In debut novelist Caitlin Breeze's poetic, otherworldly dark-academia fantasy, The Fox Hunt, a young woman falls in with a glitzy but dangerous crowd and stumbles into a life-altering magical bargain.
"Flood gossip [is] the spice on every tongue" at the University, an institute known for producing the most brilliant scholars in the world. Introverted student Emma notices her school's wildlife reacting strangely after a mysterious flood and hopes to use her prestigious research fellowship to study the phenomenon. Instead, she is thrust into the glamorous orbit of the Turnbulls, an elite, all-male, generations-old secret society. A debauched game ends with Emma calling out for rescue from the boy she loves and receiving help from the Night City, a hidden magical metropolis that exists alongside mortal reality. The city binds Emma into servitude as a shape-shifting fox maiden in exchange for the intervention. Emma is determined to return to her mortal life, but first she'll need a way to take down the Turnbulls, who draw power from the city through dark rites. However, the connections she forms with her fellow fox maidens leave her wondering where she truly belongs.
Breeze's narrative voice is thick with dreamy imagery. The Night City is vibrantly imagined, with arcane eccentricities and fairy tale codes of order, at once perilous and alluring. The Fox Hunt thrums with undercurrents of female rage and anti-elitism, but its heart lies in the solace of community and the healing act of honoring one's true nature. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads