Contemporary Authors

• Borderline Saga Press (New York, NY), 2016
• Phantom Pains Saga Press (New York, NY), 2017
• Imposter Syndrome Saga Press (New York, NY), 2018

Library of Congress Online Catalog 1. Borderline LCCN 2015009176 Type of material Book Personal name Baker, Mishell, author. Main title Borderline / Mishell Baker. Edition First Saga Press paperback edition. Published/Produced New York : Saga, [2016] Description 390 pages ; 22 cm. ISBN 9781481453066 (hardcover) 9781481429788 (trade pbk.) Shelf Location FLS2016 081562 CALL NUMBER PS3602.A58665 B67 2016 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLS2) 2. Phantom pains LCCN 2016020852 Type of material Book Personal name Baker, Mishell, author. Main title Phantom pains / Mishell Baker. Edition First Edition. Published/Produced New York : Saga Press, [2017] Projected pub date 1703 Description pages cm. ISBN 9781481451925 (trade pbk.) 9781481480178 (hardcover) Library of Congress Holdings Information not available. 3. Impostor syndrome LCCN 2017019627 Type of material Book Personal name Baker, Mishell, author. Main title Impostor syndrome / Mishell Baker. Edition First Saga Press paperback edition. Published/Produced New York : Saga Press, 2018. Projected pub date 1803 Description pages cm. ISBN 9781481451949 (trade pbk.) 9781481480185 (hardcover) Library of Congress Holdings Information not available. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS ONLINE CATALOG Library of Congress 101 Independence Ave., SE Washington, DC 20540 Questions? Ask a Librarian: https://www.loc.gov/rr/askalib/ask-contactus.html

• author's site - http://mishellbaker.com/

  Mishell Baker is a 2009 graduate of the Clarion Fantasy & Science Fiction Writers’ Workshop. Her short fiction has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Daily Science Fiction, Redstone Science Fiction, and Electric Velocipede.

  Her urban fantasy series The Arcadia Project is being released by Simon & Schuster’s Saga imprint, beginning with Borderline. The series is narrated by Millicent Roper, a snarky double-amputee and suicide survivor who works with a ragtag collection of society’s least-wanted, keeping the world safe from the chaotic whims of supernatural beasties.

  When Mishell isn’t convention-hopping or going on wild research adventures, she lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two changelings. When her offspring are older, she will probably remember what her hobbies are. In the meantime, she enjoys sending and receiving old-fashioned handwritten paper letters. You can write her at:

  Mishell Baker

  4960 W Washington Blvd

  PO Box 78760

  Los Angeles, CA 90016

  If analog isn’t your thing, Mishell also tweets almost incessantly under the handle @mishellbaker.

  Frequently Asked Questions

  I value honesty, so every question in this FAQ has been asked of me at least three times. Full disclosure: sometimes by the same person.

  How do you spell your name again?

  Here, have a mnemonic in limerick form.
  It’s M-I-S-H-E-L-L.
  I know it’s not easy to spell.
  Like my fortunes in this,
  It begins with a “mis”
  And ends with a quick trip to hell.

  What kind of books do you write?

  Strictly fantasy. I enjoy reading a variety of things, but somehow everything I write ends up having magic in it.

  What do you do when not writing?

  It changes year to year. Which is to say, the video game varies. In all seriousness, I am a mother to small children, an occasional political activist, a language nut, and a tabletop RPGer. I also manage SFWA‘s Estates Project (helping people contact the rights holders for the work of deceased SF&F writers). I try to carve out time for conventions and other business-related travel a few times a year.

  How can you stand living in Los Angeles?

  I love sunlight. I love the ocean. I love having anything I could possibly want to do, see, listen to, taste, or learn within a day’s drive. I love movies and television. I love palm trees and hibiscus. I love hearing a dozen different languages on a single shopping trip. I love knowing I can get a direct flight to almost any major hub in the world. I love standing right on the pulse of humanity, even if it is a noisy and chaotic pulse. I’m a city girl at heart – the bigger the better – and I’m solar powered. So it’s hard to imagine a place where I’d fit better.

