All posts tagged: Penélope

Midnight Curfew by Penelope Douglas

Midnight Curfew by Penelope Douglas

An emergency alert goes out to every phone on one side of a Florida town. Severe summer storms, high winds, curfew in effect from midnight until six, running through October. It reads like weather. It is not weather. Somebody with money has worked out that a community whose people clean hotel rooms at dawn and close bars at two cannot survive a rule that makes it illegal to be outside at night, and he has written that rule specifically to trap one man. Midnight Curfew by Penelope Douglas hangs an entire novel on that single piece of paperwork, and it is the most efficient thing she has built in years. How Midnight Curfew Is Built The architecture is worth describing, because it does most of the work. Two narrators alternate, both in first person present tense. Dallas Jaeger is twenty-five, teaches philosophy at the private academy on the rich side of the tracks, and belongs to a family that has held its land for five hundred years by refusing to be moved. Callum Ames is …

Of Dragons and Lies by Penelope Knayme

Of Dragons and Lies by Penelope Knayme

There are debut series openers, and then there are the ones that rewrite your understanding of what fantasy fiction can do. Of Dragons and Lies by Penelope Knayme belongs firmly in the second category. From the first page — a dream drenched in sirens and smoke, in fire that takes rather than warms — you sense that you are not in safe hands. You are in capable ones. That distinction matters enormously. Knayme, previously known for The Last Petal, steps boldly into epic fantasy with a world and a story that feel both intimately human and cosmically high-stakes. The Unbound Saga has arrived, and it has arrived fully formed. The World of Aluxia: Built on Beautiful, Breathable Lies The realm of Aluxia is one of the most politically layered fantasy worlds crafted in recent years. On the surface, it is a structured, elemental society: citizens either wield one of six elements — water, fire, rock, wind, metal, or wood — or they are classified as Sines, magicless individuals who exist at the margins of a …