Eccentric Circles, by Rebecca Lickiss (Ace, 2001)

Piper Pied, aspiring writer, has just received the surprise of her lifetime. Her grandmother, a woman who she hadn’t even seen in six years, has passed away. At the funeral, Piper’s relatives conspire against her, manipulating her into fulfilling a very specific term of Grandma Dickerson’s will. As a result, Piper inherits her grandmother’s Victorian home, located at the very edges of a Colorado suburb. A beautiful house, it’s filled with the books and magazines and remnants of Grandma Dickerson’s eccentric collecting habits. It has a lovely view from the front door, and an even better view from the back door. In fact, the view from the back door is out of this world. Literally. In fact, it’s a portal to the land of Fairy, a dimension inhabited by creatures of our imagination and scripted by our popular literature.

Thus, when Piper goes to explore the world outside her door, she discovers three very strange, very stereotypical creatures, one of which turns up in her own kitchen.
Aelvarim is a gorgeous elf, Larkingtower is a reclusive and misogynistic wizard, and Malroux is a charming, albeit grumpy dwarf. Not only do they represent certain archetypal figures found in “classic” fantasy, but they also fit the male trinity of youth, father figure, and grandfather figure. And none of them are particularly satisfied with their roles in life. That’s not the problem. Under normal circumstances, Piper might even be able to deal with the new weirdness in her life, balancing it with her own writing career and a part-time job in a local bookstore. These aren’t normal circumstances.

Aelvarim is convinced to a fault that Grandma Dickerson was murdered, and before long he has Piper aiding him in a search for clues, for the killer, and for a manuscript supposedly written by Piper’s grandmother before she died. If that weren’t enough, holes in reality are beginning to swallow Fairy and Earth, piecemeal. Are these events connected? And how can Piper solve the first and stop the second? If she can’t, reality itself will cease to exist. Piper will have to embrace her own inner power, accept her role in the story, and even tap into the magic of creativity to rewrite the ending, if she wants things to work out happily ever after, or even just happily for a while.

Eccentric Circles is sly and intelligent, commenting on the power of the imagination, suggesting that our subconscious influences not just the world around us but other worlds entirely, speculating on the symbiotic relationship of the mundane and the otherworldly. Rebecca Lickiss reimagines Tolkien as a shaper of worlds, and popular literature as a catalyst for cultural change, and does so with a keen sense of story and characterization that makes the book rather too short for the immense potential suggested as a result. She’s opened an interesting can of literary worms with this, her debut novel, and hopefully she’ll use them as bait for subsequent stories. I’m looking forward to her next release, in the hopes that it’ll be longer, and more complex, as I think she’s got a lot of as-yet untapped potential. Give this one a perusal.


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