  How do you write well about disability?

  Ask me when I figure it out. For a longer answer, see my May 2017 Barnes & Noble interview.

  Any advice for a hopeful author?

  Lots of it! But I charge by the hour. I’ll give you this for free, though: if someone takes the time to read your work, try not to be defensive, and carefully listen to what they tell you. Unless they tell you, “Stop writing.” Don’t do that, unless you don’t want to be an author. But other than that, pay attention. Even though not every critique will be valid, I think it is far more common for a new writer to ignore valid critique than to take invalid critique too seriously.

  Will you read my work?

  If you have to ask, I’m afraid the answer is no. If you saw my to-read stack, you’d understand.

  Where do you get your ideas?

  I steal them from my husband.

  I have a great idea for a novel but can’t seem to get it on paper. Any advice?

  Marry someone who can. Be sure you have a joint bank account, and don’t sign a pre-nup.

  Seriously, though.

  Seriously? You won’t like me when I’m serious. But here goes: I think if you actually wanted to write a novel, you’d have started already, unless you’re in the habit of denying yourself pleasurable activities. If you find writing a difficult and tedious way to express yourself, I don’t think it’s something you should spend a lot of time doing. Life’s short; do what you enjoy, and failing that, do what gets you a guaranteed paycheck

  What’s with the hair?

  I like putting weird colors in it. I think of it as a warning label. Anyone who has a problem with the hair is likely to have a problem with me, eventually. I like to save them some time.

  Are you crazy?

  Do you mean, am I eccentric and free-spirited? Yes. Do you mean, did I just make a really imprudent decision? Yes. Do you mean, am I mentally ill according to the DSM-5? Yes.

  So… yes.

• wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mishell_Baker

  Mishell Baker
  Born 1976
  Occupation novelist, short story writer
  Nationality United States
  Period 2009 - Present
  Genre fantasy, Urban fantasy

  Mishell Baker is an American writer of fantasy and urban fantasy. A 2009 graduate of the Clarion Workshop, her fantasy stories have been published in Daily Science Fiction, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Electric Velocipede. [1]

  In 2016, she published Borderline, the first novel in The Arcadia Project urban fantasy series with Saga Press (edited by Navah Wolfe). It was a Publishers Weekly staff pick,[2] and Barnes & Noble chose it as one of the best science fiction and fantasy novels of 2016. [3] Borderline is notable for having a disabled protagonist with Borderline Personality Disorder.[4] It was nominated for the 2016 Nebula Award for Best Novel.[5] Borderline was also included on the 2016 James Tiptree Jr. Award Honor List.[6]

  The second book in the series, Phantom Pains, will be released in 2017. [7]

  Contents

  1 Biography
  2 Novels
  3 Awards
  4 References
  5 External links

  Biography

  Mishell Baker lives in Los Angeles, California with her husband and two children. [8] She frequently writes about her own Borderline Personality Disorder diagnosis and how it has affected her writing. [9]
  Novels

  The Arcadia Project

  Borderline, March 2016, ISBN 9781508225263
  Phantom Pains, March 2017, ISBN 9781481451925

  Awards
  Borderline was nominated for a World Fantasy award in 2017 in the Novel category.

• simon & schuster - http://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Mishell-Baker/470213022

  Mishell Baker is the author of the Nebula and World Fantasy Award Finalist Borderline, which was also a Tiptree Honor book, as well as the second and third books in The Arcadia Project, Phantom Pains and Impostor Syndrome. She is a 2009 graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, and her short stories have appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Redstone Science Fiction, and Electric Velocipede. She has a website at MishellBaker.com and frequently Tweets about writing, parenthood, mental health, and assorted geekery at @MishellBaker. When she’s not attending conventions or going on wild research adventures, she lives in Los Angeles with her husband and children.

