Title: Good Neighbors
Publisher/Author: Stephanie Burgis
Pages: 254pp
Price: $12.99 / $4.99
Mia Brandt is an inventor. Unfortunately, she is also much more than that. Mia has magic, and her magic works on iron. This is an impossibility, an abomination. And when her neighbors find out — people she has known her entire life — they turn on Mia and her father, burning down her workshop and nearly killing them both. Fleeing to the far side of the country, Mia sets up shop in the shadow of nefarious mansion. Her new neighbor, it turns out, is a necromancer. A very powerful necromancer. A very handsome necromancer named Leander Fabian ….
I’m a big fan of Burgis’ frothy Regency-inspired fantasy romance novels. I loved Scales and Sensibility, and I am constantly recommending the Harwood Spellbook series. So when I found out that she was releasing an omnibus edition of her Good Neighbors stories, I immediately pre-ordered it.
I was not disappointed. This is a funny, sweet, romantic adventure. But with magic and zombies and mad science. Mia is a wonderful heroine: smart and snarky, but also wary and wounded. She loves her father and feels guilty for the injuries he suffered at the hands of their enraged neighbors. She is immediately suspicious of Leander and his overtures of friendship, but he wins her over by letting her repair the zombies he rescued from another necromancer. And then there’s that secret mission to a walled city where magic has been outlawed and the few other-than-human residents are in hiding for their lives. And the ball where Leander has to face down an old nemesis and does so in as flamboyant a manner possible, all to impress Mia ….
Go. Read. Buy it or pick it up at your local library. Disappear between these pages for a few hours, and lose yourself in the humor and adventure and romance. Have fun.
Highly recommended to fans of Burgis’ other books, as well as The Elf Tangent by Buroker, The Lady Jewel Diviner series by Rosalie Oaks, and Forest of Firelight by Shari L. Tapscott.
[Reviewed by Rebecca Buchanan.]
