Rewards & Fairies

Elizabeth Bear's Blood and Iron is an urban fantasy (in the sense that magical beings and events occupy the streets of New York), and a fairy story (in the sense that it is concerned with the Fae, and the magical places where they live, and their dealings with mortals). It may well be entitled to any number of other descriptive labels which passed me by, because my reading in contemporary fantasy is patchy, and matociquala has clearly read everything. Like Diana Wynne Jones's Fire and Hemlock (and many other books), Blood and Iron builds on the ballad of Tam Lin; it also draws on a mass of Arthurian legend, and nods to Tolkien.

This makes it sound like a scissors and paste job, and that isn't the case at all: completely unlike the Jenny Casey books is setting and subject matter, Blood and Iron shares their insistence that sometimes there is no right answer, only a choice of wrong answers, that people may be damaged by their experiences, not recover from that damage but nonetheless do heroic things.

Which makes the book sound not only Educational but also Improving, and fails to point out that it is also a gripping (" just one more chapter before I turn the light out. Oh, just one more, then...") story. There's a war on, and a love story, and there's politics and werewolves and Merlin...

( That's about as far as I can go in review mode; from here on in, there's a constant risk of spoilers )