It's a magical world

Bull, Emma (coffeeem). War for the Oaks. New York: Tor Books, 2001 and 2009. (1987.)
Territory. New York: Tor Books, 2007.

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I can't really pretend to have come to these books with a completely open mind, but I have to admit that I enjoyed them both very much, so much so that I was slightly surprised.

War for the Oaks is arguably the text that established the "metropolitan fantasy" subgenre which people such as China Miéville and Charles de Lint have made so famous. Properly, of course, this subgenre really should be known as "urban fantasy," since it is explicitly fantasy of (an) urban space and place, whether that city is real, unreal, or somewhere in between, but "urban fantasy" is what paranormal urban romance has taken as its own label, so "metropolitan fantasy" it is, at least as far as I'm concerned (and yes, I did just make that name up, I think).

( War for the Oaks )

( Territory.  )