Rennia, a novice Singer, and Shaiala, a girl raised by centaurs, battle against a great evil and try to restore harmony to the world.

THE CRYSTAL MASQUE books, masks and a readers theatre for twenty five chapters. Its masks are prescribed in crystal and framed for familiar or strange faces at a neighborhood optical shop. While providing his services and even when not, the master directs diverse dialogue involving his or their personal conflicts, complications, catastrophes. During most of the scenes, the walk-on apprentice, a schoolboy, stays silent but is watchful of what it takes to run a business. His senior is dependent upon him because of a pending retirement, yet fears to actualize, after having experienced family trials, sports triumphs, patriot plaudits and business booms, busts. Between its covers and curtains, there projects compassion for all ages, especially after a decision made by the boys master.

Left to die in a dangerous forest by her stepmother, Cindy survives with the help of an older woman, known as Godmother, and finds a new family with a werewolf pack. She lives a happy life until she discovers the king of her birthplace is looking for her. Cindy attends a masked ball to find out what's going on, which shouldn't be a problem when her godmother knows fairies who can dress her like a princess and hide her identity behind a magical crystal mask that shouldn't be removed. There's just one problem: during her younger years, the prince of the Shattered Bones Island didn't lose a chance to make fun of her. Now, she must seduce him to find out why his royal family is looking for her. That is, if she can find him in a ball with more handsome princes than she can handle. When Prince Solveig insists on taking Cindy back home and removes her mask, Cindy needs to run for her life. Only her friends can get her safely to the Fairy Island where the queen reveals a shocking truth—Cindy has fairy blood, and she's going to turn into a fairy after her twenty-first birthday. However, when Cindy finally wakes up from her transformation, her world comes crumbling down. Someone dear to her is dead, and the Dark King has been released. Racing against time, she needs to save her friends from the deadly elf. With her newfound powers, will Cindy be able to protect everybody she loves, especially the one she doesn't want to forget? In a land where supernatural creatures live peacefully with humans, not everything is what it seems, and some chosen ones are fated to live extraordinary lives and all-consuming love.

Masques, Mayings and Music-Dramas comprises a sequence of in-depth case-studies of significant aspects of early twentieth-century English music-theatre. Vaughan Williams forms a central thread in this discussion, and Stratford-upon-Avon serves as a geographical focus-point for mediating conflicting visions of an English musical tradition. But the reach of the book is much wider, shedding new light on English Wagnerism (at Glastonbury especially) and on the reception of Wagner's ideas as a point of emulation and resistance. No less significant is the discussion of Purcell and the seventeenth-century masque - one of the primary sources for re-imagining an English dramatic tradition - and the more familiar images of the May festival, the Mummers' play and the pageant play, which are tellingly re-contextualised. The book also looks at the associations between Vaughan Williams, the theatre artist Edward Gordon Craig and the impresario Serge Diaghilev. The sequence is framed by the image of the pilgrim-vagabond Vaughan Williams's setting of the poetry of Matthew Arnold and Robert Louis Stevenson as a metaphor and paradigm for his creative career and personal progress. The book not only sheds light on the activities and ambitions of principal agents but also illuminates a particularly dynamic moment in the re-emergence of a distinctively English music-theatrical practice: one especially concerned with calling on aspects of the past to help to secure a worthwhile future. Notions of Englishness turn out to be less insular than sometimes thought and the idea of a 'musical renaissance' more complex when the case-studies are understood in their proper historical context. Scholars and students of twentieth-century English music, theatre and opera will find this volume indispensable. Roger Savage is Honorary Fellow in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He has published widely on theatre and its interface with music from the baroque to the twentieth century in leading journals and books.

On their first journey away from the safety of their island home, two novice Singers learn important lessons when they must confront an evil Khizpriest and stop him from stealing the power of their life-controlling Songs.

Experience the fantasy and adventure of #1 New York Times bestselling author Patricia Brigg's first published novel—the thrilling start of the Sianim series... After an upbringing of proper behavior and oppressive expectations, Aralorn fled her noble birthright for a life of adventure as a mercenary spy. But her latest mission involves more peril than she ever imagined. Agents of Sianim have asked her to gather intelligence on the increasingly popular and powerful sorcerer Geoffrey ae'Magi. Soon Aralorn comes to see past the man's striking charisma—and into a soul as corrupt and black as endless night. And few have the will to resist the sinister might of Geoffrey and his minions. So Aralorn, aided by her enigmatic companion, Wolf, join the growing rebellion against the ae'Magi. But in a war against an enemy armed with the powers of illusion, how do you know who the true enemy is—or where he will strike next?

Modern Coyote stories, as Coyote moves to Kansas, learns to be a tree, runs for Congress, encounters other tricksters, such as Landy of the Lake and Monkey King, and fights the 5th generation industrial gods and the military for the right to stay free.

Criticism and Compliment examines the poems, plays and masques of the three figures who succeeded Ben Jonson as authors of court entertainments in the England of Charles I. The courtly literature of Caroline England has been dismissed by critics and characterised by historians as propaganda for Charles I's absolutism penned by sycophantic hirelings. Kevin Sharpe questions the assumptions on which these evaluations have been based. Challenging the traditional argument for a polarity between court and country cultures in early Stuart England, he re-reads the plays, poems and masques as primary documents of political attitudes articulated at court. Far from being confined to a decade or a party, the courtly literature of the 1630s is relocated within the broader humanist tradition of counsel. Through the language of love - a language, it is argued, that was part of the discourse of politics in Caroline England - the court poets criticised fundamental premises of the King's political ideology, and counselled traditional and moderate modes of government.