3.5 stars, really. This book is entirely from the viewpoint of Matt Johannsen, a young male dancer who's moved to NYC for his bite of the Big Apple and bigtime showbiz. He's also gay and a martial arts expert, which is a skill that comes in handy several times. Matt gets involved with a new musical production called Chapel of Ease, written by a Tufa who's moved to New York to stay. If you've read the other Tufa books, you'll know that it's seen as a very bad idea for a Tufa to leave Needsville, Tennessee, for more than a short time.

The Tufa are otherworldly in their good looks and their musical talent. Matt sort of falls for Ray, the composer. When Ray dies unexpectedly just before the show is due to premiere, Matt ends up volunteering to return his remains to Needsville, a place he's never been. And there the fairy tale really begins.

A good part of this book takes place outside of Needsville, to its detriment I think. Needsville is so vividly filled out and its characters are so rich that Matt has a hard time keeping up. The centuries-long concerns of Faerie make his life seem ephemeral in comparison. For all that, Matt's a plucky protagonist, and he was fun to follow. He just didn't have that melacholy, tragic core that's so enthralling about the Tufa. Since if you've read the books, you already know quite a bit about what's going on, the outsider looking in viewpoint was sort of frustrating.

The idea was that Ray, the composer, had written about a real event concerning a Chapel of Ease ( a place built to house itinerant preachers) which was a love story and a tragedy. One of the characters buried something in the Chapel of Ease, and the audience never finds out what it is. Matt is on a mission to find out if something is buried in the real Chapel of Ease that the musical is based upon. He finds out what it is- but we, the readers, never do! Matt and Ray both decide that it's just not important. Well, that's great! I didn't buy into that romantic idea. You tease a mystery for a whole book and I want to know the answer!

This book also depended a lot upon descriptions of music, and I think it was a bit more difficult to pull off this time. We get a whole musical described without hearing any of the songs, and there's also a description of dancing without ever seeing the performance. The description didn't quite let me make the leap to feeling like I understood the experience.

This entry on its own is not my favorite of the Tufa books. I think it will end up being important, though, as a stage of the Tufa beginning to interact with the rest of the world more once again, pushing past old taboos.

Bledsoe's stories of the Tufa just get better and better. There's more "real world" in this one than usual, but it works. The familiar Tufa characters are here, and we get a glimpse of life in Cloud County without Rockhouse, but the real stars here are Matt and C.C. whose budding same-sex romance is handled beautifully. A definite yes for Bledsoe's readers; if you haven't read his earlier Tufa novels, read them in order.