The Shadow Reader

In talented newcomer Williams’s fantasy debut, 26-year-old Houston college student McKenzie Lewis finds her studies interrupted yet again when war escalates in Faerie and its king demands she use her mystic gift for tracking the rebels through the magical fissures they use to travel between lands and worlds. Kidnapped by the rebels, McKenzie is torn between their arguments and her loyalty to the faerie king as well as between her illicit romance with the king’s swordmaster, Kyol, and the feelings stirred by the handsome rebel leader Aren. Williams portrays a realistically shaded faerie realm in economic and magical turmoil compounded by human technology and the atrocities committed by both sides in a brutal civil war. The only hiccup is an angst-filled love triangle that distracts from the action and narrowly avoids a descent into pure soap opera. (Nov.)