With so much urban fantasy saturating the market these days, it’s really nice to see that a good ol’ fashioned fantasy novel can still show up on the shelves. Like, say, Benjamin Tate’s Well of Sorrows.

Well of Sorrows tells the story of Colin, a boy who’s come with his parents across the sea to a new country, fleeing war in their homeland–only to discover that the city where they’ve settled has no use whatsoever for the influx of refugees. Violence eventually ensues, and Colin’s father must lead a group of their people out to try to found a new settlement. But there are strange and dangerous things out in the plains, things which have caused previous settlers to never be seen again.

Colin’s family’s group of course finds these dangerous things. And Colin’s life is irretrievably changed.

I could go on from there, but that would be significant spoilerage. I will however say that this is only really the first stretch of the book; the main storyline is what happens long after these events. And I can add that the worldbuilding is the primary thing that appealed to me about Tate’s work. The idea of an overseas colony, complete with strife between it and the motherland, is not new to fantasy to be sure. But it’s handled well here and with a nice balance between a realistic feel and just enough magic to remind you that oh yeah, this is in fact a fantasy novel–not to mention that there are two non-human races that initially will probably strike most readers as thinly disguised elves and dwarves. Tate’s names for them, the Alvritshai and the dwarren, do not exactly dispel that impression. (That said, the dwarren are not miners, which helps a lot.)

Much of the book hinges upon the volatile relations between the humans, the Alvritshai, and the dwarren, and this is really where it shone for me. I was less invested in Colin’s acquisition of magical powers that enabled him to be the prime person to stop the blossoming warfare, mostly because his acquisition of them is primarily off-camera and so I had to adjust hard to jump from “Colin as youth” to “Colin as man with magical ability”. Aeren, one of the lords of the Alvritshai, becomes a more accessible character in the latter stretches of the book.

Lastly, I’ll note that Tate had a bit too much “as you know Bob” type dialogue in various conversations, such as an Alvritshai character using a given term and then immediately following it with the term’s definition–in conversation to another Alvritshai. But that was pretty much the only issue I had with any of the writing at all, and I’ll definitely be coming back for the next book in the series. ‘Cause this ain’t done, not by a long shot. And I do need to know what happens next! Four stars.

Much has been made of Malinda Lo’s being a “lesbian Cinderella”, and while that’s certainly true, it’s only true up to a point. If you’re familiar with the fairy tale in question, you’ll certainly see most of its familiar elements in play here: the young girl whose mother’s death leads to her father’s disastrous second marriage, the cruel stepmother and stepsisters, the ball attended in secret, the Prince. There’s even a fairy protector.

But even with these familiar elements in place, Lo nonetheless builds a lovely tale that is at once similar to and quite a bit different from that of Cinderella. The fact that this version of Cinderella is much more interested in the King’s Huntress–and that the Prince isn’t really ever in the picture–is only part of this. The rest of it is simply charming worldbuilding, where Lo takes the pieces of the tale we all know and assembles them into a setting uniquely her own. Ash’s fairy protector in this version of the story is in fact a fairy godfather of sorts, with much more of a backstory and much more characterization than you’ve probably seen in most traditional Cinderella retellings. The interaction Sidhean has with Ash is the heart of the magic of this story, and as a fan of stories involving fairies and the Sidhe, I can say that it pleased me greatly. It was unearthly and compelling.

On the other hand, there is definitely a queer element to this tale, and the best thing about it is how refreshingly underplayed it is. The fact that Ash loves another female is not the conflict of the story in the slightest; it’s just there, without angst, without either Ash or Kaisa being considered out of the ordinary for where their romantic interests lie. And if Ash’s interaction with Sidhean is the unearthly driving force of the story, her affection for Kaisa is its sweet, earthly counterpoint, pulling it ultimately towards a very human resolution.

If there’s any complaint I have about this book, it’s that it’s honestly too short. The length’s probably fine for YA, but I came out of it wondering “that’s it?!” and quite anxious for more. Since it was so unexpectedly short, what conflict there is in the story felt a little too easily resolved–but that’s really something I didn’t mind at all, given the overall win of the rest of it. Four stars.

Kate Noble’s The Summer of You is an immediate sequel to Revealed, quite literally picking up pretty much right where the previous book left off. And, as is often the way with consecutive romance novels from the same author, they involve a connected cast of characters. In this case, the heroine is Lady Jane, the rival of Philippa Benning from Revealed; her love interest is Byrne, the brother of Marcus Worth.

Jane’s been called to the country to contribute to the care of her ailing father, who’s started showing alarming signs of what modern readers will of course recognize as Alzheimer’s. Her brother Jason is no help, as he’d just as soon lose himself in his youthful pursuits of drinking and carousing with his friends. This leaves only one retreat for Jane: the company of the irascible Byrne, who unbeknowst to her has already settled in the area to convalesce from a bullet wound to his leg and the laudanum addiction he’d developed as a result. And Byrne, too, has another problem: everybody in the town thinks he’s the highwaywman who’s been waylaying victims in the area for the last year.

The Summer of You isn’t as action-driven a plot as Revealed, and since we’re not in the heart of the ton in this story, we don’t get the barbed repartee that made up a lot of the fun of the previous book. What we do get here though is some nice character development, especially as Jason has to catch up in maturity to his sister, and both of them have to wrestle with the fact that the man they’d known as their father the Duke is pretty much gone. Meanwhile, Byrne’s overcoming his own issues as he and Jane fall for one another and team up to unmask the highwayman is well done too.

Overall, a nice read and a bit more substantial than many examples of the genre. I’ll cheerfully return for more of Noble’s work. Four stars.