The “Mistress of Complications” returns with a meticulously plotted urban fantasy/supernatural thriller. Its hallmark, an intricate web of magical systems and relationships in a well-developed fantastical world. Yet at its heart, it’s about people we care about, how they live, love, and survive the forces of evil who would see them destroyed.
In this sequel to The Never Witch, JP McLean offers an ingenious illustration of the dangers of xenophobia. Two interwoven subplots converge at the climax in an epic battle to destroy a near-unstoppable assassin whose goal is to annihilate the Hexborn. That’s what this group of young soldiers call themselves. Others call them cursed. They are mixed blood, carrying the DNA of both witches and warlocks and persecuted by both, who fear their power. The Hexborn work like an intelligence team. They are the hunted hunting the hunter—their mission to execute this “killing machine.”
Meanwhile, in Vancouver, the sparks between Adeline (a magically barren witch carrying warlock magic) and Luke (a sexy warlock determined to teach her how to control her magic while winning her heart) explode into a fiery romance. The couple can now communicate telepathically and spend hours at his nature sanctuary where Adeline learns to draw her power from trees and hold it in check as Luke tests her. Adeline and Luke are two of the narrators. The third is Mia.
One of the leaders of the Hexborn, Mia is tasked with protecting Alice, a twelve-year-old telepath tied to the hunter’s signet ring. Alice leads the group across Canada as they pursue this monster who’s murdering innocent families. Adeline can not only hear Luke, she can hear Alice, and this is how the two entities converge to join forces against the hunter.
McLean transforms Vancouver into a magical underworld reminiscent of the Harry Potter stories. Gastown’s Arcane Alley “oozed a quiet menace aimed at non-magicals. Anyone who resisted their influence would find themselves in an empty alley with an overwhelming compulsion to leave.” Arcane Alley is where witches and warlocks go to buy supplies but here also “stolen artifacts, questionable potions, and magical tools of the trade—many fake—change hands.”
Adeline and her witchy sister, Sarah, are combing through archives at The Sanctuary, researching magically barren witches and telepathy as Adeline’s health declines. Having mixed magic is a dangerous and relatively unknown proposition. Could it kill her? Perhaps. The stakes are high.
Yet, there are moments to sink into the lushness of nature, the excitement of love, the tastes and textures of food, and to chuckle at Zane’s snarky t-shirts: “I didn’t mean to push your buttons. I was just looking for mute.”
Fans of Deborah Harkness (The Discovery of Witches) will appreciate McLean’s multi-faceted magical universe where a desire for the freedom to live pushes against cultural transgressions, rules, and prohibitions in an effort to alter the status quo.
McLean’s imagination is at its peak; her writing cinematic and sensory, fuelled by relentless action and sustained with tension and intensity. This is her third supernatural fantasy thriller series. She’s been the recipient of numerous honours for her Dark Dreams series and her six-book Gift Legacy series. Among them: an Eric Hoffer, CIBA and National Indie Excellence Awards, the UK Wishing Shelf Book Awards, and the Whistler independent Book Awards. McLean lives on Denman Island and is a favourite at Vancouver Island markets and festivals.
Torlée’s third and latest novel offers glimpses into the art world, exotic locales (decor, culture, and cuisines), philosophical concepts, and the interweaving of lives and histories to illustrate one universal theme: the complexity of motherhood.
Part One introduces several disparate characters who revolve around each other like planets in the night sky. At times, it’s hard to keep them straight. Twenty-six-year-old Aiden Quinn, the protagonist, is a despondent artist. His aunt, the woman who raised him when his mother couldn’t, has just died and, in his grief, he’s kicked out his girlfriend. A photograph in a magazine inspires a meeting in Vancouver with a man with an uncanny resemblance to Aiden’s long-deceased father. Turns out Uncle Stephen is “one of Canada’s best-known painters.” When Stephen realizes his nephew’s artistic potential, he offers him a chance at a new life and Aiden accepts, moving from gritty Downtown Eastside Vancouver to the glamour and glitz of life working with the El Hassans.
