Fantasy Life - Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Fantasy Life - Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Fantasy Life is about a family that hereditarily runs a refuge for magical sea creatures on the Oregon coast. (Despite the cover, there are no unicorns or dragons - mainly selkies.) Lyssa Buckingham ran away from her family after high school to stay in the real world. When she divorces and her daughter Emily undergoes a traumatic event, she ends up seeking refuge from her family, despite reservations. This corresponds with a time of trouble for the aquatic fantasylife of the area, involving an oil tanker that sank in a storm in 1970. The selkies ask for help as most of the Buckingham family relations are colliding into each other or coming undone.
Lyssa's family is portrayed very well, and different from each other. (To the point of making Lyssa uninteresting a bit.) Athena, her grandmother, is a tough old woman who works for the sheriff's department and secretly runs the town. Cassie is Lyssa's very psychic mother. All 4 generations of the family have problems living with the other generations or communicating with them, and I thought it was very well done. All of Kristine Kathryn Rusch's fiction I've read has a sort of gritty feel to it, and there's also lots of local knowledge about the Oregon coast, where Rusch lives in real life. It is a very absorbing and enjoyable read, very thick and realistic-feeling.
That said, I think the book resolves a little too quickly. The family reworks its relations in the last couple chapters, and it seemed as if Athena changes her opinion of Cassie for little reason. No one ever really deals with the significance of why Lyssa's ex-husband went mad (and he is portrayed as very dramatically schizophrenic, to the point of violence, which is uncommon - although there may be reasons for this). There is also an unresolved romantic subplot between the sheriff and Lyssa, although the author might be making the perfectly valid point that not all human relations get resolved.
Overall, I would recommend the book, but wish the ending had been a little different somehow, or at least longer.
Fantasy Life is about a family that hereditarily runs a refuge for magical sea creatures on the Oregon coast. (Despite the cover, there are no unicorns or dragons - mainly selkies.) Lyssa Buckingham ran away from her family after high school to stay in the real world. When she divorces and her daughter Emily undergoes a traumatic event, she ends up seeking refuge from her family, despite reservations. This corresponds with a time of trouble for the aquatic fantasylife of the area, involving an oil tanker that sank in a storm in 1970. The selkies ask for help as most of the Buckingham family relations are colliding into each other or coming undone.
Lyssa's family is portrayed very well, and different from each other. (To the point of making Lyssa uninteresting a bit.) Athena, her grandmother, is a tough old woman who works for the sheriff's department and secretly runs the town. Cassie is Lyssa's very psychic mother. All 4 generations of the family have problems living with the other generations or communicating with them, and I thought it was very well done. All of Kristine Kathryn Rusch's fiction I've read has a sort of gritty feel to it, and there's also lots of local knowledge about the Oregon coast, where Rusch lives in real life. It is a very absorbing and enjoyable read, very thick and realistic-feeling.
That said, I think the book resolves a little too quickly. The family reworks its relations in the last couple chapters, and it seemed as if Athena changes her opinion of Cassie for little reason. No one ever really deals with the significance of why Lyssa's ex-husband went mad (and he is portrayed as very dramatically schizophrenic, to the point of violence, which is uncommon - although there may be reasons for this). There is also an unresolved romantic subplot between the sheriff and Lyssa, although the author might be making the perfectly valid point that not all human relations get resolved.
Overall, I would recommend the book, but wish the ending had been a little different somehow, or at least longer.