Booklog 104/2024: Kesia Lupo: We Are Blood and Thunder

Aimed at the upper end of the YA age range, this is a story in two parts with two focus figures, Lena and Constance.  Lena is a cryptling, one of the hidden people who service the revered Ancestors, condembed to that life because of a facial birthmark. When she is accused of being a mage and sentenced to death she bolts from the walled city of Duke's Forest and into the woods where she encounters Constance, who is a mage, and desperately trying to re-enter the city of her birth, a city to which she is heir. Constace is also a mage and her stated purpose is to destroy the spell which hangs over Duke's Forest ,a spell of cloud-darkness and corruption which will eventually cause the dead to rise.  Constance directs Lena towards Emris, a hunter-mage, who takes her under his wing and initiates her into magical education. (She does seem to pick it up a bit too easily, but that's probably necessary to move the story forward and keep pace with Constance's narrative.) When it transpites that Lena has the key to the spell to which Constance is trying to find the key, and that Constance is in trouble, she heads back to Duke's Landing. There are some twists in this, two strong female leads presenting alternating storylines, and an interesting magic system. There's also an unreliable narrator element which is difficult for any author to pull off, but Ms Lupo manages it successfully.

Booklog 105/2024: Alexandra Walsh: The Wind Chime

Narrated by Emma Gregory
A timeshift story of family research, secrets and mysteries, set in two timelines, now and the late Victorian era. Timeshift, yes, but don't assume time travel. The Victorian story is revealed through research and journals. Amelia Prentice is debilitated by the grief of three deaths in two years. First her daughter dies, then her father, and now her mother. She has an inheritance and friends but no family. Her mother's last instruction was to clear out boxes in the attic, boxes containing antique family photos and a journal by a young Victorian woman called Osyth Attwater, a member of the sprawling Attwater family from Wales. Intrigued by one family photograph of a group standing in front of Cliffside - a house on the Pembrokeshire coast, Amelia discovers that it's now a retreat centre and, curious, she books herself in for grief counselling. She finds the house is now owned by Edward Stone and his aunt, descendents of the Attwaters in the photo. One thing follows another and Amelia and Edward join forces to reveal the Attwater story through research and Osyth's journals, uncovering dark secrets and family connections. Is Amelia linked to the Attwaters? Why did her mother leave the puzzle to be solved after her death? What secrets were the Attwaters hiding? This was engrossing, though right at the end the author might have made one speculative connection too many. (See what you think about that.) There were so many secondary characters in this (in both timelines) that I wished I'd had the Attwarer and Stone family tree drawn out for me, but since I consumed this as an audio book there was no chance of that. (Maybe it was included in the printed book.) Expect families, secrets, obsession and madness, a circus, an asylum romance, and fairy tales (though not the actual fairies themselves. This is a magical book without any kind of magic whatsoever, except maybe for the wind chime itself that draws true members of the family to Cliffside.