Dear TBR:
I first became acquainted with the work of Lish McBride through the amusingly titled, Hold Me Closer, Necromancer, and the fairytale reboot, Curses. I’ve enjoyed her crossover adult fiction, so I was super excited to see her with a new thriller-adventure YA novel, and intrigued that it is kind of a …Western. I can’t recall the last time I read or reviewed a Western novel of any stripe, not to mention YA Western, so this was a special treat.
Faolan Kelly is deep in grief – and also in dire straits. His beloved Pops is dead, which means Pops’ tidy little homestead and holdings should be his, but alas, he’s only seventeen, and cannot inherit until he turns eighteen which is a long eight months away. In the interim, the mayor and the do-gooders in town have decided to send him away to the Settlement, a religious enclave that cares tenderly for the orphaned, until he can come of age, until they can have the time to find his so-called next of kin, an “aunt,” of whom Faolan’s never heard a thing. What the townsfolk really mean to do is to go through the homestead and all of Pops’ possessions with a fine-toothed comb until the find the deed to the land – and then they mean to steal it right out from under him.
Faolan is horribly, terrifyingly, on his own. No one will have him in town, not with his nearly grown ways, not with his smart mouth or with that curse-touched flame red hair and pale, pale “witch’s” eyes. The superstitious townsfolk have hired a gunslinger to escort him out of town for his own good… and Faolan isn’t stupid. He – or rather she, which is another little tidbit of information that the mayor and the townsfolk have no need of knowing – sees which way the wind is blowing. Pops hasn’t taught her to be a fool. She can work like a nearly grown man, and she can hold her own. She do anything for eight months, right? Faolan goes meekly to the Settlement – a cursed town which no one has ever made a go of – and meekly eats their food, meekly sits through their strange holy services, meekly does the work they load onto her narrow shoulders, and keeps her head down, making a special effort to stay out of the way of His Benevolence Gideon Dillard. Faolan knows she should ignore how the enclave has way more money than makes sense, and pretend she doesn’t hear the screams at night, doesn’t suspect the strange acolyte, or His Benevolence’s stunningly beautiful assistant. But she can’t ignore the deep gouges from beasts on the doors and the palisade around the enclave, and the strange nightmares she and many of the other children have. She shouldn’t question, and just keep her head down, even when she hears a beast snuffling around at night, and when the livestock are slaughtered.
It gets a lot harder to ignore anything when she finds a body…
Fresh onto the TBR:
- A Marriage of Undead Inconvenience, Stephanie Burgis
- Tribute, Sherwood Smith
- Lenny Among Ghosts, Frank Maria Reifenberg
Until the next book, 📖
Still A Constant Reader
