Customer Reviews

The Enchantment Emporium

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

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.

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!

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.

First, I found this to be one of the most enjoyable books of the year. I've re-read it several times.

However -- Huff decided not to make it easy. Unless a person comes to it with some sense of Celtic mythology (the horned god; the power of young woman/mother/crone, the leprechaun, the water spirit, etc.), making sense of the May Day family reunion scene into which the reader is immediately dropped would not be an easy adjustment. There's no actual description of "ritual," but plenty of implications as to what it involves.

Additionally, and I believe deliberately, she didn't make a lot of anthropology-style or sociology-style infodumps in regard to the world-building. In one way, it takes place in modern Canada, partly in the family's "traditional" territory and partly in Calgary. In another way, the Gale extended family, while mostly human, is not quite so, not entirely so, and its members exist in accordance with their own prerequisites, which are not identical with the conventions of the ordinary society around them (though some reviewers would have benefited from reading more carefully before fretting about the level of inbreeding). The Gales go to college; Alysha has a fine arts degree and was working at the Royal Ontario Museum cataloging artifacts before the grant money that paid her ran out; her cousin Roland is a lawyer.

It's a world that the protagonist, Alysha Catherine Gale, knows well, and sees no need to explain at length. She just needs to figure out how to function in the changed circumstances caused by her possibly but not necessarily deceased grandmother's rather unusual bequest.

At the same time, the world of the Gales borders on others, with the result that there are dragon princes in their Calgary. There are sorcerers; ritual requires power and the "Gale girls" are attracted to power -- although, as Alysha points out, power can be variably defined and her father is a high school history teacher.

I enjoy urban fantasy, and this novel is a fine addition to my bookshelf! In it we meet Alysha, a young woman who has just been laid off from her job, who has a rather unusual family. As we meet "the aunties," who seem so kindly at first, we soon realize that there is an unexplained source of power available to this family. And a propensity to growing stag horns among some of the men...

As Alysha heads west to Calgary to take over an Enchantment Emporium left to her by her grandmother, we meet a wonderful cast of characters. If I say too much about them, I'll create a spoiler, and I don't want to do that. Suffice it to say that battlelines are being drawn, and we will discover more about Alysha's family!

I do hope to read more of these charmingly written fantasies!

Many thanks to Tanya Huff for one of the best fantasy novels I have read in years. Echoes of Charles deLint's work are ever present in this delightful story of a young woman who leaves her strangely-empowered family, ruled by a circle of "Aunties," to take charge of her deceased grandmother's antique shop and perhaps also discover what happened to Grannie.

Leprechauns, sorcerers, dragons -- oh, oops, those are actually dragon-LORDS -- old and new love interests, and rafts of cousins all contribute to an exciting plot in which every new revelation leads to more questions and intricacies. Sexual relationships of all types abound, but they are more implied than described; much heavy breathing, not so much actual coitus. And all is handled with just enough humor so that the reader can sympathize with the characters while still laughing hysterically at the dialog.

And the best part? No icky info-dumps, those paragraphs of rules and regs for the alternative universe to which SF&F novels are all too prone. Huff respects her reader's intelligence. One need only pay attention and pick up the hints as they are dropped.

This is one of the most interesting books I've read so far this year, though as others mentioned, Huff pushes the envelope with some of the subject matter.

The book is a difficult starter. There is next to no background given for the world building done here, so the reader has a steep learning curve at the beginning trying to make sense of it all, while also following the plot as it develops. However, all that straining to make the pieces fit quickly pays off as the story starts to hit its stride.

A great deal of what I read is urban fantasy and while many authors put their own stamp on staples such as witches and vampires, I can't recall anything quite as unique as Huff's Aunties in The Enchantment Emporium. They're funny, nosy, meddling, powerful, and if you really pay attention, quite scary considering that they answer only to themselves and not outsider society's morals and laws. There is no attempt from the author in the writing to justify what they do and why they do it, it's all just presented as-is, which I think is part of why I was so fascinated. The magic system is also relatively unique in that it's all accomplished via charms, or magical symbols which are drawn.

