Lisa L. Hannett

Midnight and Moonshine begins with the evocative and bloody story of the flight of Mymnir, one of Allfather Odin’s ravens, escaping from Asgard as Ragnarök destroys the gods. In Hannett’s and Slatter’s mosaic of short stories, Mymnir is the white raven, a creature of magic and memory, who flees the wreckage of her old world, re-making herself as a woman and a queen on the shores of the new world. She brings splinters of Asgard with her, creating a new people – the Fae – and a new show more realm for herself.

As time passes, some Fae break free of Mymnir’s power, and the magical Fae blood mingles with human blood through the ages: they mix with the skraelings of the new world, they marry into human families, but their magic and otherness remains, even if it is diluted.

Hannett and Slatter’s writing is entrancing and evocative, their tales shifting between brutal and enigmatic, frightening and enchanting, dark and light. The stories follow Mymnir and the Fae through the ages, from the distant past into our own time, and towards the end of the book, the white raven, the Fae queen – lost for many years – appears in our present day and brings new destruction down upon the world, as some of her Fae descendents try to stop her.

Midnight and Moonshine is a fantastic read, a highly recommended collection of uniquely imagined fantasy tales, with prose that is a joy to read. show less

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Told from multiple points of view, this story features a war against an enemy that's never really explained.

Or if it is, I must have missed it. While the writing at times was really beautiful and intriguing my problem with it was mostly that I felt like I was missing a lot. Exactly what was going on for example. The many, many different characters that are brought into the story don't make it any easier.

Don't get me wrong, I like show more it when stories don't spell everything out for you and there's something left to the imagination, but I do like to have some kind of knowledge about what the story is about. The fact that the enemy, the Greys, are never named or explained didn't help either.

It had great potential, but for me it fell a bit short on the execution.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for providing me with a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review! show less

After reading the description of this book, I thought it sounded interesting enough to try out and I received a free advance reader copy. Unfortunately, I got about a third of the way through the book and couldn't go any farther. I felt like I was forcing myself because the story wasn't really able to pull me in.

The story starts off from the point of view of a teenager named Peyt that was drafted to fight in the war against an enemy he's never seen. Every time the story was in his point of show more view, I felt it was poorly written and wasn't structured very well. I really didn't have a good understanding of Peyt and found myself not caring at all for him. This is unfortunate because I actually enjoyed the story from the point of view of Peyt's father, Borys. show less

Setting is a melded steam punk/fantasy locale. An amusement park hustler employs a crow in a fixed game of 'throw the ball at the bird'. The marks all lose until a fox in a wheel chair takes the plate. Lacks a rationale for the story, feels like an extract from something bigger.