There is only one word that works for Philippa Balantine’s Digital Magic.  It’s one I’ve used a lot in the last few hours.  MINDF***!  It’s a complete and total mindf*** and it doesn’t get any better than this.

I walked into this book blind.  All I knew was that it took place centuries after Chasing the Bard and totally makes up for how I felt about the ending of that story.  I will be honest, the first third of the book I kept wishing it had been two stories.  There’s so many characters and the story lines are so different that you want it to be two different books, one for Ella, Ronan and Bakari (YUMMY) and one for Aroha, Sally, Daniel and Nana.

I would get to the sections with Aroha and sag.  They made absolutely no sense and didn’t really seem to add anything to the story.  When I hit that second third of the book though I was so totally immersed and things started becoming so much clearer it wasn’t funny.  I saw hints of this book being a total mindf*** then but in the later third of the book you’re just slapped upside the head with it.  BLAM!  Crystal clear, perfect weaving of the story threads and me sitting there with my mouth open like a hungry frog.

I love stories that do this.  I’m the one who got in trouble for having The Sixth Sense figured out in fifteen minutes. Therefore I like nothing more than having a story smack me in the head with a clue-by-four just pages from the end.  It makes the story more worthwhile, more enjoyable, because you’re not sitting there knowing how it’s going to all end in chapter three.  On the whole, with everything I have read - or listened to - this year, this story delivers that punch in the form of a vicious upper-cut and I will sing the praises of the Kiwi Goddess all the more for it.

Interestingly enough I found, that while this is a squeal to Chasing the Bard, it’s not required to have read the Chasing the Bard to understand Digital Magic.  You get a fuller impact of the story, but I think Digital Magic would work just as well as a stand alone novel.  You may find that reading this one first, then going back and reading Chasing the Bard, may work better.  This only serves as a reminder that I need to add that book to my personal library as well.

I think having read this, Chasing the Bard, and many of the other small press publications, I’ve discovered that these podcasters that big name publishing has spent so much time scoffing at are better writers than some of the mass market publications I’ve read in the last few years.  Mind you, this doesn’t mean I’m giving up my Anne Bishop and Jacqueline Carey collections, or for that matter my new addiction to Scott Sigler, but I’m more inclined to look at these smaller press publications.  The writing has certainly been a hell of a lot better.

But that’s a tangent for another time.  For now I’m going to you with the blurb for Digital Magic and a reminder that you can pick this book up from Amazon.com on August 8, 2008 at 8:00 AM Pacific.  Unfortunately the economy keeps me from helping assist Philippa, and her cabana boy Morris, up the charts on Friday but it won’t keep me from sharing their excellent stories with you and hope that my enthusiasm and joy in these stories will make you curious enough to pick them up for yourselves.

The Fey are gone… and with them, magic. At least, that is how things seem at the conclusion of the award-nominated novel Chasing the Bard. ~ Lord what fools these mortals be. ~ Penherem is a quaint, sleepy English village where people go to escape the 21st Century. Hiding from the world of laptop computers, the Internet, and wireless communication, is Ella. A writer, now barren of ideas and drive, she resigns herself to a quiet life of solitude. Everything changes with the arrival of a shapeshifting thief. Suddenly, everyone begins to change–from the local librarian to the lady of the manor–revealing their true natures and dangerous secrets. Something in this sleepy English village is awakening… something that might be better left alone.

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