Fantasy Life starts with a bang. Emily Buckingham, the intelligent ten-year-old daughter of divorced parents, doesn’t understand why she’s not allowed to see her daddy any more. She gets on her bike and makes the forbidden journey to her father’s house, where a shocking incident occurs.

Meanwhile, in the little town of Anchor Bay, Oregon, strange things are happening. The body of a fish-woman is found on the beach, and the local sheriff sees ghostly creatures emerging from the foggy sea. Of course, the people of Anchor Cove are used to weird events, and remain surprisingly calm. Whenever anything really odd happens, they turn to Athena and Cassie Buckingham, a mother and daughter who live in that peculiar old house on the cliff. When Cassie’s daughter Lyssa brings her daughter, Emily, back home to live with the rest of the Buckingham women, the strange happenings start to accelerate: dead water sprites, tarry messages from the deep, a sinister exodus of bizarre sea creatures, and so on.

There are a lot of things I really liked about this book. First and foremost, its Oregon coast setting is extremely well realized. I don’t know if Rusch lives on the coast or just did her research exceptionally well, but she gets the details exactly right, from the cinderblock bathrooms at beach waysides to the odd little shops that somehow survive selling bad watercolors and seashell souvenirs. I also enjoyed Cliffside House, where the Buckingham family lives: it’s kind of like the professor’s house at the beginning of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, except not quite as benign. We slowly learn about Cassie’s 1970s romance, a story that is both powerful and touching.

Indeed, the whole concept of the book is quite fascinating, and after that dynamite first chapter I expected to be riveted. But then Fantasy Life gets really bogged down, and the central section is pretty boring. The book only covers a couple of days, and a lot happens during these days, but it all seems to take much longer. For one thing, there are a lot of characters, and we get a lot of background detail about them, even when they don’t turn out to be at all important or interesting. A lot of these characters get point of view, and events tend to be described again and again from the POV of several people, and then repeated in conversation later as still other characters arrive on the scene. I believe that this book is the first of a series, and perhaps all these characters will become important in later installments. As far as this book is concerned, there was just too much space devoted to too many people.

Annoyingly, there are scads of foreshadowing, great chunky wads of it everywhere. “All he knew was that something had changed. And he doubted that the change was for the good.” “Lyssa could get used to it. She just wasn’t sure she wanted to.” “I thought I understood this place,” Gabriel said. “I’m beginning to realize that I was wrong.” For crying out loud, I get it already. These little portents are incredibly repetitive and seriously contributed to my boredom. If an author wants to build suspense, she needs to provide a little less talk and a lot more action.

Finally, I had some problems with the Buckingham clan. These four females – Athena, Cassie, Lyssa, and Emily – are the protagonists of this story, but they sure aren’t very sympathetic. They’re so busy keeping secrets from each other (and us) that they can barely converse, much less get anything done. In the climax of the book, we discover the infuriating and unforgivable extent of some of those secrets. The book ends with a heartwarming little affirmation about how Buckinghams need to stick together, which, coming only minutes after some painful revelations, was the most incomprehensible moment in a book filled with astonishments. Someone should have been on the next Greyhound out of there.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch is a fairly prolific writer – she’s also known as mystery author Kris Nelscott and romance author Kristine Grayson, and I believe she also collaborates with her husband, Dean Wesley Smith. I have read and enjoyed her fantastic short fiction in the past.

Fantasy Life is interesting and at times quite entertaining, and if you like books in which fantastic elements erupt into everyday life you will probably enjoy it. I think that it could have used some severe editing to cut out the repetition and extraneous fluff. Its sagging middle detracts from the otherwise remarkable whole, which features a great setting and strong backstory. I’ll probably read the next installment, but I do hope it’s tighter.