Wen Spencer

The fourth in the Elfhome series, this is not a continuation of the ongoing storyline, but a parallel story overlapping with Tinker and Wolf Who Rules. As such, it would be an acceptable entry point to the series, although the reading experience would be quite different for someone without the background of the other books.

Twin geniuses Louise and Jillian turn nine the week they blow up their playhouse with flour while filming a video about elves. Soon thereafter, they learn that their show more parents got them from the embryo bank where their father works, that they have an older sister, Alexander Graham Bell, who lives in Pittsburgh on Elfhome, and that there are four more embryos still frozen--embryos that are due to be discarded in a month. Suddenly frantic to save their little brother and sisters from distruction, they turn from feuding with their snooty classmate and trying to hijack the class play to planning to steal an Elven artifact and rescue the babies. In the process, they learn about a sinister plot to take over Elfhome and subvert Earth. Events spiral out of control from there.

Louise and Jillian may be geniuses, expert hackers, and brilliant videographers with an avid online following, but they are also nine years old, with the concomitant lack of experience, understanding, and agency. While trying to save their unborn siblings and the world, they must deal with parents, teachers, schoolmates, that damned class play, bureaucracy, the legal system, and a far-reaching conspiracy. They are in over their heads and know it, but they forge ahead anyway.

A wonderful read, with very real characters. show less

This third book in the Elfhome series is told from multiple viewpoints. While Tinker does have a substantial role, the focus for me was on her cousin Oilcan. Oilcan has been the supportive side-kick in earlier books but this time he gets center stage.

His story begins when he rescues a Stone Clan child who has just arrived on the train. She is being kidnapped when Oilcan comes on the scene. Saving her leads to a conspiracy wherein multiple Stone Clan children have been drawn to Pittsburgh and show more then kidnapped to be experimented on by oni.

Because Pittsburgh is under control of the Wind Clan, no one at the train station did anything to help these children. Oilcan calls in Tinker to help rescue the children and finds them in horrible situations. The only Stone Clan in the city are very unsuitable as guardians which is why Oilcan ends up responsible for five Stone Clan children who are in various states of distress including one who has lost her name and memories and only makes the sound of a duckling and is called Baby Duck.

Oilcan needs a new home that will accommodate his expanded family and takes over a former girls' school which needs lots of repair. That brings in Riki and his clan of tengu who have been taken under Tinker's care despite the way he betrayed her to the oni. Tinker can forgive him but Oilcan isn't there yet. Oilcan contemplates sponsorship by Wind clan but hesitates when he finds out the depth of commitment needed.

Meanwhile, Tommy Chang is also dealing with the new situation in Pittsburgh. He is the head of his group of half-oni - most of whom are either children or pregnant women. Although Windwolf offers sponsorship to him, Tommy sees it as just another kind of slavery and his people have been slaves to their oni masters for far too long. It takes the head of the tengu reframing the situation for him before he realizes that he needs relationships with other groups if he's to keep his own people safe.

As Tinker tries to discover why the oni wanted the children Oilcan is now protecting, she discovers a long-term plot with some members of Stone Clan cooperating with, or being puppets for, a new oni leader who is determined to conquer Elfhome. Tommy discovers huge encampments of oni in the wilderness outsside Pittsburgh while he is looking for a kidnapped member of Stone Clan whom he is searching for to forestall being blamed for her disappearance.

The worldbuilding in this story was excellent. It was fascinating to see the various groups - elves, humans, half-oni, and tengu - try to learn to work together and build a new sort of society. The characters were richly drawn and brought to life by Tana Eby's masterful narration of this story. show less

(Before I start gushing about it, I should say: this book has a lot of potentially disturbing content, and basically a constant underlying threat of gendered violence/rape/etc towards male characters. It didn’t bother me, but I could easily see it bothering others.)

I remembered being HELLA sad when I was done reading this book (especially after discovering there were no sequels), and, yeah, very much the case again now. I could keep following these characters and this world basically show more forever. I love them so much! Beautiful, clever Jerin. Eldest Whistler, Ren, and Halley giving us so many different flavors of badass! Cullen being this world’s equivalent of a tomboy, but cleaning up so nicely.

The narrative voice is pretty straightforward but there’s something I really like about it? It’s so effortless to get sucked into. I love how protective everyone is of Jerin. I love the setting. I love that this is just a dumb, wonderful romance with a side of palace intrigue and military swashbuckling. I love how the gender flip plays into all this.

