Giselle lives in a tower in the woods with her adoptive mother. They are Elemental Masters, Air and Earth. Her mother’s death sends her out into the world to finish her training in both magic and regular methods with friends she makes. It is the return of her first enemy that proves the strength of her training. ( )

The latest installment in the Elemental Masters series is a loose retelling of Rapunzel. The early chapters are straight out of the traditional retellings of the story with the mother’s desire for food sends the father out to steal from a vegetable garden. After the witch in the house catches her father raiding the garden a deal is struck for the baby. After that the story then starts to veer away from the fairy tale with the exception there is a tower, fast growing hair and a mysterious man wanting in the tower.


The setting for this is in Germany so the reader doesn’t need to have read the earlier books that were set in England. I do highly recommend that you do read the forward since there is info there will help the reader understand a facet of the story that there is almost no good way to give that info to the reader without being a complete infodump. I like this series since it does take the framework of fairy tales and stretch them to fit into this large world that she has created.

Digital review copy provided by the publisher through NetGalley ( )

Highly enjoyable fluff. Nice main characters that know how to fend for themselves and how to fend for each other. ( )

This is another fairy tale based story in the Elemental Masters series, this time based on Rapunzel. It goes fairly quickly through her father promising his unborn daughter to an elemental master after stealing rampions and more vegetables from an abandoned urban garden to keep his wife and family alive. Jump to Mother (a sympathetic character in this version) being away and a strange man charming Giselle into letting him into her locked tower. He's thrown out the window before he can rape her and we jump again to Giselle having to try and support herself with the skills she learned to defend herself. As an Air master she's an expert shot and soon she's drafted into a travelling wild west show. There's a strong influence from the books of Karl May, Giselle makes over the show to match them so that they can make moremoney touring Germany (the Native Americans get to be the heroes now). There didn't seem to be a lot of tension or plot in this, most of the book is spent with the show, working with Rosa from the previous book to fight monsters they encounter, and then a quick bit at the end circles back around to the plot threads from the beginning. I did enjoy the cameraderie among the show people, but the Pawnee were under represented and it didn't feel like there was anything much driving the action. Rio Ellie was mostly just along for the ride. It was a fun fluffy read, but back to library books for this series. ( )

Mercedes Lackey was a splendid storyteller. From the elements of fairy tales, she creates imaginative and energetic characters that freshen the old tales and make them fun to read again. ( )