Nice little snack. Love the characters and want to read more. It is odd that I can't find the second book as ebook, only the first and the ninth book of this series. ( )

You don't have to be a NASCAR fan to love this elvish fantasy series by Lackey and Dixon but it helps! ( )

Born to Run is urban fantasy. The premise is that elves and banshees and various creatures and circumstances of the Irish and Scottish mythology are real. The good elves are relatively well-disposed toward humans, and will generally help people, and the bad ones hate humans and will try to do them harm. The modernization of this basic story is that the good elves, led by Keighvin Silverhair, are building racecars in order to get money to help children, since in the modern world magically-created gold isn't so useful, while the bad elves (and other creatures of the Unseleighe Court) are running a business creating kiddie porn and snuff films, enjoying both the monetary profit and the negative emotions.

The story plays out in the lives of the elves of Elfhame Fairgrove, the human mage Tannim, the retired metallurgist Sam Kelly, and the teenage runaway and prostitute Tania.

I like this modernization of the mythology. It serves as a great basis for the story, and it's an interesting enough setting to hold the reader's attention.

Unfortunately, the writing wasn't so good. It was very heavy-handed. I'd even call it amateurish, in many ways. The foreshadowing is obvious enough that they might as well have just said "check back in a hundred pages when this plot thread ties into the others".

In particular, it was totally obvious from the beginning that Ross would be helping out in the climax ("You need me, you call."), that Tania would be rescued by Tannim ("She had vague memories of a dream, where Tannim was some kind of warrior, in leather and blue jeans, and he fought monsters to protect her. . . ."), that the bad guys who make kiddie porn would use Tania in their plot against the good guys... and so on. It would have been far more surprising if those things hadn't happened. Even the character of Skippy-Rob was pretty obviously set up as someone we should miss when he died--someone to die to show us how serious things are.

Besides the plot-related issues, the book feels very like reading fanfiction--regular references to popular culture and scifi/fantasy literature. As for the former, being published in 1992, it's very firmly set in a late-eighties/early-nineties cultural milieu, which is probably a little more jarring now than it was twenty years ago. As for the latter, the only other book I can think of that made quite so many scifi references was [Inferno] by Niven and Pournelle, but it had a pretty good reason for it. Born to Run also ignores the Law of Conservation of Detail at odd moments, devoting, for example, two large paragraphs to describing Tannim's bed. Those kinds of things can add character to a work, when done well, but they just felt out of place here.

The heavy-handedness I mentioned comes through not just in the foreshadowing, but in the moralizing the book engages in. The most substantial theme of the book is that there are children in very bad circumstances, forced to live as no child should, and that this is a real problem. True and important. But they try too hard, I think, to convince us. A relevant quotation:

Sam nodded, but he had reservations. Not that he hadn’t heard about all the supposed abused kids, on everything from Oprah to prime-time TV dramas, but he wasn’t sure he believed the stories. Kids made things up, when they thought they were in for deserved punishment. Hell, one of the young guys at work had shown up with a story about his kid getting into something he was told to leave alone in a store, breaking it, then launching into screams of “don’t beat me, Mommy!” when the mother descended like a fury. Embarrassed the blazes out of her, especially since the worst she’d ever delivered in the kid’s life was a couple of smacks on the bottom. Turned out the brat had seen a dramatized crime-recreation show the night before, with an abused-kid episode. Sam was beginning to think that a lot of those “beaten kids” had seen similar shows, then had been coached by attorneys, “child advocates,” or the “non-abusing spouse.” Wasn’t that how the Salem witch-trials had happened, anyway? A bunch of kids getting back at the adults they didn’t like?

Sam, being one of the good guys, comes around pretty quickly (he decides that elves are probably pretty hard to trick). I recognize that the authors are intentionally trying to head off the kinds of arguments people make in the real world, by having them countered in the story, but it still feels clumsy. And it's far from the only time in the novel when there's a scene that is almost certainly only present to counter some misconception that the readers may have.

I've said a lot of bad things about this book, but that doesn't mean I didn't like it. I'll probably read the others in the series, some time, and I'd even recommend the book--if you think it sounds interesting, you'll probably not be disappointed if you read it. Just don't expect a masterpiece. The plot is engaging enough, and it's not hard to care about what happens to the characters, particularly in Tania's segments.

