The Obsidian Mirror by Catherine Fisher

Jake Wilde has finally got himself expelled from his exclusive Swiss boarding school. Despite his many efforts this is the one that has succeeded: taking the role of Laertes in Hamlet rather too literally and substituting a sharpened rapier for a blunted one. Like Hamlet he is driven by the desire to avenge the murder of his father, not by an uncle but by his father's best friend Oberon Venn. Venn became Jake's guardian when David Wilde disappeared on his way home from Venn's estate.

Jake's teacher Wharton is sent to accompany Jake to his guardian's estate to ensure he doesn't abscond en route and together they enter Wintercombe Abbey. This is a house of myth and legend, the Venns are said to be half fairy and the woods around the estate to harbour fairies, not the cute creatures of Victorian imagining but wild and dangerous immortals. Enter also a girl called Sarah who comes from another time, pursued by something resembling a man and by an ice wolf. 

Jake's quest for vengeance and the characters come together in a mesmerising story by a writer who is skilled at taking ancient mythology and giving them a fresh slant. She weaves together fairy lore, the legend of Queen Elizabeth's magician Dr Dee, time travel and Shakesperean revenge tragedy into a story which I can't wait for the next installment of.

The Story of Stone by NM Browne

Jaret is a member of the Brood Trove, the children of his father's four wives who live in cold and squalor below the luxury of his father's apartments in the Tier House at the centre of his father's lands. His society is feudal, his upbringing brutal, at the age of 3 the Brood Trove are separated from their mothers and placed in the Brood Trove, if they survive they are trained to fight and protect their father and his territory, but many don't survive. Warlike farmers and mighty warriors the Lakesiders are fearful of the Night People who live in the unfamiliar forests that boundary their lands.

Separated from Jaret by a gulf of time Nela is searching with her father for traces of the history of their civilization. She is unusual, in her society women marry and have children, but she is unlikely to find a husband as she fits which appals those around her She has shaved her head as a sign that she is not marriageable and she and her father move in a small band with his apprentice Findsmen and a bondsman, a slave tethered to the boundary of their camp.

On the shore of the same Lake Jaret lived beside they find a stone, a stone which conjures in Nela fits filled with visions of the life of Stone, a Night Person, and the narrative begins to move back and forward between Jaret and Stone's lives in the prehistory of Nela's world, and Nela's own life. As Jaret and Nela's lives come together on the death of his father and the casting out of much of the Brood Trove a terrible spell is unleashed on their world.

I felt the book needed to be a little longer, there was sometimes confusion and I felt there was not enough development in the climax of the story. However, all the characters were brilliantly deliniated and I always wanted to turn the next page and know more.

Faery Tale by Signe Pike

I really enjoyed this book but did have to constantly struggle against my inner sceptic saying 'yes but' and being rational all the time.  Signe Pike, disillusioned by city life in America, goes in search of fairies, first in Mexico and then to the great Celtic heartlands of fairy lore in England, the Isle of Man, Ireland and Scotland.  But it's less simple than a deluded new age hippie searching for magical beings.  Pike is desperately trying to come to terms with the death of her beloved, brilliant but difficult father and searching for the sense of wonder she had as a child.  I may not believe the same way as her, but the inward journey and a belief that the world is more than we can see with our terribly limited faculties makes sense to me, and her quest to recapture the childlike wonder that can heal any hurt is bewitching.  A little kooky in places, but a great lesson.