This starts as an SF Little House on the Prairie but quickly moves on to become something far more strange and wonderful. It starts with the narrator, Lora, and her family eking a living from the land just outside a Martian frontier town. The first few chapters sketch in this version of Mars beautifully, adding SF touches to the transplanted Western story. Then things take a turn for the darker as the story unfolds and Mars proves not quite as dead as it seems…

As ever Magrs is a master of genre-mashing madness, stirring in elements which wouldn’t obviously go together and garnishing with familiar touches including literary homages and sentient furniture. His version of Mars is wonderfully idiosyncratic too, redolent of unconquered mystery and avoiding the pulp SF trap of homogenous alien societies – that said the Martian natives we do meet are fabulously spooky and so vivid they’re practically begging to be realised in other media. Topping all that off, Lora’s a strong narrative voice, an impressively different tone from the author’s usual prose.

The only frustration is that this is clearly the first in the series – there are a lot of wonderfully intriguing mysteries left hanging at the book’s end, leaving me wanting much more right now. In that sense, this is a fine start to a new series and I’m eagerly awaiting the chance to revisit this eerie, eclectic Mars again. ( )