the owl and the olive tree

The Dubious Hills, by Pamela Dean

(This is a really hard book to synopsize! That's my way of saying that if the following sounds boring or dumb, that's my fault, not the book's.)

In the Dubious Hills, knowledge is divided up amongst the adults of the community, each of whom have their own purview. Fourteen-year-old Arry has the knowledge of pain, and the soothing thereof, just as her uncle Oonan has the knowledge of broken things and the fixing thereof. The community has thus lived in peace and balance for hundreds of years, relying on one another to fill the gaps in their knowledge. Things begin to shift, though: Arry's parents have disappeared, leaving a hole in Arry's family that she must struggle to fill; pains appear that are not physical and are not easily soothed, and Arry does not know what to do about them. And then there are the wolves who do not act like wolves, black and silent as shadows, who come into the village offering a bargain that will change everything, one way or another.

This was a lovely novel, strange and quiet. It takes a handful of starting premises ("what if knowledge was split up tidily between people in a community, rather than spread out messily among them as in the real world?" "what if magic spells existed and were very effective, but could only be practiced by young children?") and explores them in a way that's very thorough without turning them into engineering. In that way the book is remarkable: we have magic whose nature and origin is pretty thoroughly examined that, to me, still manages to remain mysterious, mystical, even numinous.

Part of the reason for that is that everything is explained slowly, gradually, in pieces; you see the world from the point of view of Arry, for whom all of this is both old hat (she's lived in the community her whole life) and new (knowledge comes to people around puberty, which was fairly recently). The mystery deepens before it's explained, and the whole complex system by which the country runs is revealed bit by bit rather than in infodumps. It's really impressively-done.

The story itself is very domestic: there is magic but no big battles, and much of the book is taken up in conversation. Much of the tension of the book is taken up in Arry's attempt to figure out what is hurting her brother and sister and what (and whether) she can do about it. Most of the magic (which is performed by speaking spells, and the spells are lines from English poets, a touch I appreciated—at one point Con, Arry's sister, creates a glass of intoxicating beverage by reciting, "O for a beaker full of the warm South") is used for little things, like kindling hearthfires and lighting rooms. This makes it sound boring, and it isn't at all: it's just very personal. It's about the fate of home and village, not the fate of the world.

The only other book of Dean's that I've read, and the one I hear talked about far and away the most, is Tam Lin. Tam Lin was a book that I appreciated and admired but couldn't feel attached to, because it gave me the curious feeling of hovering anxiously on the outside of a clique that I was not cool enough for—probably not an unreasonable thing to feel, because, duh, faeries, and certainly more about my own issues than about the book itself, but still uncomfortable enough to put a barrier between me and the book. This had a lot of the things that I admired about Tam Lin, without the parts that I couldn't enjoy.

So: This book is probably not for everyone, but I enjoyed it very much indeed, and recommend it to anyone who thinks it sounds interesting. It's about knowledge and doubt, and family, and community, and the things outside us and within us that challenge what we know. I love domestic fantasy, fantasy where the magic involved is strange and slow to unravel, and stories in general where the stakes are no less real because they're personal.

Mockingjay (The Final Book of The Hunger Games), by Suzanne Collins

This is the third (and final) book in the "Hunger Games" series, and as such it's difficult to talk about without spoilers for Mockingjay, and almost impossible to talk about without spoilers for the prior books. So I'll keep the outside-the-spoiler-cut brief: I still think this trilogy is worth reading, but this final book left me feeling curiously deflated. I won't say it was a bad book, or that I didn't enjoy it, but I really, really wanted to love it and I... didn't. Couldn't. I liked it okay, but after the lead-up, it left me feeling disappointed.

( Spoilers leave the arena behind )

The Adoration of Jenna Fox, by Mary Pearson

When Jenna Fox awakens from a year-long coma, her parents reassure her that everything will be fine, and her memories will return. But even from the start, Jenna knows that something is wrong. Why can she remember recent history with textbook precision, but know nothing of her best friends? Why did her family move abruptly from Boston to California—leaving behind not only careers and friends but also most of their possessions? Why can her grandmother not stand even to be around her?

