I confess I expected a story about Brenden, but this isn't what McKillip was after. Now she appears to a young man in the North named Brenden Vetch, and asks him to go to her school to be the gardener, and to look for the door under the shoe. Centuries earlier she founded a school of wizardry in Kelior, the capital city of the Kingdom of Numis. Od is a legendary female wizard, very long lived but hardly ever seen. But in this particular case it does sort of dull the edge of the book. Which isn't a bad or dishonest thing, really. In Od Magic there are no bad guys, just temporarily misled people.

But it is one of a consistent set of novels that she puts out, pretty much one per year, tidily sized (about 90,000 words in this case), tidily shaped.

McKillip's latest novel, Od Magic, is not part of a series. But the way things worked out Od Magic (a minor novel) and The Bell of Sealey Head (which I like rather better) are the only two I wrote about. I read The Forgotten Beasts of Eld and the Riddle-Master books in the early '80s with enjoyment, but it was her glorious Winter Rose, from 1996, that turned me into a true fan, and from that point I read each of her nicely sized novels, one every year or two for about 15 years, always with a lovely Kinuko Craft cover, until she slowed down in the past decade or so.

Alas, I didn't really write a great deal about her best work - a few short reviews of short fiction for Locus, or for my blog, and the shortish piece below about Od Magic, a nice novel but not her best. And in her memory, I have compiled a few other things I wrote about her work. Sadly, before another of her quadrennial birthdays came up, she died. She was a leap day birth, so back when I was doing 'birthday reviews' it was a while before I had a chance to do one for her, and when I did it was a reprint of a review I did of The Bell of Sealey Head.

Moon-Flash by Patricia A. McKillip