,  abused mentally, emotionally and magically. She came home to tiny Edgemont, on the edge of the Badlands, looking for a place to heal and recover.

What she found back then was an increasing tide of raids by the hungry, cursed Raiders, and a town that was too hidebound to do what was really necessary to fight back. So, in her youth and arrogance, she tried to do it for them. They forced her out with torches and pitchforks.

She can’t go home again – not after what she – and they – did. Or so she believes. And she’s probably right.

But when she receives a message from her mother that her father is dead, she goes anyway. To find out what happened. For the funeral. For closure of one kind or another – even if it’s at the pointy ends of a new set of pitchforks.

It should be different now. After years of life-altering practice in the necromantic contracting of the Craft, Tara has not merely power but the knowledge of when to – and more importantly when not to – use that power in the face of people who are mostly just plain afraid of what she can do.

Edgemont, and the entire Badlands, are under siege by the hungry, infected, cursed Raiders, at the end of their collective rope and facing inevitable absorption by a curse that consumes everything it touches including the bodies of its victims. Victims who are compelled to hunt for more grist for the mill of a curse that has become more voracious and deadly in Tara’s absence.

Edgemont needs someone to save it, and Tara needs to strike back at everyone who ran her out of town back when she needed them most – but who, conversely and perversely – made her the power she has become.

She’ll spit in their collective eye by saving them all. Whether they want her to or believe she can – or not. All while she attempts to train an apprentice, protect her mother and fight off a curse. Only to discover that she is returning to the beginning of all things just at the point where the end is entirely too nigh.

Escape Rating A: Once upon a time (back in 2012) there was a book titled Three Parts Dead, the first book in the Craft Sequence, set in a world where Craft equals magic, and where that magic is rooted – often literally – in a combination of contract law and necromancy.

Yes, all lawyers are necromancers in this world. It’s still a WOW concept and seems totally and utterly RIGHT, both at the same time.

In that utterly awesome opening book, Tara Abernathy – yes, the same Tara Abernathy, pictured on that cover of Three Parts Dead to the left – was at the beginning of her career, fairly fresh out of the whole torches and pitchforks experience.

Dead Country is the golden opportunity I didn’t know I was waiting for to return to the world of the Craft Sequence without needing to remember every detail of this intricately detailed world. (Contract law, remember? LOTS of details. Positively – and negatively – entire metric buttloads of details – generally arising from the dead bodies – including butts – of gods.) The whole thing is intensely fascinating and I loved the series but I got a bit lost at the end and didn’t finish. I’ll probably go back.

But Dead Country is a starting over kind of book. While Tara comes home with all her years of experience and power, she is returning back to her point of origin – in more ways than she believes as she’s on her way back for her father’s funeral. That return kicks off Craft Wars, a new sequence in the Craft Sequence, and provides the perfect place for new readers to get themselves stuck right in – as well as giving returning readers a way of coming back to a place once loved but not remembered in detail. Just as Tara herself does.

In Three Parts Dead, Tara was still a neophyte, giving readers the opportunity to learn about her world and her Craft right along with her. In Dead Country, she is older and sadder, if not always wiser, just as the readers (and probably the author) are, making her yet again a character that the reader can identify with.

Her parents’ home and village have gotten smaller, she has gotten bigger, and the world has gotten darker and more dangerous, as it does as we move further into adulthood. At the same time, the old fears and the old grudges are all still very much active, and it’s all too easy to slip back into the same old patterns of thought and action. As Tara does. As we do.

The overarching story of the series is a huge one – as it should be. Tara discovers that saving the world is part of some old business she thought she’d finished. She faces traumas both old and new, driven to clean up the messes she left behind, and it nearly kills her.

But death is not an ending when you’re a necromancer. Unless it’s the death of her entire world. Or her soul. Hopefully, we’ll all find out in the second book of the Craft Wars, equally hopefully in the not too terribly distant future.

