Featuring both an uncommonly well-conceived setting and buckets of high-energy action, Taylor’s debut tale of a thumb-sized devil hunter who comes this close to meeting her match belongs at the top of everyone’s fantasy must-read list. Having discovered that ignorant humans are actually releasing brutish devils from the enchanted bottles into which they had been forced 25,000 years ago, young Magpie Windwitch has set herself to flitting about the planet with a bevy of ageless crows to recapture them. But devil number 24 turns out to be a different sort of proposition altogether—a shapeless mass of darkness and hatred that “uncreates” its victims and is out to unweave the warp and weft of the world itself. By the time devil and hunter have squared off in Dreamdark, a bespelled wood that hides the last great Faerie settlement, ’Pie has discovered that she has more abilities, and a role to play in larger events, than she had ever dreamed. Taylor carries her Faerie world well beyond its recognizably Victorian base, and crafts a memorably clever, intrepid insect-winged heroine to save it. (Fantasy. 11-13)
