This is a good buy. It's all three books in this series in one volume. All three were good reads for those like fantasy and magic. There are plots within plots and this third book puts some of the pieces together for you. I wouldn't mind reading more about these characters. Oh, and watch out for the flying cat with wings...

World Weaver Press and Net Galley let me read this book for review (thank you). It will published March 20th.

In "Into the Moonless Night", Ascot is determined to find Catch again. He believes he's the golden one and is going to fulfill the prophecy. He might die but it's his responsibility. Ascot doesn't agree. She thinks he could use help.

These stories include shape shifting, a witch that has a cauliflower house instead of a gingerbread one, a tall thin man that used to be a dog, the cat that can fly, a wolf and more odd characters before the quest is over. Those that start as enemies even become friends. When you have to overcome the ones holding all the power, you work together if you want to or not.

There's plenty of action, lots of surprises, and you finally learn what all this has been leading up to. My favorite part is watching Ascot try to protect Catch while he tries to protect her. The ending makes me think there may be more in this series. If so, I'll read it.

I've already reviewed the first two books, so here are the links to those reviews:

The Falling of the Moon
The Meddlers of Moonshine

Give the whole series a try if you like fantasy. They're a fun read. The wolf is my favorite animal in the series.

Book 1:

A fun story which both celebrates and undermines the fairy-tale genre, with a half-human, half-do-not-say-vampire-we-don't-use-the-V-word going out from Shadowvale, where her people live, into the wider world to live her own life. Equipped with a book of fairy tales, she finds that real life is a bit more complicated-and, indeed, the plot has an impressive number of twists. In all three books, I found myself unable to imagine how everything in the plot could possibly be tied up, almost up to the point when it was.

Ascot, the main character, possesses intelligence, determination, a good heart, and some unlikely but appealing allies, and manages to use them to the best advantage. Both she and the book combine brains and heart.

I was very happy to have the second book on hand so that I could carry on reading.

Book 2:

The interesting thing about this series is that it's one continuous story, but each of the books is in a different genre. Each book is complete in itself-no cliffhangers-but you wouldn't want to jump in partway through; each one sets up the next. (I received all three books together from Netgalley for review).

This one is steampunk, and if I didn't know better I'd blame the Steampunk Curse for the many copy editing issues on display. It is possible to have a well-edited steampunk book; it's just extremely rare, and this one is jam-packed with incorrect applications of the coordinate comma rule, along with some typos (mostly words left out of sentences), several misplaced apostrophes, and a couple of homonym errors (discretely/discreetly, site/sight). It's a pity, because it's another well-told story, this time of travelers in a steampunkish city who must battle corrupt and hypocritical authorities to bring about justice and solve an intriguing mystery.

The first book was relatively simple, almost all from the viewpoint of Ascot, the central character. This introduces a couple of other viewpoints, most interestingly the zany Rags-n-Bones. I was a little worried that the characters would fail to develop and remain just a collection of a few traits and a couple of tics, but each of them gains more depth, most of them gain more backstory, and they work more as an ensemble cast and less as a hero with a bunch of sidekicks (as in the first book).

I happily progressed to the third book.

Book 3:

The third of this trilogy (though the final line leaves the door open for a fourth in the series) adds a new genre. So far we've seen fairy-tale comedy of manners/horror and steampunk mad science mystery; now we get shifter dystopian with a prophecy/Chosen One. I don't usually read dystopian, so I'm not familiar with the tropes, but this isn't a very tropey author in any case.

The extremely slow burn of the romance subplot continues, but is not resolved. In fact, the potential couple are in different places for much of the book.

There's plenty going on here: high stakes, characters new and old struggling for their own varied agendas, multiple clashing factions, and a race-supremacist villain (there's a nice bit about how, being mediocre, he has to slant the playing field in order to make himself superior). As with the earlier two books, I couldn't figure out in advance how all these threads would eventually come together into a satisfactory ending, but in this case I felt that they didn't completely come together. The ending felt abrupt, and a bit of a cheat; part of it was handed to the characters by someone they couldn't control or predict, rather than being earned by them directly.

It's a pity, because it was a good ride up to that point. That minor stumble isn't quite enough to drop it down to three stars, but, along with a few other small glitches and (in the pre-publication copy I got from Netgalley) an abundance of copy editing issues, the ending made this my least favourite of the three books.