If you're irritated because you've figured out the twist from my summary, have no fear: I figured out the twist within the first ten pages, and I'm terrible at figuring out plot twists, so you're not spoiled in any meaningful way. This isn't a book where figuring out the mystery is the key: the mystery is revealed before the halfway point. It's a book where it's not the secret but the crashing aftermath of the secret's revelation is the point.

This is a book for you if you've ever read Gift of the Magi and thought, "Okay, so she doesn't have her hair and he doesn't have his watch—what does that mean for their lives, their relationships, their self-definitions?"

Making Jenna sympathetic is quite a task, because she starts out blank: an amnesiac with no idea who she is. And I'm not a big fan of blank female characters. (Confession: Rei from Neon Genesis Evangelion bugs the snot out of me, because there's no there there. And she's a fan favorite, but I can't... give me shouty Asuka any day; at least she's got something going on inside her head.) But, although Jenna starts out pretty blank and remains pretty helpless, I liked her a lot because she was smart and determined to figure out what was going on, and acted within her very limited circumstances to change her future. Which I appreciate a great deal.

The rest I have to say is spoilery, so, cut.

( Spoilers behind the cut )

Recommended. And if you get impatient with the fact that you figure things out before Jenna, remember: that's not the point.

Archer's Goon, by Diana Wynne Jones

The Goon who showed up at Howard's family's kitchen table, huge legs stretched out to take up the whole room, said he was from Archer, and that Archer wanted his "two thousand." But according to Howard's father, the two thousand Archer wanted was not money but words. And it wasn't just Archer who wanted it: all seven of the family of wizards (or whatever they were) who farmed the town wanted those words, for purposes of their own. And they were prepared to make things quite uncomfortable if they didn't get them....

This was the first Diana Wynne Jones book I ever read, and while I've always been bad at picking favorites, this might be it. (That's your warning that this review is mostly an encomium.) It's part of what I call DWJ's odd standalones—odd not meant as an insult but as a genre designator—a class which includes A Tale of Time City, Fire and Hemlock, The Homeward Bounders and Eight Days of Luke. I say "odd" because they're not quite like anything I've found by anyone else: they are all set in our world, with secret or hidden magic, and the secret or hidden magic manages to be simultaneously very mysterious and very mundane in a way that's difficult for me to explain but that delights me to no end. And then there's DWJ's distinctive dry sense of humor, which permeates this book particularly.

Anyway. Archer's Goon. One of the things that I love most about this book is the way that the plot is a truly satisfying, sense-making, interesting plot that springs fully from character. In fact, it springs so fully from character that, on my first read-through, I was fairly certain that the plot was just an excuse for the characters to be fascinating (and fascinating they are, and often likable too)... and then at the end everything slotted neatly and inevitably into place precisely because of the way the characters had spent the prior two hundred pages being fascinating. It's beautifully done, and it's something I appreciate because I read books for character first, and so a character-driven plot that works so well is immensely satisfying.

And oh, the characters! There's Howard, the main character, who is smart and wry and sensible and daydreamy all at once. There's his little sister Awful, who I love to pieces: she's one of the least-romanticized child characters I've ever seen (she lives up to her name, let's just say), and who is nonetheless quite charming in her own Awful way. There's the Goon, who I came to like a great deal almost against my will, on the first read-through, and who now on re-reads I like from the beginning (which works, too). There's Howard and Awful's parents, who are delightful and infuriating by turns, and who neither solve the problems themselves nor are particularly useless. (Well, Howard's father is kind of useless, but for reasons that are in character and not just 'it's a kid's book, he has to be useless.') And then there are Torquil and Hathaway and Ginger Hind and Archer and Dillian and Shine and on and on. The book has a ton of characters, and they're all distinct and interesting, and some of them I love and some of them I want to punch in the nose and it all works.

