Spindle

After four hundred years, a princess is awoken with a kiss -- except that she wasn’t the princess and the curse isn’t fully broken.

This reminded me a lot of Diana Wynne Jones’ fantasy, most notably Howl’s Moving Castle, in the best possible way. Like Jones, Gingell doesn’t explain everything and expects her readers to keep up. It’s a style which particularly suits Poly’s story -- scrambling to retrieve her memories, catch up on major historical events and work out why she was targeted in the first place. The wizard who woke her is not at all inclined to stop and explain everything! It also fits with Poly’s experiences of magic.

I loved this.

“That’s another thing, Poly. You can’t go wandering off with strange show more men.”
“I can, you know,” said Poly, feeling argumentative. “I’m making quite a habit of it, actually. I wandered off withyou.”
“Yes, but I’m not a strange man.”
“Yes, you are. You’re the strangest man I’ve ever met,” said Poly. “Why can’t I wander off with anyone I want to?” show less

After I thoroughly enjoyed the City Between series I was looking for more of something similar and I found it here.
While this is fantasy and not urban fantasy the writing style and characters are very very similar. (which isn't a bad thing.)
I normally dislike magic systems that are too whimsical and vague but the way this author expertly embeds the magic into the world in such a natural way largely compensates for how arbitrary it works.
This is very much a character-driven story. Either you enjoy the protagonists and their interactions and banter or you most likely won't get much entertainment out of this book.
It's a very quirky story full of quirky characters. Usually quirky ends up meaning gimmicky instead and isn't actually show more interesting. But in this case, I mean quirky in the very best way.

The writing style is very unique and very similar to her other books as far as I know.
It reminds me a bit of the writing style of Soulless by Gail Carriger but it doesn't seem inspired by it, just similar by chance maybe.
"Unique" just like "quirky" is frequently used to wrap "bad" in prettier words. This is, again, not at all what I mean. I mean unique in the very best way.

The weakest part was the ending where arbitrary magic went all over the place and the book utterly fails to properly communicate who even has the upper hand and anything can completely flip on its head at any time. Needless to say, I didn't enjoy the climax of the book.
But I loved basically everything else and am very sad to not find an audiobook for the other books in the series not least because the narrator does an incredible job. Probably one of the best audiobooks I have listened to. show less

Why does this book not have more reviews!? It's wonderfully reminiscent of Diana Wynne Jones- magical, funny, mysterious and exciting. Very glad I randomly found it at my public library. Why am I not seeing Book 2?

Lacks a strong antagonistic force for most of the book.