Audely Bensen Writes

I picked up The Hounding by Xenobe Purvis from the library on a whim. This slim little gothic was a fascinating take on femininity and the way that male violence shapes the lives of women, even when they're doing nothing but trying to help. It was fascinating that this book was able to communicate so much about the weight that expectations can place on women, and done in a way where the POV characters were never given their own voice--making the reader complicit in the assumptions foisted on them by their community.  I also enjoyed how this book straddled the lines of speculative fiction by never confirming the answer to the community's central, gossipy question (were those girls turning into dogs??).  Everything present in this book could have truly happened without any magical involvement, but the specter of the supernatural carried the plot forward. 

A friend and beta reader suggested to me that the tone of some of one of my books was similar to Megan Bannen's The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy . After seventeen weeks on the library wait list, I finally had the opportunity to give it a read and see for myself!  While I understand the similarities they highlighted (wacky world-building, people just trying to do their jobs), the tone of this book was way more adorable than anything I could hope to recreate. This book is not what I expect most people would consider to be 'romantasy', but it does follow primary romance beats in a fantasy world. I've been recommending it to all of my non-fantasy reading romance friends as an easy gateway into a new section of the romance market, without the complex world-building and intrigue that more "traditional" (to the extent that such a new phenomenon can have a tradition yet) romantasy requires.  I loved it! The world, the characters, the plot--it all really worked for me...