Book Log 10/2013 - Freda Warrington: Elfland - Aetherials #1

Oh, wow. I only picked this because I was attending Eastercon this year and Freda Warrington was one of the guests of honour, but I'm so pleased that I did. It was a thoroughly engrossing read and it certainly won't be the last Freda Warrington book I read.

Semi-immortal Aetherials are what humans may once have called elves. They live amongst us, indistinguishable from you or me. The Foxes and the Wilders are two neighbouring Aetherial families with more than a few issues. Auberon Fox is the solid heart of the local Aetherial community while Lawrence Wilder is the tormented and unstable gatekeeper to the other world, in which lies the Spiral. One midsummer he refuses to open the gates, cutting off the earthbound Aetherials from their spiritual home, citing some dark danger that no one else can sense.

The Fox children, Rosie and her brothers and the two Wilder boys have crossed paths as children, and not in a good way. As a teen, Rosie falls for Jon, the mild mannered, pretty-boy, younger brother and detests the older brother, Sam, a real scrapper who's always in trouble, but time passes and relationships change. When Sam goes too far and kills an intruder in the Wilder family home, soft hearted Rosie is the only one who will visit him in prison and there's a subtle shift. Meanwhile Jon is leading Rosie's baby brother Luke astray, bigtime, trying to find a way into the spiral.

Rosie is caught between a life in the real world and her Aetherial heritage and it takes tragedy and danger before she comes to terms with who she is and who she loves.

This book flips back and forth between the mundane and the magical, always carrying you along with it. Freda writes charaters you can care about. Actions have consequences and there are real world solutions to magical problems and the other way round. Highly recommended.

Movie of the Week: Oblivion

What can I say? Certainly worth the ticket price. Tom Cruise is Tom Cruise, and if you like what he does that's recommendation enough. (I swear he's got a picture in the attic!) The script is decent, the twists and surprises wholly satisfying, (I certainly didn't see them coming), but I'm not giving them away.

To begin with, then:
Earth has been damaged beyond repair and the survivors of an alien war are on their way to Titan, or on the space-station waiting to go. They are harvesting Earth's water to take with them. Jack is number 49, a maintenance engineer looking after the droids who protect and maintain the water harvesters. He's partnered with Victoria, living in comfort in their tower home above a ruined landscape. They both had an obligatory mind-wipe before starting this tour of duty, something which does not seem to surprise or upset either of them.

But it all starts to fall apart when a battered human spacecraft falls out of the sky and Jack rescues Julia who has been in stasis sleep for the best part of sixty years. She recognises him, but how can that be, he wasn't even born then? More worrying, however, is that he recognises her from his dreams.

When Jack discovers a group of human survivors led by Morgan Freeman and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Jaime Lannister in Game of Thrones) everything he knows about who he is and what he's doing is challenged. If I say more than that and there would be too many spoilers. Just go and see it.