I enjoyed Lackey's Valdemar series much more, but this book is a pretty solid 3/5, in my opinion. ( )

It was a reasonably entertaining read that I guess you could call Suburban Fantasy, maybe? I might check out some of her other series, but this particular story felt both too derivative for me and overly melodramatic, plus I wasn't crazy about all the "head-hopping" the author chose to use to tell this tale. ( )

Fun as always. I like Tammin - he has an interesting outlook on life. I like Sam Kelly too. the way he handles finding out that magic is real is - impressive, really. I hope I'd do as well. I don't really like Tania - yeah, she had a hard time at home but she overreacted - she ended up a lot worse off. Laura had a reason that was worth it. I guess if Laura had been the focus Misty thought people couldn't relate - which is probably true, I sure have a hard time with When the Bough Breaks, though... well, whatever. Born to Run actually feels kind of choppy - there's Russ, and Sam, and Tania, and three completely separate stories there. Sam and Tania end up overlapping through the villains' actions, and Russ is there and very handy but kind of irrelevant. I dunno, the final fight feels more than a little contrived. Which doesn't mean it's not good - there's a lot of good stuff in there. Just - on this readthrough, I was noticing a lot of jumping back and forth to bring in all the stories. Fun read though - the two Tannim books are definitely the best of the series. And the reference(s) to Jinx High are fun and as usual make me want to reread that. ( )

This little forgotten gem is the purest urban-fantasy fluff, but the real selling point is how convincingly these authors weave their weird, unrelated story elements into a somewhat coherent world.
Tannim is a sport-racing enthusiast and human mage. Keighvin Silverhair, his boss, is the leader and lord of Fairgrove Industries, a company with a secret double life. They don't just design, build, and race cutting-edge cars; it's also a true underhill Elfhame. Tania is a teen runaway, forced to turn to prostitution to survive-until she meets Tannim and the elves, who are fierce in their defense of abused children, of all species. Unfortunately, elves aren't all good guys. The Fairgrove crew has Dark-Elf enemies, and these scoundrels are willing to use any means necessary to destroy them. At first, Aurilia and Vidal are content to undermine Fairgrove's racing credibility, but when that becomes impossible, they begin to consider more discreet, and deadly, tactics.
If you like fantasy of all kinds, read this book while traveling, lounging, or simply for a bit of "mind candy." Granted, it deals with some pretty heart-wrenching subjects, but if you stick it out, the Shining Heroes always save the day. It's the first of a series, so if you like it, there's plenty more where that came from!
( )

A group of racecar-driving elves in the American South get entangled in a plot by the Unseleigh Court.

I steered clear of this series for years. It’s about elves who race stockcars – ‘nuff said, right? Eventually, though, I decided to give it a try because it was available for free via the Baen Free Library, and I was very surprised. This isn’t a deep and meaningful piece of literature by any stretch, but it was really good! I had a blast with it. I enjoyed the first half more than the second, but I think this was at least partly due to some disruptions to my reading time during the book’s latter portion. Still: interesting concept, good execution. There are some heavier things here too, (including some issues surrounding child abuse), but for the most part this is a fun piece of fluff about rival elven groups living in America in the 1990s. Very good reading for those times when you need something quick and entertaining. ( )

http://www.sfreader.com/read_review.asp?ID=284 ( )

eh not too big on this one. Seems very dated. ( )

The basic plot is, child prostitute who's seriously into unicorns meets nice wizard (in a bar); wizard gives her money, says "make your own magic," and stresses constantly that magic can't fix your problems; child prostitute is angst-ridden, shot at, and kidnapped for two-hundred-fifty pages; child prostitute is touched by her unicorn and suddenly her abusive parents are saints and everything's quite all right.

At once point, child prostitute's internal monologue explains that escapism is a myth and she reads fantasy to find *solutions*.

Hopefully child prostitute never reads this book.

(Oh, and there's also some stuff where evil elves make porn films by kidnapping other child prostitutes and taping monsters raping/eating them, if you're into that. We even get to sit in on a brainstorming session. And good elves playing with racecars, as usual.)

Sample Chapters: http://webscriptions.net/10.1125/Baen/0671721100/0671721100.htm