In Ashes Lie
By Marie Brennan
Orbit, $14.99, 438 pages
Award-winning author and professional folklorist Marie Brennan brings together a tumultuous time in English history with its ancient folklore of elfinkind to fabricate a novel that is historical in context and wonderfully fanciful in its content. Set in the period of English history between 1639 and 1666, the story follows the immortal Lune, Queen of the London fae, and her human consorts as they attempt to save England from both mortal and immortal foes. This period of English history was the time of Cromwell, strong Puritan belief, the scourge of plague, and the Great Fire of London that changed its landscape from medieval to modern. Although this novel is a follow-up to Midnight Never Come, it is not at all necessary to have read the first book to enjoy the second. And enjoy it you will, if a complex plot of overlapping schemes, a fae people beset by their own kind both within Lune’s court and without, and a period of English history that is unlike any other it has seen before or since gets you salivating with reading eagerness. You will swallow this book whole, wishing that it would never end. Brennan is a bright new voice in fantasy fiction, and In Ashes Lie is her best effort yet.
Reviewed by John Ottinger III