This is Torlée’s third book and, although it’s not described as a series, each of these character-driven books builds on another. Stephen was introduced in her first book, The Way Things Fall: a novel. We also meet Gabrielle Mazhar, an unhinged horsewoman who’s inherited an Egyptian stud farm; along with the perfect family, rich, hotelier Dominic El Hassan, his beautiful wife Amina, and their adorable children. Amina is the centre of Book Two, In Love With The Night. I’ve not read the first two books and was able to follow the story, but it would have been richer and simpler to digest if I had, due to the number of characters and detailed backstories. However, a few chapters in, things gel as we begin to travel between countries and locations.
In Part Two, we find ourselves in South America. Dominic’s in Patagonia with his perfect family. He takes his rather psychic son, Luka, to the Atacama Desert in northern Chile to view the night sky, and on their return, they meet up with Gabrielle who’s flown to Patagonia to check on horses. This chance meeting inspires a diabolical plan that propels us into Part Three. Now, we’re in Morocco, where we glimpse the true natures of our flawed characters and the lengths they’re willing to go to get what they desire. Here too, we meet Fate: “A living, breathing force out there orchestrating the details of our lives. It separates people and it brings them together.”
Dominic, who feels like a second protagonist, has an ethereal quality and is able to articulate this concept of Fate perfectly.
“Through the weaving of the countless paths of fate, the lives of the three of them under the stars tonight, the lives of people they loved in the past and would love in the future—all were meant to intersect, fuse inextricably together.”
It is the desire to be a mother that fuels Gabrielle’s criminality, and the natural force of motherhood that propels pregnant Amina to save her daughter. Aiden cannot forgive his mother for disappearing and leaving her sister to mother him, even though she’s still alive and has been desperately trying to reconnect.
To summarize this story does it an injustice. Torlée’s a masterful writer and her rich and rhythmic, cinematic prose propels us through art galleries and exotic locations into these dramatically twisted lives. The book is like a living photograph—the reader becomes immersed in the intrinsic beauty of the far landscape then zooms into the quiet closeness of a character’s soul in an intimate moment. Through photographs and paintings we are drawn in. For example, take this description of Italy, drawn from a photograph.
“Here was the house itself, a fading creamy yellow, caper flowers growing tenaciously in cracks of stone, frothing mounds of wild lavender in the gardens at the side. The pictures showed terraced vineyards and lilac skies, the medieval towers of the walled city in the distance.”
Torlée loves stars, the concept of fate, travel and the desert—motifs that define her books. In fact, she met her husband Jürgen in Cairo, on the edge of the desert with the pyramids in sight. They now live in midtown Toronto.
Lovers of travel and culture will become immersed; in fact, this would be a good book to pack on your journeys. Armchair travellers will love the tangible sketches of Chile, Egypt, Morocco, even Toronto and Vancouver, and the in-depth emotional journeys of these divergent, yet intimately connected souls, as they take A Long Walk With Fate.
I picked up this massive paperback in one of our little free libraries (a weatherproof outdoor bookcase where people leave and take books.) I physically can’t pass by one without at least a sweep through the titles. I thought it might tell the tale of Hy Brasil, a mythical island off the West Coast of Ireland, that only reveals itself in the shifting mists every seven years. The name comes from the Old Irish Uí Breasail, meaning descendants of Breasal (mighty/beautiful.)
This story was not at all what I was expecting. I read the entire book of 438 pages entranced. It contained no fantasy whatsoever and I simply couldn’t put it down. Elphinstone’s Hy Brasil is as much a treasure as the Spanish goblet Jared finds while diving off the coast.
“… it was a delicate green, dark at the base, and translucent in the bowl, like seawater … The stem widened out into a fluted base; the shape under his fingers was like overlapping petals. There were circular ridges under the bowl of the goblet. And on the side of the bowl … a galleon” (80).
Hy Brasil was published in 2002, but the author, Margaret Elphinstone, Scottish poet and retired university English professor, says she wrote it in 1996/97 while spending a happy, inspired year at Central Michigan University as a visiting professor. I wish I’d been one of her students.
The story is a mystery/thriller/adventure inspired by the author’s love and understanding of several real and literary islands.
“My island of Hy Brasil is also Caliban’s, Robinson Crusoe’s, Gulliver’s, Long John Silver’s, Peter Pan’s, Ralph’s, and a host of other more or less fictional characters. It seems that people needed to believe in Hy Brasil. Until 1865 it actually appeared on Admiralty charts.”
