The Way Home

Starred review from February 27, 2023
SFWA Grand Master Beagle returns to the magical landscape of his most famous work with two breathtaking novellas, “Two Hearts,” a Hugo Award winner originally published in 2006, and its heartbreaking sequel “Sooz,” which is original to this volume. Narrator Sooz is nine in “Two Hearts” when a malignant griffin lands and nests in Midnight Wood near her home. Sooz sets out to ask King Lir for help defeating the beast, aided by two mysterious riders familiar to Beagle’s fans: Schmendrick the magician and his companion Molly Grue. Together they find Lir, and poignantly rouse him from old age and fatigue, recruiting both him and his beloved Unicorn to slay the griffin. Eight years later, in “Sooz,” the now 17-year-old heroine seeks the sister she never knew she had who was kidnapped by the fairies as a baby. Upon entering the land of the fae, she is raped by four men but befriends a woman of stone who comes to her aid in the aftermath. This new friend is on a quest of her own; she’s looking for Uncle Death. In reaching their goals, Sooz learns that the people who change your life stick with you, even after they’re gone. With beautiful worldbuilding and tons of heart, these tender fantasies are sure to delight. Agent: Howard Morhaim, Howard Morhaim Literary.

March 1, 2023
Beagle explores The Last Unicorn's world in these novellas about the adventures of young Sooz. In ""Two Hearts,"" Sooz is nine when the griffin that lives in the nearby forest, Midwood, kills her best friend. She sets off the following night, convinced that where his knights and soldiers had failed, King L�r would succeed. Oblivious to where the king lives, she happens to meet Schmendrick and Molly Grue, who are en route to the king's castle. At the story's conclusion, Sooz is left with a bit of magic that opens the next novella, ""Sooz,"" which begins when she learns on her seventeenth birthday of her sister, Jenia, who was stolen away by the fae years before. Sooz sets off again, nearly killing her stone friend, Dakhoon, as they meet when she lashes out while recovering from being raped in the fae lands. The two agree to travel together for their disparate quests, pushing each other when needed. Beagle brilliantly balances the bits of darkness that exist with Sooz's drive to accomplish whatever needs to be done.

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March 1, 2023

This collection, set in the world of the author's fantasy classic The Last Unicorn, serves as a coda to that beloved story. Of the two novellas in this book, the first (the previously published Two Hearts) won both the Hugo and the Nebula for bringing back Schmendrick the Magician and Molly Grue in their journey to escort a now elderly King Lir from his castle to save a young girl's village from a terrible monster, giving him one last bright and glorious day in the sun. The second story, the previously unpublished Sooz, carries on the tradition of this magical world by taking the girl whom Lir rescued in Two Hearts and giving her a story of her own, a tale of changelings, lost sisterhood, and the terrible price that the fae enact for the children they steal, and especially for the ones they want to keep. VERDICT A lovely duology that invokes the charm of The Last Unicorn while extending the magic of the original into a bigger world. Highly recommended for lovers of Beagle's classic, who are legion.--Marlene Harris

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