Customer Reviews

Children of Magic

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Story collection featuring kids with magic- dealing/learning/getting corrupted by.. Ect. Some really wonderful stories!!
Tanya Huff's "After School Special" featuring Bri and Ashley, TONY, Amy and CB from Huff's Smoke series! Ashley's troubled by the presence of her magical and lonely, loser-little-sis at school. While Bri is having difficulty learning spells, Tony is called in to help when a voice in the walls starts to cause problems at their school.
Nethan's Magic (Jody Lynn Nye) features a great magician learning the joys of everyday life through her non-magical infant. Really cute!
Touching Faith (Alexander B Potter) a young boy works out his future and his healing ability in the best way he knows how. Cute and funnt!^ ^
An End to all Things (Karina Sumner-Smith) in a gritty street life, a tough young girl as one Talent that the punters eventually seek her out for- she can take the ghosts away, re-attach them to her and give the haunted piece, for a time, for a price. The world is run on magic and she wasn't born with any.. Or so she thought. Amazing! I'd read more!
Shades of Truth (Jana Paniccia)- all refuse magic and are Good people, but what if you ARE Magic, would you die to reject it or embrace the Truth? Not great. Okay.
The Winter of Our Discontent (Nancy Holder)- a dark world, no color, eternal rain. Only the women of the house can bring forth life and color, but the oldest daughter still only a child has failed to bring forth anything for years, her Mother the leader of the clan orders her death, for there is only so much magic to go around and this is the girl's final Test. Can her brother swing the sword if she Fails? WILL she fail? AMAZING!!!
Fever Waking (Jane Lindskold)- heirs to the long dead pharohs they have been cursed with the Fever, when their time comes they will burn until they burn away their magic or they burn away.. Something else. Is HAVING magic worth ANY sacrifice? Your arm? Your mind? Your emotions? Interesting! I liked it!
Far from the Tree (Melissa Lee Shaw)- Nal's best friend is Jemmy, a fatherless boy in a small town. She sees in Jemmy a good person despite what the townspeople say about him and is one of the only poeple that knows his secret- he has an affinity with the trees. One that will allow Jemmy, under the urging of his pure friend Nal to save a town- but will that save him from the townsfolk? GOOD! And there will be a TRILOGY "Set in the same world."
Shahira (Michelle West)- Shahira is a Summer child, one of many scattered in the populace born on the same day. They are fated for Something, and Shahira's grandma takes special care to teach the young girl about the Winter mentality, of sharing and working together to survive. Shahira uses this wisedom to bring the Summer children strength as they are herded to the capital, to the cave beneath the King's castle where a mysterious egg waits to hatch... Shahira's resilence and emotional strength is wonderful and well WORTH THE READ!

This is one of the best, if not the best, anthology of the year. Each of the seventeen tales (mostly written by women) is excellent with some like the amusing "After School Special" by Huff and "The Trade" by Patton being extraordinary. The seventeen contributions will be read more than once with this reviewer for instance having finished the book in one fabulous sitting; something that rarely happens by me with short story collections. Fans of coming of age fantasy tales will appreciate this superior compilation as observing the efforts of the starring youngsters to learn to use their magic make for a terrific book in many ways reminiscent of the early X-Men.

Harriet Klausner

"How good would it really be to have magical abilities in a world that doesn't believe in magic?" asks the bacover blurb of this anthology of original fantasy stories. "How would you learn to master those skills? Would you use them for the general good or your own selfish reasons? Would it be better to be born in a realm where magic is actually accepted? What challenges would the fledgling wizard face in such a world?" That pretty well sums up the assortment of tales between these covers. In 17 stories, authors including Alan Dean Foster, Jody-Lynn Nye, Tanya Huff, Sarah A. Hoyt, Fiona Patton, and more (the women, I notice, are heavily in the majority--perhaps women are just likelier to write about children?) show us young people from infancy to teenhood (one is 15--and any 15-year-old will be quick to tell you that She Is Not a CHILD!), some of them living "under wraps" in our own world, some in realities where magic is an everyday part of the landscape. Some stories are dark, some humorous; there's even a story explaining how the "godlike" Leonardo daVinci--the epitome of the Renaissance Man--acquired his talents. Greenberg, as usual, chooses well, helped by co-editor Kerrie Hughes. Fantasy-lovers shouldn't miss it.