Eccentric Circles (Rebecca Lickiss)

Eccentric Circles
Rebecca Lickiss
Ace
Fiction, Fantasy
*** (Okay)

DESCRIPTION: All her life, Piper Pied Dickerson has wanted to lead a normal life, with normal friends and a normal home. With her eccentric family, though, that's never been possible. It doesn't help that she's still drifting years after college, nursing half-formed hopes of publishing novels. After her great-grandmother dies, Piper unexpectedly inherits her house, a small Victorian cottage in a Colorado suburb. It's full of dust, old furniture, books... and magic, as she learns when she comes down the stairs in the morning to find an elf sitting at the kitchen table. His name is Aelvarim. He hails from the land of Fairy - just through the cottage's back door, if you know how to pass through it right - and he's come to solve Grandma Dickerson's murder: her death, he insists, was no mere accident of old age, but a magically-committed crime. Though Piper can't help but feel attracted to the handsome, likely lunatic man in her kitchen, she wants no part in his delusions... but she may not have a choice. When her great-grandmother died, the world of Fairy began falling apart, with bits and pieces falling into black rifts and nothingness. The rifts will spread to Piper's own world soon, for if the realm of imagination fails, the real world will quickly follow. Like it or not, Piper the would-be writer finds herself cast in a story of her own. Will she become an unlikely hero, or another tragic victim?

REVIEW: A fast read, I found it vaguely enjoyable, yet oddly bland at the same time. Piper takes too long figuring out that Fairy is a real place and Aelvarim is a real elf.  After that she remains wishy-washy on the whole "saving the world" part of her job; she'd much rather drool over the handsome elf, even as she frets and worries over his sanity and whether or not coming from different dimensions would significantly impede romantic relationships. The world of Fairy should've been more captivating, but it feels more like a cul-de-sac than a world. There are only three inhabitants - a dwarf, a wizard, and the elf, plus a handful of generic, pesky fairies - and one little path in an endless, featureless wood. This not only limits the imaginative horizons, but it limits the suspect list in Grandma Dickerson's murder to three on the Fairy side. I'd actually hoped more would come of Piper's large and eccentric family, after the time Lickiss spent establishing them; it would've added a nice twist in the tale if Piper wasn't the first Dickerson relation to stumble across Great-Grandma's back door to another world, especially if one of them was presented as a potential suspect in a magical murder. But, no, mainly her family exists to distract her from the search for clues (and provide people who embarrass her about her new elfish boyfriend.) As for the murder itself, Piper and Aelvarin spend more time looking for clues and not finding them than they do solving anything, and the culprit proved too obvious. The ending wraps up a bit too easily. Overall, it's not a terrible little book, but it missed several opportunities to be a better story than it was.