Book Review: On the Verge by Garen Glazier

On the Verge

By Garen Glazier

Genre: Dark Fantasy, Urban Fantasy

Book Description

Freya is just a student at the University of Washington worried about grades and making her next tuition payment until a gorgeous succubus interrupts her post-exam latte with a proposition: come work for her boss, Seattle’s reclusive heiress and antiquities collector Imogen Beldame. Eagerly agreeing despite a nagging feeling in the pit of her stomach, Freya finds herself swept up in a deadly quest at the behest of her psychopathic new employer. Beldame has given her until Halloween to collect three magical pigments that hold the key to crafting mesmerizing portraits that can access the Verge, an undiscovered borderland on the edge of human reality, and the powerful beings that call it home.

Freya’s reluctant journey takes her to a goblin stronghold in the Cascades for the color blue, to the Seattle Underground to request the color red from Baba Yaga, and to the Fremont home of a beautifully gruesome Cambodian ahp, or spirit of the night, for the color yellow. Working together with Rusty, an enigmatically disfigured man intimately connected with the Verge, and a motley crew of mercurial demons and loyal friends, Freya must come up with a plan to stop Beldame and preserve the fragile balance between fantasy and reality that is at its most vulnerable on Halloween.

My Review

It's always exciting to find an author that has written a story unlike any other one you have read before. On the Verge is excellent! I really liked the characters, their names and the fantastical world called The Verge. 

I love the author's description of the Verge told from protagonist, Freya: It was the accumulation of the million colored pieces of the inspired fancies and terrifying depths of the creative mind, a melting pot of mosaic dreams and chromatic visions. The Verge took them all in, became the black hole at the center of the color wheel, absorbing the Technicolor creations of a thousand civilizations.

Freya has been given an ultimatum to search for specific colors for a painting or become the deceased model. She visits the Verge on her frightening mission and meets some unusual creatures. One of my favorites was Baba Yaga! 

Kudos for the entertaining magical tale. 

Author Bio

I'm a lifelong resident of Seattle. I married my Russia-born-America-raised high school sweetheart, and we have a four year old and a new little one born in February.

I like coffee shops, bookstores, dancing in my living room and singing in my car. The opening scene of Up always makes me cry. The Three Amigos always makes me laugh. Fashion magazines, croissants, and long, long baths are my guilty pleasures. They might occur separately or together. I prefer boxing classes to yoga, and I get some of my best ideas when I'm running. I loved school and spent more time than one really should getting a business degree in marketing and a master's in art history. In an ideal world I'd go to bed at 2am and wake up at 10am. I've never been an early bird, and I feel strongly that alarm clocks kill dreams.

Learn more about me and read my blog, Scriven by Garen, at garenglazier.com.

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/garen.glazier

Twitter: @GarenGlazier

On the Verge is available on Amazon: http://amzn.to/1KBUQxS