There are no dragons here, but you won’t miss them. Instead you’ll find a superb tale of faerie, music, and romance. Emma Bull and Steven Brust (also a well known fantasy author) were at one point two components of the band Cats Laughing, and Bull uses her musical knowledge and experience to great advantage here. Her descriptions of practice sessions and performances will resonate with any music fan, and she skillfully weaves this into a major component of her tale of Eddi, selected by the Seelie to invoke the boon of mortality on the battles of the faerie world. To protect Eddi until the time of the battle, a phouka is assigned to guard her, at times a formidable dog, at other times a whimsical human trickster. Though quite predictable, there is a slowly building romance between the two, and this defines both characters to a depth that is rare in fantasy, as each impacts on and reacts to the other, and wind their way into the reader’s heart.
The world of faerie is seen at a distance (even though the major characters are directly involved in some of the faerie battles), never fully explained or examined in detail, and this very indistinctness adds flavor, a bit of mystery, and charm to what is really a story of and about some of our deepest emotions. The final battle between Eddi and the Queen of Air and Darkness is extraordinarily different, drawing on the ‘magical’ emotional state that sometimes occurs between the makers and hearers of music, rather than swords, spells, talismans, or some hidden bit of arcane knowledge so common to the climax of most fantasy.
Different, powerful, skillfully told, this book is a charmer.
--- Reviewed by Patrick Shepherd (hyperpat)