I love this series.
Everything about it.
This is probably the best book I've read in a good long while.
Charlie is at her best here, and we finally get to see the world through Jack's eyes for a while, and the view is pretty cool. Huff's understanding of teenage boys is superlative and engaging.

This series is a comfortable read, homey like apple pie. But watch out: The pie may be be charmed, because darned if you don't end up wanting more. ( )

Third Enchantment Emporium book. Charlie has a cryptic message from Aunt Catherine. ( )

"The Future Falls", the third of the Gale Women books, was my favourite so far, mainly because of the focus on Charlie starting to understand what she's really capable of and what this means for her future.

This is not an easy book to classify. Tanya Huff is atrope twister extraordinaire, so I guess that's not surprising.

Still, how do you classify a book that is, on one level, about a Gale Girl Wild Power trying to save the world from an extinction event and on the other is tale of star-crossed lovers, where one of them is a witch who is already part of a polyamorous relationship and the other flips between being a Dragon and a teenage boy?

I guess, the answer is that you don't worry about classifying it, you just grab hold and enjoy the ride.

The whole story stands in the deeply disturbing shadow of the power and rituals of the Gale women. This book made it very clear that the priority of the Gale women is to protect the Gale family, even if this means treating family members as breeding stock or as power sources for their rituals, or letting the rest of the world's population die.

Charlie refuses to stay in that shadow. She does what she thinks is right, regardless of the cost to her personally. Her bravery is one of the best aspects of the book. The next best thing about the book is the fast-witted humour, fed by pop culture references to sci fi movies and Canadian pop music.
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I don’t know if I’ve outgrown the standard urban fantasy style in the last few years or if this is a weaker or more rushed novel than Huff’s usual, but I found myself almost skimming a lot of this, less from inattention and more to finish the book and move on to something else. In the end, I liked the book okay but I don’t think I really enjoyed it much.

Huff has a good hook, that’s for sure. It’s a problem I’ve never see another novel tackle and I was genuinely worried over how Charlie and her family would solve it, especially as the story progressed. And I was more than happy to see Charlie again (and would happily follow her through more magical adventures if the series wasn’t so wrapped up here). I don’t know if it’s her outsider-ness or her music, but I really like her as a character.

But there are a lot of places where the book failed to work for me. I’m often down for Huff’s meandering, coincidence-dropping, gently foreshadowed, character-focused style, but here it felt more like Charlie was beating a brick wall than ever making progress, and her family …. I’ve never really been a fan of the Gales as a whole, I have to admit. They’re all pretty dominant personalities, all positive they know best for everyone else, which leads to a lot of politics and mind games, and while that might be familiar and funny to some, it isn’t for me. I spent a lot of scenes wondering why Charlie didn’t push back more or run away to Europe and change her name.

And the romance? I’m not sure why Huff felt there even needed to be a romance? I think she could have gotten the emotional payoffs through other means, and especially that a lot of the tension of the novel is not the asteroid, but the sexual chemistry between star-crossed lovers. If you want to call a woman in her late twenties and her teenaged distant cousin star-crossed, which, um. Kudos to Charlie saying, “Absolutely not, we’re not doing this”, and kudos to Huff for finding a way to make the end of that subplot decently acceptable.

And then there’s the almost deus ex machina nature of the climax….

All that aside, Huff’s humour is still going strong, and she’s got lots of quirky scenarios and by-play, and she fleshes out the Fae part of her world-building a lot here, which was neat to see. She’s got some cool new characters too, and Charlie’s mental soundtrack, with a song for every situation, is really fun. So there was lots for me to enjoy in this book, just not enough to make up for the bits that made me grumpy.
5/10

Contains: a romantic subplot that’s pretty skeevy on both an age and a genetic level, though it’s solved all right; family dynamics that had my shoulders by my ears; scientist jokes; and a lot of music ( )

The third book moves the focus of the story back to the Western part of Canada but the main focus of the trouble is actually all of Earth. Catherine “sees” an asteroid coming and Charlie is able to confirm with her magic and through personal connections it allows her that NASA knows and doesn’t have a way to stop it. Charlie figures out a way to solve this problem and solve a personal issue of her own at the same time. I like these stories but sometimes I wish they came with a family tree and diagrams of the different circles the Gale families make.
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