Hex Life

Hex Life is an anthology of witch stories. I bought it because Amber Benson has a story in here and I'm currently reading her works. 

I'll do my usual anthology treatment, which is making a list of the stories and my brief impressions. 

A Invitation to a Burning: I feel like I can't summarize this without giving away the entire plot. It was good, but not great. 

Widows' Walk: Four widow witches live together in a house. Their ages range from 59-82. They work together to help a young girl in a bad home situation. I liked this one. 

Black Magic Momma: This one is set in Kelley Armstrong's Otherworld series and it interested me enough that I may read all 13 of those books. Otherworld, predictably, is about a bunch of different supernatural types. 

The Night Nurse: A mother of two who doesn't want her third ends up hiring a night nurse to help her manage the baby. The husband is useless aside from working to pay the bills. As the night nurse slowly worms her way farther and farther into the mother's life, her agenda becomes known. I didn't hate this, but it went on way too long. 

The Memories of Trees: Post-apocalyptic new religion hates witches. A witch and her foster daughter fight back. I liked this. 

Home: This one is set in Rachel Caine's Morganville Vampires world. It wasn't bad, but I think I would have liked it better had I some knowledge of the characters. Unlike Otherworld, this one did not make me want to read the series. 

The Deer Wife: Woman has an affair with a deer shapeshifter woman or whatever she is. I liked this. 

The Dancer: Telekinetic/pyrokinetic teen girl is upset her family moved her way from her ballet classes in New York. A man with similar powers comes to help and ends up having to save her. 

Bless Your Heart: Ah, love that title. A Texan woman with a young gay son resorts to cooking witchcraft to get her message across to the mother of his bully. This was fun. 

The Debt: A girl visits Poland with her widowed father and...let's just say Baba Yaga is in it. This one is bleak. 

Toil & Trouble: A girl working for the three Macbeth witches (I guess? They also have aspects of both the Greek fates and the gray sisters.) wants to be free of them but runs afoul of one of the...I'm assuming...Dark-Hunters. Another one where it would have helped to have some knowledge of the series before I'd read this, though this one worked better than the vampire story. The Dark-Hunter world seems quite huge, so I don't think I'll ever be reading it, but I didn't hate this at all. 

Last Stop on Route Nine: A young black girl and her younger teen cousin go through some sort of portal and get run off by a racist witch. I feel like this is part of the larger world the author has created and I've never read anything of. 

Where Relics Go to Dream and Die: A dying man and a witch trapped in a candle. Interesting. 

This Skin: This one is Amber Benson's. A teen girl is under investigation for a mass murder at her school. Loved this. I love Amber. 

Haint Me Too: Set during the sharecropping days at the famous Myrtles plantation in Louisiana. If you do read this book, stop before you start this story and read about the hauntings at the plantation. This was good, but it helps to have some of the backstory if you don't know about it. 

The Nekrolog: A somewhat confusing story told from three different perspectives. I don't really get witch here. More like superpowers. I didn't really understand the story. 

Gold Among the Black: A young orphan girl in medieval-ish times works in the castle but spends her nights in the forest because they won't allow her big black dog inside. She's warned by a kind man that she's becoming old enough that it's not safe to be alone, and then she's told by a fellow servant that she's thought of as a witch because of her dog and her solitude. The girl is rightly afraid and her dog ends up turning into a human. After an incident with a would-be rapist, the girl and dog/man flee together. 

How to Become a Witch-Queen: A very interesting take on Snow White in her middle-aged years. Loved this. 

Definitely recommend this book if you like witchy fun stories. Not that all of them are fun. A couple don't end well. I didn't actively dislike any stories. The biggest failing is that I didn't connect with a couple set in their own worlds from outside this anthology, and the one I feel like there was something I wasn't grasping. 

The Seven Whistlers

So I am currently reading the Buffy prequel that just came out, because it stars TARA. My forever favorite. Buffy is such an expansive lore that I've gotten so behind in everything that I won't ever catch up, but I could not resist something about Tara. Even though it makes me mad all over again that she got the ending she did. GRRR. 

Anyway, Tara led me to Amber Benson, the actress that played her, and I wanted to get back to reading Amber's works. She's quite the author, screenwriter, director, etc. 

I have one full series of hers written for adults, and a stand-alone middle grade book that I'm now in the middle of rereading. (The Tara book got set aside.) So I ordered her witch trilogy, a witch anthology that she has a story in, and this book here, which was co-written by her and Christopher Golden. I like his work. I like her work. I should like this. 

And I did. 

While I was initially surprised at the book's short length (only 126 pages), it really didn't need to be any longer than it was. I think this falls into the novella category? I always forget the sizes. 

The story is about the bad things that start happening to the small Vermont town Rose lives in when large black dogs begin showing up. First, there are two. Then four. Then five. The climax takes place when there are sixth and the whistling of the seventh can be heard. 

The Seven Whistlers are hellhounds whose job it is to track down souls that did a very specific crime. They let someone else die in their place, so basically, they lived on someone else's time. These aren't cases of someone heroically sacrificing themselves to let someone else live, but times when people let others unwillingly take the blame for them, etc. 

The longer it takes the Whistlers to find the soul, the more of them appear to help, and the more bad things happen. 

So can Rose figure all this out in time to get the soul to the Whistlers? Because if that seventh gets there...it's the end of the world. 

Goddesses & Heroines

This book was suggested to me by Amazon. It's the newest one following three featuring Greek, Egyptian and Norse myths. I have the Egyptian one to be read tomorrow and I plan on ordering the other two pretty soon, too.

It's written for a younger age group. Amazon's listing says ages 7-9. But I actually learned a lot from it. Even with as much mythology as I've read since I was even younger than that age group, there were several deities in here that I had never heard of. 

The book is divided into three sections: Goddesses, Magical Beings, and Mortals. Then it's further divided into even more sections after that (Creator Goddesses, Shapeshifters, Unique Goddesses, First Women, Warriors, etc.). Each section begins with a page showing multiple beings that fall under that heading, and then it goes on to tell 1-3 stories that involve the beings shown. 

It's so good, you guys. Who even cares that it's written for kids? 

I should note that even though it IS written for kids, there is no shying away from the Hawaiian goddess Hi'iaka being mentioned as having a PARTNER, Hopoe. Also female. Way to go, author and publishers. Keep on with that important inclusion. 

The art is phenomenal. I absolutely adore it. It's the main reason I want all the books in this series. 

This was just such a good read. It made me very happy and I can't wait to read the others. HIGHLY recommend! 

Picture Day

Picture Day is the first in what I hope is a new series of middle grade graphic novels. The book is listed with (The Brinkley Yearbooks) behind its title, so I'd love for there to be more.

Viv is a seventh grader who wants to make more of an impression on her classmates. On Picture Day, she chops off her braid in the girls' bathroom while her friend Al(exandra) films it. After that, other students start coming to her for help to make big impressions. One gets a haircut, a pair of mathletes show off their trophy, and one is a dance proposal between two adorable girls. 

Unfortunately, Viv is so caught up helping others that she doesn't realize she's neglecting her best friends. Al is a sports nut who has several brothers. Milo is a fashion genius who's learning how to do electrical stuff, like add lights to a helmet, from his college-age older brother. The trio is planning on dressing up as their favorite characters from Roller Team Space Force (I think I got that name right. I don't have the book next to me.), so they're elbows deep in cosplay creation, trying to get it done before the upcoming con. 

I quite liked this book. It gets its lesson across without being as serious as other middle grade series. Not that I don't like the serious ones, but I like a variety. I'm looking forward to seeing more from this author.