Not only is Maria’s obsessive devotion to Dante probably clinically classifiable, but Dante himself is just not interesting or believable as an object of such devotion. Now, I recognize that in real life, codependent or obsessive relationships are often not comprehensible to those outside of them. But this is fiction, people. We’re supposed to believe that Dante is somehow Worth It. Yet the author did not persuade me of this. For one thing, he’s so rarely around that we hardly get to know him. This problem could have been alleviated with some character-based flashbacks, or with some internal monologues related specifically to Dante’s wonderful personality or admirable characteristics. But, again, no. Dante remains personality-less, and therefore incomprehensible as an object of such dedication, and all that we really see drawing Maria to him is the sex. Which does seem to be something of a fixation for both of the characters, seeing as how that is the prime way we see them interacting with each other. Now, maybe it is possible for two people to maintain a decades-long, wholeheartedly devoted relationship based purely on physical attraction. But even if that is possible, those aren’t the sort of characters I want to read an entire book about. Unfortunately, I apparently just did.

Content note: Yeah, there are a fair number of sex scenes, the majority of them more awkward than explicit, but definitely “adult”. There’s also some bad language.

Taylor’s prose is as graceful, gothic, and gorgeous as the streets of Prague on which her story opens, but just as significant is her skill in developing the story, as she introduces tensions and mysteries, develops them masterfully, and creates resolutions that feel both startling and inevitable. I don’t want to give away anything of the plot by describing details here, because part of the book’s charm is the gradual revelation of its central mysteries, as it moves seamlessly from street-scene vibe to high-fantasy drama. The whole structure is immensely satisfying. The worldbuilding, too, is entirely effective, evoking a variety of locales both real and fantastical often with only a few well-chosen details. And upholding all the melodrama, the Romeo-and-Julietness, the love-as-strong-as-death emo-intensity, there’s the masterfully crafted prose. The story had won me over long before I even realized how awesome the melodrama was.

I would be remiss not to mention the book’s central conceit here; the “in a world where” setting draws somewhat from urban/paranormal fantasy tropes, and includes an ancient, cosmic battle between angelic seraphim and demon-like chimaera. However, it quickly becomes clear in the story that these beings are not remotely related to the Christian concepts of angels and demons. Though they are opposed, their power struggle has nothing to do with moral right and wrong, and there is no God-like figure in the story. Once I realized this, I actually became much more comfortable with the book’s use of the angels/demons trope, since it was so entirely fantastical; there’s no connection to real-life spiritual conflict, and the author does not appear to have an anti-Christianity axe to grind.

Of course, one could still argue (as I actually do believe) that the romantic soulmates/you-complete-me trope is morally problematic. And the implied extra-marital sex is certainly an issue. However, considering how many YA books are out there wherein the author goes out of her way to emphasize that Sex Is Cool, But Tough Girls Don’t Need Marriage, it could have been a lot worse. The book calls out for a sequel, so as it is there is no resolution to the story’s central conflict, but the author emphasizes hope even in the midst of much darkness and sorrow; in spite of all the drama, the story certainly lacks the gloom of many popular recent YA books. Essentially, the book is escapist fiction, yes, but beautifully crafted escapist fiction!

Oh yes, and that sequel? I’m preordering it.

Content warning: There is some sexual content, most of it references in dialogue.

This book has similar elements and a similar feel to darker and more ambiguous works of urban fantasy such as the Dresden Files – there’s a nod to Harry Dresden on the third page, and Jim Butcher provided cover quotations – but there’s no sex and less graphic violence or disturbing content than you’d expect to encounter in a typical urban fantasy setting. Not only that, but Alex is a principled fellow; he disapproves of the movers and shakers of the magical world because they are too inclusive in their attitude toward Dark mages (hence his falling out with the powers that be). And the Dark mages’ philosophy, one which Alex cannot accept, revolves around their belief in the relativity of right and wrong and the supremacy of power.

