By Tanya Huff.
I need to explain some things to you before we begin.
The Gales are a huge magical family, primarily run by the "Aunties" (women who hit menopause and REALLY came into their powers). The Aunties scare the shit out of everyone. Incest is pretty much mandated in the family to keep the power in. There's fewer Gale men than women, so it sounds like the men are forced to marry some cousin of theirs no matter what. They are given a list of every girl they can choose from within 7 years of their age. Everyone sleeps with everyone (I do mean sexually, and pretty much at random) and have whopping sex drives, and until a Gale boy has Chosen a wife, any of the eligible women on his list can order him around and he can't do shit about it. I can't even explain that. As for the Gale Girls, they either wait around to be Chosen, or since there are so many of them, they can marry outside the family if the Aunties approve the guy. Choosing a Gale is a BIG EFFING DEAL, and kind of awkward if you aren't born into Gale Culture and have no idea what you are getting into.
I'm explaining this to you ahead of time because for all the talk about Gale Boys and Gale Girls and Aunties and the like, this stuff doesn't really get explicitly explained for quite a damn while in the book. (And I'm still wondering how the dudes develop semi-visible magical horns.) We're told so much about Gale Culture and how super-important it is and the like, but damn, I could have used some more exposition early on. This is weird stuff and could use it.
Our heroine, Alysha "Allie" Gale, is recently out of work when she gets a notice from her grandmother Catherine announcing "If you got this, then I'm dead." Grandma ran off years ago and mostly turns up once a year. In this case, she owned a business (guess what it's called) in Calgary, and she leaves the whole thing to Allie to take over. After about five minutes of thought, everyone deduces that Catherine isn't actually dead, but Allie should go to Calgary and figure out what the hell is going on and where Catherine went to. So Allie goes, soon to be followed by her brother, cousins Roland and Charlie, and her gay best friend Michael. Allie hires the local leprechaun changeling, Joe, to run the store. She also falls in love with Graham, tabloid reporter and sorcerer's apprentice since the sorcerer took him in after he got orphaned. Graham doesn't do magic, but he does do the sorcerer's killing for him.
Gales can't stand sorcerers--the Aunties take them out for being magic-abusing power hogs--but Allie wants to try another method of handling Stan the sorcerer other than death. Since her brother's a potential sorcerer if he ever goes bad from power, she's motivated. She finds out that Stan is in the midst of a war with a family of Dragon Lords from the fairie dimension--holy shit, dragons in Calgary. She's told "it's a family matter." Little does she knows how true that is. Meanwhile, poor Graham is trapped in the middle, getting magically claimed left and right, and he has no idea about the whole Gale Choosing Thing, which kinda bites him in the ass.
I don't know what to make of this book. On the one hand, the plot with the sorcerer and the Dragon Lords and how Graham is caught between everything is good and interesting. I like the non-Gales and most characters in general on some level. On the other hand, the Gales are some weird, weird people. And you spend more time hearing about Gale Culture than anything else. And this starts to kind of get old, on top of the weird. Really, I just don't know what to make of the Gales, if I like them, if I'd want to spend more time with them. I guess I'd want them on my side in a crisis, but dating within the family...argh. Plus, Aunties. Terrifying people there.
And the whole incest thing... well, squick. I don't know how close "the lines" are in this book, but somehow I found it more bothersome than say, Temptation of the Night Jasmine (note: most distantly strange and hard to describe "cousin" relationship EVER) or the last two books in the Kushiel series (also fairly obscure/distant blood relationship). It's more along the lines of the Family Trade books, though we're less clear on the "braids" and how incest-y it is or how distantly related the braids are. I think with the boy shortage, I suspect it's closer/more ick than we're supposed to think somehow. I also feel sorry for the Gale Boys if they don't WANT to marry their cousins-- Roland being the example of this in the book, but getting somewhat off the hook for impregnating his bisexual-partnered-with-a-lady cousin rather than Choosing A Bride. It makes you wonder how the hell they can be happy with their options.
But really, what makes this squicky is that the family culture is to sleep with pretty much anyone short of a sibling because all the Gales are sexually voracious and attracted to power no matter whose. Like Allie is worried about suddenly wanting to sleep with the sorcerer when she meets him because uh, power is horny. It's very Anita Blake-ish there if you have no self-control. Hell, it's mentioned multiple times that if David and/or Allie are horny, they need to stay out of the same room, GEEZ, REALLY?! I think that's what puts me off about the incest-loving in this book: the sexual hijinks go way beyond just falling in love with your cousin stuff.
I do have to give one cool point, which goes below the spoiler cut.
I'm going to give it three and a half stars overall. Pretty good, but with some issues. I am undecided on reading the sequel.
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
I did guess where Grandma was in the book, but still, good show of hiding in plain sight there. Hah.
Comments