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Not exactly a disclaimer: Sandra Unerman is not actually a personal friend. I met her the year we attended Eastercon, and was sufficiently impressed to make a note of her name when I posted about it; I met her again last month at the Diana Wynne Jones conference in Bristol, and that impression had endured to the extent that I was able to work out why I recognised her, and to ask about the progress of the book she had been writing back then. Which is how I learned that she had now published two books, and these are they. I would not otherwise have read them, and that would have been a pity, so look on this as a Public Service Announcement.
Spellhaven opens at am English garden party in 1914. Lucian, one of the guests hears something original in the playing of musician Jane Fairchild, and places her under a magical compulsion to travel to the island city of Spellhaven. The city is maintained by the power of unseen spirits, bound by magic but capable of turning nasty unless entertained by the finest artistic performances. All the efforts of Spellhaven go into creating these, and into enlisting the assistance of people from the non-magical world. Jane is furious at being conscripted in this way, which is not unreasonable, though Spellhaven offers compensations to its captives: here her creativity is appreciated and rewarded, and she has more freedom than would be accorded to a woman at home. Her friend Maisie Holden is happy to have been brought somewhere she can gain both income and respect for her embroidery - a skill she learned from "Miss Morris": Spellhaven is a very Arts & Crafts utopia. It is maybe not entirely convincing as an economically viable city state, but magic is a great enabler, and I was happy to suspend disbelief and wander the streets and shores of the city, waiting to see how Jane's story would be resolved. The cover copy promises "[Jane's] rivalry with Lucian escalates and the quarrels between them grow strong enough to shake the city to its foundations" so I had certain expectations, but the resolution of those expectations, when it came, took me completely by surprise.
Ghosts and Exiles is not a direct sequel to Spellhaven, and follows (with the exception of one cameo appearance) an entirely different set of characters. But it is set in the same world, some twenty years later, and it is rooted in events which are spoilers for the earlier book. It features, as the title promises, both ghosts and exiles, and - I'm hesitating over saying even this, but it's one of the things I particularly liked about the book - these are not the same thing, or the same people. Of the two books, I have a preference for Spellhaven: feel free to blame this on my liking for fresh starts, my resistance to sequels. I did not have the same sense of period in the second book: paradoxically, because it means that the magical city of Spellhaven felt like a more authentically Edwardian magic city than the real England of Ghosts and Exiles felt like a pre-war England. Or perhaps I wanted to spend time in Spellhaven rather than in England...
Don't be deterred by this preference, though: I enjoyed both volumes of the siptych immensely, and gulped them down greedily, one after the other. I recommend reading them in the right order, but I definitely recommend giving them a try.
Spellhaven opens at am English garden party in 1914. Lucian, one of the guests hears something original in the playing of musician Jane Fairchild, and places her under a magical compulsion to travel to the island city of Spellhaven. The city is maintained by the power of unseen spirits, bound by magic but capable of turning nasty unless entertained by the finest artistic performances. All the efforts of Spellhaven go into creating these, and into enlisting the assistance of people from the non-magical world. Jane is furious at being conscripted in this way, which is not unreasonable, though Spellhaven offers compensations to its captives: here her creativity is appreciated and rewarded, and she has more freedom than would be accorded to a woman at home. Her friend Maisie Holden is happy to have been brought somewhere she can gain both income and respect for her embroidery - a skill she learned from "Miss Morris": Spellhaven is a very Arts & Crafts utopia. It is maybe not entirely convincing as an economically viable city state, but magic is a great enabler, and I was happy to suspend disbelief and wander the streets and shores of the city, waiting to see how Jane's story would be resolved. The cover copy promises "[Jane's] rivalry with Lucian escalates and the quarrels between them grow strong enough to shake the city to its foundations" so I had certain expectations, but the resolution of those expectations, when it came, took me completely by surprise.
Ghosts and Exiles is not a direct sequel to Spellhaven, and follows (with the exception of one cameo appearance) an entirely different set of characters. But it is set in the same world, some twenty years later, and it is rooted in events which are spoilers for the earlier book. It features, as the title promises, both ghosts and exiles, and - I'm hesitating over saying even this, but it's one of the things I particularly liked about the book - these are not the same thing, or the same people. Of the two books, I have a preference for Spellhaven: feel free to blame this on my liking for fresh starts, my resistance to sequels. I did not have the same sense of period in the second book: paradoxically, because it means that the magical city of Spellhaven felt like a more authentically Edwardian magic city than the real England of Ghosts and Exiles felt like a pre-war England. Or perhaps I wanted to spend time in Spellhaven rather than in England...
Don't be deterred by this preference, though: I enjoyed both volumes of the siptych immensely, and gulped them down greedily, one after the other. I recommend reading them in the right order, but I definitely recommend giving them a try.
