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raven_cromwellAll y'all know just how deep my Tam Lin adoration goes by now. Shockingly, when I took advantage of a free ebook giveaway Brennan was hosting, I snagged Lies without! in fact knowing 'twas a Tam Lin spin.
You can imagine the levels of screaming that were done when fuckin Tam Lin was mentioned in the dedication, and Brennan credited a Lin re-telling I hadn't heard of before. My expectations were sorta stratospheric at this point, so I put the book to the side for a bit so I could come back with fresh eyes; and finally picked it up yesterday.
To understand just how much I'm loving this book, you need the context that I'm not anywhere near what you'd call a fast reader. Here in the second week of September, I've just finished my 50th book of the year. So when I tell you that in the last twenty-four hours I've devoured a third of this thing and am going back to devour more before bed as soon as I finish shrieking, you'll know it's excellent.
From protagonist Kim's opening sally:
As the chapter progresses, we learn that her advisor-induced row of this quarter centers around conquering old fears of hers regarding magic, and a large chunk of this first third is Kim, long before she perseveres to get any mysterious boys from fae clutches, persevering to overcome her own insecurities.
And yeah, you read that right: this's a world where magic in all its vibrant glory is celebrated; Kim is at magic college, after a cataclysmic event unleashed magical abilities in the human population.
It's, honestly, one of my fav parts of the re-telling so far. Just as sprinkling in some guitar and speeding up the tempo gives Anais Mitchell's Tam Lin most riveting re-telling for me, turning over the apple cart by making magic such an open, vivid part of this world, rather than having the heroin being an ingénue utterly out of her depth made me cheer with glee.
Brennan has her "Tam Lin" already be a friend of Kim's, the suitably mysterious--without being Byronic, which earned her some more whooping--Julian. There are, naturally, all the finest Tam Lin trappings, including an astonishingly beautiful birthday tradition between them whereby they meet by moonlight by the monument where they first encountered one another and he gives her suitably thoughtful and beautifully expensive presents. (that the monument had a stone circle made me glee-shriek.)
But if all Brennan were doing was tossing every Tam Lin element into a stew, this probably wouldn't work. She's such an accomplished stylist: your first mystery revolves around, what, precisely, Kim is bucking her advisor on and why. And just at the moment yhou're getting grouchy from lack of answers, that mystery is revealed, which then leads to about three others. And by then, you're utterly hooked: by Kim's tenacity; by this wonderfully well-realized magic school, dealing with much more adult concerns than your usual magic school genre; by the wonderfully well-rounded friend group Kim has, be it the overly courtly sorcerer or her profoundly kind empathy roommate, who pretty much decided freshman year she was going to mother everybody and is dating a badass lady to boot.
If something can be said to be the perfect blend of formulaic and inventive, that's Lies and Prophecy in a nutshell.
You can imagine the levels of screaming that were done when fuckin Tam Lin was mentioned in the dedication, and Brennan credited a Lin re-telling I hadn't heard of before. My expectations were sorta stratospheric at this point, so I put the book to the side for a bit so I could come back with fresh eyes; and finally picked it up yesterday.
To understand just how much I'm loving this book, you need the context that I'm not anywhere near what you'd call a fast reader. Here in the second week of September, I've just finished my 50th book of the year. So when I tell you that in the last twenty-four hours I've devoured a third of this thing and am going back to devour more before bed as soon as I finish shrieking, you'll know it's excellent.
From protagonist Kim's opening sally:
Arguing with my advisor over my class schedule was a familiar ritual. We’d done it six times before, like clockwork, once for every quarter of my freshman and sophomore years, and without it, my junior fall at Welton would not have been ready to start.I was grinning like a loon. There's very little that will capture my perfectionist heart like a badass lady who knows precisely what she wants and takes no shit, particularly if what she wants is to be left alone while she devours every book in her vicinity. And Kim just continues to be fabulously brave, as the protagonist of any Tam Lin tale rightly must be.
As the chapter progresses, we learn that her advisor-induced row of this quarter centers around conquering old fears of hers regarding magic, and a large chunk of this first third is Kim, long before she perseveres to get any mysterious boys from fae clutches, persevering to overcome her own insecurities.
And yeah, you read that right: this's a world where magic in all its vibrant glory is celebrated; Kim is at magic college, after a cataclysmic event unleashed magical abilities in the human population.
It's, honestly, one of my fav parts of the re-telling so far. Just as sprinkling in some guitar and speeding up the tempo gives Anais Mitchell's Tam Lin most riveting re-telling for me, turning over the apple cart by making magic such an open, vivid part of this world, rather than having the heroin being an ingénue utterly out of her depth made me cheer with glee.
Brennan has her "Tam Lin" already be a friend of Kim's, the suitably mysterious--without being Byronic, which earned her some more whooping--Julian. There are, naturally, all the finest Tam Lin trappings, including an astonishingly beautiful birthday tradition between them whereby they meet by moonlight by the monument where they first encountered one another and he gives her suitably thoughtful and beautifully expensive presents. (that the monument had a stone circle made me glee-shriek.)
But if all Brennan were doing was tossing every Tam Lin element into a stew, this probably wouldn't work. She's such an accomplished stylist: your first mystery revolves around, what, precisely, Kim is bucking her advisor on and why. And just at the moment yhou're getting grouchy from lack of answers, that mystery is revealed, which then leads to about three others. And by then, you're utterly hooked: by Kim's tenacity; by this wonderfully well-realized magic school, dealing with much more adult concerns than your usual magic school genre; by the wonderfully well-rounded friend group Kim has, be it the overly courtly sorcerer or her profoundly kind empathy roommate, who pretty much decided freshman year she was going to mother everybody and is dating a badass lady to boot.
If something can be said to be the perfect blend of formulaic and inventive, that's Lies and Prophecy in a nutshell.
