War for the Oaks by Emma Bull was the May book for my Women of Fantasy book club. I finished it in record time.
From Amazon:
Emma Bull’s debut novel, War for the Oaks, placed her in the top tier of urban fantasists and established a new subgenre. Unlike most of the rock & rollin’ fantasies that have ripped off Ms. Bull’s concept, War for the Oaks is well worth reading. Intelligent and skillfully written, with sharply drawn, sympathetic characters, War for the Oaks is about love and loyalty, life and death, and creativity and sacrifice.
Eddi McCandry has just left her boyfriend and their band when she finds herself running through the Minneapolis night, pursued by a sinister man and a huge, terrifying dog. The two creatures are one and the same: a phouka, a faerie being who has chosen Eddi to be a mortal pawn in the age-old war between the Seelie and Unseelie Courts. Eddi isn’t interested—but she doesn’t have a choice. Now she struggles to build a new life and new band when she might not even survive till the first rehearsal.
I loved this book. Loved it. Loved it.
…mild spoilers ahead!
The only thing I thought was a little bit odd was the way Bull constantly described what everyone was wearing/what they looked like. Beyond this, everything was great.
I liked the writing style even though I didn’t understand why we kept being told what everyone was wearing. It flowed well, and the story was very engaging. I did have to look up quite a bit about British, Celtic, and Scottish folklore - well, I didn’t have to look up too much stuff but I ended up reading a lot about it anyway - and that’s what I liked most about the book. It explained enough for the reader to understand but didn’t treat the reader like an idiot by going into too much explanation.
Considering how I didn’t like the main character for April’s book (Eden in Four and Twenty Blackbirds), I was a little wary when the main character’s name was Eddi. No real reason, except they were similar names, but I was still a little wary.
But I ended up liking Eddi much better than Eden. Eddi reacted the way I felt she should have reacted when chased down by a phouka. She was wary of him and didn’t want to be in the situation she was in - which I thought was NORMAL. I hate it when a completely normal human character gets kidnapped by some supernatural entity and just go along with it without question. Her doubt (and reactions) gave the book realism that sometimes I feel are lacking in urban fantasy books. I thought it was a nice touch that Eddi wasn’t comfortable with Meg slaving away for her, because I wouldn’t be comfortable with it either. I liked the Eddi explained to Meg that she could help save Willy just because it was the right thing and Eddi was asking her to do it. I really, really, really liked Eddi.
I liked that Eddi played guitar - rock and roll - and could sing, but while she did this and made her living off being in a bar band, she wasn’t SUPER!famous and they weren’t constantly talking about how she should be SUPER!famous. I also liked how while there was a lot about music in the book, there wasn’t so much that it got in the way of the story.
I thought the resolution was a little bit weak - the Queen of Air and Darkness’s magic vs. Eddi’s band’s magic, the way mortals sometimes have magic and music amplifies it.
Carla was the best girlfriend I always wished I had. Dan was kind of irrelevant, except to the band, but was there to give Carla more depth. I didn’t quite understand why Hedge was the way he was, and I kind of wish Bull had gotten into Hedge a little deeper because he was really interesting. Willy was…skeevy in a way, but got less so as you realized he was trying to understand what humans were like.
Then, there was the phouka. I really loved him. He was so…I don’t know…great is the best word. The way he talked was totally adorable and not normal, which was good, because he wasn’t normal. He was charming and pleasantly deceptive and overall just super adorable. I loved the way he described his love of Eddi to her. I will say the way the romance aspect of the story progressed a bit predictably; the moment Willy showed up and the phouka looked at him warily I knew that Eddi was going to start with Willy and end up with the phouka. I liked the phouka though, so it wasn’t one of those unbearable march-towards-the-inevitable-hideous-end things. I was rooting for him.
A major positive was that there were people/faeries/characters of color in this book. Dan was black (though he didn’t play a MAJOR role, he was a good supporting character and uber!cute when he was with Carla). The phouka also had dark skin, and he was central to the story. I didn’t like how, in Four and Twenty Blackbirds, Eden was described as a light skinned dark person who could have passed for white or something like that (I can’t remember exactly what the description was and the book is not close by) and there was this very clear distinction of light skinned blacks being the “normal” characters and the dark skinned blacks being the weirdos. Maybe it wasn’t intentional but it came across that way. Here the characters who weren’t white played better roles. I don’t usually get into the racial stuff I sometimes see on the internet, but in these two particular books it seemed kind of obvious to me, so I’m touching on it here.
I felt there could have been a little bit more on the faerie motivations and their desire to have this particular area of land. There were, for all intents and purposes, the good faeries and the bad faeries, and they were fighting over an area of land without really explaining why, except that was “what they did.” I suppose I might have missed the reason, but assuming I didn’t, it was a bit ill-defined.
Last thing - IT WAS SO 80s! I loved it! Eddi wore vintage stuff and they played punk rock and it was just so 80s! There were phone booths and no computers and people could make a living being a bar band! <3
I highly recommend War for the Oaks. It’s engaging and fun - not too long or too dense. I can’t say enough good things about it. There’s so much to love.
Four and Twenty Blackbirds by Cherie Priest is a story that I really, really, really wanted to like. And I thought I did for awhile.
