On the Verge
By Garen Glazier
Genre: Dark Fantasy, Urban Fantasy
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.
Garen Glazier
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, and check out Facebook & Twitter.
My Review
5 stars
Freya agrees to work for Imogen Beldame collecting pigments from supernatural characters to create an access to the Verge. This job sounds a little odd but she still goes through with it. She meets several different characters and has help from demons and friends alike to gather the pigments. But the real question is what does Beldame want them for and will Freya give them up once she has all three.
I really liked this book, it was not what I was expecting. I loved the whole concept behind the pigments and the Verge. I really liked all the different characters that Freya meets and how you really just can’t tell who is good, bad, or just working for their own goals. And the description of Seattle, I just makes me what to go there.
I couldn’t put this book down, I just had to find out what happened next and I loved how it all came together. Make sure to check out On The Verge. It’s a great hidden gem of a book.
I received On The Verge from Sage’s Book Tours in exchange for an honest review.
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