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39 of 41 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Gale family will blow you away., June 6, 2009
Like Huff's 'Blood', 'Smoke' and 'Keeper' books, 'The Enchantment Emporium' is fast-paced urban fantasy peopled with believable characters and stuffed with pop references. It's also laugh-out-loud funny on nearly every page.
Alysha 'Allie' Gale comes from a old, large family whose women are witches who grow more powerful as they age, and whose men are also powerful, different and dangerous. Allie is at loose ends. She's worried about her brother, because he hasn't chosen what he wants to be and their meddling aunties are thinking about choosing for him. She's pining over a man she can't have because he's gay(though she could have changed his mind) and she's just lost her job.
Then she gets a letter from her grandmother, who has left her shop and the mystery of what's become of her to Allie. What she finds is a junk shop frequented by the Fey, a snooping reporter with the bluest eyes she's ever seen, and Trouble with a capital 'T'.
She wants to handle it on her own, but even with the help of a couple of cousins, her gay not-boyfriend and an overgrown leprechaun, Calgary, Alberta is the center of a coming storm, and all the might of the Gales will be needed to stop it.
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28 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"We don't force it; we just let things happen.", June 12, 2009
As there are already some good summaries of the plot, I'll skip this and come right to the point.
"The Enchantment Emporium" is not "The Keepers Cronicles" or any other Huff book recycled. It's a great new novel with an original plot and an interesting cast of characters.
Of course, if you've read a lot of Tanya Huff's books, you'll meet old aquaintances: her trademark sense of humour, her habbit of having characters quoting from popular culture to make a point (and the reader laugh), the fact that she enjoys writing about strong, independend women and makes fun of men. So what? That's normal for every author. It's called a writing style.
About the things that don't get explained: I admit it, as a reader, you get hit over the head with the plot in the first sentence of the novel. A lot of things don't get explained explicitly. You have to figure them out yourself in the course of the narrative. I think it's fun, keeps the plot moving and helps the reader to get deeper into what's happening because you have to begin to think like the characters if you want to understand what they are, what their motivations are and why things happen. It's not the 'normal' approach to writing a fantasy novel, but in my opinion, it works and provides an exciting new perspective.
"The Enchantment Emporium" is a funny, suspenseful book with loveable characters and wonderful descriptions (I just love the dragons!). There's humour, violence, sex, mythological creatures, yoyos, music and lots of baking.
Highly recommended!
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Get ready for a lot of repetitions of the name Gale, August 6, 2011
I've had the full range of reactions to Huff's books, from deep enjoyment to horrified revulsion. I really wanted to like this book, if only because most of the bad reviews I read were turned off by the occasional F-bomb and the copious sex between cousins (not considered incest in many cultures, including the protagonist's!). Also, I don't mind having to figure out the world's rules as I go along, nor do I mind infodumps, which this book somehow managed to combine. However, smug essentialism trumped casual acceptance of sexuality, both het and gay, and because the essentialism was reduced to a tic I couldn't ignore it for more than a page at a time. Sigh.
Um, summary: Allie Gale, member of a powerful family of witches that always gets what it wants and can make anything happen via charms (sometimes sent in pies), including getting you a phone that always works and never costs any money, inherits her grandmother's curio shop in Calgary, away from the "aunties," and goes there to investigate what happened to her grandmother. Cue leprechauns, sex with a mysterious stranger who has a hidden agenda, sorcerors, and dragons.
I cannot begin to express how annoyed I was at the repeated (seriously, about once a page) trope "Gale girls X" where X is some blanket statement, mostly about taking care of the people they cared about or getting what they wanted--with the occasional variation for "Gale boys Y" where Y is about having sex, choosing which Gale girl they wanted to mate with, or going power-crazy in the way that the most powerful Gale boys always do. When Gale girls get old enough, they become "aunties," powerful and meddling with each other. Though Allie and her cousin Charlie rebel cute against the aunties, it's just that they don't want to do what they're told; they have no compunctions about running roughshod over other people if *they're* the ones making the Gale decisions. Gale girls get what they want, and that includes getting public services and plane tickets whenever they want them. I guess whoever was going to get them in the ordinary course of events is just out of luck. Non-Gales are pets, including the man Allie was formerly in unrequited love with, who seems to have been modeled on Jared Padalecki physically. Look, I don't care if your characters have lots of sex between cousins and I'm all for women who get more powerful with age, but I have a real problem with being expected to enjoy a family (and it's clear that free will is not in effect and that these habits just breed true, like magic and grey eyes) that simply doesn't regard other people as worth consideration unless some Gale decides that those non-Gales are specifically and individually worth taking under the Gale wing. Perhaps all the Gale-ing was supposed to be cutesy, but I found it not just creepy but actively offensive.
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