Chasing the Bard by Philippa Ballantine

I picked this book up at a con in the spirit of sampling works on my publisher's table. (Dragonmoon Press is now part of Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing. I'm published by Edge.) I've read a couple other fantasies from Moon Dragon Press which were competent and interesting enough to finish, but this is the first of three I have felt the urge to blog about. So - why did I like Chasing the Bard? For characters like Puck and Anne and Oberon, I think, although Sive and Will himself are the main protagonists. I suspect Sive is Ballantine's invention. A quick google for "Sive" turned up references to an Irish play by John B. Keane and a bunch of acronyms from various industries and adding "Oberon" yields hits from the software industry, not mythology. Sive is Oberon's smarter, tougher sister in the novel and the savior of her kind from the evil machinations of her ex-boyfriend, Mordant. For this she needs to woo Will Shakespeare for magical reasons which play out over his lifetime. I recently did a course on Renaissance literature which featured Shakespeare, so perhaps the interweaving of the bard's story with faery was another reason I enjoyed the book. Readers are idiosyncratic creatures, after all, who respond to what an author offers based on what they have already laid down as a foundation in their own brains. As villains go, Mordant was predictably vile and mindlessly destructive. He is given a little scope by his back story, but not much is made of his betrayal of his former nature. Everyone important seems to grasp, from the start, that he is possessed by the story's god of chaos, the "unmaker". The lively interactions of characters from faery with the world of mortals is the fun part of the story. Ballantine’s portrayal of multiple universes bridged by fey immortals reminded me of Martha Wells’ book, Elements of Fire. I suspect anyone who liked one of these books might find the similarities and differences interesting. Both feature a powerful female misfit from faery-land whose alliance with a mortal is critical to beating the bad guys.