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

[jacey]

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.

Comments

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

I read Hunger Games and thoroughly enjoyed it, but I read it before a lot of the bandwagon dystopia books came out. I don't know how I'd feel about it if I'd already been saturated with similarly-themed books. For my money the first one was excellent, the second one was pretty good, but the third lost its way a bit and Katniss seemed to have no agency in it. It was still an essential read if you'd already enjoyed the first two, but certainly not the best one. If you like urban fantasy I've recently enjoyed the first outings in the Iron Druid series (Kevin Hearne: Hounded – Iron Druid #1) and the first Alex Verus novel (Benedict Jacka: Fated – Alex Verus #1). Though the two are in similar vein to each other they are both worth reading.