What with all this, you’d think the book would feel “sanitized” or genre-defying, but there’s enough cityscape (London! fun!) and enough genuine evil in the villains to keep things squarely in the genre. It actually took me awhile to realize how essentially moral the story’s set-up was, simply because it felt like I was reading a more conventionally ambiguous urban fantasy novel. Plus, there are enough intriguing hints (and a few details) about Alex’s dark past to keep him interesting and believable as an imperfect person trying to do the right thing. (Not only does he have a dark past, but it is this dark past which – believably – drives his opposition to Dark philosophy.) His friend/side-kick Luna, who suffers from a curse which prevents her from getting close (physically) to anyone without causing that person harm, is also an interesting and sympathetic character. And there are enough hints about the history of the mages’ hidden world – as well as more mundane world-building details – to keep the reader buying into the story and interested in learning more. Overall, I found the book enjoyable and entertaining, and if I didn’t like it as much as I like the Dresden Files, I would also probably find it less problematic to recommend to a wider audience.

Anytime you have a plot dealing with the ability to see or predict the future, you also run into the age-old conflict between fate and free will. Many SF books and films have dealt with this conflict in interesting and thought-provoking ways, but this is not one of those SF books. Of course the author comes down on the side of free will (what would be the use of seeing the future as a superpower otherwise?), with the “future” actually existing in Alex’s vision only as a chain of possibilities, each of which depends on decisions yet to be made. Yet Alex’s power is clearly here as a character and plot device only, not as an excuse to explore a philosophical conundrum. Which is just as well. The story is still fun without philosophy.

Content warning: There is some strong bad language (employed mostly by the evil characters).

To mix things up a bit, Lawhead tells two stories simultaneously – Daniel and Freya’s underground adventure as teens, and the beginnings of their involvement as young adults in a new eruption in the ancient good-versus-evil conflict. Meanwhile, a third character, a detective named Alex who investigates scenes of supernatural conflict, discovers patterns of violence and suicide in a Scottish village and heads north to check it out. In spite of the fact that the author is thus essentially telling four stories here, the book’s pacing never falters. Each time the narrative switched settings or perspectives, I was hooked in immediately. Though the three modern narratives are extremely different in feel – with Daniel drawn into a Faerie world, Alex out monster-hunting, and Freya undergoing truly creepy mind control – I still sensed that the author was in control of each of them, and that the variations in tone were intentional. Even though the word-to-word writing style was only satisfactory rather than stellar (occasionally I really wondered what the editor was thinking!), I felt that the plot was well-crafted and the pacing excellently executed.

I enjoyed the book’s use of various English myth/legend traditions – the “realms thereunder” are connected with Anglo-Saxon culture, while the world Daniel visits is very much an English Faerie-land. (The book’s title is actually taken from The Ballad of the White Horse – huge bonus points for that!) I could tell that the adventurous tale was supported with plenty of solid research. I also enjoyed the author’s development of his characters. Daniel and Freya felt unique, rather than simply being the obligatory boy-and-girl main characters. Indeed, though the story is in part about a young teen boy and girl, and the book will doubtless drawn teen readers, it has a very broad appeal – it’s being marketed as adult fiction, and I think it will please both teen and adult readers equally.

Unfortunately, this book is only the first in a trilogy, and this appears to be one of those trilogies where the reader is left with about a million questions at the end of the first book. There were several moral questions left unresolved, not to mention a whole host of mysterious plot points. Indeed, the end of this volume, while completing the story of 13-year-old Daniel and Freya, leaves their story as adults barely started, making for an enticing ending. I wanted to read the sequel immediately, but unfortunately I’ll have to wait another year!

This book gets off to a great start, as Amy watches her parents put into cryogenic sleep. Her horror at the procedure and her determination not to leave them are palpable. Also vivid is her terror when she is not quite unconscious during her sleep. Afterwards, though, the story becomes . . . okay. There’s a mystery, and a romance, and a horrible dystopian society. I did enjoy reading it, and there are some good twists to the mystery. But there are some serious issues.

