The Leaning Pile of Books

This month I bought one book for National Buy A Book Day. (I also decided to also make it "Buy Cookies and Caramel Mocha Day" at the Borders coffee shop - I hadn't been to their cafe in a long time and didn't realize just how delicious their cookies were but they were soft and chocolatey and really, really good. Maybe I need to make this a monthly holiday.) Every once in a while I try to go over there and buy a book or two that I know I want to read. We had a bookstore on our mall that I can't remember not having there that closed down recently and I really don't want the same thing to happen to our Borders!

Elfland by Freda Warrington

Somehow I had completely missed this book until I read Sarah's review at Bookworm Blues. It sounds like it is just my type of book - a character-driven story with captivating prose. I had already decided I must read this when I looked for it at the bookstore, and then I found it and opened the cover and what do I see under the "Praise for Elfland" section?

Elfland is an absorbing and gripping journey into a world where the otherworldly shivers alongside us, unseen. - Storm Constantine, author of the Wraeththu Chronicles

Wraeththu Chronicles is of course one of my favorites ever for the same reasons this book sounded appealing to me. It turns out some of Freda Warrington's other books have been published by Immanion Press, Storm Constantine's publishing company.

Another Aetherial Tales novel, Midsummer Night, is coming out in the US in November. Each novel in the series is supposed to stand alone.

Elfland is an intimate, sensual novel of people—both human and Aetherial—caught between duty and desire. It is a story of families, and of Rose Fox, a woman born to magic but tormented by her place in her adopted world.

Led by Auberon Fox, a group of Aetherials—call them the Fair Folk, if you will—live among us, indistinguishable from humans. Every seven years, on the Night of the Summer Stars, Lawrence Wilder, the Gatekeeper, throws open all gates to the Other World. But this time, something has gone wrong. Wilder has sealed the gates, warning of a great danger lurking in the realm beyond them. The Aetherial community is outraged. What will become of them, deprived of the home realm from which their essential life force flows?

Rose Fox and Sam Wilder are drawn to the lands beyond the gates, even as their families feud over Lawrence’s refusal to do his duty. Struggling with their own too-human urges, they discover hidden truths that draw them together in a forbidden alliance. Only by breaching the dreaded gates and daring the danger beyond can they confront that which they fear most— their otherness—and claim their birthright.