Review: Junkyard War by Faith Hunter

Review: Junkyard War by Faith HunterJunkyard War (Shining Smith #3) by Faith Hunter
Narrator: Khristine Hvam
Format: audiobook
Source: purchased from Audible
Formats available: audiobook
Genres: dystopian, post apocalyptic, urban fantasy
Series: Shining Smith #3
Length: 6 hours and 35 minutes
Published by Audible Audio on December 8, 2022
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazon
Goodreads

It’s find retribution or die trying in Shining Smith’s ultimate challenge, from the author of the “Jane Yellowrock” and “Soulwood” series.

Shining Smith and her crew have obtained the weapons they need to rescue one of their own from the grips of their mortal enemy, Clarisse Warhammer. But to mount an assault on her fortified bunker, they have to cobble together an army of fighters.

That could be the biggest battle of them all.

Shining will need to step back into the biker world she left behind to broker an uneasy peace, then lead rival factions into a certain death trap. Can Shining take Warhammer down without having to compel more and more people to do her bidding? And will her feline warriors, the junkyard cats, remain loyal and fight alongside her? Or will Shining have to become something and someone she hates, so that vengeance can finally be hers?

My Review:

“Bloody damn!” as Shining Smith would say. Bloody damn this was a wild ride in Shining’s sidecar. I meant brain – although occasionally also sidecar.

Because Shining’s post-climate-apocalypse AND dystopia is run by the biker gangs – or at least Shining’s little corner of it as well as her mental landscape are. Shining herself is famous and infamous – in equal measure – among the Outlaw Militia Warriors as ‘Little Girl’ – one of the first female ‘made men’ in that fiercely misogynistic culture.

When Shining was literally a little girl her daddy sent her inside the carapace of one of the enemy’s giant ‘mamabots’ with a nuke strapped to her back. Those mamabots were crawling, rolling factories of nanobots designed to infect and kill anyone or anything they came across. They were helping the enemy to conquer the West Coast of the U.S. one klick at a time.

Shining expected to die in that bot – and she very nearly did. Instead, she came out changed, infected by the bots’ poison and transformed by her own exceedingly stubborn will into the human equivalent of the mamabot – a queen constantly emitting a poison that turns anyone that touches it into her thrall.

Including the ever-increasing crew at her junkyard. Especially the cats. Her Cats, who have a queen of their own who is probably the person truly running the place.

But Shining is not the only human queen, because every true hero – especially if that’s not remotely what they want to be – creates their own archenemy – or the other way around. Clarisse Warhammer targeted Shining all the way back in Junkyard Cats, sending the dead body of her best friend back to her junkyard in the trunk of a rusted out car.

Shining has been gunning for Clarisse ever since.

Junkyard War is the final showdown between Shining and Warhammer, the culmination of every single thing that’s happened since the opening of Junkyard Cats. Shining has pulled every string, coaxed every friend, bribed every enemy she has in order to bring enough firepower to bear to have the best chance possible of crawling out alive after sending herself into the lair of someone much worse than that first mamabot.

This time she doesn’t even have a nuke. What she has this time is better. She has friends. And, more importantly, particularly from their point of view, she has the Cats.

Escape Rating A+: I picked up the audio of the first book in the Shining Smith series, Junkyard Cats, three years ago when the audio was all there was. And did I ever wish there was more.

I got that more in 2021’s Junkyard Bargain, and that still wasn’t enough of Shining Smith, her totally FUBAR’d world, or especially her telepathic battle cats who have probably been running things for a lot longer than Shining either knows or wants to think about.

It’s been a long wait but here we have the climax – sometimes in multiple senses of that word – or Shining’s story in Junkyard War. And I have to say that it has SO been worth the wait.

But it has been a hell of a wait because the three books in the series aren’t so much separate books as they are chapters in a continuing saga that now reads like it has skidded, heart first, into a WOW! of a conclusion.

Which means two things. First, the books pile layer upon layer building Shining’s world, so you really need to start at the beginning in Junkyard Cats. Fortunately, the first two stories, Junkyard Cats and Junkyard Bargain are both available as ebooks as well as audio, and they’re fast, compelling reads.