There are other things that I love and want to talk about, but they're, hmm, varying degrees of spoilery. Here, I'll give you two cuts: one for things that are mildly to moderately spoilery but that, IMHO, won't ruin your book-enjoyment, and another for things that I suspect you would not want to know before your first read-through. (If you click the first cut, have no fear; I will make it boldingly clear at what point the spoilers switch over.)

( Moderate spoilers )

( Big bad spoilers )

Anyway, this is a beautifully-plotted book with a lot of great characters, and I'm sad that it's out of print. Recommended.

EDIT: Spoilers welcome in the comments, so be aware of that if you are unspoiled!

The Stepsister Scheme, by Jim Hines

Thanks to her own strong and kind nature, and the supernatural help of her dead mother, Danielle de Glas (aka Cinderella) is now free of her malicious stepmother and stepsisters. But even as the princess of the realm, Danielle can't put her troubles behind her, as she soon finds out. Her stepsister returns with new and inexplicable magic powers, attempts to kill Danielle, and then kidnaps Prince Armand. Danielle must rescue him...but fortunately she doesn't have to do it alone. She gains the help of the Queen's most trusted aides and "secret service:" Snow (White), a master magician and expert at mirror-magic, and an incorrigible flirt; and Talia (aka Sleeping Beauty), who used her fairy gifts of grace and poise to become an unparalleled martial artist. And Danielle soon learns that her mother's grace has not quite left her yet. But since the rescue will take them into Fairy, it's possible that even these skills won't be enough.

In other words: Disney Princesses crossed with Charlie's Angels.

I've read a lot of fairy tale retellings. I mean, a lot. All of the Windling/Datlow fairy tale anthologies, all of the Fairy Tale series of books that included Yolen's Briar Rose and Brust's The Sun, The Moon and The Stars, Robin MckKinleys' oeuvre, Tanith Lee's fairy tale books, Donna Jo Napoli, and on and on. You'd think this would make me tired of them, but it actually hasn't.* I still love a good fairy tale retelling. And this scratched the itch in a way I enjoyed very much.

* Well, that's not true. I have grown tired of a certain kind of fairy tale retelling that feels, to me, self-consciously ugly, adding nasty things just to make it more Gritty And Real. Thank you, no. But that's not a problem specific to fairy-tale fiction at all.

First off: the characters. The three princesses are different and distinct, without their differences being used to mark one as 'better' than the other. (This is surprisingly uncommon.) Danielle is genuinely kind and good-hearted in a way that's backed with steel: to be honest, the character she reminds me of the most is Tohru from Fruits Basket. She has the same, well, genuine kindness that Tohru has, and the narrative makes it clear that that isn't meant to be a default virtue for a woman. Instead, it's something that Danielle has to work at, and it doesn't make her a pushover (although Talia might not agree); in fact, Danielle may have the most strength of character of any in the group.

Snow is the magic-user of the group, specializing in (what else?) mirror magic. In that sense she's her mother's daughter, since her mother was a powerful enchantress. Snow is the most conventionally beautiful of the three (Danielle and Snow are both also beautiful, but in different ways), and she enjoys being beautiful. She's also a flirt, and she likes men; this is, as in real life, sometimes to her benefit and sometimes to her detriment. Crucially, her prettiness and her flirtyness don't make her stupid: she may in fact be the smartest of the trio, although she's probably the least world-wise.

Talia is the badass, of course. As Sleeping Beauty, in addition to exemplary beauty and a beautiful voice and so on and so forth, she got supernatural grace and poise from her fairy godmothers. And she uses it... to be an elite martial artist beyond compare, pairing her (super)natural ability with lots and lots of training and practice. She's the physical powerhouse of the group, and also the most suspicious and ruthless, a trait that is probably necessary to counterbalance Daniellle's kind heart and Snow's naivete. Talia, in short, could kick your ass.

