All the Time in the World

My taste in reading material is wide and varied: SF/fantasy/"speculative fiction", mysteries (police procedurals, mostly), history, fanfic, straight fiction, smutty vampire books, biographies, poetry, cereal boxes, assembly instructions, the fine print, and your mind.

The Hob's Bargain

The Hob's Bargain - Patricia Briggs Something a bit different from Ms. Briggs - more traditional setting than her usual urban fantasy, and it deals with aspects of faery (elemental creatures/land ties) I haven't previously seen. In The Hob's Bargain, the land's magic has been suppressed in favor of "blood magic", wielded only by mages in service to the country's rulers. Anyone shown to have magic is given a choice: become a blood mage, or die. Aren of the village of Fallbrook lost a brother to the blood mages' choice - rather than be enslaved or killed, he opted to leave the village and died of exposure. Since then Aren has hidden her own prophetic visions and remained under the blood mages' radar. But when her family and husband are killed by raiders, and a distant clash between rival blood mages rips the binding from the land's magic, she taps her own gifts to aid the residents of Fallbrook in protecting themselves, going so far as to seek the help of the one remaining hob living on a nearby mountain. With her childhood friend Kith, until recently a soldier tied to a blood mage, and with the blessing of the village elders, she and the hob Caefawn operate as part of a guerrilla unit fighting the raiders. Along the way she's exposed to different ways of working with her developing abilities, which will come in handy when the blood mage comes for Kith.