Second, this does feel like an ending, after an edge-of-the-seat thrilling battle that literally plucks at the heart – because the whole series has been told from Shining’s jaded, world-weary, all too often jaundiced and misanthropic point of view. So when she’s directing her friends, her people and the Cats around an ever changing battlefield and worrying over every single one we’re right in there with her, both because Shining’s voice is so singular and wry, and because the narrator who brings her to us, Khristine Hvam, has done a consistently excellent job of embodying Shining through this entire riveting series.

As this story ends, Shining is confronted with something she’s never really had before – the power to choose her own future. There could be new stories in Shining’s world from this point, but they’d be fundamentally different from what came before. So this is at least a break but also quite possibly as close to an HEA as Shining will ever get considering the state of the world she inhabits.

Either way, it’s a wild ride and a total rush and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

Whether or not you’ll feel the same way probably relies on whether or not you are able to fall into Shining’s voice because you see everything from inside her head. I loved riding her journey with her but your reading and/or listening mileage may vary. I hope it doesn’t because she’s one hell of a character experiencing a fantastic and utterly absorbing story.

Review: Never Too Old to Save the World edited by Addie J. King and Alana Joli Abbott

Review: Never Too Old to Save the World edited by Addie J. King and Alana Joli AbbottNever Too Old to Save the World: A Midlife Calling Anthology by Alana Joli Abbott, Addie J. King
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: fantasy, science fiction, short stories, urban fantasy
Pages: 318
Published by Outland Entertainment on February 7, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

Once every generation there is a Chosen One, who will stand between humanity and darkness.
But why is the Chosen One so often a teenager? Why do only children get swept through portals to save the fantastic world on the other side? Whose idea was it to put the fate of the world in the hands of someone without a fully developed prefrontal cortex?
In Never Too Old to Save the World, nineteen authors explore what would happen if the Chosen One were called midlife. What would happen if the Chosen One were:
a soccer moma cat ladya nosy grandmothera social workera retireean aging swordmaster?
The Chosen One could be anyone— because when the universe calls, the real question is whether the hero will take up the mantle and answer their midlife calling. Sometimes the world needs a hero who's already been in the thick of chaos and survived. In those cases, age does matter.

My Review:

What if you didn’t find a wardrobe to Narnia – or anywhere else – back when you were 8? And you didn’t get your Hogwarts letter at 11? And Gandalf didn’t even manage to come to take you on an adventure at 50?

Or perhaps, by the time Gandalf found you at 50, you thought you were too old to go on adventures – or – and much more likely –  had too many commitments in the so-called ‘real world’ to run off and leave your responsibilities behind? After all, Bilbo very nearly did.

That’s what this collection is about. It’s all about people who pick up the mantle of the ‘Chosen One’ in some fantasy or science fictional world who are explicitly not children or teens. Who are a bit too tied down – or a bit too wised up – to be the fool that rushes in where angels rightly fear to tread. Or so they think.

This collection is for everyone who missed that wardrobe or that letter and still wonders whether or not they’d have what it takes – or have the willingness to feel the fear and do it anyway – if a white wizard or a mad man with a blue box came calling for them.

There are 19 fabulous stories in this collection – and I think I loved every single one. To the point where I can’t just pick one favorite. I have to pick two.

My favorite fantasy story is “Jackalope Wives” by Ursula Vernon – who also writes marvelously fantastic fantasy and horror as T. Kingfisher. “Jackalope Wives” is the only story in the book that has been previously published, originally in Apex Magazine and later in her short story collection Jackalope Wives and Other Stories.

This is the story that won the 2014 Nebula Award for Best Short Story and should have won the 2015 Hugo Award in the same category. But, well, puppies. I digress and I need to stop to keep from going there again. Because ARRGGGHHH. Still.

“Jackalope Wives” is one of those stories that surprises the reader with a twist at the end that is even more heartbreaking, in its way, than the story you thought you were reading – which was already heartbreaking enough. Grandma Harken is absolutely correct that “You get over what you can’t have faster than you get over what you could.” But the truth of that statement doesn’t make the getting over any faster or any easier.

