Diana Pharaoh Francis

Horngate Witches — (2009-2011) Publisher: SOMETIMES YOU CHOOSE YOUR BATTLES. AND SOMETIMES, THEY CHOOSE YOU... Once, Max dreamed of a career, a home, a loving family. Now all she wants is freedom... and revenge. A witch named Giselle transformed Max into a warrior with extraordinary strength, speed, and endurance. Bound by spellcraft, Max has no choice but to fight as Giselle's personal magic weapon — a Shadowblade — and she's lethally good at it. But her skills are about to be put to the test as they never have before... The ancient Guardians of the earth are preparing to unleash widespread destruction on the mortal world, and they want the witches to help them. If the witches refuse, their covens will be destroyed, including Horngate, the place Max has grudgingly come to think of as home. Max thinks she can find a way to help Horngate stand against the Guardians, but doing so will mean forging dangerous alliances — including one with a rival witch's Shadowblade, who is as drawn to Max as she is to him andstanding with the witch she despises. Max will have to choose between the old life she still dreams of and the warrior she has become, and take her place on the side of right — if she survives long enough to figure out which side that is...

Bitter Night

In Bitter Night, Diana Pharaoh Francis introduces an unusual urban-fantasy heroine. Max is a Shadowblade, a super-powered warrior bound to serve a witch and her coven. Enslaved against her will, Max has loathed Giselle, her witch, for decades. Yet she finds herself working alongside Giselle, and other unlikely allies, when the Guardians (gods) plan an attack on the human race and threaten to destroy any coven that won’t help them.

What I liked about Bitter Night: First of all, the concept of Shadowblades (and their day-dwelling counterparts, the Sunspears) is unique. Second, I liked the themes of honor, debt, and freedom that Francis explores. Max’s determination to help various characters escape their supernatural bindings reminds me a bit of the ending of Charles de Lint’s Jack the Giant-Killer, which I loved.

Fans of action-packed, high-octane urban fantasy will find a lot to like here. I feel like I’ve just experienced the literary equivalent of a summer blockbuster! Bitter Night features heaps of violence and gore. The gore was maybe a little too much for me. The Shadowblades’ preternatural healing abilities enable Francis to dish out unbelievable injuries to her characters and still have them bounce back. Some of the injuries result from fighting, some from torture. Torture seems to be almost a sport to Francis’ witches. They torture their own Shadowblades for fun and “practice,” and when they want to challenge their rivals, they torture the other witches’ Shadowblades as a form of competition. This is definitely not a book for the squeamish!

The real problem I ran into with Bitter Night, though, is that I felt a little distant from Max. This is in part due to Francis’ unusual decisions regarding point of view. Most urban fantasies are written in the first person, and most of the rest are written in third person but still told exclusively from the heroine’s perspective. Bitter Night is written in the third person, and roughly half of the story is written from the male lead’s point of view.

But there’s also the issue of Max’s fellow Shadowblades. Her loyalty to them, and their devotion to her, is a big part of what makes Max tick. Yet I never felt like I knew these people very well. We learn a lot about Max’s enslavement by Giselle, and a lot about her present-day situation, but not much about the intervening years, during which the bond between Max and her Blades developed. We don’t get much personal backstory about these Blades, either. Since these characters are so important to Max, knowing them better would help the reader know Max better. Perhaps this will happen in the sequels.

The romance didn’t really click with me, either. Don’t get me wrong — Max and Alexander make a great team. I can feel the respect and admiration between them, and it’s clear that they work well as friends and colleagues. But their chemistry doesn’t really come through the page. So whenever one of them had a thought about how attracted they were to the other, it would startle me for a moment, and then I’d think, Oh, right, this is the romantic subplot.

However, I loved Francis’ decision to have Max in a position of authority over Alexander for much of the novel. For a supposedly female-driven subgenre, there are a lot of urban fantasy worlds, and urban fantasy couples, that are male-dominated. This is not one of them!

Bitter Night is an urban fantasy that takes a lot of risks. The results are mixed, but I can unequivocally say that it’s not a carbon copy of anything else I’ve read. —Kelly Lasiter

Crimson Wind

Reading a Horngate Witches book is a bit like watching a big summer movie. Action! Explosions! Impossibly tough characters doing awesome things! It’s a heck of a ride. Crimson Wind, the second installment in the series, is better than the first and quite enjoyable.

