October 11, 2013
MarkBernstein.org
 

Discount Armageddon

Discount Armageddon
Seanan McGuire

(order)

(October 11, 2013)

Verity Price, fresh from rural Oregon, occupies a tiny semi-legal Greenwich Village sublet whilst pursuing her avocation for professional ballroom dancing and her studies in the zoology of creatures most people assume to by mythical. The streets of New York, it turns out, are quite full of obscurely supernatural beings: boogymen who own strip clubs, dragon princesses who work as waitresses, brownies who run a breakfast bakery.

But what girl doesn’t have a few problems? Verity’s problems include a tribe of intelligent mice who devise arcane religious ceremonies around her family, a telepathic cousin, an International Order that is sworn to exterminate the people Verity studies, a little sister named Antimony who likes to play with snares and pitfalls, and of course the dance competition judges. This confection could bear with a little more dance and a little less Buffy, but it’s good fun.