As a counterweight to the bitter, bitter sweetness of “Jackalope Wives”, my science fictional favorite story is “Launch Day Milkshakes” by Jim C. Hines, which is literally laugh out loud funny. To the point where I started laughing and couldn’t get a breath OR stop as my spouse looked over at me like I’d lost my mind because I could not catch enough breath to explain the joke.

At first, “Launch Day Milkshakes” is a story about absolutely deliciously getting one over on a misogynistic asshat boss in the biggest and best way possible. It’s also a brainship story in the vein of Anne McCaffrey’s classic, The Ship Who Sang. But that’s not all it is, and neither of those things were the parts that made me laugh so hard – no matter how much I enjoyed the asshat’s comeuppance. Which I very much did. I’m not going to spoil this one because it’s just so much fun when you get the joke – and see it get batted around like the universe’s biggest ball of yarn.

I know I said two favorites, but my third is kind of a riff on Buffy, meaning that there’s some urban fantasy in here as well. “Lean In: The Lord of Hell is Coming” by Ericka Kahler starts out with the local representative for the equivalent of the Watchers coming to a CEO to tell her that demons are coming to her city and that she’s the ‘Chosen One’ who is supposed to vanquish them. It’s not news to Mary Ann because she already has, just not in the way that heaven expected or that hell can ever manage to fight. I think this one is funnier the longer you think about it.

Of the rest of the collection, there are considerably more fantasy stories than SF as fantasy does tend to lend itself more to ‘chosen one’ narratives. Not that there haven’t been more than a few famous SF stories in this vein (I’m looking at you, Luke Skywalker – ahem). But magical appointments, by their very nature, do find themselves a bit more comfy – while their protagonists are generally quite uncomfy – in fantasy.

Because I loved this collection so hard, I can’t resist a brief shout out to every single one of the stories in it. The SF stories are listed first because there were fewer of them and because I’m contrary that way.

  • “The M.A.M.I. Incident” by Guadalupe Garcia McCall reminded me a whole lot of Day Zero by Robert C. Cargill which makes for a great but uncomfortable story.
  • “Utopia” by Vaseem Khan about making a friend out of a very great enemy.
  • “All the World’s Treasures” by Kimberly Pauley about a family legacy that is just so much bigger on the inside than it first appears.
  • “Big Momma Saves the World” by Maurice Broaddus about the great power in bad macaroni and cheese.
  • “A Legacy of Ghosts” by Sarah Hans about exorcizing one’s very own demon family with the power of positive thinking.
  • “Adya and the Messengers” by Jaymie Wagner about the proper treatment of heavenly messengers and their steeds.
  • “Soccer Mom Saves the World” by Addie J. King, a story whose title does pretty much say it all.
  • “My Roots Run Deep” by John F. Allen about a social worker saving the multiverse and getting her groove back at the same time.
  • “It’s My Nature – A ‘Monster Hunter Mom’ Adventure” by JD Blackrose, another one whose title gives more than a bit of a clue about the story.
  • “Truthteller” by Linda Robertson, a historical fantasy about an object of power that isn’t quite what any of the parties seeking it imagined.
  • “Granny” by R.J. Sullivan about a neighborhood snoop who is way more than she seems.
  • “The Sunspear” by Alexandra Pitchford, about a young woman who believes she has a destiny and a middle aged woman who is running from hers.
  • “Once a Queen” by Alana Joli Abbott, a Narnia-like story with a much better ending.
  • “By the Works of Her Hands” by LaShawn M. Wanak, another Narnia-type story where the portal opens as a lure to pull the right person in chasing after the young fool who rushes in believing that they are ‘the one’ when they’re just bait for their mother.
  • “Strange Wings” by Kathryn Ivey about a warning that comes nearly too late.
  • And last in both the collection and this list: “The Mountain Witch” by Lucy A. Snyder about the uses to which both heroes and villains are put when they are both female.

Escape Rating A+: I don’t normally list every single story in a collection like this, but this collection frequently got me in the feels and gave me something to identify with in just about every story. Sometimes we all need that reminder that age is just a number and that everyone has it in them to save, if not the world, at least their corner of it.

I’m also still hoping against hope that Gandalf will finally get the hint!

 

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 & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
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.