• speculative herald - http://www.speculativeherald.com/2016/04/07/interview-with-mishell-baker-author-of-borderline/

  Interview with Mishell Baker, Author of Borderline
  April 7, 2016

  Today we are happy to welcome Mishell Baker, author of Borderline. In case you missed our review of her book, it received 5 full stars! Definitely worth checking out.

  Welcome to the Speculative Herald, Mishell! Thank you for answering some of my questions.

  Mishell Baker (Vanie Poyey, Headshots LA)For those who may be unfamiliar with the story, can you give us a brief synopsis ofBorderline?

  A double amputee with borderline personality disorder gets recruited to a secret organization policing traffic between our world and a parallel magical one. Her first assignment is to find a missing fey nobleman who has vanished somewhere in Los Angeles. As she follows the trail of clues she begins to uncover a conspiracy that could lead to a war between the worlds.

  Borderlineis a combination of several unique elements: the film industry, the realm of the fey, characters with mental illnesses, and more. How did you decide to bring all these elements together in a story?

  They say “write what you know,” especially with a first book, and so it began with my attempt to write about the things most familiar to me: Los Angeles, mental health, the entertainment industry. But I can’t seem to write any story without magic in it, so I knew I had to find a way to make it into a fantasy. The magical element came from something my husband had pitched to me years ago when I was trying to write spec scripts for television. He had an idea for an organization like the Arcadia Project, a sort of border patrol for the supernatural. It seemed to me, as I played around with novel ideas, that Los Angeles would be a perfect place to exist on the brink of the surreal. My brain kept playing with the term “glamour” and its double meaning of allure and magic, and how that could relate to the entertainment industry. It clicked well enough that a plot emerged.

  You’ve given your main character Millie a double whammy of disabilities: she’s mentally illanda double amputee. What was the inspiration behind your decision to create such a challenging character?

  This is difficult and problematic to talk about, but you’re the first to ask point-blank, so I’ll do my best.

  I knew that I wanted to write about someone who had survived a suicide attempt, because I have such strong feelings about the phoenix-like effect of hitting rock bottom and then emerging into an entirely new existence. I’ve experienced that in a less extreme way, myself. But the problem, especially with female characters, is that a failed suicide attempt is often looked upon with disdain as somehow fake, a ploy for attention. I felt that to counteract that unfortunate prejudice it had to be obvious that Millie wasn’t just “staging” an attempt for sympathy.

  Unfortunately, there are only so many foolproof ways to die. I’m not comfortable with firearms, so a seven-story jump looked like the best option. A fall like that is either going to kill you (most likely) or do catastrophic permanent damage. I accepted the consequences, then did the necessary research to make that damage an integral part of her new life. People have remarked that I incorporate her disability without making her character “all about” that, and if I’ve succeeded in that at all it’s because I didn’t sit down and say, “I want to write a story about a double amputee.” She came into my head already embroiled in another story, and her injuries are something she carries around with her as she lives that story.

  As an able-bodied person I ignorantly, accidentally stumbled on a truth about disability: no one’s story is “all about” that, even when it permeates every other aspect of their lives. We’re all pursuing our own goals, exploring our emotions, overcoming external obstacles at work and in our relationships. Some of us just have more baggage along for the ride than others. I guess I wanted to write an example of this idea, show that you don’t have to have every piece of a typical human body in order to live a whole life, an interesting life worth reading about for reasons other than “inspiring” people without disabilities.

  BorderlineCoverBorderline’s unexpected humor was one of my favorite elements of the story. How hard (or easy!) was it to write such funny dialogue—Millie’s in particular?

  I’m one of those people who has to suppress turning everything into a joke, to be honest — one of the few personality traits Millie and I share beyond our diagnosis. That said, the jokes aren’t always good on a first pass. But that’s the nice thing about writing a novel; there’s no esprit d’escalier. If you later think of the awesome thing Millie should have said, you just… go back and add it in. There are jokes I added in even at the last-minute proofread phase. If they let me, I’d probably go in and add more. I never stop tinkering with the jokes. So it’s easy, and it’s hard. It’s easy (for me) to find the humor in everything, harder to get the timing and the rhythm of a joke right. I’ve learned a lot about this from my husband, who can nail a joke on the first pass in an instinctive way that I envy.

