Modern Day Fae

Today's rambling is a short story collection called The Modern Fae's Guide to Surviving Humanity edited by Joshua Palmatier and Patricia Bray.  I remember seeing the cover on Pinterest and just had to have it and this time judging a book by it's cover paid off.  This is a collection about the fae trying to adapt and live in modern times.  Here are a couple of my favorites.  As always SPOILERS AHEAD!

We Will Not Be Undersold by Seanan McGuire - I have always found Ms. McGuire's take on modern fae to be well done so I was not at all surprised to find I loved her contribution to this collection.  In this story we find a Wal-Mart like store that turns out to be run by the king of fairies. The best part is watching the human lover eventually give in to the idea and help the fairies optimize their business using things like the internet and other modern conveniences.  There are plenty of nods to the old ways, like when the king states on of the reasons for the store is to spread plastic (which does not hurt fairies) around the world to replace iron and steel (which is dangerous to them).  A fun and humorous take on the big box corporate store.

Changeling by Susan Jett - This is a great story because it reads like an old tale, set smack dab in the modern world.  This is the tale of Marisol, a young mother who has been told her baby was a stillborn.  She is trying to come to terms with this when her midwife figures out that her baby is not dead, only stolen by a fairy.  She teaches Marisol how to see the fae world and how to get her son back.  The feel of the story is so authentically old school and yet show's how the old world can slide right into ours with just a few adaptions. The author seems to have done her research on the customs and rules of the fairy world and applied them to this story beautifully. I love love loved it.

 The Roots of Aston Quercus by Juliet E. McKenna - This story features dryads and tree's and that makes me so very happy.  We read about a grove of trees that have been inhabited by dryads for thousands of years and is now being threatened by the development of a highway.  The dryads must learn about the modern world, interact with modern humans, and tackle politics to save their homes.  I loved how the author showed a race of beings who continually live within our world, and yet are apart enough from it to not always understand what is going on.  Watching the different dryads and their various knowledge of the different time periods and how they put it all together to save their home was inspiring and magical.

How Much Salt by April Steenburgh - The Selkie plays the starring role in this tale, and as Selkies have long been a favorite of mine, this story was bound to please.  We follow Carrick through the ages as his beach gets slowly taken over by humans.  As his family drifts away Carrick discovers an aquarium that holds a seal show.  Imagine his surprise when he finds it full of Selkies and run by one as well.  Turns out, that since so much of their home has been invaded, they came up with this show to be able to interact with humans, play, sleep, eat and just generally be content.  Carrick see's the wisdom in this and joins the show.  This is probably the best example of how a fae uses their special abilities to adapt to the new world.  I like how Carrick weighs the pros and cons and comes to his own conclusion.  Good story over all.

Hooked by Anton Strout - Here we have a very dark take on the Tinker Bell style of fairy.  This tale features a fairy who has gone so bad and so feral that she has been banished by her own kind.  Her way is to lure men to her glamoured house in Centeral Park with the promise of fantasy sex.  Once there she rips their hearts out and leaves their bodies to rot.  She is finally thwarted by a changeling who's parents had been killed in her rebellion. He has been sent to bring her back to the courts for justice.  He allows her to go through her spiel, letting her pull out her Tinker Bell act and revealing her power source before capturing her.   This story show's how dark our fantasy's can get and how the blending of fantasy and reality can be both awesome and dangerous.

These are just a few of the awesome, amazing stories in this collection.  Over all I loved the cohesion of the theme, the variety of authors, the different takes on the stories.  It was just really, really good.  I recommend it to anybody who likes fantasy, fairies, urban fantasy and/or short stories.  I give this collection 8 out of 10 glimmering wings.

What is your favorite blending of modern and ancient?  What is your favorite urban fairytale setting?  Do you still search for the fae like I do?

A Dryad, A Wizard And A Burning Spider Walk Into A Mess

Hello All, how is your week going?  I'm a wee bit exhausted, but hey I'm still alive and kicking so there is that.  How about a rambling?  Cool.  Today let's ramble about Codex Born, the second book in the Magic Ex Libris series by Jim C. Hines.  You may remember my absolute geek out love of the first book in the series, so you can imagine my excitement to start this second book.  Unfortunately, while still a good book, it did not live up to my admittedly over the top expectations.  But first, as always SPOILERS AHEAD!