Crimson Wind benefits, in part, from my having read Bitter Night and gotten an idea of what to expect from the series. These really aren’t much like the usual urban fantasies. Some of Diana Pharaoh Francis’s changes to the formula are excellent, but they can be jarring if you go in with the wrong expectations. The primary setting is neither a gritty city nor a quaint small town but an isolated mountain stronghold; the supernatural beings are unusual for the genre; Max is abrasive even by urban fantasy standards; and the story is told in third person through the eyes of two narrators. In addition, Crimson Wind proves Francis is not creating a world perennially on the verge of apocalypse but never quite getting there, nor is she creating a post-apocalyptic world. This is a during-the-apocalypse world. I think I gasped aloud when a well-known landmark went kaboom partway through the book. Francis is not afraid to blow up the scenery and change the world right before our eyes.

Familiarity with the series’ unique setting isn’t the only reason I liked this one better, though. The main issues I had with Bitter Night were that I couldn’t connect to Max and didn’t find the romantic subplot convincing. Here, Francis fleshes out Max further, showcasing both of the central facets of her personality — her reflexive anger and her selfless heroism — and making her likable despite her razor-sharp tongue. Her nascent relationship with Alexander feels more fully drawn too, and this time around the physical attraction and the hint of a deeper connection really come through the pages.

The impetus for the plot is that Max learns her mortal family in California is in danger. She takes Alexander with her and travels there, both of them dogged by dire visions and prophecies. Along the way they encounter some of the chaos kicked up by the Guardians and try to save people whenever they can. These adventures are suspenseful and reveal aspects of Max’s personality, and her eventual reunion with her family is deeply emotional for Max and for the reader.

Francis keeps the focus squarely on what Max and Alexander personally witness. On the one hand, I like this. It adds to the immediacy of their mission and helps keep the story personal rather than making it a big-picture story. On the other hand, once in a while I wished Max would turn on the car radio and at least give us a brief hint of what is happening in the rest of the world as the Guardians rise.

Crimson Wind ends on a cliffhanger and will leave readers wanting more and wondering how Max will get herself out of her current pickle. If anyone can do it, it’s Max… —Kelly Lasiter

Shadow City

At the end of Crimson Wind, Max gave herself up to the demigod Scooter to save Horngate. In Shadow City, the third HORNGATE WITCHES novel, we find out what Scooter needs Max for, and also what happens at Horngate while she’s gone. Diana Pharaoh Francis has split the narrative into two points of view from the beginning: Max’s and that of her maybe-lover, Alexander. This split enables her to show both storylines in alternating chapters. Unfortunately, one of these storylines is much more riveting than the other.

Alexander’s chapters deal with life at Horngate after Max’s disappearance. Alexander has some self-pity to overcome but is soon thrust into a leadership role when a Fury threatens the covenstead. This is a direct result of an atrocity that happened in Bitter Night and is emotionally compelling, as is the interaction among the denizens of Horngate as they adjust to life without their beloved Max.

Max, meanwhile, has been drafted to travel through a supernatural abyss to a city called Chadaré, where she must help Scooter recover three lost pieces of himself to save him from certain death. Max’s commitment to helping Scooter is admirable. This plotline never grabbed me the way the Horngate events did, however, and I think there are several reasons.

One, Chadaré itself seems a little vague. That’s not to say Francis doesn’t have a strong conception of it in her mind; it’s more that there just isn’t time to show us much of it. A lengthy high fantasy novel could probably be written about its history and politics and the beings who populate it. But urban fantasy is a quicker-moving style and the Chadaré sequences are only a little over half of the book. There’s a lack of a sense that the city “exists” beyond the portions of it that Max sees.

Two, the pace is slower in Max’s chapters. For reasons of plot necessity, the Horngate story reaches its climax long before the Chadaré one, and so (for example) we end up with a brutal end-of-chapter cliffhanger at Horngate where we know people have died and are waiting to find out who — and then we jump to Max doing something much less nerve-wracking and want to shout “Auuugggggh!”

Three, the magical-apocalypse scenario has always felt like the heart of the HORNGATE WITCHES series, and so the chapters that deal with it feel like an integral part of the overarching plot while the Chadaré chapters feel like a way to keep Max away for a while so that some other things can happen.

The two threads weave together at the end for a big battle royale with high stakes. If our heroes win, Scooter survives; if they lose, they all die or are enslaved. There’s a strong sense of tension going in, but unfortunately, once battle is joined, it’s not nearly as tense or wrenching as the earlier climactic battle at Horngate.

What does work really well are the emotional aspects of the story. Francis continues to reveal more and more of the bonds among the Shadowblades and Sunspears, and now more people have been added to the Horngate “family” with touching results. Furthermore, there are deeply satisfying developments in both the Max-Alexander and Max-Giselle relationships. These interpersonal developments kept me reading even when aspects of the plot had me frustrated.

In the end, I didn’t find Shadow City as enjoyable as Crimson Wind. I hope the next book features more of Horngate and of the magical apocalypse. —Kelly Lasiter