Next SFF Author: Richelle Mead
Previous SFF Author: Adam McOmber

SFF Author: Melissa McShane

Melissa McShane’s love of reading has been a constant in her life and she still remembers the places she lived by the books she was reading there: the Riddle-Master trilogy in New York, the Foundation series in Colorado, Howl’s Moving Castle in Texas, Crown Duel in Utah. That love of reading stayed with her after she settled with her family in Utah and grew into a love of writing, first critical essays and reviews, then fiction. Her family includes her husband (a long-suffering man willing to let ideas bounce off him at speed), four children (also long-suffering and happy to live off macaroni and cheese while Mom writes) and three very needy cats, one of whom is so dumb he frequently runs into walls.


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Servant of the Crown: Romantic fantasy with a twist

Servant of the Crown by Melissa McShane

Servant of the Crown is a steampunk-flavored young adult romantic fantasy by Melissa McShane, published in July 2015. It is set in a well-imagined Victorian-era type of world where magic plays a lesser and socially suspect role. Alison, the young Countess of Waxwold, is summoned from her city to be a lady-in-waiting to the Dowager Consort of the kingdom for six months. This seems like a prison sentence to Alison, who enjoys her work in the budding printing industry and as a theater patroness,


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Rider of the Crown: Large and in charge

Rider of the Crown by Melissa McShane

Rider of the Crown (2015), the second book in Melissa McShane’s CROWN OF TREMONTANE fantasy series, is set a generation after the events in Servant of the Crown. The story initially shifts to a neighboring country to Tremontane, where the Kirkellan live, a fierce people who live a rustic life on the grassy plains and are known for their magnificent horses. Imogen is a young warrior of the Kirkellan,


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Agent of the Crown: The princess spy

Agent of the Crown by Melissa McShane

Agent of the Crown (2016), the third book in Melissa McShane’s CROWN OF TREMONTANE fantasy series, shifts to a third generation of the royal North family: Princess Telaine North Hunter has been secretly working for her uncle, the king of Tremontane, as a spy for the last nine years, since she was 15. She’s deliberately created a public image as a frivolous, bubble-headed socialite, while she works behind the scenes to uncover plots against her country. Only the king and her maid (who is also an agent) are aware of her double identity.


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Exile of the Crown: A queen in hiding

Exile of the Crown by Melissa McShane

Note: this review contains a few spoilers for Servant of the Crown and many spoilers for the bonus short story “Long Live the Queen” at the end of that novel, which sets up Exile of the Crown.

In “Long Live the Queen,” a “five years later” short story that appears at the end of Servant of the Crown (2015), the first book in Melissa McShane‘s CROWN OF TREMONTANE series,


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Burning Bright: High seas adventure and romance, flame-broiled to taste

Burning Bright by Melissa McShane

Twenty-one year old Elinor Pembroke, dreaming of fire burning all around her, awakes to find her room actually ablaze with an intense fire ― a fire she caused in her sleep. Elinor is able to quench the fire with simply a thought. The ability to not only mentally generate but also to extinguish fire makes her an Extraordinary Scorcher, the first British person with this high level of power over fire in over a hundred years. In this alternative Regency world, a few people have magical talents ― telepathy,


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Wondering Sight: The price of vindication

Wondering Sight by Melissa McShane

In Wondering Sight (2017), the second book in Melissa McShane’s THE EXTRAORDINARIES series, we return to a fantasy-touched version of Regency-era England where some people have magical talents ― throwing and extinguishing fire, shaping one’s appearance, flying, teleporting, and more. Sophia is an Extraordinary, one of the very few people who have particularly strong magical abilities. As a Seer, she can cast herself into Dreams, which show her future events as a series of doors in her Dreams that she can open and explore,


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Abounding Might: Jaunting around colonial India

Abounding Might by Melissa McShane

In Abounding Might (2017), the third book in Melissa McShane’s EXTRAORDINARIES fantasy series about Regency-era women with diverse magical skills, the setting shifts to British-controlled India in 1813, and to a new main character, Lady Daphne St. Clair. Daphne, who was a minor character in the previous book, Wondering Sight, is gifted with the magical power of Bounding, teleporting instantly from place to place. It’s a highly useful skill to the British army,


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Voyager of the Crown: Adventures of an ageless ex-queen

 

Voyager of the Crown by Melissa McShane

In a world where a minority of people have inherent magical powers, and in a country where such magical powers are viewed with deep suspicion ― particularly if wielded by people in power ― Zara North has a huge secret: she has the ability to automatically heal physical injuries to herself, even those that cause aging and death. What would be a mortal injury for anyone else simply puts her out of commission temporarily. Zara was the queen of Tremontane sixty years ago,


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The Summoned Mage: Diary of a misplaced mage

The Summoned Mage by Melissa McShane

Editor’s note: At the time we are posting this review, this  99c at Amazon.