Professor Elphinstone grew up on Shetland and taught at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. Being fond of islands myself, I was absorbed by the lyrical descriptions and kept flipping back to the map (using my phone magnifier) to locate key characters and settings:
Sidony Redruth, an Englishwoman, who fraudulently won a writing competition, has been tasked with writing a series of travel books beginning with Hy Brasil, something that combines a guidebook with a narrative and first-hand experience—like Bill Bryson and my friend Bill Arnott write. Sidony begins her stay in St. Brandon’s, a town with pastel townhomes reminiscent of Ireland or St. Johns, Nfld., but she soon moves in with Lucy. Sidony’s first line hooked me: “I would hate to have to choose, but I think I’d rather have traveling than sex.” Fortunately, for Sidony, both are readily available.
Lucy Morgan, whose great-grandfather was a pirate, lives alone in her family’s fantastical old castle, Ravnscar, until joined by Sidony.
Jared Honeyman inhabits a lonely seabird haven on the Isle of Despair. Since the lighthouse is automated, Jared lives in the third bungalow of three and spends many hours monitoring the new gannet population (his paying gig) while exploring the Cortez, a sunken Spanish wreck (1611) off the coast for which he’s been given exclusive rights of salvage.
Ishmael Pereira, a businessman who lives at Ferdy’s Landing with his family and supports Jared’s salvage attempts along with Per, who drives the boat.
Columbo McAdam, journalist and friend of Lucy’s, introduces Sidony to Finnegan’s on the High Street, a lovely book shop with yummy doughnuts. Columbo’s best line: “[History] can’t be changed, therefore it has to be forgiven” (164).
Hy Brasil sits on the North Atlantic Ridge, has three mountains and is volatile. In fact, the eruption of Mount Brasil triggers a coup d’etat against the corrupt government. Sidony climbs Mt. Brasil alone and peers down the crater into the active volcano in an exceedingly well-written chapter (24).
Like any good mystery, there are murders, cover-ups and political intrigue. Add to that: piracy, sunken treasure, drug-smuggling, love affairs, eco-adventure, an active volcano, and incredibly detailed, sensory, lyrical writing and you have a masterpiece. This book’s a keeper that I’ll return to again and again. Someone needs to produce this story as a film.
Be prepared to crave raspberry jam when reading this YA cozy fantasy by Sarah Beth Durst. It’s even dedicated “To Adam, with love and raspberry jam.” And if that’s not enough there are raspberry chapter heads. I had to go buy a jar of jam and a loaf of sourdough. True.
The story hits all the tropes of cozy fantasy:
Personal Problem: Kiela’s an introverted, orphaned librarian who fled the city of Alyssium, after working in the Great Library for many years, because a fire ravaged her library during an uprising. She escaped with her sidekick, Caz, a wise and sentient spider plant (and only friend) and several spell books which will bring about her demise if she gets caught with them. Now, she’s on the island of Caltrey where she was born and once lived in a charming cottage with her parents. After working in the library so long, she doesn’t know how to talk to people or make friends. The garden is wildly overgrown and the cottage needs a good cleaning. Plus where or where will I hide these contraband spell books?
Community Problem: “the magic is unbalanced, too concentrated in some areas and absent in others” (110). Weather manipulation by sorcerers? Climate change? Aha. The Emperor of Alyssium has been hoarding all the magic for years so the outer islands are in decline. Kiela wants to fix this problem using her salvaged spell books. To do that, she’ll need the help and support of the everyone on the island, especially when an Imperial Investigator arrives.
Idyllic Lifestyle: Kiela needs to make a living. When she notices a tangle of ancient raspberry bushes out behind the cottage, she uses a spell to “accelerate plant growth.” Soon she has so many big juicy raspberries she realizes the only thing to do is make jam. Of course, why not open a jam shop?
Romantic Subplot: a kind, handsome, young man lives nearby. Larran is a “wears a tool belt” builder type of guy who often strips off his shirt to dive in the sea and tend to his merhorses. His creatures help the community by driving the fish into the fishers’ nets. Due to the magical problems, his merhorses have stopped reproducing. Larran makes it known that he’s interested in Kiela, but Kiela doesn’t seem to trust or understand him. So a slow burn romance throbs beneath the surface. Thank god, he’s persistent and can keep a secret. It doesn’t hurt that he looks great swimming shirtless in the sea.
