War for the Oaks

By Emma Bull.

This is billed as a classic urban fantasy. I think it lives up to that for the most part, with a nice amount of spunk and large quantities of musical flavor mixed in. However, I did find the one or two sex scenes somewhat offensive and jarring to the overall mood of the book.

This is the story of Eddi McCandry, a rhythm guitarist who should be a lead singer in her own band, but is instead stuck with losers. Well... until she quits the band and ends up practically kidnapped by the mystical side of town, recruited to help the Seelie Court wage war against the Unseelie. The premise is rather more interesting than usual: the fairies need her because without her mortality tainting the field, they can't kill each other. Fortunately for her (and them), she turns out to be less of a quiet, compliant victim than they might have hoped.

A reasonably good book. There's a nice appendix in the paperback I checked out that has some exposition about and excerpts from the screenplay she (and her husband, I think) wrote based on the book. Unfortunately, it's rather easy for me to imagine a bad movie being made out of it, and less easy to imagine a truly excellent one. For that matter, I don't think this book is truly superb, which is how some people seem to react to it. It is a sweet story but doesn't seem very well resolved--it's more like all the loose threads are shoved under the carpet at the end. (How's that for mixing metaphors?)