The book is set in a secondary-fantasy world that borrows more from fairy tale than from mythology or history. The country they live in, where Danielle is princess, is sort of an alternate France (or maybe France/England); the mountainous country Snow hails from is more like Germany/Austria, with dark woods and high mountains; and Talia is from a Middle Eastern analogue. But most of the action of the book takes place in Fairytown, a place that's an amalgam of northwestern European folk and fairy tales. (Not so much mythology. In other words, you'll see variants on hobs and pixies, but not Tuatha de Danaan. This is actually sort of refreshing, as fairy tale retellings that track things back to Celtic mythology are pretty darn common.)

So, let's see. The book is in two of my personal mental book categories: it's a romp (meaning that it's a pretty fast-paced book with good characters and exciting action, more fun than seeeeeeerious), and it's a bathtub book (meaning that it's the kind of thing I'd read at the end of a hard day, and also the kind of thing that I could happily read in one or two sittings). It's not Great Literature but it's not supposed to be: it's a ton of fun, a fantasy adventure that features not one but three strong female characters, all of whom are different.

Why do I keep mentioning that? Because, outside of certain kinds of YA fantasy, it's surprisingly rare. These days you generally do at least get The Girl (not always, but more than you used to), but usually in terms of major characters The Girl is all you get. Books with more than one female protagonist aren't all that common. Books about more than one woman working together and/or being friends (rather than being romantic rivals) are even rarer. The fact that this book features three such characters is just plain awesome, and that overshadows any nitpicks I might have with the book.

( A bit more, spoilery: )

Anyway. Recommended, especially as an airplane or bathtub or bad-day book, and doubly so if you like strong female characters. I bought it on the Kindle, read it on a plane ride, and actually liked it well enough to buy in paper copy so I could lend it to people.

Thief Eyes, by Janni Lee Simner

(Disclaimer: I know the author and consider her to be a friend.)

After Haley's mother disappears during a trip to Iceland, Haley and her father return, and Haley seeks to figure out what happened. But it turns out that "what happened" is a more complicated question than Haley could possibly know, involving her many-times-great grandmother Hallgerd, an equally ancient spell, the fire spirits that dwell beneath the surface of Iceland, and Odin's own servants. Together with Ari (whose presence is, in itself, another problem: Ari is both sweet and attractive, but Haley already has a boyfriend), Haley must figure out what her ancestor wrought, what she herself has done, and how to resolve it before it tears apart Iceland, and the world.

I have to confess: my first response to hearing about this book was delight that a YA novel had been written about one of the Icelandic Sagas. I first read Njal's Saga (the story that is central to this book, and one of the greatest and most famous of the Sagas) when I was in college, and then reread it a couple of years ago. It's a story of both grand scope and intimate detail, and I'd recommend it to anyone. (Don't go with the free Gutenberg translation, as that's a thoroughly expurgated Victorian one; get a modern translation.)

But anyway! Thief Eyes! As I said, I was delighted (after years of Greco-Roman and Celtoid fantasy) to see a fantasy based on the Icelandic Sagas and Norse mythology. Freki and Muninn, both familiar figures from Norse myth, are distinctive and well-rounded characters... but even more so are the characters from the Sagas: Svan the sorcerer, ancient and amoral, and Hallgerd, who reaches across the generations to avoid a fate she doesn't want.

But the star of the show was Haley, an Arizona teenager who happened to be one of Hallgerd's descendants, who came in search of her mother and accidentally fell afoul of ancient magic, and who then had to find a way to turn back that magic. She was tough and determined, but realistically sheltered and sensitive, and I liked that. I also really liked her relationship with Ari, an Icelandic boy who was sweet and shy and charming, a total geek (he kept making Star Wars references, and I loved him a great deal just for that), and attractive to Haley. But Haley also had a boyfriend in the States, Jordan, and while she was undeniably attracted to Ari, she also felt loyalty to her boyfriend, which I found pretty admirable.

