Steel Rose

Kara Dalkey

I purchased this book because I kept seeing it on a cheep pile and thinking of the Project Pitchfork song by the same name. It's a cool song so I figured the book might be worth a read too, even though they are totally un-related. Same way I found out there is a movie called Soylent Green because of a Wumpscut song. Still haven't seen Soylent Green, but I intend to when next I get the opportunity.

T.J. is a struggling artist, her chosen medium is performance art, she dream of one day being well known and respected enough to earn a living of it. Problem is her act just isn't very good, she desperately needs to come up with something good and fairly quickly if she wants to keep getting gigs.

In search for inspiration she takes some items and goes beneath a bridge to try and come up with inspiration, she unwittingly performs a kind of ritual the calls the attention of some of Pittsburgh's non human inhabitants.

Two sidhe from the unseelie court come to T.J. and offer to help her with her performance. They secretly plan to harness what is basically raw magical talent and a ritualistic performance to attack the seelie nobles, since T.J. is human it will be a way to do it without breaking any treaties that have been formed between the two courts.

The sidhe (pronounced she) are fey folk, this has been drawn from folklore/mythology. They are spilt it to two factions or courts the seelie who are basically nobles and I guess can basically be though of as fairies or elves, and the unseelie court that are basically everything else, like goblins and stranger things. This is my mental image/understanding of these things anyhow, based on this book and A Kiss of Shadows by Laurell K. Hamilton, which is part of a separate newer series than the Anita Blake series.

In this novel the seelie court are interested in nature and want everything to be all pretty and green where as the unseelie are interested in industry and factories. It is a delicate balance, if either side wins the humans lose out as their goals for the earth are at extreme opposite ends of the scale and neither extreme is particularly helpful.

T.J.'s first performance goes very well, she draws a massive crowd, mainly sidhe folk, but her dreams are coming true, unfortunately her newfound fame has come at a price.

Through her actions T.J. has started a war between the factions and she is now stuck in the middle of it, whatever way it goes this is going to turn out badly.

I found that already having an idea about the sidhe prior to reading this book made things a lot easier, but it was good to get someone else's spin on it, much in the same way it is good to read multiple sources on anything, be it non-fiction or folklore. It was also an entertaining novel.