KELLY LASITER is a mild-mannered administrative assistant by day; at night she rules over a private empire of tottering bookshelves, guarded by a ruthless hellhound. (All right, so her manners aren’t always mild and the hellhound is actually quite friendly, but the shelves do totter.) She came late to the fantasy genre, wandering into its enchanted lands nearly by accident in her early twenties, by way of Pamela Dean‘s Tam Lin and the suggested reading list provided in the back by Terri Windling. She is most fond of fantasy set in a historical setting (a la Jo Graham) or in a setting that echoes a real historical period (a la George RR Martin and Jacqueline Carey). She also enjoys urban fantasy and its close cousin, paranormal romance, though she believes these subgenres’ recent burst in popularity has resulted in an excess of dreck. Her pet peeves include atrocious grammar, protagonists that are either impossibly perfect or insufferably nasty, being beaten over the head with a moral, and books in which female characters are absent or cardboard. She is a sucker for pretty prose and mythological themes.  See Kelly’s reviews here.