throw another bear in the canoe

mood: sleepy

La. YA books are good; you can cheat and read them quickly.

I like blackholly's work. It's unflinching, and if the endings tend to be a little tidier than I can easily believe, there is certainly no doubt that her otherworld is fickle and unfair and just as arbitrary as it should be. In any book about Faerie, justice needs to be a rare and hard-won commodity.

She's got the knack of limning a character in a few sharp brush strokes; it reminds me of those Chinese paintings where bamboo, animals, landscapes, structures all emerge from a few quick motions of the brush. And while the plot of this struck me as just a little overly coincidental in one or two places, she manages a brutal little tale of betrayal and redemption quite handily.

I do think Val's mom got off lightly, though.