I'm not going to bother discussing the plot since it's covered to enough degree in the book description and other reviews. The story itself is okay, but isn't actually what enthralled me with this particular book and that's why I gave it four instead of five stars. What truly grabbed me is the outstanding world building, a wide variety of very interesting characters, especially the main character who is growing up and into her power, and some of the best writing I think that Huff has done. So if you're looking for something different and are willing to take a chance on a book that may be a bit more difficult in some ways than the norm, give this one a try.

Here's a couple quotes from the book to give a taste. (I love Huff's humor in her writing.):

Okay, there didn't have to be a body. Given what it would take to kill Gran, a body after the fact had to be considered optional.

"You know what the aunties are like. Gran's gone, someone broke the security on a gate to let the dragons through, and they're going to blame the sorcerer for both those things as well as the hike in Calgary's transit fares, middle-aged women wearing jeans that barely cover their a**es, and SciFi canceling The Dresden Files."

This reads more like the 4th or 5th book of a well established series rather than the first of a new one. There is virtually no description of any of the characters and an assumption that the reader knows and understands the created universe. It is assumed that one knows who the Gales are and what it means to be first, second, third or fourth circle amd the significance of the baked goods.

In addition, point of view is changed very frequently in the first couple of chapters so that it difficult to follow the story. Especially, considering that the point of view charactern isn't typically identified. If I had just downloaded the sample, I would never have purchased the book. However, it does get better.

If one ignores the fact that there is a lot of back story that is not explained, the story is pretty interesting. Allie's grandmother dies (or does she just disappear?) and leaves her a junk shop to run. But it's more than a junk shop,there's the sideline in magic potions and the mailstop for local paranormals. Pretty soon, she is involved with a tabliod reporter and steps into a problem with an evil wizard and 12 Dragon Lords from a different realm.

It's a pretty good story, it would have been a much better one if there was less of "everyone already knows and understand thus, so I'll skip any explanations" and more description of the magic system and back story. If one can get through the first couple of chapters, it is well worth reading.

The Gale brood can be called witches, but actually are something much more. Their magic spells come in the form of charms and are so powerful they can change future events. The Aunties run the family, but the Cousins allow them their belief but not the control.

After Alysha Gale loses her research grant, she is at loose ends while wishing to escape from her Aunties who demand control of her life. When her Gran writes her informing her she is dead and that she bequeathed her junk store The Enchantment Emporium, Alysha travels to Calgary to look at the shop. The first person she meets in the store is Joe the Leprechaun. She soon is stalked by an assassin who is blood bonded to a sorcerer (evil witch). Alysha concludes the shop services the local fey community. When Alysha learns just how much trouble is brewing in Calgary, even calling in the family to help may not be enough to save the day. Graham the assassin is assigned to keep Alysha out of his master's business, but his feelings for her are that of man towards the woman he cherishes. She feels the same way about her him. However he has a task to kill whatever crosses through the portal and Aly stops him from completing his mission. She must deal with the sorcerer while he must deal with what his love for Aly will do to him.

Tanya Huff has written a fantastic urban fantasy reminiscent of her Keeper's Chronicles. The support cast is great; one of the best in recent memory, as they are quirky yet deadly and determined to save the world. There are plenty of surprising spins in THE ENCHANTMENT EMPORIUM that explain why witches and sorceresses fight to the death when they meet. The lead couple holds all this together as they struggle with a forbidden love at a time of pandemic crisis. Ms. Huff is at the top of her game with this thrilling winner.

Harriet Klausner

Interesting world-building, complex characters, and an innovative plot line.

Plus, Ms Huff doesn't do that really annoying thing of assuming readers are too stupid to hold a thought for more than two seconds. This author requires a reader to engage in the imagined world and do some thinking, for which my thanks.