Most of all, I just love being able to, even briefly, live in a world where the expectation of AMAB people is that they’re pretty and soft and need to be protected and cherished. That you’re expected to be more nurturing, more gentle, more submissive. This book meant a lot to me when I read it early on in college. I was in the middle of questioning my gender identity and sexual orientation, so having something that played with gender the way this did as just a baked-in part of the setting was just so exactly what I needed. As I reread it now I do find myself at timmes wishing that it had been done differently. Specifically I don’t like the idea that men had to be more scarce to sort of justify why society developed the way it did? And the society presented here does not seem to have any room in it for transgender and nonbinary individuals, or even AMAB gay people. (Nor is there much room for lesbians, though lesbian sex does at least come up a few times.)

Oh, and there’s the fact that everything is based on procreation. Procreation is… not something I’ve ever been interested in. I’m ace, actually, so the whole scarcity of males and desperate need for the ones that exist to procreate would… really not work for me? So all the aforementioned is obviously not great for me in terms of wish fulfilment. But idk? Even taking it all into account, at times this book is just… perfect. I just want to slip right into Jerin’s shoes.

Yeah, it isn’t a perfect fit for me, because in this fictional society boys are still expected to eventually be comfortable being called “men,” and… yeah. That one will never really work for me? I’ve tried being a cis boy, a trans girl, an enby, an enby boy… that last one has stuck alright, even if it at times has seemed ironic that I found my way back to some kind of boyhood, but one thing I have never at any point been comfortable with is the word “man”?

And before you start worrying, I get that in actuality, it will be better for everyone (including me) to fight for a more egalitarian society, and I’m certainly never going to ADVOCATE for a society like this one, but… still… having had such a hard time carving out a gendered space for myself that makes any kind of sense, and having to explain and justify it all the time… it’s hard to read something like this and not wish that I could just wake up in a world where my kind of boyhood is the default assumption.

(... on the other hand, I kind of love being neutered, and that is VERY much something that world wouldn’t let boys do. Shrug.)

It’s a pity there wasn’t a sequel, and doesn’t seem to be any sign the author is considering one. Aside from my aforementioned misgivings about it, I really want more books in this setting. Or at least a similar setting. I’ve kind of scoured the internet for recommendations for similar books, and I’m gonna try reading a few that popped up in that search, but I’m not sure I’m gonna find anything that will quite hit this exact same spot.

There’s a flippant part of me that wants to say “maybe I’ll just write one!” but I’m not going to pretend for even a second that I could do so nearly as skillfully as Wen Spencer did. On top of all the wish fulfillment, this is just such a terrific read! I just really, really didn’t want it to end. show less

This story is a direct sequel to TINKER. It begins with a Prologue that catches up the reader on the main events in TINKER through the vehicle of Windwolf's participation in a ceremony of memory. Then the action begins...

Pittsburgh is stranded on Elfhome along with its 60,000 citizens who are mostly human but also include tengu and oni and half-oni. Windwolf and the Wind Clan need to root out the oni who are also immortal, breed like rabbits, and want to conquer Elfhome. It is too big a task show more and requires Windwolf to call in help from other clans. But this comes at a cost: the Stone Clan sees this as a weakness in Wind Clan and wants to institute a land grab and even assassinate Windwolf and Tinker and the Queen's representative also wants to gain a greater control in the Westernlands.

While Windwolf plays politics, Tinker is busy trying to clean up the mess left behind when she destroyed the interdimensional gate. Besides stranding Pittsburgh on Elfhome, it also left the ghost lands - a weird spatial discontinuity which seems to contain fractured pieces of various dimensions all jumbled together.

Tinker is also being plagued by dreams that seem to contain prophesy which are waking her screaming in the night and leaving her sleep deprived during the day. The dreams indicate that there is something she still needs to do to make things right. They contain elements from the Wizard of Oz which is odd because Tinker had not seen that movie. In it, she is the Scarecrow and is the one with the answers which she finds increasingly frustrating.

While helping xenobiologist Lain with a black willow - a mobile and dangerous tree, she needs to explore her grandfather's papers and discovers the family birth certificates but hers is missing and a strange file on a woman named Esme whose picture shows her to be one of the people who are starring in her dreams of Oz.

The story is action-packed and has great worldbuilding. I love that Tinker hasn't lost her human heart in her transformation to elf. I also like the look at Elven culture and the ways it is suited to a race that is potentially immortal.

This book was immensely engaging and entertaining. I do recommend reading TINKER before this one despite the information catch-up of the prologue. While this book can stand alone, much depth and richness would come from reading TINKER first. show less