Eccentric Circles
Rebecca Lickiss
Ace
Fiction, Fantasy
***
DESCRIPTION: All her life, Piper Pied Dickerson has wanted to lead a normal life, with normal friends and a normal home. With her eccentric family, though,
that's never been possible. It doesn't help that she's still drifting years after college, nursing half-formed hopes of publishing novels. After her great-grandmother
dies, Piper unexpectedly inherits her house, a small Victorian cottage in a Colorado suburb. It's full of dust, old furniture, books... and magic, as she learns when
she comes down the stairs in the morning to find an elf sitting at the kitchen table.
His name is Aelvarim. He hails from the land of Fairy - just through the cottage's back door, if you know how to pass through it right - and he's come to solve Grandma
Dickerson's murder.
Her death, Aelvarim insists, was no mere accident of old age, but a magically-committed crime, one he is determined to solve with or without help. Though Piper can't help but
feel attracted to the handsome, likely lunatic man in her kitchen, she wants no part in his delusions... but she may not have a choice. When her great-grandmother died, the
world of Fairy began falling apart, with bits and pieces falling into black rifts and nothingness. The rifts will spread to Piper's own world soon, for if the realm of
imagination fails, the real world will quickly follow. Like it or not, Piper the would-be writer finds herself cast in a story of her own. Will she become an unlikely hero,
or another tragic victim?
REVIEW: A fast read, I found it vaguely enjoyable, yet oddly bland at the same time. Piper takes too long figuring out that Fairy is a real place and Aelvarim is a real elf. After that, she remains wishy-washy on the whole "saving the world" part of her job; she'd much rather drool over the handsome elf, even as she frets and worries over his sanity and whether or not coming from different dimensions would significantly impede romantic relationships. The world of Fairy should've been captivating, but it feels more like a cul-de-sac than a world. There are only three inhabitants - a dwarf, a wizard, and the elf, plus a handful of generic, pesky fairies who count more as scenery than characters - and one little path in an endless, featureless wood. This not only limits the imaginative horizons, but it limits the suspect list in Grandma Dickerson's murder to three on the Fairy side. I'd actually hoped more would come of Piper's large and eccentric family, after the time Lickiss spent establishing them; it would've added a nice twist in the tale if Piper wasn't the first Dickerson relation to stumble across Great-Grandma's back door to another world, especially if one of them was presented as a potential suspect in a magical murder. But, no, mainly her family exists to distract her from the search for clues (and provide people who embarrass her about her new elfish boyfriend.) As for the murder itself, Piper and Aelvarim spend more time looking for clues and not finding them than they do solving anything, and the culprit proved too obvious. The ending wraps up a bit too easily. Overall, it's not a terrible little book, but it missed several opportunities to be a better story than it was.
You might also enjoy:
The Everworld series (K. A. Applegate, YA Fiction - Four Chicago teens are pulled into a world where magic and elder gods still rule)
Faerie Wars (Herbie Brennan, YA Fiction - A boy finds a faerie prince in the garden)
The Wiz Biz books (Rich Cook, Fiction - A Silicon Valley programmer finds himself in a magical world)
Magician: Apprentice (Raymond E. Feist, Fiction - An orphan boy in a frontier castle faces otherworldly armies)
Coraline (Neil Gaiman, YA Fiction - A door in her flat leads a girl to a mirror world, where a darkly mysterious "Other Mother" awaits)
Stardust (Neil Gaiman, Fiction - A man crosses into the forbidden world of Faerie to find a fallen star)
The Familiar Dragon series (Daniel Hood, Fiction - A detective solves magic-tinged mysteries with a small dragon, formerly the familiar of a murdered wizard friend)
Beyond the Open Door (Andrew Lansdown, YA Fiction - A boy finds an odd knife that lets him cut windows into another world)
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Un Lun Dun (China Miéville, YA Fiction - A girl and her best friend find their way to the surreal "abcity" mirror of everyday London)
The Fablehaven series (Brandon Mull, YA Fiction - Two children find a magical sanctuary on their grandparents' vast farm)
The Magic Tree House series (Mary Pope Osborne, YA Fiction - Two young children find a magical tree house that whisks them to other places)
The Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica (James A. Owen, YA Fiction - A mysterious atlas brings three London men to a magical world, inspiration for myth and story since time began)
The Curious World of Shelley Vendor (Colin R. Parsons, YA Fiction - A clumsy girl follows alien book-thieves into a dangerous world)
Avalon: Circles in the Stream (Shelly Roberts, YA Fiction - Three girls find odd animals and a portal to a magical world on an old wildlife sanctuary)
Jake Ransom and the Skull King's Shadow (James Rollins, YA Fiction - An ancient artifact pulls two siblings into a lost world)
The War of the Flowers (Tad Williams, Fiction - A man finds himself abducted into the world of fairies, where magic parallels technology and a war with the mortal world is brewing)
The Dragons of Ordinary Farm (Tad Williams and Deborah Beale, YA Fiction - Two kids discover strange farmhands and stranger livestock on their secretive great-uncle's California farm)
The 100 Cupboards trilogy (N. D. Wilson, YA Fiction - A boy discovers magical cupboard doors to other worlds behind the plaster of his new room's wall)
The Castle in the Attic and The Battle for the Castle (Elizabeth Winthrop, YA Fiction - A model castle, a knight figurine, and a magical amulet lead a boy into a medieval world where dark magic threatens a kingdom)
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