Mishell Baker
Saga Press
Published March 1st, 2016
ISBN: 1481429787 (ISBN13: 9781481429788)
“It was midmorning on a Monday when magic walked into my life wearing a beige Ann Taylor suit and sensible flats.”
Millie Roper is just trying to keep it all together. She’s been living at the mental hospital awhile, since she tried to kill herself by jumping off a seven story building. Instead of dying, she ended up with extensive facial scarring and lost both her legs. She’s been learning to cope with borderline personality disorder and walking on prosthetic legs.
The day Caryl appears in Millie’s room, the world gets a whole lot stranger.
Borderline is a quirky urban fantasy about the Arcadia Project – an organization that governs human-“fey” interactions, monitoring the gates between the worlds. Hollywood is peppered with people whose explosive creativity comes from finding their fey counterpart: their Echo. The human in the relationship finds magically-induced inspiration from the fey, and the fey get concentration and sanity from their human Echo.
The Arcadia Project has been monitoring a strange fluctuation in numbers of fey on this side of the gates. Something is causing fey to only half register in the system, as though they’re not quite here. Caryl thinks the impulsive and curious Millie may be just what the Project needs to get to the bottom of it.
The honest treatment of Millie’s disorder and the treatment of her locomotion concerns made this a better developed character and a better book. It took an already interesting and quirky concept and pushed it to the next level, holding my attention and interest solidly throughout the whole story. Solid world building makes this a series I’ll gladly follow.
JL Jamieson is a strange book nerd who writes technical documents by day, and book news, reviews, and other assorted opinions for you by night. She is working on her own fiction, and spends time making jewelry to sell at local conventions, as well as stalking the social media accounts of all your favorite writers.