The Summoned Mage (2017) is the diary of Sesskia, a 27 year old thief and secret mage: secret because being a mage is viewed as an executable offense in her country of Balaen. But her magical powers have saved Sesskia’s life before, and in any case are a part of her very self that are both exhilarating and terrifying. So Sesskia wanders from place to place,


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The Wandering Mage: The turmoil of converging nations and magical systems

 

The Wandering Mage by Melissa McShane

The Wandering Mage (2017), the second volume of the CONVERGENCE trilogy by Melissa McShane, picks up right where the first volume, The Summoned Mage, left off (so there are, necessarily, some major spoilers here for that first book). Their world was split apart many centuries ago by a misuse of magic, but now the worlds have converged again. A complex spell, involving the work of many mages, has helped to minimize the physical damage caused by the convergence,


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The Unconquered Mage: The struggle toward unification

The Unconquered Mage by Melissa McShane

The CONVERGENCE fantasy trilogy wraps up in The Unconquered Mage (2017), as Melissa McShane continues to explore the repercussions of the magical merging of two different worlds, with different language and cultures. Balaen and Castavir were split apart centuries ago by a complex magical spell that went awry. Now the two countries are reunited physically, as are our main characters, the Balean mage Sesskia, who narrates the story through her diary entries, and her husband Cederic,


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Pretender to the Crown: It takes a thief…

Pretender to the Crown by Melissa McShane

Pretender to the Crown (2017) follows the adventures of Willow North, a professional thief who’s always been a lone wolf type of personality. Willow has an inherent magical talent for sensing worked metals: she both sees it ― even in total darkness and through walls ― and feels it. It’s a particularly handy talent for a thief, since she can see where metal jewelry is hidden and when guards with swords are approaching. Anyone with a strong magical talent is required by law to study to become a mage or “Ascendant,” but Willow holds such bitter feelings against Ascendants,


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Guardian of the Crown: Struggles against middle-book syndrome

Guardian of the Crown by Melissa McShane

Guardian of the Crown (2017), the second book in Melissa McShane’s SAGA OF WILLOW NORTH fantasy trilogy, picks up where the first book, Pretender to the Crown, left off. (It’s necessary to read that book first, and this review will contain some unavoidable spoilers for Pretender.) Willow North has left her homeland of Tremontane in company with her ex-fiancé, Kerish, and the rightful king of Tremontane,


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Champion of the Crown: A battle royale for the throne

Champion of the Crown by Melissa McShane

The battle for the crown of Tremontane comes to a climax in Champion of the Crown (2018), the final book in Melissa McShane’s SAGA OF WILLOW NORTH fantasy trilogy. (Obligatory warning: here be spoilers for the prior books, Pretender to the Crown and Guardian of the Crown.) The first book focused on the escape from Tremontane of Willow North, her ex-fiancé Kerish of Eskandel,


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The Book of Secrets: Introducing a magical bookstore with oracle powers

The Book of Secrets by Melissa McShane

Helena Davies, a twenty-one year old who’s been living in her parents’ basement since dropping out of community college for lack of funds, is at loose ends and clueless about her future. She needs a job ― any job ― while she tries to figure out what she wants to do with her life. Surprisingly, the proprietor of Abernathy’s Bookstore immediately hires her, despite her sparse resume. But her new boss barely has time to have her sign an employment agreement (“I … swear to uphold the standards of Abernathy’s without fear or favor,


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The Book of Peril: Trouble with magical illusions

The Book of Peril by Melissa McShane

Abernathy’s Bookstore is a powerful oracle, used by the community of mages to answer important questions and foretell the future. Its proprietor, Helena Davies, is a critical part of the bookstore’s oracular function: she takes augury slips of paper with questions on them from customers, wanders among the bookshelves until she finds a book that glows to her eyes, and sells the book to the customer as the answer to their question. The price for the augury is conveniently and magically printed inside the book on the title page,


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Next SFF Author: Richelle Mead
Previous SFF Author: Adam McOmber

We have reviewed 8275 fantasy, science fiction, and horror books, audiobooks, magazines, comics, and films.

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