Author: Amy Casey

Written on the Dark by Guy Gavriel Kay

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


It is always such a pleasure to read Guy Gavriel Kay. He does this magic trick in all his writing, in contextualizing well-known footnotes of history within a narrative style that uses the smaller moments of being alive as the palette for painting characters. And he so clearly loves these characters. Kay’s voice is distinct, and I think that might be his signature at heart-even in a literary landscape where it’s not always considered cool to do so, he does love his characters, and the world, despite all the things it does and has been doing for all these centuries. Kay’s generous humor, his romance, and his optimism are all on unabashed display in WRITTEN ON THE DARK, which I found deeply enjoyable and more than that… also quite fun.



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The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


A transportative fable (and bonus short story!) from a magical mind. Amal El-Mohtar’s novelette THE RIVER HAS ROOTS reads like something both from the past and the future, where fairy realms are taken as one of life’s facts and the physical forms people take are up for grabs, depending on which side of the fae boundary they happen to be on. Plus, it acknowledges the deep power of willow trees, something that anyone who has gone behind a willow’s curtained branches, especially as a child, can attest to. A folktale for any era, this book is as comforting as a dog-eared old fairy tale, read aloud to wide-eyed listeners learning of dangerous promises and healing spells for the very first time.

Also, the short story at the end was so fantastic! I am eager for El-Mohtar’s next collection!



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The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


THE STARLESS SEA by Erin Morgenstern is a party that I am very late to, but after reading it, I feel certain that the story itself was expecting me to arrive, just now, just as I am. This book is an indulgent, comforting, and surreal homage to the power of a literary life. The way Morgenstern builds a spiral of recursive symbols goes up, down, and especially forward. The book is built from specific old rules that govern the magic of reading itself: the same elements can be endlessly remade into new stories, and even the same stories, when they are read at different times in our lives, can meet us anew. The particulars change throughout the epochs, but many stories emerge from the place in imagination where they were born to become important pieces of what we call reality–and this book is surely one of them.

Need to spend some time in another place, entirely away from whatever this timeline is? These 500 pages are a wonderful prescription.



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