Wisp of a Thing by Alex Bledsoe

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Wisp of a Thing draws us into a tableau populated by very different characters with very different troubles than its predecessor The Hum and the Shiver. Ron Quillen has not lost his connection to his music as Bronwyn Hyatt had in book one, and Rob is not a Tufa (although he is alternately mistaken for one or accused of being an inauthentic hanger-on to the Tufa’s history and community throughout the story), but he is in Cloud County for a reason: to find a powerful and magical song to heal his broken heart. I admit to some very slight eye-rolling as I started reading, until, as always, Bledsoe cut to the heart of the story and I realized that Rob’s heart wasn’t broken in the ways he was willing to admit to himself and others. He had more serious wounds to treat.

Book two of a series can often suffer under the weight of reinvention or a lack thereof, but Bledsoe neatly sidesteps this by making Rob the ultimate outsider, and yet his status as an outsider is not entirely a stand-in for the reader. It can be, if you missed book one and jumped right into this one, but rather than an unfolding of the Tufa’s secrets, Rob barges in and demands knowledge at every turn, while the natives treat us to a very different flavor of “don’t tell the outsider” than the previous book.

Rob is a wonderful parallel and foil to Rockhouse Hicks, as their tales of ambition and destructive pride echo over the mountains surrounding Cloud County. My one gripe is that Bliss Overbay was positioned as such an important character with a lot of attention in the story, but she didn’t have as strong of an arc, and what we got wasn’t really resolved. Bledsoe didn’t tie her to Curnen as elegantly as he tied Rob to Rockhouse. I actually felt she functioned better as a secondary parallel/foil to Rockhouse, but that wasn’t fully fleshed out or resolved either.

Regardless of these flaws, Bledsoe’s writing is a delight, even when it veers into slightly purple prose or stumbles over a slightly awkward phrase. His stories are compelling because they’re so human, populated by flawed characters who, while sometimes not human at all, still ground us in authentic and passionate feelings and troubles.

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The Hum and the Shiver by Alex Bledsoe

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have been interested in, and put off, reading this book for years. I regret not picking it up when I first saw it, because it’s so good. Appalachia, magical music, clan feuds, fairy-folk–so many of my boxes checked off. Bledsoe cuts directly to the heart of his stories; he did the same in The Sword-Edged Blonde, which I discovered later but read first. I appreciate jumping right in to a good action-oriented story that still keeps characters at its heart.

Bledsoe has a great ear for dialogue, a keen sense of people, and delivers a great tale. Even when he’s being coy and revealing things slowly to the readers, the characters aren’t falsely coy in their thoughts and actions as a substitute for good writing. Bronwyn isn’t hiding things from the reader; she is locking things away from herself or admitting that she isn’t ready to deal with them yet. Her feelings and actions are, in a very real way, often sideways to the truth of things until she’s ready or forced to confront the problem. She also lives in a closed society where speaking openly of these secrets is taboo, so we’re treated to a lot of aborted conversations and warnings about responsibilities and consequences that ratchet up the tension and make the little pieces of the story behind the story that much more satisfying when we finally uncover them.

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California Bones by Greg Van Eekhout

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In the 3 years since I first read this book, I forgot just about everything between the beginning and the end, so it was like reading it all for the first time, and I enjoyed it just as much this time around. Osteomancy is such a cool kind of magic, both in concept and execution, as it presents real dangers and goes uncomfortable places. Van Eekhout’s fun and zippy heist story is the frosting over a darkly-flavored cake of two characters making bold and difficult choices to change their own lives and the lives of everyone around them, with a jam-filling layer of magic-as-metaphor for how we use fossil fuels.

And now I really want a piece of cake, but then, when do I not?

Now that I finally have books 2 and 3, I’m excited to see where Daniel and Gabriel go next.

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