To Trust the Wolf (Little Red) is free until midnight Pacific time today. This is my favorite review, so far:
"To Trust the Wolf calls on many of the great fantasy tropes, but also carries the author's unique imprint in style and content.
Like Tolkien's proto-European Middle-Earth, the world of Raioume is an almost-France, in which French place-names and language snippets create a distinct flavor that sparks the imagination of the reader with minimal exposition.
Like so many good adventure tales, from Star Wars to Harry Potter, it is a coming-of-age story involving a young person caught up in a current of destiny.
Like modern novelists such as Neil Gaiman or Tom Robbins, the author taps into a rich well of mythological, anthropological and religious themes and archetypes, from the virgin-mother-crone feminine trinity to the fairy-tale source material.
A plot line including constant power struggles, epic battlegrounds and magical warfare places this novel firmly in the footsteps of the great fantasy traditions.
Amidst all these familiar genre conventions, a story unfolds that reflects a unique authorial voice. The tale hinges, memorably, on certain prophecies and vision of the future that are related gradually to the reader. The backstory and prophetic predictions come into view as perfectly disorienting sliding puzzle pieces. Particularly striking are the descriptions of lucid dreams and magical telepathic encounters, in which characters gain insights and glimpses of future events, confused through the language of dreaming or the potential pitfalls and paradoxes inherent in relating to the future. As all these trajectories of foreshadowing begin to reinforce and converge on the themes of the archetypal source material, the novel shifts from "page-turner" to high art.
The result is the impression of reading something satisfyingly familiar, through an entirely fresh means of storytelling."