The way that Haley's conflicted friendship-and-proto-romance with Ari reflected her love-hate relationship with Iceland and her ancestry seemed to me to be particularly well-done.

( Spoilers beneath the cut )

Recommended. And I also recommend Njal's Saga: find it in a recent-ish translation, and enjoy.

Raven: The Untold Story of the Rev. Jim Jones and His People, by Tim Reiterman

One of my quirks: I am squeamish and easily frightened in general; I can't watch movies that are all gory or that are designed to make you jump, and most horror novels are also difficult to impossible for me to read. But I can read accounts of, say, the Charles Manson cult and murders right before bed with nary a qualm. In fact, I... enjoy them is kind of a ghoulish way of putting it, but I find them absolutely absorbing. (I suspect that growing up in a school run by a church that, um, bordered on the edge of cultlike fed my fascination.)

It was in that mindset that I went looking for more information about the People's Temple and Jonestown, site of an enormous and tragic mass suicide/murder. What I found was this book by Tim Reiterman, a journalist who researched the People's Temple and who was part of Congressman Leo Ryan's ill-fated visit to the jungle of Guyana and the People's Temple enclave, Jonestown.

This is not a small book. I read it on the Kindle, but in paper form it apparently runs nearly seven hundred pages, beginning with Jim Jones' childhood and ending with the mass suicide. On the way, it tracks the rise of the People's Temple, including biographical sketches of many of the participants: some of those sketches were necessary to the narrative (such as Tim and Grace Stoen, whose child—who Jim Jones claimed as his own—played a central role in the final tragedy), but some were not directly related. But I appreciated those, even though they made a long book even longer, because they really made me feel the disaster of their deaths. I spent a lot of the book chewing on my knuckles and thinking, "Oh, I hope he/she gets out before the end." Some of them did. Most didn't.

The other thing that the book is very good for is depicting the slow but steady way that a charismatic leader can take a group of people from an idea that is fairly normal (in this case, Christianity plus egalitarianism, social justice, and racial harmony) through intermediate stages to a bizarre conclusion (Jones depicted as God the Father, control of people via sex, beatings and humiliation of anyone who disagreed because they were 'elitists', and finally mass suicide/murder in the name of revolution).

This is not an easy book to read, because if you know anything about Jonestown, you can feel the weight of doom almost from the beginning. It's particularly hard to read about the journey the Concerned Relatives and Congressman Ryan make, knowing what the end result will be. But it's also fascinating, and very useful as a depiction of the psychology of charismatic leadership. (I also liked that, as tempting as it must have been, Reiterman refrained from armchair psychoanalysis. He gave details that you could draw conclusions from, but even when he mentioned Jones' delusions of grandeur and paranoia, he was quoting a psychiatrist who had actually examined Jones.)

Caveat: The book was originally published in 1982, and while I didn't notice anything egregious as regards mishandling of gender or race, it also wouldn't shock me if it was there.

Recommended, but only if you're in a buoyant mood.

Meridian, by Amber Kizer

All her life, Meridian has seemed to attract dead and dying small animals and insects. A bit morbid, but you get used to it. But on her sixteenth birthday, Meridian witnesses a fatal car crash... and everything changes. Her parents hustle her on a bus to see her great-aunt (without even giving her a chance to say goodbye to her younger brother), who breaks the news to her: Meridian is a Fenestra, a person born to help the souls of the dying pass into Heaven, or Paradise, or whatever you might call the benevolent afterlife. But the Fenestra are not alone: the Alternocti have the same mission, but they strive to draw the dying into Hell. And they see the Fenestra as their sworn enemies.