We left our intrepid Libriomancer Isaac being reinstated as a researcher for the Porters and tasked with finding an ancient evil that seems to inhabit whatever realm it is that libriomancers pull from.  He is happily...if awkwardly in a relationship with Lena the dryad, and by proxy with Lena's other lover the psychiatrist Nidhi. At the start of each chapter, we get a bit of Lena's history.  From her "birth" as a tree, to her meeting various lovers and seeing how it affects her personality.  Isaac is working with Jeneta, a teenage girl who has shattered the notion that libriomancy does not work with e-readers.  While working with her he gets a call to investigate a potential wendigo murder.  While investigating, Lena's tree (which she lives in) gets attacked and infested with magical, mechanical bugs.  After some investigating they discover that a former colleague, who was a mechanical genius, created the bugs and in some way sent them to his abusive father when he died.  His father August Harrison is a bit of a sadistic freak, and has been recruited by an ancient, pre-Porter libriomancer like group to help return the souls of their leaders, who were imprinted in books hundreds of years ago for their own safety.  This leads to Isaac and his team investigating a group led by a person called Bi Sheng, who was able to use and teach a form of libriomancy before the Porter leader Gutenberg

started using it.  At some point Gutenberg decided the group was dangerous and attacked them, to save the teachings a group of students essentially imprinted themselves into specially prepared books to hopefully be retrieved at a later time.  This is where August comes into play.  The group who has been guarding the books recruited August and his mechanical bugs to kidnap Lena, after they learned of her potential ability to use her tree to create new bodies for the trapped souls.  Lena does this for one of the book's and the result is a body for the soul, but it is soon discovered that the soul was corrupted by the same dark entities that Isaac was researching.  During the battles we continue to learn that Gutenberg is much more of a dictator style leader then anything and he is willing to go to great lengths to protect his wizardly arts.  He says he has to be so harsh as to protect the world from the dark entities that are always looking to come through.  Chaos and death and fighting and geeky references occur and Isaac burns himself out in the final battle.  While this battle is happening he hears/sees an entity calling itself Meridiana before being overcome.  The good guys win, albeit at a high cost and we end with Jeneta apparently being infested by entities from her e-reader, setting up the second book.

Ok, so first the good.  Lena's story and how it unfolded was my favorite part of this book.  It was great to see where she came from and how she got where she is.  I enjoyed the concept of taking two lovers giving her a form of freedom.  If you remember in the last book we learned that she takes on the personality of her current lover and will do whatever it takes to keep them happy, so the idea of having two lovers with different personalities gives her some choice in who she is and what she does.  I liked the addition of Bi Sheng's group and their history, it adds an international/historical spin I find is lacking in many European centric fantasy stories.  I liked that the group was also not inherently good or bad, they just were and wanted a way to survive and return their long lost leaders. Also the burning spider Smudge will forever be AWESOME!  Now what I did not enjoys so much.  In the first book, the rules of the magic seemed fairly clear cut and made sense.  In this book (and I realize it is part of the story) the rules kind of explode and are altered to fit what needs to be done.  I get it in

some ways, Isaac is supposed to be a bit of a rouge and able to research and find new ways to use his magic...which is a pretty realistic idea, it just seemed he found ways around pretty much anything that got in his way with very little issues.   In general it seemed that "magic" and it's "rules" were played with fast and loose in this book, depending on the person magic could pretty much be used as a pat answer for almost everything, which to me gets a bit annoying, and I feel a bit of a cop out.  I also found the story to be a bit more muddled then the last book.  The histories don't seem consistent and their is a lot of vagueness about the "bad guys".  I'm not sure if this is to make a big reveal in later books, or the author does not have a clear idea of who the bad entities are or how they work.  Gutenberg is a big bully, and I am never sure why this group of obviously smart and talanted people follow him no questions asked.  I understand that he is the founder, has hundreds of years more experiance, and is a bit scary, but there is a lot more of them.  This is definitely a book in a series, and if you have not read the first book you will be hopelessly lost (in fact I had to go back to the first one to remind myself of what was going on), which is fine if the whole series ends up being a big cohesive story.  Overall it was a solid book, and I think if I did not fall so head over heels with the first book, I would have not been so nit picky about this second one.  I give this book 7 out of 10 enchanted acorns.
What is the feeling between love and dissapointment?  Can a 10 out of 10 book ever be followed?
How badly do you want the power libriomancy?