For one, I never really bought Elder as a product of a society where normal human emotions are viewed as insane. Yes, he’s a rebel, and he’s spent a bunch of time in the mental hospital and his best friends are there. But he didn’t really seem like he had internalized his society’s views to any degree, which really didn’t ring true for me. It is really, really hard to break out of the paradigm in which you were raised — and even if you do, usually you’re at least somewhat defined by your opposition to it.

The romance was also not terribly impressive — I liked both Amy and Elder, but I never got a sense for what was between them besides physical attraction and you-are-my-only-ally. Which . . . actually is a pretty likely foundation for a romance between teenagers, but I would have liked to see them bonding over something more.

I also had some issues with the dystopian elements. I did like the explanation of how the Godspeed ended up the way it did. But (slight spoiler) we’re told one of the main dangers in a generation ship is incest. The Godspeed‘s solution? Keep everybody on contraceptives all the time, except for the once-in-a-generation “Season” when everybody is drugged into heat, and then use genetic modification to fix the resulting incestuous children. Wouldn’t it be simpler to keep track of who is related to whom? And use contraception plus IVF if you wanted crazy amounts of control over the genetics of your next generation?

There are some good themes about the necessity of truth-telling. (And Amy is apparently a Christian, which is nice, though she has no guilt over sleeping with her boyfriend before she leaves Earth.) I especially liked the way that theme played out in Amy and Elder’s relationship. But though the book tries to raise the question of “Is it worth it to tell lies for the sake of social stability?”, the dilemma never becomes real because the heroes never have to pay a serious price for telling the truth.

All that said, I did enjoy this book — and I quite liked the prose throughout — I just can’t say it impressed me.

Content: there’s a little bit of swearing, plus some sexual content (the Season mentioned above, plus a fairly graphic rape attempt. Which leads to a plot hole: the characters know about somebody who is an attempted rapist. What do they do? Absolutely nothing!)

Our heroine Lucy is on the brink of marriage to a boring (or worse) man, when she suddenly discovers that she has magical powers — and (of course) a special role to play in the Destiny of the Universe. Unfortunately, the magic in The Twelfth Enchantment bothered me on both an artistic and a moral level. For one thing, it is stated a couple of times in the book that magic in this world is entirely “natural”, yet considering that it’s being used to turn people immortal and exert mind control (among many other things), thinking of it as “natural” was a bit of a stretch for me – especially since, rather than being delineated at all, the magic was entirely of the “just feel it, just use your instincts” variety. Our heroine Lucy was apparently born with a phenomenal magical talent: everything she tries comes easily to her, because she just “knows” how to do it. Due to various other inconsistencies and credulity-stretching oddities in characters and relationships, I felt like this incoherence was derived simply from the author’s failure to define his book’s magic system in his own mind rather than from any intentional decision on his part. (There are a few references to things which were Meant To Happen, as well, but no hint regarding what the source of this special destiny might be.)

And then there’s the aforementioned mind control. Lucy, formerly a poor female with no prospects and reveling in her newly-developed control over her own destiny, resorts quite regularly to magically manipulating and controlling those around her. She occasionally feels a little bad about it, but not enough to stop doing it. (The author gives her an altruistic motivation for part of her questionable behavior — rescuing her kidnapped niece — but the whole situation ends up ridiculously contrived. The reasons for the kidnapping are extremely weak, plot-wise, and it’s obvious the author put it there purely in order to give Lucy an excuse to magically manipulate people without looking power-hungry. It didn’t work.) The line between good and evil magic in this book is more than a little fuzzy, and characters knowingly cross it so frequently as to make it rather irrelevant. Both Lucy and her several allies over the course of the story quite commonly do things which they freely admit involve dangerous, ill-advised, or downright evil magic, but they always shrug it off with an excuse about the extraordinary circumstances. No one feels any real compunction, and these forays into dark magic never have any negative results (even use of mind control doesn’t seem to damage relationships in any significant way), so not only is the use of magic defined within the story as “dark” essentially condoned, it’s not even viewed as significant.

