Kay

Oooo I just LOVED this! It's taken me a while to get around to it as I found the first chapter/intro a little hard to get into (it's only four pages...) but as ‘Silence' had been recommended by one of my favourite authors I perservered and was rewarded with a wry, thoughtful, quietly funny and quite terrifying read.

I really enjoyed Sagara's discursive writing style. Initially I found it a little distracting, but once the story picked up the pace this wasn't a problem. And Sagara does awkward, uncomfortably real conversations like few authors I've ever come across.

What I most liked about ‘Silence', I think, was that Emma, the main character (and potential Necromancer) tries, always, to be kind. To do the right thing. To reassure others that everything is OK. She's been doing this for so long it's become automatic, (despite having to cope with two very close bereavements, which would give anyone a free pass to be self-absorbed and surly!) so when the dead come into her life her first instinct is to help. She doesn't even have to think about it.

Emma's all-encompassing kindness is never presented as weakness, or a character flaw. On the contrary, she's a very strong, stroppy character; and it's the initial kindness and respect she shows to the lost and helpless dead which saves her - and her friends, in the end.

I will be hunting down Sagara's earlier books - I need something to keep me going until the sequel to ‘Silence' comes out next year!

Absolutely chilling!

Perfect.

The best, most surprising, amazing and thought-provoking anthology I have ever come across. I have been dipping into it for years and am still discovering new gems.

I LOVED this book.
I picked it up expecting yet another slight and amusing riff on the theme of girl-with-21st-century-attitude-stars-in-retelling-of-classic-fairytale-set-in-unspecified-yet-still-annoyingly-historically-inaccurate-medieval-kingdom.

Instead, I was blown away by Merrie Haskell's impeccably realised and researched world - the 15th century principality of Sylvania, (a country so convincing I was quite shocked to discover in the Author's Notes that she made it up!)whose Price - lacking an heir and desperate for alliances to preserve his country's independence from it's rapacious neighbours - is prevented from marrying off his twelve daughters by a very inconvenient curse which not only causes them to wear their shoes to rags each night, but responds to any attempt to separate or remove the princesses from their tower bedroom with floods and earthquakes.

Enter apprentice herbalist and accomplished liar Reveka, a commoner recently transplanted to Castle Sylvian by her father, an ex-soldier. (Nice allusion to the Brothers' Grimm Twelve Dancing Princesses there.)Reveka's interest in the princesses' curse is at first solely motivated by the reward money, (which will buy her the chance to one day run her own herbary) but once she discovers the princesses' aren't the curse's only victims she becomes increasingly determined to break it, especially once she realises that the peace and stability of her new home rests on discovering the princesses' secret.
However, there are no easy fixes here and freeing the pricesses from their nights of dancing results in anything but a happy-ever-after.

This book was excellent in so many ways, but the best thing for me was that Merrie Haskell has that great and rare gift of knowing her world so well that she DOESN'T FEEL THE NEED TO EXPLAIN EVERYTHING. The characters know their own stories, customs and history, so we, the reader don't have to, and, while this book resolved the mystery of the princess's curse, Haskell has left many tantalising loose ends and unexplained mysteries, (amongst them the back-story of her gorgeously sympathetic Demon King) leaving me in desperate hope for a sequel.
In the meantime, I'll have to resort to googling Romanian fairy tales.