A House of Perfect Safety

Description

For centuries of seasons, Warden has served the Pact at Ash House. For any creature of the Twilight Lands who shows up on the doorstep of her House with a need, she stitches wounds, cures poisons, provides safety and rest, assuming the form demanded of her by each of her varied visitors. When a guest arrives whose mind is so locked away that she does not know what form to take, what injuries he has suffered, nor how to help him, it will stretch her skills ­— and the Pact — to the limit.

Should the Pact be broken, it could be the end of the Twilight itself.

Praise:

“When a book so singularly focused on healing meets the current tropes of SFF, it might easily be relegated to the sub-genre of “cozy fantasy.” And while A House of Perfect Safety by Virginia M. Mohlere is deeply comforting, radiant with care, I would not call it cozy. There is such ferocity in its desire for the safety and well-being of its characters, such passionate fury at the cruelties of a world that inflicts harm on the poor, the weak, the low of status, and such profound acknowledgement of pain, that every flicker of light, every new growth, every step towards freedom, is an enormous victory against the powers that seek to break us. Mohlere’s magic and invention call to mind Diana Wynne Jones’s Howl’s Moving Castle, but the deep work undergirding her prose sounds an alternative to LeGuin’s The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, entreating us not to walk away from suffering, but to serve to alleviate it instead—and not only that, but to end it at the source, both individually and in community, for once and for all.”

— C. S. E. Cooney, World Fantasy Award-winning author of Saint Death’s Daughter