Unfortunately, the quality of the book’s plot and character development in general matched the literary fuzziness of its magic. I thought the story got off to a fantastic start in the first chapter, which introduced mystery, magic, and mayhem to Lucy’s drab life in a way both dramatic and entertaining. However, I was disappointed. Not only did nothing in the rest of the story live up to the first chapter or two dramatically, but the dramatic events of the first chapter were also never satisfactorily explained. I never got the details to satisfy my curiosity about the mysterious events of Chapter One! Oh well. I keep looking for the perfect Regency SF novel, but I have yet to find it. At least there are plenty more Lord Byron SF novels out there…

On the whole, this is a very enjoyable story. It’s interesting, suspenseful, and hilarious by turns; Chmakova has mastered the technique of putting wry, snarky characters in her story without undercutting the drama. The artwork is both readable and attractive, obviously influenced by manga but with its own coherent style. And while most aspects of the world will be familiar to anyone who’s read any urban fantasy, there are a few unique twists.

There are some problems with the series. For one, it has a large cast of characters, and though by the end more of them have been explored than I expected, a number remain pretty bland. More troubling is the pacing: there are enough characters, conflicts, backstories, and species for an epic — but the series is only four volumes long. (And we are still getting introduced to important stuff in Volume 4.) It made the sudden ending feel like a bit of a cheat — though apparently the author is planning more stories in this world, which may end up justifying the epic cast.

More importantly, the ending is very close to a deus ex machina. Granted, it is realistic that the plucky teenagers wouldn’t be able to save the world all by themselves — but there’s a reason that’s a cliche: because it makes for a more satisfying story. Hopefully, if Chmakova does write a sequel, her teenage heroes will start learning to save themselves.

(Also, there’s a glaring problem in the world-building. In the first few pages, we find out that the Nightschool is in the same building as a regular high school, and various magical safeguards are employed to keep human students out. But this is also a world where a pack of werewolves owns penthouse apartments with armed guards. Why can’t the Nightschool manage to rent its own building?)

Morally, the book is not hugely problematic, except for the metaphysics being a complete muddle. Various characters have psychic/magic powers, but where they come from is not explained. Sexy vampires turn up — and are mocked, hurrah! — but it’s never even hinted whether vampirism is a medical or metaphysical condition. There are also “demons” at the Nightschool, but what that word means in this world is unclear. They don’t come across as fallen angels implacably devoted to the suffering and damnation of mankind, but what they are besides “magical people with funny eyes” is left entirely unexplained. (Beyond the name, there is nothing to ties the “demons” to the Christian concept, so I don’t think it really counts as an attempt to subvert Christianity.)

Content-wise, there’s nothing much to worry about. There are some scenes of monsters attacking, but they weren’t terribly scary or gory. And in a refreshing deviation from the stereotype of urban fantasy, there’s no sex: the characters are much too busy with missing siblings, apocolyptic visions, and baby dragons getting loose in the classroom to bother with any torrid love triangles.

Cute boys who turn into animals when you hug them: it sounds like a pretty stupid premise, or at least like something that could never be more than fluffy romance with a bit of soap opera thrown in. Certainly there’s plenty of fluff, romance, and melodrama spread across Fruits Basket’s 23 volumes, along with whacky characters and high school hijinks. And for the first few volumes, there isn’t much else. But as the story progresses, Tohru learns more about the Sohma family. The curse doesn’t just make it difficult for them to be around strangers; it has isolated the entire family and locked them into a cycle of misery for centuries. And there’s more to the curse than just the hugging problem . . .

At its heart, Fruits Basket is the story of good-hearted but messed-up teenagers learning how to love and be loved. It’s about the courage necessary to love and be happy in a world where neither love nor happiness is guaranteed. And it’s about change–how it’s scary and difficult but utterly necessary to stop handing down misery from generation to generation.

This is a character-driven series, and it works brilliantly despite how whacky some of those characters are. The really over-the-top personalities do get toned down a bit over the course of the series, but none of them become exactly realistic. What makes them work is that thrown in among the wackiness are moments of emotional realism. Forgiveness isn’t easy in this story. Neither is changing yourself: several characters have important epiphanies but still have to struggle with their faults afterwards.

