Elfland (Freda Warrington)

There is a magical Otherworld called the Spiral, inhabited by beings known as Aetherials. There is a Gateway that allows these beings to visit modern-day Earth and even to live here, undetected, for generations, raising their Aetherial children. Rosie is one of these Aetherial children, born here to Aetherial parents who love Earth and have set up lives here. Every seven years there is a ceremony in which the great Gateway is thrown wide and all the Aetherials who live on Earth go into the Otherworld to recoonect with their magical roots--only something is wrong, and the stony, unlikable Gatemaster refuses to open the Gateway, claiming that there is a danger on the other side and he must protect everyone. Cut off from their source, Aetherials begin to fade. As Rosie grows up she faces the usual angst and issues of young people, amplified by the internal turmoil of the Aetherial community over whether the Gatemaster's decision is justified or not. As rebellion brews, Rosie is torn over her relationships with various others: the Aetherial boy she is hopelessly in love with who doesn't acknowledge her, his brother who is impulsive and scary, her brother's human friend who adores Rosie, her brother's human wife who hides a frightening secret, and another brother who is not what they think him to be. If this all sounds like a soap opera, that's my only complaint about the book. I love the magical worlds and the sense of mystery and power they build. I didn't love the whole I'm-in-love-and-there's-nothing-I-can-do-about-it mythos; that's a view of life I find misleading and dull. Why is everyone so helpless in the face of their impulses? But overall I can recommend the story; I was caught up in what will happen next and how everything is going to be resolved.

Dirty Magic (Jaye Wells)

This is straight-up urban fantasy, with a gritty, mean streets vibe. When a new potion appears in the Cauldron, one that turns its users into raging monsters with a thirst for human flesh, Kate Prospero is one of the cops assigned to the Magical Enforcement Agency to find out where it's coming from and stop it. Kate has the background for this assignment: she grew up in one of the covens, a magic cooker being groomed to take over the business from her Uncle Abe who ran one region of the city, but she gave all that up after her mother died and has now sworn off all magic use. But the new assignment drags her back into that part of her past, and seems to be dragging her little brother in with her. Kate will do whatever she has to in order to save her brother and fight this implacable enemy. I'm not in love with the grim atmosphere of such a dark police story, but this one is well done and the magic is blended with the contemporary world seamlessly. Kate is a believable hero, tough but vulnerable, determined but conflicted. I will read more.

Faerie Tale (Raymond Feist)

Another contemporary fantasy, about a family living not too far from where I live (the story is set in Fredonia, NY) that winds up targeted by evil faerie magic. The victims include a famous author/screenwriter, his wife who was an actress before her marriage, a college-age daughter, twin 8-year-old boys, and assorted other friends and neighbors. That's one reason why I didn't love this story, though I didn't dislike it either; it wasn't focused on one main character. The story starts with the wife, drifts through various others, and at the end it's one of the boys who is the true hero. Another gripe is that the characters sometimes act as stupidly as the teen-movie heroines who go into the basement all alone at night to investigate the scary noise.  At one point a doctor told the father about all the horrible things happening to his son who had come through a very high fever with heart failure and apparent brain damage, displaying appalling behavior and EEG tracings nobody could make sense of, saying that he didn't even know how he can be alive, but if he were brain dead the chaotic brain scans would be flat -- and the father says, "Then he's all right?" I laughed out loud, which was NOT the reaction the author was going for. Finally, there were too many places where the mysterious events were described only as "indescribable," making me think of advice I read somewhere (I wish I could remember where) that you're the writer, damn it, so it's your job to describe it. These are small, niggling points, but for me they added up. Though there was a lot of atmosphere and horror, and some engaging characters, I just didn't get inside the story.

Moon Called (Patricia Briggs)

I enjoyed this first book in a fantasy series. Mercy Thompson lives in our modern world with the addition of werewolves, vampires, witches, and fae, but she is not one of them. She's not human, either; she's a walker, one of the few remaining descendants of Native American magic, who can turn at will into a coyote. She's generally maintains good relationships with the supernaturals in her area, but when a young, untrained werewolf in human form appears on the doorstep of her garage, things go bad quickly. Mercy has to negotiate two different werewolf packs and a nest of vampires in her search for a kidnapped child. I liked Mercy; she's tough and smart, but realistically limited in her abilities.The story was engaging and kept me turning pages. I will definitely read more of this series.

Human Memory: A Constructivist View (Mary Howes & Geoffrey O'Shea)

The authors present a thorough, tightly-argued case for the idea that memories are constructed, not simply stored. That is, each time we remember something, we use the bits and pieces of information available in the hugely complex network we've built, incorporating traces of all our experiences and knowledge, to build that memory. We don't just go on a shelf and find it there; it's new each time, and is changed every time we remember it. This is a very strong idea and has a huge amount of empirical support. For me, this was the weakness of this book; it argued against the idea that memories are exact replicas of our experiences, perhaps stronger or weaker, faded or intact, but otherwise unchanged. I don't know of anyone in the field who seriously takes that position any more. This made me lose patience with the book, because it seemed they were devoting their energies toward knocking down a straw man rather than actually examining the implications of the constructivist nature of memory. I also had another issue, which is much more mine than theirs; the book leaned heavily toward a philosophical approach, focusing on logic and introspection, but not so much empirical research. It's a matter of taste, I suppose, but that's not to my taste. I can't fault their conclusions, but don't feel that reading it really changed or enlarged my understanding of memory.

The Mind's Eye (Oliver Sacks)

Sacks is famous for his insightful case studies of people dealing with neurological challenges, and this volume maintains that tradition. Here he focuses on issue related to visual imagery: the ability, or lack of ability, to see things one's imagination, the "mind's eye." The stories he tells range from people with no ability to imagine visual stimuli at all, to the blind man whose visual imagination is so strong he relied on it to climb up on his roof by himself to repair it. Along the way we met a woman who can see shapes and colors perfectly well but can't use that information to recognize what she is looking at and learned about Sacks's own journey as he progressively lost vision in one eye to cancer. As always, Sacks focuses more on each individual's experience, how the challenges affect each one as a person in daily life, than on brain circuitry or the firing of neural impulses. I enjoyed this collection quite a lot.