Strange Toys

Author

Jon Del Arroz

Her father's been pronounced dead. Destructive earthquakes ravage the countryside. An invading army looms over the horizon. And Zaira's day is just getting started...

Abandoned at an early age, Zaira von Monocle found life as the daughter of a great adventurer to be filled with hard work...

Author	Evangeline Walton
ISBN	0020264739

The Song of Rhiannon, a retelling of the Third Branch of the Mabinogion, isn't as powerful as The Children of Llyr, which is a relief, in a way. There's a time of healing for the characters, as well as what they suffer during the action of the story, and there's a happy end for them as well. It continues to follow...

Author	CLAMP
ISBN	1591820855

More in my explorations of the cross-connected CLAMP multiverse. This is one of the earlier and thus foundational works in the whole teetering superstructure. I was interested to see how characters and themes recycled and refined in later works had their starts.

Three 8th-grade girls on...

Author

Danielle Ellison

Never leave home without salt.

Penelope is a witch, part of a secret society protecting humans from demon attacks. But when she was a child, a demon killed her parents—and stole her magic. Since then, she’s been pretending to be something she’s not, using her sister’s magic to hide...

Author	Lexie Elliott
ISBN	0399586954

An eerie, old Scottish manor in the middle of nowhere that’s now hers.

Ailsa Calder has inherited half of a house. The other half belongs to a man who disappeared without a trace twenty-seven years ago—her father.

Leaving London behind to settle the inheritance from her mother’s...

Author

Linda Haldeman

Review originally published at Fantasy Literature

(2.5 stars)

I love fantasies set at colleges, so when I heard about Linda Haldeman’s Esbae: A Winter’s Tale (1981), I had to track it down and read it. The titular Esbae is a spirit who is found wanting by some greater power, and...