But sometimes you just have to talk about them. 

I had an interesting experience reading The Hum & the Shiver, and it was an experience brought to me specifically because I read this book on the kindle.  This is the story.  My friend was exuberant in her praise of Alex Bledsoe's Burn Me Deadly, which made me remember how much I had enjoyed The Sword-Edged Blonde.  I contemplated buying BMD, but it was book 3 and I was two books behind and to be honest, the plot of Dark Jenny just sounded too Arthurian for me.  So I let it go. 
 
Then a few days later, skimming Tor.com, I saw he had another book recently released called The Hum & the Shiver and there was an excerpt. The title stuck with me, though I didn't take the time to read the excerpt.  Later, browsing books online, I stuck a sample on the ereader, again without really looking at it. 
 
Push on yet another few days, and I'm flicking through the ereader and hit that sample.  Sit down, read it.  Huh.  A young military hero(ine) returning, badly wounded, from Iraq to a strange, small town full of stranger people.  Her family is… oddly unsympathetic with a strong flavor of "well, what did you expect to happen if you left home?" though their affection is evident. 
 
I reached the end of the sample and bought the book without hesitating.  Keep in mind, I still had no idea what the plot was.  All I knew is that here was this very young woman who had a past of bad decisions, who'd tried to cover the worst of them by making another bad decision, and had come home to find her mother ready to die.  Time to grow up and fast. 
 
It was a really interesting read, watching everything unfold with completely unspoiled eyes.  I hadn't even read the blurb!  I can't remember the last time I did that.  It's a totally different experience. 
 
The book itself… SPOILERS.
 
I loved this book.  Loved it wholeheartedly.  It's not perfect—there are two spots that bugged me, one seriously, the other an irritant—but it's damn close. 
 
And it's a book about fairies.  That's the thing that kills me. 
 
Over the years, I've become dismissive of a whole slew of fantasy tropes—vampires, werewolves, fairies, tolkienesque rambles—just because I loved them so much and glutted myself on them, and now I'm burned out.  You want me to not read a book?  Tell me it's about fairies.
 
And yet…
 
I loved this book.  And by the time I caught on, I had nothing but a squeal of delight for the unmasking.  What this book has going for it, more than anything else, is balance. 
 
The Tufa, the local people, are so perfectly balanced between being earthly and human and magical and eerie, between doing good things and doing bad things and just being plain "people" that the "secret race" never slips into stereotype.  They mix technology and magic, lead regular lives and impossibly strange ones.  Bronwyn's desire to escape is both sympathetic and cowardly.  Her mother's criticisms of her are both fair and unfair.  The characters present themselves one way—reveal themselves another.  It could feel contradictory, but in Bledsoe's hands it always feels like the characters are learning their own truths as they go, unmasking their own secrets. 
 
We get outsider views also.  Chess, the new minister in town, is fascinated by Bronwyn.  And Donald Swayback, probably my favorite character,  wakes up to everything he's forgotten about himself.  Both of these men are enormously sympathetic.  Most of the characters are sympathetic.  There's only one flat-out villain in the whole book and he's, honestly, a bit of a stereotype: the redneck cop seething with hate.  Overall, the characters are who they are: damaged, recovering, brittle, terrifying, joyous, learning.  Magical. 
 
Then there's the magic.  One of the things I liked best about The Sword-Edged Blonde was the magic; it felt original and so plausible.  That same writerly skill is in effect here.  There's music and there's magic and they're inextricably intertwined.  There are secret languages and spells conveyed with a twist of a hand.  There are glamours and ghosts who carry messages, signs and omens and bits of folklore.  And then there is the night wind and what might be riding it.
 
All this magic and mood are beautifully woven together in a seductive and low-key fashion until it slips into high speed over the course of one night and one murder.  Then, I found it breathtaking.  It's one thing to understand that the heroine can sprout wings and fly.  It's another to finally 'see' it. 
 
My only real quibble in The Hum & the Shiver was the character of Chess, the minister, who was told his faith would be questioned.  I never saw that questioning happen.  So maybe it was too subtle for me, or it's upcoming in a later book, but mostly Chess felt like a misfired gun.  He serves a good romantic purpose, the steady suitor with a kind heart, but I wanted to see his struggle as well as Bronwyn's.  He's got opportunities here, but we never really see them.  Even when Bronwyn's headed off, transparently, to kill someone. 
 
Minor complaint: Bledsoe apparently was inspired to write this book based on a famous painting, and to that end, he shoe-horns the painting into the story which didn't work for me.  It felt false instead of deepening the mystery.  I would have much preferred an author's note suggesting the reader go look at the painting where we could have made our own story-links to it, instead of watching two characters make those links for us, painstakingly. 
 
The redneck cop, though a stereotype, is also so genuinely horrifying that I give Bledsoe a pass.  Pafford was terrifying.  I cringed every time he showed up on the page. 
 
If you like contemporary fantasy in the vein of Nina Kiriki Hoffman's early novels, read this book.  If you like stories about magical, mysterious peoples, read this book.  If you like musical fantasies, read this book.  If you like coming of age stories where characters face their magical destinies, read this book. 
 
Basically?  READ THIS BOOK.  Its leisurely pace is deceptive.  It's a quick read. 
 
It's been the better part of a week since I finished it, and I can't stop thinking about it.  It's definitely going to go on my best of the year list.  I bought it as an ebook, but I'm going to have to pick up a paper copy for forcing on my friends.