  Borderlineis the first in a trilogy (and thank you for that! I can’t wait to dive back into this world!). Can you give us a hint about what’s next for Millie and the gang?

  I can’t say too much without spoiling the ending of Borderline for those who haven’t read it yet, but I’ll do my best. Certain questions that remain unanswered because of a choice Millie makes at the end of Borderline? Those questions are going to come back to haunt us, and it will take two more books to fully resolve that larger story arc (though each book has its own smaller arc that finishes off decisively). The next book is called Phantom Pains and, as the wordplay in the title suggests, there will be a bit of a “ghost story” feel to parts of it. It has gotten amazing reactions from all 5 of the people who have read it so far.

  Please tell us three things about yourself that can’t be found on your website.

  1) I find snakes and spiders endearing. 2) I’ve been to every U.S. state except Hawaii. 3) I’m studying Russian right now to prepare for a trip I’m taking to Saint Petersburg in 2017. And yes, I’ll be doing research for a book there.

  Mishell Baker (Vanie Poyey, Headshots LA)ABOUT MISHELL BAKER

  Mishell Baker is a 2009 graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, and her short stories have appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Redstone Science Fiction, and Electric Velocipede. She has a website at MishellBaker.com and frequently tweets about writing, parenthood, mental health, and assorted geekery at @MishellBaker. When she’s not attending conventions or going on wild research adventures, she lives in Los Angeles with her husband and children. Borderline is her debut novel.

• redstone science fiction - http://redstonesciencefiction.com/2011/07/interview-mishell-baker/

  Five Questions with Mishell Baker

  by Michael Ray

  1) You attended the 2009 Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. What is the biggest effect Clarion had on your writing?
  Clarity. Before Clarion, I had a tendency to hold my cards close, to couch things in long convoluted sentences, to make my readers work too hard. I assumed that everyone would be lovingly poring over each and every phrase in what I wrote, looking for double meanings and subtleties and symbolism. Then I handed over a story to eighteen people who had a few hours to read and make notes on mine and three others, and I realized that people don’t want to work. They want to be swept in, and entertained, and moved, and above all they want to understand what the hell you’re talking about.

  With the possible exception of professional literary critics, every reader is severely pressed for time and should really be doing something else right now. Everyone. Not just sleep-deprived Clarion students. So be kind.

  2) You’ve remained involved with Clarion by becoming editor of their blog. How did they talk you into that and what have you found interesting about the experience?
  I actually founded the blog several months after graduating Clarion. There was no Clarion Blog before that. I say I founded it, but only in the physical sense. The idea of an official Clarion Blog came from my classmate Liz Argall, and she kind of volunteered me for it because she saw that I enjoyed blogging. Ironically I’ve done very little blogging myself at all; my job mostly is finding people who are more knowledgeable and eloquent than I am and talking them into blogging. That’s been the interesting part: the people I’ve corresponded with. I’ve gotten some incredible people to contribute: a slew of big-name literary agents, writers ranging from Samuel R. Delany to Jim Butcher, and editors of short fiction venues, like that creep Michael Ray.

  3) Your story with us, Vaporware, is a sociological scifi story that examines something we may well see in the future, projecting how one’s children might turn out. What experiences prompted you to write it?
  The experience of being out of story ideas in week four of Clarion and being desperate to meet a deadline.

  Oh, you mean related life experience? None whatsoever. At the time I conceived the idea of this story, I was ten years away from having children myself; it mostly came out of my empathy for a sweet, passive guy I knew who had a severely troubled thirteen-year-old daughter. I honestly have no idea where the science fiction aspect of it came from; it’s been so long. We writers always sit around going “what if” and sometimes those flights of fancy stick with us and sometimes they don’t. That was one that hitched a ride in my subconscious for a decade and finally rattled loose in a moment of desperation.

