Mercedes Lackey

I have become enamored of Mercedes Lackey's Elemental Masters & Elemental Masters Fairy Tales. Each of these books has characters that have mastered working with one of the 4 elements. Earth, Air, Fire and Water. She goes into great description of the attached elementals for each of the elements and how they can be utilized by the Masters. All take place in the mid 1800's through the 1930's. Her characters are realistic and yes, there is a bit of romance. Her descriptions of the mores and thoughts in those times are spot on. (I am so glad I live in today's world.) Below is a list of her books in these series in order.

Elemental Masters

The serpent's shadow
The gates of sleep
Phoenix and Ashes
The wizard of London
Reserved for the cat

Elemental Masters Fairy Tales

Firebird (Russian folk tales)
The fire rose (Beauty & the Beast)
The Black Swan (Swan Lake)

I am looking forward to starting her Five hundred kingdoms series.

Passion: A Novel of the Romantic Poets by Jude Morgan

Amazon description: The attempted suicide of Mary Wollstonecraft opens this carefully researched, deeply imagined and gorgeously written novel about the Romantic poets, as seen by the women who loved them: Mary Wollstonecraft's daughter, Mary Shelley, who fell scandalously in love with then-married Percy Bysshe Shelley and wrote Frankenstein at age 19; the passionate but untethered Lady Caroline Lamb, who never got over her love for Lord Byron; charming Fanny Brawne, devoted to her consumptive fiancé, Keats; and Augusta Leigh, half-sister to Byron, notorious for her incestuous affair with him. Dense, empathetic, detailed portraits of each woman lift them above their iconography; even Byron, in all his famous charm, is convincingly rendered. The poets, of course, are doomed—Byron, fighting in the Greek war of independence, dies of fever; Shelley perishes in a boating accident; and Keats succumbs to consumption. Morgan concludes with a series of carefully crafted plateaus that evocatively capture the women in varied states of acceptance, ambivalence and longing after their losses. Augusta, whose appealing calm and optimism is all the more paradoxical in light of her taboo-shattering decision to sleep with her half-brother, Byron, makes for a particularly fascinating character study. Mary Shelley, clear-eyed, solemn and terribly intelligent, also emerges as three-dimensional and compelling.

My review: A sublime, beautifully written book that engages the reader from the start. I found the characters interestingly flawed and very real. Jude morgan has a deft hand with his writing and was able to bring these historical people to life in a way that made you feel as if you know them. This book has made it on my favorites list and I look forward to reading more of his works.