Rowenna Miller

A charming, cozy fantasy about two women who get more than they bargain for when they use fairies to change their lives.

The veil between fairyland and our world is thinner on Prospect Hill, and Alaine's family has always bargained with the Fae: silk and silver to reverse luck or a coin and a sheath to keep the rain away. Her grandmother warned them to never wander from the approved bargains. But when Alaine's problems grow, no longer content to summon rain for the harvest or a good crop, she creates a fairy ring to summon the Fae to her, face to face. As her courage grows, she stretches the bounds of what she thought possible, until the day her sister steps into the fairy ring to rid herself of her abusive husband. The consequences threaten to destroy them all.

Alaine's fierce, willing to do whatever it takes to save her struggling orchard and protect her family. Delphine's sympathetic, as the new society wife struggling to find a place in a society that shuts its doors on her. The fairies add a level of intrigue that keeps the reader guessing.

This delightful fantasy brings the fantastic and the scary right to the doorstep of a homey rural community. It also makes me wish I could bargain with fairies!… (más)

A real disappointment. Admittedly, I might not have found Torn so thoroughly exasperating if I hadn’t read it while living through the first half of 2020. Rowenna Miller’s prose is competent, if never thrilling, and the core idea—a young dressmaker with magical abilities living in a city that bears a passing resemblance to late 18th-century Paris, trying to make a living despite her immigrant background and growing civic unrest—has lots of potential. That concept (plus the admittedly eye-catching cover design) was more than enough to make me pick up the book.

But if you’re going to write a fantasy novel that tries to tackle what it means to live within a system of inherited power, actually write that book. Don’t write a book whose thin veneer of progressivism hides an apparent sympathy for monarchism and a distaste for any attempt at revolutionary change.

True, Torn is set in a fictional world. There’s nothing to say that the class system there would work in the same way that it did in 18th century Europe. Miller establishes that the predominant religion bears no resemblance to Christianity, so there’s no reason that sexual mores should have to operate in the same way as Ancien Reegime France. But there’s nothing in what Miller writes that shows that she actually understands class, or poverty, or hunger, or oppression, or the intersections of gender with all of those things, then or now. Her aristocratic characters are all presented to us as interesting, caring, talented individuals who perhaps party a little too much—but can you blame them when running a large estate is such a stressful business! Meanwhile all the leaders of the pro-democracy movement are villains and/or idiots of the cardboard-cutout, moustache-twirling variety.

It’s 2020. Black and brown people are dying. The world’s burning. The rich are getting richer. Forgive me if right now I have little patience for a book whose message boils down to “Working-class revolt is very messy, isn’t it? Why not wait for the enlightened aristocrats to decide on some reform to introduce from above without surrendering any actual authority?” Ugh.… (más)