Short Book Reviews: Juliette Marillier at Her Most Addictive

 A Dance with Fate, by Juliet Marillier (Ace)

In The Harp of Kings, only the most promising students qualify for the elite Swan Island school for assassins, warriors, and spies. Two such were Liobhan, a gifted singer and even more gifted fighter, and self-exiled prince, Dau. Sent together on a spy mission along with Liobhan’s bard brother, Brocc, it was hate at first sight and an ongoing challenge to work together for the success of the mission. Now Brocc has followed his fae heritage into the Otherworld, leaving Liobhan and Dau to continue honing their skills and an increasingly friendly rivalry. A freak training accident leaves Dau blind. Liobhan blames herself, since the two were sparring at the time, but so does Dau’s vicious, abusive older brother. Rather than expose the secrets of Swan Island, the elders strike a bargain with Dau’s family: he is to return home, where he will be cared for, and Liobhan will serve as an indentured bondswoman for a year. Dau’s brother has agreed not to harm her physically, but there is nothing to stop his cruelty.

The situation is a recipe for disaster. Dau is right to be fearful of being at the mercy of his older brother and heir to the estate, doubly so because of the extreme vulnerability due to his blindness. Old traumas haunt him, threatening to drag him into suicidal despair. It will take all Liobhan’s healing skills, empathy, and bloody-minded authority to keep him alive. Meanwhile, the violently aggressive Crow People launch ever-increasing attacks on both fae and human communities.

Engaging, dramatic, romantic, and thoughtful, A Dance with Fate is Marillier at her most addictive. Highly recommended.

Short Book Reviews: A Psychological Thriller from SF Master John E. Stith

Pushback, by John E. Stith (ReAnimus Press)

I encountered the work of John E. Stith through his imaginative hard science fiction novels, Redshift Rendezvous and Manhattan Transfer (among others, but these were my gateway). I was curious to see what he would do with mainstream thriller material, and I was richly rewarded. Stith is not only thoroughly skillful in handling character, plot, and descriptive narrative, but in this book, he weaves together a dramatic, tension-filled plot with the main character’s struggles with PTSD. In fact, rarely have I seen a protagonist as functional yet scarred, and PTSD and the techniques for managing it so accurately depicted.

Dave Barlow has made a remarkable recovery from childhood trauma. He’s a successful investment adviser, and happy in a new romance after the death of his fiancée. Things start to go wrong in bizarre, inexplicable ways when he and his girlfriend show up for his high school reunion and no one there has heard of him. Soon it becomes apparent that someone is trying to systematically destroy every aspect of his life – his relationship, his career, his home, his assets . . . and then his very life. The most likely suspects include anyone outraged that he has found love again, like his dead fiancée’s wealthy, reclusive father.

Stith shapes the tension of this thriller with consummate skill, pushing each new threat ever higher. I especially admired how he used Dave’s inner turmoil and still-unhealed wounds to intensify the escalation of pressure. The dramatic story is extremely well handled, but most of all, it’s a compassionate, humane tale of the resourcefulness of a deeply damaged, yet sympathetic, courageous, loving person. Ultimately, it’s as much a story of hope as a page-turner thriller.

Short Book Reviews: Magic, Medicine, and PTSD

Witchmark, by C. L. Polk (Tor) is one of the most unusual and compelling love stories I’ve read this year. The setting, very much like England in the throes of national PTSD following the First World War, a magic-yielding aristocracy, a conflicted hero, and so forth, are familiar enough to be recognizable, yet integrated into a freshly imagined world.

A brutal war has dragged on to end in a draconian peace. Men returning from the front are all too often shattered in mind as well as body, although the effects of their trauma are poorly understood. In our own world, WW I veterans were said to suffer from “battle stress” or “shell shock,” and both were associated with cowardice or lack of moral strength. In this world, however, some of them carry a spiritual darkness within them, visible only to those with magical sight. One such is our hero, working as a physician under an assumed name to escape the enslavement of being a “second-class” magician. He alone makes a connection between the dark presence and the reports of his patients that a mysterious he wants them to murder their loved ones. Creating a metaphor for dissociation born out of guilt and trauma is one of the things I love about fantasy. In this case the darkness is also a real, separate thing, related to the retaliation plotted by the losing side in the war, but again, I found myself wondering at the parallels between Polk’s vengeful, decimated vanquished and the rise of the Nazi Party following the Treaty of Versailles. One of the hallmarks of thoughtful fantasy is how it invites us to look at our own world, our own lives, through new perspectives.

Witchmark, however, is not at all a diatribe about the root causes of war. It’s an intensely personal story of a man who, fleeing one sort of persecution (the exploitation of his magical talents), dedicates himself to healing and then, without meaning to, gets caught up in increasingly larger crises. Through this all, he forges a connection-of-the-heart with a man of another race, an Amaranthine, this world’s version of Fae. Like Fae, they are immortal or nearly so, and are said to be incapable to loving as humans do. All of this makes the slowly evolving love story between Miles Singer and Tristan Hunter both tender and bittersweet.

The book has a lot of different elements, from the murder mystery that launches the action to the politics of the hospital where Miles works, to the aristocratic magic-wielders who subjugate those of lesser talents, to the international politics, to the bicycles criss-crossing the city. It would all be too much in the hands of a less skillful author, but Polk introduces each aspect of the setting, characters, traditions, and drama in such an easy, natural fashion, they all fit effortlessly.