Juno Books

“The Shadowed Heart” by Catherine Asaro

An empathic starfighter — the sole survivor of a squadron that fought, thought, and felt as on — survives with an injured mind and shattered soul on the colony planet he helped defend. A local girl feels his wounded spirit and helps him begin to heal, but when the enhanced soldier feels threatened he becomes a supremely dangerous, consumate killer. Can he even remember the girl whose mind touched his?
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“The Hard Stuff” by Paul Barnett
The loving wife of bitter, disabled American veteran takes him home to Scotland to meet her family. Although her love for him is deep and real, what he discovers about her in Scotland is beyond human belief.
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“Follow Me Light” by Elizabeth Bear
Maria, a Nevada public defender who sees auras, finds love with Isaac, a fabulously ugly, crippled-but-brilliant fellow lawyer. She eventually marries another but, by the time Isaac’s brother shows up to fetch him back to the unusual New England family he fled long before, she is back in his life.
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“Magic in a Certain Slant of Light” by Deborah Coates
Nora’s careful, controlled, scientific life cannot protect her from losing Jeff’s love, but maybe the irrationality of magic can.
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“Calypso in Berlin” by Elizabeth Hand
When men find nymphs, they say they are lovelier than anything they have ever seen: wilder, stranger, more passionate. Elemental. They say they will stay forever. They always leave.
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“Fir Na Tine” by Sandra McDonald
After Lisa kisses a boy with sun in his bones, no other will do until — in college — she finds Steven, a lover full of heat and fire. Lisa has memories of this fiery love embedded deep within her and no lover after Steven comes close to triggering that same melting response.
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“A Maze of Trees” by Claudia O’Keefe
What would you do if dragged off to an environment that was too different from your own for you to ever be happy? Not strange enough to make life impossible, but filled with a people whose mindset was so alien from yours that you had no one to talk to or run to when something devastating happened? What if you knew you would never see home again? Then, by miracle, a piece of home comes to you, not just a sliver or a suggestion or an empty memory, but a huge, comforting, bathrobe-sized piece of it. It wraps you up in its remembered cocoon..
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“A Treatise on Fewmets” by Sarah Prineas
There are monsters lurking in handsome Ned’s witchy old Aunt Maude’s back garden, Ordinary, dumpy Esme, a professor from the College of Magic comes to help, but her presence just makes things worse. It will take a special sort of mutual “sacrifice” to save the day.
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“Single White Farmhouse” by Heather Shaw
The whimsical tale of a cute farmhouse who falls in love on the Internet with a studly building in exotic San Francisco.
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“Walpurgis Afternoon” by Delia Sherman
A Victorian house and a pair of witchy inhabitants appear overnight in a nice neighborhood of sensible folks who discover neither magic nor love can be denied
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“A Knot of Toads” by Jane Yolen
A Cambridge scholar returns, on the death of her father, to the small village of her birth in Scotland. She discovers what frightened him to death and that no one back home — including her childhood sweetheart — is as she believed him or her to be.
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“A Hero’s Welcome” by Rebecca York
Childhood friends become enemies. After a horrible war she, once high-born, has lost all; he, a rebel, has gained a great deal, but is crippled. Both live with pain. Can they learn to trust one another?

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Remember what I wrote about “balance”? I wound up with three stories involving a soldier. But, considering the times, perhaps that is to be expected and they are very different stories.

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