Borderline
The Arcadia Project series, Book 1
Mishell Baker
Saga Press
Fiction, Fantasy
Themes: Diversity, Familiars, Faeries and Kin, Girl Power, Hidden Worlds, Magic Workers, Stardom, Urban Tales
****
Description
Like countless other women and men, Millie came to Los Angeles with stars in her eyes and dreams in her heart... only to lose everything in a single moment, a failed suicide attempt that took her legs, her coveted spot at the UCLA film school, and her fledgling career as a director just starting to get noticed on the festival circuit. Diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, she's been surviving day by day in rehab, slowly learning the coping mechanisms that would let her return to a normal life, little as she even knows what "normal" is anymore. Then a strange woman arrives with an even stranger job offer. About half a dozen red flags at least are waving all around the situation, but Millie doesn't see many (or any) other options. Thus she finds herself drawn into the Arcadia Project: the secret liaisons between the human world and the fey, charged with keeping knowledge of magic hidden and preventing rule breaches that might result in humanity being squashed like bugs by an irate faerie queen. Her trial run is supposed to be fairly routine, informing a fey viscount that he's overstayed his visa and needs to return to his world. Unfortunately, this job turns out to be anything but routine, plunging a still-unstable Millie in way over her head in a dark plot that could destroy everything, and everyone, it touches.
Review
I have middling luck with urban fantasies like this, so I didn't go into it with high expectations. (To be honest, I mostly chose it because pickings were a bit slim on Overdrive.) Those expectations were, happily, soon exceeded, in a story with magic and mystery and danger and flawed, hurting characters who aren't ever magically (metaphorically or literally) fixed, but who have to navigate their broken world with the sometimes-faulty tools they have on hand. Millie isn't always a likeable heroine, but she is determined, and even when she gets overwhelmed she manages to pick herself back up. (She also recognizes, if belatedly, when she hurts others with her iffy coping skills, and does what she can to make amends.) The supporting cast all has problems of their own to cope with, problems that they, too, often struggle and occasionally fail to handle well. The fey here aren't just bored partiers visiting our world for fun, or on dark secret missions; there's a very real need for fey and human worlds to interact, as without fey magic humans would have no inspiration or creativity, and without human logic and stability most fey just drift, lacking focus or object permanence or even memory. Every human has a bond, whether they know it or not, with a particular fey, their "echo"; meeting one's echo can spark a powerhouse career, such as the one enjoyed by a key player and one of Millie's personal heroes, David, a director who once lit Hollywood on fire but is in the waning days of his glory. This adds extra, interesting dimensions to the otherwise generic urban fantasy template of "hidden fey in the modern human world". The plot moves at a decent pace, only occasionally lingering overlong in self denial or misery or deliberate stupidity by the characters; even though I saw a couple twists coming, it was more in the anticipatory sense and less in the "dear gods, how obvious can you be - and how stupid are the characters for not seeing it?" sense. It all comes together, the plot and the characters' hard-won growth and even the cost of their lingering scars, in a rather satisfying, if somewhat bittersweet, way by the end. There's just a certain magic to this story that really worked for me, placing it above many other urban fantasies.