witches

It's that time of year where my reading generally turns to the spookier side, and there's no paranormal motif I love more than witchy women. Fiction has definitely seen an uptick in feminist reclamations of witchy tropes and depictions in recent years, and I am here for it.

When I first saw the publication announcement for Toil & Trouble: 15 Tales of Women & Witchcraft, I struggled to keep my expectations reasonable, certain it would be yet another teen fiction anthology that sounded amazing and would end up disappointing me with uneven story quality. But I was only so successful in

"Genre mashups," where an author takes two different genres or sub-genres--for example, romance and steampunk or hardboiled detective and science-fiction--are not exactly new, but they have become a hot topic lately. With her debut novel All the Birds in the Sky, Charlie Jane Anders has done something different, taking a character in a modern fantasy story and a character in a near-future, dystopian SF story and having their lives intertwine in friendship and romance, without mashing up the different genres they belong in. It's like if Harry Potter and Katniss Everdeen lived in the same world

The second book in the Echo Park Coven series picks up immediately after the end of the first book, The Witches of Echo Park. Lyse and her fellow witches, or blood sisters as they prefer to call themselves, have a major threat called "the Flood" looming over them. It isn't long before the Flood comes in and washes the coven, and the plot, in many different, dangerous directions.

When I reviewed The Witches of Echo Park, I said the book moved at a leisurely pace, slowly introducing the cast of characters and the urban fantasy setting, letting the readers get to know everyone, until the end

As he does for everyone in the end, Death has come for Granny Weatherwax.  The finest leader the witches never had, indisputably first amongst equals, Granny bequeaths her legacy to young Tiffany Aching.  Tiffany struggles to do the job in front of her when she has to manage her own steading, Granny's steading, train a new apprentice (and never before has a boy wanted to be a witch!), and stop the elven incursion into her world.  Not to mention reining in the Nac Mac Feegle clan.  Crivens!

I gave this four stars for lack of ease for new readers.  Even if you've read all of the Tiffany Achin