  Most of my Clarion classmates hated the first draft, which was admittedly weak. But Kim Stanley Robinson saw what I was trying to do, and he’s a dad, and he loved it. When Kim Stanley Robinson loves something, you don’t throw it away, you keep working on it. I did the final pass at it a few months after my daughter was born, which is where some of the baby-related flashbacks come from.

  4) I particularly enjoyed your fantasy story in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Throwing Stones. You have mentioned how it is set in the world of a novel you were working on. What sort of work do you find that you are currently spending most of your writing time on and why do think you made that choice?
  It’s novels, now, definitely. I have two I switch off between: a sort of edgy-chick-lit urban fantasy that I hope to have drafted by fall, and the novel (trilogy actually) mentioned in the BCS bio, which may take years. I am retired from short fiction for the foreseeable future. Before Clarion I had no ability to write short fiction whatsoever, and I think every writer should become reasonably competent at it for reasons I go into in my blog at great length. I learned enough about how to write short stories that I managed to sell a few, and so now it’s time for me to get back into novels. My answer to why I’m abandoning short fiction is kind of embedded in the answer to your next question.

  5) Whose work should we be reading that we may not know about (and why)?
  You use the word “should,” which casts the question in a different light. I can’t really name names, because if you’re a writer you should be reading the type of thing you write. I am constantly dismayed at how many aspiring writers say things like, “I’m writing a YA epic fantasy novel but I mostly read sci-fi erotica.” This raises two points. First, it helps to be familiar with at least the big names in the field where you’re trying to market yourself, or you risk looking like a bit of a doofus to your prospective agent or publisher. Second, look at it the other way around: why aren’t you writing what you most enjoy reading? You’d be great at it, and as a bonus, your guilty stolen moments of leisure time are now called “market research.”

  Aside from that? Read Mark Lawrence’s Prince of Thorns when it comes out at the end of the month. Not only will it make you sit up straight in your chair and go, “Wow,” but it’s going to be controversial, and controversy is always fun to Tweet and blog about.

  Thanks for you time & your excellent story.

• fantastic fiction - https://www.fantasticfiction.com/b/mishell-baker/

  Mishell Baker

  Mishell Baker is a 2009 graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Workshop, and her short stories have appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Redstone Science Fiction, and Electric Velocipede. She has a website at MishellBaker.com and frequently Tweets about writing, parenthood, mental health, and assorted geekery at @MishellBaker.

  When shes not attending conventions or going on wild research adventures, she lives in Los Angeles with her husband and children. Borderline is her debut novel.

  Series
  Arcadia Project
  1. Borderline (2016)
  2. Phantom Pains (2017)
  3. Impostor Syndrome (2018)
  thumbthumbthumb

  Awards
  Nebula Awards Best Novel nominee (2017) : Borderline

• huffington post - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/a-heroine-like-no-other-an-interview-with-mishell_us_591c8edfe4b0e8f558bb230e

  A Heroine Like No Other: An Interview with Mishell Baker, Author of The Arcadia Project Series
  05/17/2017 01:59 pm ET

  Mishell Baker’s first novel, Borderline, came out to a buzz of immediate acclaim. A work of electrical wit and intensity, Baker’s urban fantasy series blends the glamour of the Fae with the tinsel of Hollywood. In addition to supernatural demons, the protagonist Millie grapples with mental and physical disability. Millie’s hardbitten, humorous narrative voice serves a perfect counterpoint to the fast pace and high drama of the plot. Borderline and Phantom Pains, the first two novels of the Arcadia Project series, are out now.

  I caught up with Mishell to talk about her inspirations—which include Nabakov and video games—urban fantasy, and more.
  The centerpiece of this series, with all its magic and parallel worlds, is undoubtedly the multi-edged protagonist. Millie has Borderline Personality Disorder, prosthetic legs due to a suicide attempt, and an attitude. Can you talk about the centrality of Millie, and her highly individual challenges, to these novels?

