Cat Hellisen

Originally posted on Just Geeking by.

Content warnings:
This book contains scenes of violence, blood, death and gore. There are scenes of captivity and torture. The torture scenes include multiple torture techniques including targeting a disabled character’s most painful areas. There are also scenes of abuse (verbal and physical), war, drugs, destruction, fire and ableism.

Thief Mage Beggar Mage tells the story of Tet, a former priest-mage who through no fault of his own ends up cursed by the gods following the events of a relic being stolen from his temple. Over the course of the novel his story unwinds, and we learn that there is more to Tet than even he knows. What is clear is that he has angered the gods, and they have taken it out on his flesh. They have carved it into his body, leaving him with terrible chronic pain.

Other disabled readers may be thinking that this is beginning to sound awfully familiar right about now and to begin with that was my concern as well. But Hellisen has not used disability has a plot device. Instead, she has written a diverse fantasy novel with an LGBTQIA+ disabled protagonist and secondary character. At every stage Tet’s pain is recognised and described accurately, including how someone with chronic pain and problems with their knees would move and navigate the world around them.

Tet is the beggar mage mentioned in the title, and Dohza, a wonderful character I dare you not to fall in love with, is the thief mage and a below-the-elbow amputee. While Tet’s chronic pain has limitations for him, neither character lets their disability stop them from doing things. This is especially true for Dohza who is the greatest thief in the kingdom, and it was brilliant to see this in a fantasy novel where usually disabled characters are relegated to the realms of topes, that’s if they exist at all!

The world building of Thief Mage Beggar Mage is very clever and intricate, and I enjoyed following the story as it unwove. I am not familiar with The Tinderbox by Hans Christian Andersen, so many aspects of the story were a surprise to me. While I did overall enjoy this novel I found that the pacing and the feel of Thief Mage Beggar Mage was not quite to my liking. It is more akin to epic fantasy and that can be a hit or a miss for me. This is a personal preference and not a criticism of the book or the author.

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… (plus d'informations)

What if a fairy tale curse didn't come with the guarantee of a fairy tale love? What if falling out of love meant the curse resumed? And what if you knew that someday the same would happen to you?

Such is the premise of Cat Hellisen's Beastkeeper, a book that gathers together fairy tale themes of love and revenge, courage and grief, and in beautiful, effortlessly poetic prose, brings them into our modern realm of broken promises, fickle parents, and fleeting first loves. The result is moving and unexpectedly healing: those fairy tale themes prove powerful even, and perhaps especially, amid the cutting shards we find so often in real life.

Beastkeeper is written for middle grade and young adult readers, but like many a Robin McKinley retelling or Lloyd Alexander adventure or Frances Hodgson Burnett classic, there is much here for adult readers to discover.… (plus d'informations)

For such a slim and unassuming volume, this book farexceeds expectations. Hellison's prose is light, but intricate, and perfectly captures the turning point between her protagonist's innocent youth and magic-filled future. The story starts out simply enough with a family devolving into chaos, but instead of turning the book into an expected tale of familial redemption (though there are aspects of this) or devolving into teenaged angst/darkness (though there is plenty of risky if not risqué behaviour) she manages to keep the prose simple enough that the story feels like an ageless fairytale, but complex enough that there are distinct echoes of modern faerie-masters such as Gaiman, Black, and Link. Very well done; I'm very much looking forward to more from Hellison.… (plus d'informations)