Piers Anthony Review

This is the review I received from Piers Anthony, which will appear in his Mayhem 2016 newsletter. He did point out that I should remember that it is only one opinion. I suppose this means not to grant it too much weight, though I am still very excited about it.

I read Elf Mastery by Bryant Reil. This features the teen elf girl Kyla, talkative, impetuous, nervy, who comes to college and meets all manner of other creatures as students, teachers, and other personnel of the institution of Equinox. Such as the demoness Lili who turns fiery when annoyed, as she often is. The nymph Eunoe, pronounced YOON-way, who is a good deal more than she seems. The dryad Aspen, who can do remarkable things with wood. And her roommate Aura, an air spirit who looks ghostly and controls the wind. When there's a dance they have no dates, so Kyla challenges some boys to physical combat: if she wins, they are dates. She promptly loses, as she knows nothing about it, but Aspen bails her out. This is the general way of it: Kyla dives in first, and finds out what she's into later, to the frustration of her more sensible companions. They soon encounter a plot to blot out all the light so the lord of darkness can rule. It's a serious threat; first the stars wink out one by one, then the sun goes dark. Somehow Kyla blunders her way into saving the world. This is one wild adventure with unusual twists, such as a fight between a powerful dwarf and Lug, an earth elemental formed of rocks. When the dwarf goes after Kyla, meaning to kill her, Lug goes after the dwarf. But the dwarf has magic, so that his touch makes Lug collapse into a pile of rubble. But the moment he lets go, the rubble re-forms into Lug, so that the dwarf can't chase Kyla. Lug's job is to make the world revolve by pushing it from the center; when the pushing stops, so does the world, and there are no days or nights. It's a fun story with its own peculiar logic, and I suspect there is more coming, because Kyla has yet to have a romance despite being pretty enough.