Quirky Characters: Bryn is a furry deer/goat-like creature who runs the yummy bakery and becomes Kiela’s friend and champion in record time. Eadie is her friendly centaur friend. There are winged cats and merhorses. And not long after they arrive, Kiela and Caz, the spider plant, create a sentient cactus by accident who communicates many thoughts with one syllable: “Meep!”
This is a “feel good” story, In fact the author says, I wanted to write a book that felt like a warm hug. As I wrote each chapter, I’d ask myself, Does this make me smile? —Sarah Beth Durst
The story won’t just make you smile, it will teach you about magic and spell casting. “Spells have to be cast with very specific words and ingredients” (95). It will appeal to your inner witch.
Durst is a masterful writer, lyrical and original. The cover is gorgeous and the book has violet-painted-edges, though I might have gone with raspberry myself. All in all, this book will entrance you, possibly even heal you.
But when she stepped out from the canopy of green, the blue smacked into her, and she stopped and just stared. It was the vastness of the blue that was so breathtaking, as well as the variation: the bleached blue-white of the sky near the sun, the deeper blue of the sky near the horizon, the slate blue of the clouds, the black-blue and green-blue and fathomless blue of the sea, all contrasted against the pale sand of the shore, the bright colors of the houses, and the dark green of the trees (90).
How beautiful is this cover? Art by Lulu Chen. Cover design by Angela Carlino. The book also comes with beautifully painted fore-edges.
This was my first foray into Young Adult Cozy Fantasy and it transported me right back to my childhood days of reading in the orchard beneath the apricot tree on hot summer afternoons. A Baltimore oriole made her nest there and it swayed in the breeze like a lady’s fuzzy silk stocking.
Cozy Fantasy is one of the newest trends and it comes with specific tropes, the most defining being: zero violence, an idyllic lifestyle, low tension, and a personal/community problem for the protagonist to solve. These stories are may-your-wishes-all-come-true kind of books that keep the reader in their grip without relying on murder and mayhem.
Calisa, our sixteen-year-old hero, leaves bustling New York and her cheating boyfriend, at the request of her two moms and arrives at her great aunt Zee’s inn in paradisical Vermont. Only The Faraway Inn is no paradise. It’s dirty and dilapidated. In fact, Calisa falls through the porch on her approach and gets stuck, much like Alice in Wonderland. Problem-solving is a key trait of the main character. Moreover, her ancient, crotchety aunt doesn’t know she’s coming and demands she leave. So much for a spending her summer holiday in the country. Calisa negotiates a three-day probation and decides to earn her worth by cleaning like mad and baking cakes for afternoon tea.
She also meets handsome Jack, who is the only employee at this huge inn, and is a little sad as his father’s gone missing. Their romance, of course, is flirtatious, never going beyond soft, warm kisses which are absolutely necessary in the moment, and remains secondary to the main problem. Keep the inn in business. With just the two of them, it’s something of a chore.
The story is scrumptious with just the right dose of calamity.
It reminded me very much of The Spiderwick Chronicles (ancient house, whispering voices, eccentric creatures) and Alice in Wonderland (a portal fantasy with its many doors that absolutely must not be opened.) Auntie Zee insists upon two rules: don’t ask questions and don’t open doors. Of course, we know what that means.
The inn is populated by eccentric characters from other realms: a moving statue, a magic teakettle, fireplaces that seem to light themselves, and exotic creatures—a dryad, a small dragon who takes to Calisa, and a lovely gent who’s a night owl and whips up decadent hot chocolate with vanilla.
“Standing at the counter amid the stacks of pots and bowls was a fifty-to-sixty-year-old man, as thin as a skeleton, with wild white hair that poked out at all angles and skin so pale he looked nearly translucent. He was wearing all black—a black turtleneck, black slacks, and a single black gem earring—and humming “Ain’t No Sunshine” as he poured milk into a bowl” (46).
