Ok, finally catching up with this one. I have had it sitting on my account for a while, but I so rarely log in to read books purchased via Kindle that I tend to forget I have them.
Since the vents of The Dragon Kings of Oklahoma, Daisy and Wild-Eye have settled in as the adoptive daddies of the young dragon, Ace. Ace is getting just a little bit bigger now and trying to spread her wings. All three of them are out exploring the woods on the edges of Douay when they suddenly have a ‘not in Kansas anymore’ kind of moment; the woods get a little more wild then they remember then, and a little more unearthly. It still seems like the Ouachitas, they can still sort of recognize the path to the creek. They think? But it’s clear something funny is going on, and navigating back home is going to be a little harder than they’d all like.
Now the boys both know that if you’re caught lost in the woods, you are not meant to split up. But Daisy’s bad hip starts paining him, and theirs is not a normal situation; if they have not so much found themselves lost as been relocated to another world, what are the odds of them being rescued by friendly passer-by? Not bloody likely, it seems.
So, despite Ace’s protests, Wild-Eye goes off to try and find help. And poor Daisy, mostly immobilized by his leg, finds himself being temped by the Cornucopia of fruity offerings on display in this green and shaded version of the Twilight Zone. But before he can indulge in his second lapse of judgement for the day, his druid mother suddenly appears and whisks him out of the wood.
So Daisy and Ace have made it out—only to find several days have passed. What happened to Wild-Eye? Wild-Eye is not so lucky, it seems; he eventually made his own way out, but he must have eaten some of the fae fruit along the way, and now Daisy is worried that he can’t be trusted. But he’s not alone; it looks like the denizens of Douay that were the most easily preyed on by Purdue Pharma are also those most vulnerable to the fae offerings. And now Daisy is not sure what to do; does he trust his mother, who abandoned him as a kid? Does he try and seek help from the owner of the local All-mart—who is also his Oxy dealer and a werewolf? Or does he try for a third option?
Just like The Dragon Kings of Oklahoma, the greatest strength of Fae Lords of Oklahoma is in its characters. Both Daisy and Wild-Eye are just endlessly endearing, as are a number of the other residents of their 600-odd person town. But also just like the previous book, anything outside of Douay is much more thinly sketched; like the dragon-keepers that came before them, the backgrounds of both the druids and the fae receive much less attention than the small town Oklahomans. They move the plot along, but there’s not much backing behind them.
But the books are quite short, and the well fleshed out backgrounds for these elements are not really Steinmetz’s priority. We’re really here to see what might happen if we took out regular fantasy tropes and set them out to play in a rural setting. And that’s what makes these books so damned fun.
For cbr18bingo, this one is Season Why? It’s the end of spooky season and I’m reading about faries, dragons, druids and werewolves. Seems fitting.
And if I have this right, two more bingos; horizontal and vertical