From Amazon:
The classic Southern gothic gets an edgy modern makeover in Priest’s debut novel about a young woman’s investigation into the truth of her origins. What Eden Moore digs up in the roots of her diseased family tree takes her across the South, from the ruins of the Pine Breeze sanitarium in Tennessee to a corpse-filled swamp in Florida, and back in time to the Civil War, when the taint in her family bloodline sets in motion events building only now to a supernatural crescendo. Priest adds little new to the gothic canon, but makes neo-goth chick Eden spunky enough to deal with a variety of cliché menaces—a scheming family matriarch, a brooding Poe-esque mansion and a genealogy greatly confused with inbreeding—that would have sent the genre’s traditional wilting violets into hysterics. Eden is a heroine for the aging Buffy crowd, and her adventures will play best to postadolescent horror fans.
I’ve been looking forward to this book because of both the title and the cover art. This is another entry from my Women of Fantasy book club. The cover art is a bit spooky, which I love and begs me to read. Also, in my own weird way, I’m obsessed with nursery rhymes. They all have secret meanings. I actually bought my mom a book on secret nursery rhyme meanings, which she asked for, but which I will probably get to first.
So, I dove into this story. I found out too late that the title has little to do with the actual story. Disappointing.
…beware, mild spoilers ahead!
I enjoyed the premise. Eden sees ghosts who try to protect her from him. Who is he? As Eden gets older, she discovers more and more about her history, which is very mysterious, of course, and she discovers who he is.
I liked Priest’s writing style. I also enjoyed, deeply, the relationship between Eden and her aunt, Lulu. The idea that sometimes things change and never go back/are never the same again is something I relate to and understand completely, having gone through a life-changing family experience.
The conflict with Malachi I found enjoyable. He’s like some damn obnoxious bug that just wouldn’t.go.away. As well as the old woman, Tatey. They were amusing.
But the biggest problem I had with the story was that I didn’t like the resolution. It just didn’t seem realistic to me - at all, in any way. I don’t want to say that I expect total reality in my fantasy series, but this is urban fantasy, and I expect some sense of “this could really be happening.” Considering these people were mere mortals living in modern America, the idea of someone surviving for 150 years through a concoction of blood, marsh grass, and chanting (as well as a child being reincarnated over and over again), I just didn’t buy. There wasn’t enough explanation for me to really believe that the antagonist harnessed his magic. In Prospero Lost and Prospero in Hell, the magic makes sense. You understood how it worked, and why. Here, it’s just evil black magic that just kind of…goes on. It was revenge, it was a desire for immortality, it was…just not something I could realistically believe. The foundation of the magic just wasn’t solid enough, and the motives for the magic weren’t well justified. There were just a whole bunch of half reasons that didn’t seem to fully develop.
The second major problem I had with the book: I didn’t like Eden. I thought I did, at first, but as I reflected on the book, the more and more I just couldn’t like her. As someone who is around Eden’s age when the story takes place, I felt as though I shouldn’t be aware of exactly how stupid she was. There were a whole bunch of moments where I decided this girl was really too stupid to be living. She was smart in a lot of ways, but not smart enough to come out of the experience alive. I also felt Priest spent a lot of time having Eden talk about her own attributes instead of showing Eden’s attributes. Some of these attributes also seemed to come out of nowhere as Eden needed them - it was very Mary Sue.
(Side note: I found Cora the most interesting of the secondary characters, and would have liked to see her relationship with Eden develop, but she disappeared early on. The end of her story came so suddenly and disappointingly that I was a little rattled by it - the way it was completely glossed over and thrown in there, as though it was just a detail that needed to be wrapped up. Eden doesn’t even stop to feel a pang of sadness or anything. The time dedicated to Cora early on warrants a bit more than the one sentence mention towards the end of the book.)
But even with Eden’s slight Mary Sue-ness, there was something about Eden that was just obnoxious. I don’t know if was the way she thought she was tough (but stupid, which she never managed to mention) or the way she seemed to go out of her way to be the typical “I know everything” young adult, but it was really.really.annoying.
The last major issue I had with the story was the fact that to understand it, you have to literally diagram Eden’s family tree. Too many people who were related distantly or in more than one way (we’re talking brother/cousins here). It was ridiculously hard to keep track of who was who and what their relationship was to everyone else. I had to keep going back and rereading parts just to understand who was related to who and how they were related. I’m not a stupid person, but I couldn’t keep it straight in my head, and I found that irritating.
Overall, I can’t say I felt good at the end of this book. I really wanted to. I liked the premise a lot. I liked the magic, the ideas, the very weak foundation the story was built on. The book was too short to really get into that foundation, which was disappointing, and is keeping me from really recommending the book. And unlike at the end of Prospero Lost, I don’t feel any real need to go on to the second story.
Yes, there are two more Eden Moore stories…that I’ve added to my Amazon wishlist, by the way, but I don’t really intend to buy. Someone might buy them for me if they’re looking for gift ideas, that’d be fine. I’d read them. If I happen upon them at a used bookstore or a library sale (or something like that) for a good price, I’ll pick them up. Until then, farewell Eden. It’s been real.