With brings me to food porn. What’s more cozy than tea and cakes? Maybe mac and cheese? Details. It’s all in the details. Calisa begins with pancakes; after all, it is a bed and breakfast, there are guests to feed, and Jack shows her umpteen varieties of locally-made maple syrup (blueberry, salted caramel, elderberry among them.) Without technology (another trope) she must rely on an old cookbook to learn to bake. No cell phones, no internet, no computers, not even an old television. This in itself intrigues me.
My only complaint is that the story seemed to have a long, drawn-out ending as every question posed and every thread pulled was thoroughly tied. I drifted off to sleep feeling, well, cozy, and yet excited to try another of Durst’s books, The Spellshop. Hah. I may have to give this genre a try myself.
This book is one of the readings at North Island Distance Education School in British Columbia, Canada, for English First Peoples 12. It reads like a young adult novel, which is not surprising since David A. Robertson won his accolades for children’s writing and graphic novels—twice he won the Governor General’s Literary Award, also the TD Canadian Children’s Literature Award, and the Writer’s Union of Canada Freedom to Read award. Published in 2022, this is his first adult novel.
I found his writing detailed, repetitive, and slow-paced (he did this, she did that). He tells more than he shows, and it lacks the edgy, lyrical style I’ve come to appreciate in books by other Indigenous authors like Cherie Dimaline, Eden Robinson, Louise Erdrich, and Drew Hayden Taylor, though it is honest and does reveal his feelings and experiences.
Forty-year-old Matthew feels empty and estranged from his wife and sixteen-year-old daughter. He suffers with anxiety and is weaning himself off a longtime Xanax addiction. To fill the void, he sends some flirty texts to a co-worker—that’s it, no sex, just flirty texts. His daughter Holly (birth name Hallelujah) who suffers with anxiety and teenage angst, discovers his texts and calls him on it.
“And if you want me to stop drinking this much, then I’ll make you a deal: how abut you stop texting some bitch that isn’t my mother!”
The story is divided into two parts. Part One details the problems plaguing this Winnipeg inner city family of Cree-Scottish heritage and goes on a little too long for this reader. It takes a family tragedy to shock them into action. Matthew realizes he must go back to the land where his father grew up on the old family trapline, and Holly realizes she must come along.
Robertson is a member of Norway House Cree Nation, and he drew inspiration from his own life for this novel. It reads like a fictionalized account of his memoir, Black Water, where he writes about a trip to Norway House to deal with his own mental health issues, specifically anxiety. Robertson went accompanied by his Cree father, who like Charlie McIvor in the story, is a minister. In The Theory of Crows, Robertson changes the focus to reflect estranged relationships within his own family, especially his eldest daughter.
Part Two (Chapter 17) ramps up into a survival story and that’s where the action begins. The writing style becomes more poetic too.
“They flew through the clearing (the crows) like shards of night fallen to earth, then landed on trees.”
I’d personally liked to have seen the first half condensed and the second half expanded. Most of us understand the estrangement between fathers and teenaged daughters but wilderness camping is more elusive. Norway House lies five hundred miles north of Winnipeg and was a Hudson’s Bay Company depot in the 19th Century. Matthew and Holly, both who’ve been raised in Winnipeg and have few outdoor skills, aren’t prepared or equipped to deal, which ups the stakes. Fortunately, Holly is a water-polo champion, something that saves these inexperienced city folks, when Matthew takes a canoe out on the river and makes a wrong turn. Mosquitoes and black flies are mentioned but I had to imagine what it was really like from my own experiences in Northern Ontario.
The story is split between their points-of-view. Unable to speak to his daughter, but desperate to let her know how much he cares, Matthew writes a series of letters to Holly which reveal his backstory and are woven throughout the text.
Several themes reverberate through the story: identity and belonging; the legacy of residential schools; the impact of Christianity; self harm; intergenerational trauma; Indigenous girls at risk; blood memory; and especially connection to the land.
The book has a wonderful cover and title: The Theory of Crows, but it’s not until the very end that we’re given a glimpse into that theory.
“Your moshom, he told me about this. He told me that you remembered the land, even if you’d never been on the land before. Your grandfather used to say that the land could remember you. It works the same way with crows, Hallelujah. They remembered him, they would remember me, and they remember you. They pass these things down through the generations.”
