Wen Spencer

Silas Decker is a vampire more than three centuries old, and finding it increasingly hard to keep rebuilding his life as people die and the world keeps changing. Living alone with no friends and few acquaintances, he sees less and less reason to keep trying.

Eloise is a Virtue, a soldier of God against evil. She's made being that soldier the only thing she is, lest human connections weaken her.

Seth is the sixteen-year-old Prince of Boston, a werewolf, the only survivor of his murdered family. show more His only living close relative is his cousin Jack, and the Wolf King, Alexander, is keeping Seth in New York, not letting him return to Boston for reasons he doesn't clearly explain.

And then there's Joshua, an ordinary college-bound high school student in small town, upstate New York, working hard to make his high school transcript look impressive for the colleges he wants to apply to. As part of that plan, he volunteers for the prom committee--and one awful Friday night, he finds himself badly hurt and covered in blood, with the rest of the prom committee dead and torn to pieces around him. Traumatized by events and further confused by a dream, or vision, or perhaps just a conversation, he had while undergoing an MRI, Joshua runs away to Boston, seeking someone he hopes will help him understand what's happened to him.

Because Joshua is now a werewolf, too.

This is a well-thought-out fantasy world, that makes good internal sense. It has action. It has great characters, who discover they need each other. It has a plot that really works.

It's also a novel set in Boston, at least to a significant degree, which does not contain the errors about Boston that kick one out of the story if one actually knows the city. I have a little list of otherwise very good writers who think they know Boston because they've studied maps and, perhaps, stayed awake in history class. (A hint I suspect applies to any geographic area: Before you use the official, found on a map name of a road in a story, check out whether that's what people who live in the area actually call it. Especially if it's a state highway running through multiple towns and counties.) Avoiding those mistakes adds a layer of reality and believability that strengthens a fantastical story. If you are using a real place in your story, and it's not a place you know intimately, check your details. All of them! Because yes, readers will notice.

But even more important than avoiding those dumb errors, which will after all only affect the readers who recognize them, is the fact that Spencer gets the characters right. Seth is affected by the trauma he experienced at thirteen, by the fact that he's the Prince of Boston and being educated that way, and has responsibilities--but also by the fact that he is, in the end, still only sixteen. Decker is lonely. Eloise has cute herself off emotionally and lived as a loner because she thinks it's the only way to do her job properly. Joshua, a year older than Seth, has not had either his emotional trauma or his education and training, and is in many ways younger. He's frightened and confused by what's happening to him.

And these four people have to come together to combat a plot by Wickers, a faction of witches that practice human sacrifice to gain magical power, to destroy Boston.

The plot, the characters, and the setting are developed convincingly and drew me in irresistibly. It's just one heck of a fun book.

Highly recommended.

I bought this book. 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

A very poor showing in an otherwise fantastic series, this is less a novel, and more a collection of drabbles, short-stories and novellas.
Lacking any discernable plot and without a coherent storyline, it would have been much better of as another Project Elfhome book, filling in the cracks and humanizing the city.
Based on this, I am not sure the author even knows how to progress or end the series, so instead she is fiddling her thumbs, trying to shoehorn every character and story arch into show more the main plotline.
I adore most of the characters, and welcome a chance to learn more of them, but this haphazard drive-by inclusion does not serve them or the story. show less