The Autumn Castle by Kim Wilkins
Oct. 11th, 2008 07:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snugglekittyI picked this up while I was on vacation with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mrpet in Providence and got nervous that I was going to run out of reading material. (Surely I'm not the only one who does this? I finished Dexter in the Dark much faster than I expected, and... well... you know how it goes. Or maybe you don't.) It was a paperback with a quote from Jacqueline Carey on the front as well as the picture of a beautiful woman wearing Victorian gentlemen's clothes. What's not to love about that?
Christine lives in an artists' complex with her lover Jude and their friends. She tries to have a normal life, but she is haunted by the car accident that killed her beloved parents and permanently, painfully injured her body. Bad enough to have a lingering fear that Jude doesn't really love her - but recently the reccuring, oddly familiar nightmares featuring ravens have been getting to be just too much. Then she sees an old face from the past - a childhood friend who disappeared mysteriously decades ago. What will happen when Christine's past and Little May's new world collide?
This book started out okay and then just kept getting better and better. It is dark urban fantasy - but what makes it dark is not primarily monsters or supernatural elements, but the secrets that we humans hide from each other and ourselves. The plot gets more and more complicated as reality and fairy tale begin to mix, and then all the pieces are brought together in the end. The characters are deeply believable (and some of them are deeply creepy). This is a gorgeous book and one that I think says something new about dark fantasy. Five stars.
mrpet in Providence and got nervous that I was going to run out of reading material. (Surely I'm not the only one who does this? I finished Dexter in the Dark much faster than I expected, and... well... you know how it goes. Or maybe you don't.) It was a paperback with a quote from Jacqueline Carey on the front as well as the picture of a beautiful woman wearing Victorian gentlemen's clothes. What's not to love about that?Christine lives in an artists' complex with her lover Jude and their friends. She tries to have a normal life, but she is haunted by the car accident that killed her beloved parents and permanently, painfully injured her body. Bad enough to have a lingering fear that Jude doesn't really love her - but recently the reccuring, oddly familiar nightmares featuring ravens have been getting to be just too much. Then she sees an old face from the past - a childhood friend who disappeared mysteriously decades ago. What will happen when Christine's past and Little May's new world collide?
This book started out okay and then just kept getting better and better. It is dark urban fantasy - but what makes it dark is not primarily monsters or supernatural elements, but the secrets that we humans hide from each other and ourselves. The plot gets more and more complicated as reality and fairy tale begin to mix, and then all the pieces are brought together in the end. The characters are deeply believable (and some of them are deeply creepy). This is a gorgeous book and one that I think says something new about dark fantasy. Five stars.