I especially enjoyed the treatment of Tohru’s character. Cheerful and self-sacrificing to a fault, she could be a boring paragon–except that the story acknowledges the problems of being compulsively selfless and explores the traumas that have made her that way. In her own way, Tohru is as wounded as any of the other characters. Yet while she must learn to acknowledge her own feelings and needs, it’s never implied that her kindness is foolish or weak–and if she were any less than what she is, she would never be able to change the lives of those around her in the way that she does.

The artwork, too, is impressive. Though I’m not a huge fan of the style in the earlier volumes, it’s still lively and pretty. But the style changes a lot over the course of the series; a glance at some of Takaya’s earlier and later works makes me think this is a general development in her artwork rather than just a technique to show the passage of time, but it still creates that effect. Plus, even when the style isn’t my favorite, it’s still very expressive; Takaya has a knack for layouts that convey deep emotion without any words, and by the end, there are some panels of great beauty.

In case you haven’t guessed: I love this series. I can still say that there are some problems. The first four to five volumes, as previously mentioned, do not rise far above the level of fluff; they’re enjoyable, but nothing to write home about. Around volumes five and six, the story kicks into high gear and becomes much better–but there are still sections that are needlessly padded with high school hijinks and romantic comedy. If you like the characters, it’s still fun to read, but I think the story would have been tighter without it.

I think that pretty much all of the moral positives have already been covered. On the minus side there is not a lot besides the effects of nobody being Christian. (NB: the zodiac myth talks about “God,” but it eventually becomes clear that this is not meant in any theological sense.) One male character talks about how his first crush was on another boy, but by the time the story starts, he is in love with a girl, so that element doesn’t have the chance to become hugely problematic. Shigure and his (male) cousin Ayame enjoy making suggestive remarks to each other–mostly, it seems, to irritate Yuki and Kyo–but that also comes to nothing. There are also several people having sex outside of marriage, but none of these relationships are healthy, so it’s not as if they’re being held up as paragons.

Also, one of the Sohmas has memory-wiping powers that he uses to safeguard the family secret. This is portrayed as a bad thing, but because of the grief of those who’ve been forgotten, not because it violates the dignity of the human person.

Content warning: there is a little bit of bad language, plus a few panels with topless female nudity, of which the most explicit is in a non-sexual context.

This is a modest but extremely enjoyable series. At first it’s just an episodic collection of ghost-busting escapades–a little creepy, a little suspenseful, and a little humorous. But as the series goes on it slowly builds tension through the revelations about the characters’ pasts, the development of the inevitable love triangle, and the looming threat of the demon’s return. The artwork is generally pleasant and sometimes striking, though I wish Yako and Kuryu wouldn’t sprout such enormous shoulders at dramatic moments. It’s the characters, though, that really make me enjoy this series. Yako is hilarious and adorable (because how can you not adore a cranky librarian?). Kuryu is sometimes creepy, sometimes sympathetic, and interesting to me even though I’m not often a big fan of the Tall, Dark, and Mysterious type. And Rasetsu herself is a great heroine: she’s strong and brave sometimes to the point of brashness, but she’s also palpably young and sometimes quite vulnerable–without either side of her character undercutting the other.

The worldview of Resetsu is generically pagan. Ghosts are people who died traumatic deaths; sometimes they’re just stuck reliving their trauma and sometimes they’re back for REVENGE. Either way, they can be forcefully exorcised or persuaded to ascend into the light. The various psychics have their powers Just Because, and they try to use them for good. I do like that the heroes are not just concerned with protecting the living, but also giving peace to the dead; and there are several storylines where they end up helping people who explicitly do not deserve it, which is pretty neat. And the conclusion of the story affirms the power of unselfish love.

Content warning: some of the ghosts are a little gruesome, the demon’s intentions towards Rasetsu are obviously less than chaste, and of course, you don’t want to read this if ghost stories creep you out.