This was a very... odd book. Not bad, and certainly not badly-written, but odd. The cosmology was particularly really strange, although internally consistent. What happens to you after you die seems to be determined by who is nearest you when you die: if you die near a Fenestre or a Sangre (ie, good) angel, you go to Heaven; if you die near an Alternocti or a Nocti (ie, bad) angel, you go to Hell; if you die with none of the above nearby, you reincarnate. It doesn't appear to matter what kind of person you were, or what you did in life, or what you believed in life, or any of that. This is played perfectly straight, and with a surprising unflinchingness: when a small child dies near a mature Alternocti, it's later said that her soul is in Hell. As I said, it's a very... weird cosmology, to me, but it's played totally straight, so I can't fault her consistency of worldbuilding. If there are sequels, I kind of hope they deal with that, and address the question of whether an innocent soul sent to hell by a malicious Alternocti can ever be saved and sent to heaven, or at least put back in the reincarnation cycle. If not, though, this is a really quite fatalistic book, and very depressing if you think about it very long! (Especially since it's implied that Sangre and Fenestra are pretty badly outnumbered, which means more people are sucked to Hell at random than to Heaven, although it sounds like most people reincarnate.)

(Side note: I've seen the book described as if Meridian was herself an angel, or part-angel. That made me cringe a little, but from what I can tell, Fenestra aren't angels at all: they're humans who are sort of like... like an angel's administrative assistant.)

I actually liked Meridian, who was confused, frustrated, and frightened, but in a very realistic way. While she didn't get a chance to do much, it was obvious to me that that was because she was swept up in circumstances beyond her control, not because she was an inherently passive person. At first I was piqued at the climax, in which it (being vague to avoid spoilers) appeared that Meridian was going to be saved by someone else—but then I realized it followed a fairy-tale pattern, where she was saved by people who she had helped earlier in the book. And that's not an ending I mind nearly as much.

I guess, in conclusion, I'm not sure what I think of this book. I liked Meridian, and while the romance didn't grab me, it also didn't strike me as ridiculously improbable or over the top. But the cosmology is very, very, very strange, and I wanted more exploration of the repercussions. Maybe we'll get that in a sequel. (Also the villain struck me as seriously one-dimensional, which bugged me.) Anyway, while I wouldn't strongly recommend it, as it didn't reach out and grab me, it was an enjoyable enough read—certainly I'd rec it as airplane reading.

A couple more spoilery things, under the cut.

( Spoilers.... )

Anyway. Recommended with reservations; it's an entertaining enough way to pass a few hours.

Ash, by Malinda Lo

Aisling, also called Ash, is devastated when her mother dies. Things only get worse when her father dies as well, leaving her in the hands of her stepmother Isobel. Isobel forces Ash to pay off her father's debts through servitude, and eventually Ash is serving as gardener, housekeeper and lady's maid to Isobel and her social-climbing daughter Ana. Ash's only solace is the Woods... where she meets both a fairy man who knew her mother, and the King's Huntress, Kaisa, who shares her love of the Wood and of fairy stories and who sees past her withdrawn demeanor.

This book was introduced to me as a lesbian Cinderella retelling, which is a totally accurate description, and that description alone was enough to make me read the book. I have long had a fondness for fairy tale retellings, and one that subverted the heteronormative assumptions of most of them sounded delightful. So I was really eager to like this book.

And there are some things I do like about it. I still love the idea. The depiction of the woods, and the fairies, worked for me very much; it's mysterious and dangerous without being over the top. But my favorite thing is Kaisa, who I found very compelling: her position as the King's Huntress intrigued me from the start, and I loved her kindness and courage. I found her completely believable as a love interest, and I liked the slow progression of her romance with Ash. She was a liminal character: not quite part of society, not quite part of the Wood, and I liked her very much.

Unfortunately, Kaisa wasn't the protagonist. Ash was. And Ash, unlike Kaisa, was curiously passive. Part of that, I think, was the shape of the Cinderella narrative: Ash couldn't run away or otherwise materially change her situation, because she had to walk through the paces of the story framework. She bore her trials with stoicism, which is not in itself problematic, but she didn't actually do anything about them. And the way she related to her 'fairy godfather' didn't work for me in ways that I'll describe under the cut, because they're spoilery. Had this been the story of Kaisa, King's Huntress, navigating her liminal position, falling in love, standing in the space between human Ash and the inhuman fairies, I think I would have loved it. As it was, I found myself frustrated that the major character rarely if ever tried to influence her own future.

