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Five hundred years ago when Jack was only a boy, he negotiated a deal with a pirate from the Otherworld who separated his body from his soul and sentenced him to the life of a lantern.  As a lantern, Jack straddles the world of the living and the dead and guards the crossroads between the mortal world and the Otherworld. In his fairly monotonous job, Jack maintains a sense of balance between the two realms.  Although most of the time he lives a sleepy existence, he has done everything from exporting entire herds of gremlins to clearing caves full of werewolves.  Once, he even single-handedlyRead More →

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 Fourteen-year-old Vance Ehecatl is a shape-shifter, who spends part of his existence as a quetzal and part of his life as a human in Midnight—the vampire’s empire, a pinnacle of civilization.  When Amelia Atwater-Rhodes’ novel Bloodwitch opens, Vance is living with Lady Brina in a greenhouse, a lush and comfortable existence.   Lady Brina is a talented artist with a penchant for painting mythological scenes; her paintings tell stories and capture cultures, like those of the ancient Mayan and Aztec civilizations.  In his quetzal form, Vance models for Lady Brina, ignorant of any alternative life until Malachi Obsidian visits, under the guise of selling paints.  WhenRead More →

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It was, I’m sure, pure coincidence that the two books I recently read had main characters named Jane whose death seemed all but inevitable.  Loosely connected by the thread of “Janes in constant danger”, Helen Keeble’s campy, funny debut  Fang Girl and Graham McNamee’s spooky Beyond took me from the dark nights in a British suburb to the even darker, rainy nights in a small village on Canada’s “rain coast.” Waking up disoriented, in a small dark space, to the sound of a mobile phone ringing, Xanthe “Jane” Greene, realizes very quickly that she is dead. No, actually, she’s not dead, she’s undead. As in vampire undead.Read More →