I find your lack of real conflict disturbing

 So, after seeing his book floating around and getting good reviews for a while now, I got TJ Klune's The House By the Cerulean Sea out of the library and took it for a test drive.

The plot centers around Linus, a caseworker at the Department in Charge of Magical Youth. He's been there for several year, investigating orphanages that house magical youth. His supervisor is a nasty boss, and acts oddly when Linus gets summoned before Extremely Upper Management and given a highly classified assignment to go evaluate an island orphanage off the coast. (We're never given much in the way of locations here, but given this reads a bit like Terry Gilliam, I pictured the orphanage as being off the coast of Scotland.)

He's given very little knowledge of what the residents are like, and the town nearest the island tends to looks with suspicion on the children and Mr. Parnassus, who runs the place. We find out fairly quickly the major concern is one Lucy (short for Lucifer), who is the Antichrist. There's also a Sprite, a gnome, a blob, a wyvern, and a werepomeranian. That the two adults on the island also turn out to be magical adults should not be a surprise to anyone. 

Most of the book is focused on Linus learning and helping the children while being castigated by Extremely Upper Management about losing his objectivity. And falling in love with Mr. Parnassus, but that never really becomes a major plot point until well after the climax. 

I mean, the overall theme about accepting people as the are without judgement I can get behind, and frankly, most readers of fiction spend so much time in other people's heads that I think the message is a case of the preacher giving his sermon to the choir. I mean, it's charming, but it really has no major emotional or physical conflict, beyond "Most of the townspeople hate us!", which in turn kind of falls on the whole "There are good people working to change that" trope.

While I might end up reading more of Mx. Klune's work at some point, I feel like this one is missing something to give it heft and oomph.

Hard scrabble magick

 So, a recent trip to the Book Loft piqued my curiosity about David R. Slayton's Adam Binder series, but they didn't have the first book in the series. Thankfully, the library did, so I'm now able to review White Trash Warlock having finished it.

So, our main character here is one Adam Binder, currently of Guthrie, Oklahoma, and the trailer court he lives in with Aunt Sue. As we meet Adam, he's busy trying to claim a hexed pool cue enchanted with bog iron and a saurian bone. (That there are fantasy creatures running around is the first big reveal.) Sam ends up talking to Tanner (who's Dad bought him the cue at a pawn shop in Denver) and winds up making out with him. (Adam being gay is the second big reveal.) Mind you, they guy who Tanner beat at pool prior to the make out session turns out to be what Adam thought was an extinct Saurian, which leads to Adam bargaining with the lizards to spare Tanner. 

This takes up about 3 chapters, then the meat of the story gets going, as Adam's successful brother, Doctor Robert Binder of Denver, texts Adam out of the blue because Robert's wife is evidently possessed. Robert doesn't particularly believe in or perceive the preternatural, but after finding his wife pushing a baby carriage around with a demon baby inside, he's forced to call his brother. 

Adam is justifiably upset about hearing from his older brother, since older brother had him institutionalized in high school. However, Adam does wind up driving to Denver on the advice of Aunt Sue.

When he gets there, we find out about an entity floating over Denver that eats Magick, and has begun causing problems for both the humans and the other less involved in this layer of reality species. Adam also manages to bind himself with a cop he just met, and find out his ex BF the elf is still around. 

Honestly, this was an engaging read that I really enjoyed. I loved the idea that reality is a sandwich, with humanity being the bologna in the middle, and elves, leprechauns, gnomes, etc existing in the mayo and lettuce. I enjoyed the idea that the Watchtowers changed anchors and presentation depending on where you were. (In Oklahoma, they're various plains landmarks; in Colorado,m they change based on the mountains.) About the only thing that bothered me was the alternating focus characters. While Adam is the main character, Robert/Bobby becomes the focus a few times. For me at least, that the narrative exchange was at random intervals bothered me.That's a minor gripe. 

It really fit the bill of what I was looking for in reading material at the moment.

The oddness of it all.

 Now that spooky season is over, I started back into series fiction, starting with Christopher Pike's The Yanti, part 3 of his Alosha series. Which unfortunately is evidently the end of it, since TOR was going to release the next book after some kind of development deal happened. Given that update was posted in 2006, I think we can assume we'll never see book 4.

So, we spend the book flipping back and forth between the Yellow (Earth) world and the Green (Elemental) world, as Ali tries to figure out what the hell is going on, and how the hell her sister became The Shaktra. 

This includes figuring out her Fairie Father somehow became a Deus ex Machina in the race that's invading the Elemental and Human worlds, her sister Doren fell to temptation and became an avatar of the race invading, and figuring out how to free people turned into zombie, for lack of a better word. Oh yeah, and Nemi, who everyone thought was autistic, gets cured, gets revealed as a goddess, and is now running around the the Macguffin, the Yanti. 

Quite a bit is going on here, as you can tell. 

So, long story short, invading race is one of two, this one attracted to worlds bent of self destruction. We find this out as Ali enters the chamber her sister was transformed in. We also find out here that Ra, her Tanzanian boyfriend, is also her fairie lover Jira, who died in the elemental realms jumping off a cliff. 

Doren, in human form as Sherri, has a bomb, and plans to use the connected caves to cause 7 concurrent volcanic eruptions to cover the invasion of Earth by her Fairie form's Elemental army. 

We wind up with Ali in the human world, running around trying to fix this. Her Dad; Sherri's ex, Hector; Cindy; and Nemi all wind up running around together in the Human world. Ali, having woken up her fairie body, now has Geea running around the elemental world, taking possession of the dragoin armies and trying to stop the invasion. 

It's exceptionally convoluted, but it somehow stays together right up until the cliffhanger ending, which will probably not be resolved any time soon. 

I guess we can hope someday the rights get fixed so we can find out what happens next.