  It's a variation on a common theme, I think. Often in urban fantasy and mystery, there is a single viewpoint character whose attitude and experiences serve as a filter for everything we see in the book. That's true to some extent of any viewpoint, but in these genres the filter can really tighten the emotional color palette of a story, giving it a "noir" feel for example. So the book really is the protagonist.

  Millie has some of the characteristics of a standard noir protagonist, coloring the story with cynicism and badly-managed pain, but her filter can also be treacherous at times if you forget you're looking through it. Her version of the facts is sometimes clear-eyed and sometimes very distorted. It's not always obvious which is which, and I think trying to sort that out is part of the fun.
  Setting the Fae amid the glitz of Hollywood makes so much sense! How did you come to know the ins and outs of the film industry?

  For a stretch in my twenties, I thought that maybe the best way to tell stories was through film. So I moved out to Los Angeles and immersed myself in that world for a few years. I went to screenwriting seminars, mingled at industry social events, worked as a background actor, was even a semifinalist for the Academy's Nicholl fellowship a couple of times.

  But then I realized that people in the entertainment industry work long, punishing hours and get yelled at a lot, and so I decided that it probably wasn't for me. My husband still works on the periphery of entertainment, though, and his stories keep me from drifting completely out of touch with the surreal and beautiful nightmare that is Hollywood.
  Borderline and Phantom Pains are urban fantasy. In what ways do you think they are like, and unlike, urban fantasies that readers have come to expect?

  Here's something I've never admitted in an interview before: I only read my first urban fantasy after I'd already finished the first draft of Borderline and realized what I'd written.

  This explains why I may have gone off the rails a bit here and there, but I think it also suggests that genres and subgenres aren't entirely artificial constructs. I wrote a story that was about magic in a big city, and when I went to read other books that fell into that category, I found that I'd instinctively drawn on some common threads. For example a certain sexiness, the first-person narrator, the mystery tropes, and the way the city becomes a character in its own right.

  But after reading some of the best-selling examples of urban fantasy I realized that I had veered off genre in a few ways. My protagonist wasn't particularly attractive, for example, and didn't have any special powers. She's a pretty banged-up mortal who's in over her head. Also, there isn't an overt romance in the book. But genre tendencies are just that, tendencies, and urban fantasy is pretty forgiving. Look at Charlaine Harris, who stepped away from the "urban" part with the Sookie Stackhouse books, still managed to delight all kinds of die-hard UF fans, and still gets classified as urban fantasy.
  Which works and/or writers have most inspired this series?

  It's easier to cite appropriate inspirations for my traditional fantasy stories, because as I've confessed, urban fantasy is new to me. The Arcadia Project series still has influences, of course; they just tend to be from outside the genre or even the medium.

  For example, there is some absolutely terrific writing going on in gaming these days. Games' focus on player choice has strongly affected the way I write fiction; I'm constantly thinking of the reader as a person who wants to take the wheel. I can't give readers actual choices in such a linear form, but I can try to imagine what they'd choose, and I can decide at a given point in the story whether it's best to gratify their desires or frustrate them. I always think of my stories as "interactive" even when they aren't, in the strictest sense.

  I'm also influenced by fiction writers who have nothing to do with fantasy at all. Every tiny side character in Dostoevsky's work is so real that you could swear it's based on someone you know. I love that about his work and strive for it in mine. I also adore Nabokov: the way he uses these lush, ecstatic sensory descriptions of everything and the way he restrains earth-shattering emotions behind erudite irony. If I had to pick one writer to spend the rest of my reading life with, it would be Nabokov.

  So it looks as though my urban fantasy is inspired by Russian literature and video games. Makes perfect sense in some universe, I'm sure.
  Can you tell us about your plans for the series? I know the highly-anticipated third installment, Impostor Syndrome, will be published next year. Any hints as to what it will bring to the table, without giving too much away?

  I think it sort of goes into a rage and flips the table, to be honest. All the pieces I set up in the first two books get flung every which way, and Millie has a roller coaster of a time trying to make something out of the mess.