The other problem that I had was with the prose. I like both "transparent" prose and stylized or ornate. Unfortunately, this book fell somewhere in the middle: I couldn't quite see through the prose to the world of the story (as I would with transparent prose), nor was it quite stylized enough for me to admire the words for themselves. As it was, I felt as though there was a thin but solid layer of glass between me and the characters.

( More discussion, with spoilers )

All this isn't to say it was a bad book. I did enjoy it. It's just that I wish Ash had been even a little bit more, well, proactive.

The Bones of Faerie, by Janni Lee Simner

(Disclaimer: janni is a friend of mine, although I read The Bones of Faerie before I met her.)

Before Liza was born, the world of faerie and our human world went to war. The war is long since over, but her world bears the scars: blackberry brambles invade homes and strangle their inhabitants, food plants resist the harvest, dandelions bite, and trees reach out with sinister intent. Magic—the latent malicious magic left in the plants, and pockets of wild magic left around the world—is the enemy, as are children with strands of shining-clear hair that indicates the touch of magic. All such things found within the safe confines of the village must be destroyed. Liza knows this; it is her life. But when Liza's sister is born with glass-transparent hair, and her father exposes the child on the hillside to die, everything changes. Liza's mother vanishes... and Liza's own unexpected magic power reveals itself: she is clairvoyant. And so she must flee her father and her village, and go out into the deadly danger of the faerie-touched wilderness.

I know janni has referred to this book as post-urban fantasy, and that's a label I like quite a bit for it. And a big part of what I like about it is the setting, the post-fantasy-apocalypse North America. It's set, not in a vague post-apoc location, but in the wilderness near St. Louis, Missouri, and though the isolated villages themselves have a culture of their own (a culture born of the vastly changed world they live in), I love that it's actually set in a specific place, that it touches on the atmosphere, the landscape, and the landmarks of a particular place. I don't even know Missouri, and I loved that the book felt set in a specific place.

I also like the way that the book focuses on the small elements of a post-apocalyptic world. The scarcity and preciousness of food; the dangers of injury and illness and the high value placed on medicine; the tremendous dangers of venturing outside the sanctuary of established enclaves. The dangers in The Bones of Faerie are the dangers of traveling in a pre- (or post-) industrial society, but magnified: rather than brigands or wild animals or hunger or exposure, it's the landscape itself that will do you in. I also just like the concept of a fantasy apocalypse: not one where science destroyed civilization, but one where magic did; not one where nature is crumbling in the face of humankind, but one where humankind is crumbling in the face of nature.

That leads me to the other thing I really like, which is Liza herself. She knows perfectly well that the world outside her village has a fairly high chance of doing her in, but she also knows (from bitter experience) that if her 'faerie' gift, her magic ability of clairvoyance, is discovered, she will also be killed. She considers the odds and takes the chance that an uncertain fate beyond the village is preferable to hiding and living in fear within the village. I like that a lot. She's smart, tough, and survival-oriented. Even when the odds are against her, she acts rather than giving in. And so, even though she's not a physical badass in the mold of, say, Alanna or Katsa, she makes my list of awesome girl characters with agency.

No book is flawless, so there are some things that twigged me. I expected more of an explanation of how and why the faerie war started than I got. And I kind of wanted more of an explanation of the fundamental difference between faeries and humans. But those are minor complaints; I'm hoping to see more of the worldbuilding in the forthcoming sequel.

( Spoilery discussion under the cut )

And now, on to a book I don't expect to like as much (although, who knows, I could be surprised): Vampire Beach: Bloodlust, which I got in a random YA book grab bag. I can't wait. ;)