  The end of the second book gave a hint that chaos is about to break loose, so of course the third book is all about the repercussions. It's a tangle of alliances and backstabbing and bizarre arcane lore, but of course there are also smaller, more intimate matters that will finally be addressed. And you'll get to see more clearly than ever why Millie is the way she is, as more of her past comes to light.

  My hope is that it will nicely conclude the storyline that began with a missing Viscount while at the same time firing up readers' imaginations about what the Arcadia Project might look like in the years to come.
  Mishell Baker is the author of the Nebula Award finalist Borderline and Phantom Pains, the first two books in the Arcadia Project series. She is a 2009 graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer’s Workshop, and her short stories have appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Electric Velocipode. She is represented by Russell Galen at Scovil Galen Ghosh Literary Agency and lives in Los Angeles with her husband and children.

• my bookish ways - http://www.mybookishways.com/2016/03/an-interview-with-mishell-baker-author-of-borderline.html

  An interview with Mishell Baker, author of Borderline
  Kristin March 3, 2016Fantasy, Interviews, Sci Fi, Urban Fantasy

  mishellbakerPlease welcome Mishell Baker to the blog! Her debut novel, Borderline, just came out, and she kindly answered a few of my questions about it and more!
  ********************************
  What inspired you to write Borderline? Will you tell us a little about it?

  I’ve always wanted to be a fantasy novelist, but traditional fantasy requires a great deal of world building. Creating complex worlds is something I enjoy, but after I had my first baby, I realized that long trips to the library were not going to happen in my immediate future. So I toyed around with the idea of setting a fantasy story in the city I already knew and loved. When my husband pitched me what he thought would be a great idea for a TV series set in L.A., I shamelessly stole the idea from him, tinkered with it until he didn’t recognize it anymore, and then turned it into a novel.

  Why do you think readers will root for Millie? Will you tell us more about her?

  I can only say why I personally root for Millie, because likability is very subjective. One person’s “awesome” is another person’s “unbearable.” For me, what makes Millie sympathetic is how hard she works at getting through or around her own vulnerabilities. This is someone with a lot of cards stacked against her, but something in her just won’t quite let her throw in the towel. She tried giving up once and found out it didn’t work for her. I guess you could say she’s given up on giving up.

  Did you do any specific research for the book?

  My ability to do research was limited at the time I wrote the book, since I was housebound and pretty socially isolated, but the Internet is a marvelous thing. I learned what I could about the day-to-day experience of living with lower limb prostheses, and I tapped into both my husband’s knowledge of filmmaking and some of my own experiences in the entertainment industry. At later stages of writing I drove around L.A. location scouting, making sure my physical and geographical details rang true, because I live in a huge sprawling city and my visual memory isn’t always reliable.

  What is your writing process like?

  A lot less mysterious than many writers’, I can tell you that. I have a sort of gradually expansive approach. I start with a basic idea, flesh it out to five major turning points I learned in a screenwriting seminar years ago, then break down what happens chapter by chapter, then scene by scene. All this is just an outline, but it can end up being a pretty long document by the end. Sometimes I’ll even slip in bits of dialogue or description I know I want to use in that particular scene. Once I have this ridiculously detailed outline, I use it as a road map and write the first draft at an average of 2500 words per day. Then I clean up what I know needs cleaning up and send it on to beta readers, who tell me what to do next. It’s all strangely mechanical; I feel more like a craftsman than an artist sometimes, which is why you’ll never hear me use that term.

  Have you always wanted to be an author? Will you tell us more about yourself and your background?

  Yes, I’ve always wanted to be an author. A novelist, specifically. I have no other background to speak of; my entire life always revolved around this goal. I was already writing fiction somewhat obsessively by age four, and at age six I announced my plans to make a career out of it. My parents took me seriously and bought me books on writing, sent me to writing camp and so on; I was very lucky. But even with all my privilege and encouragement, it took me until I was forty years old to hold my first book in my hands, so it’s probably good that things weren’t any harder for me.

  What do you like to see in a good story? Is there anything that will make you put a book down, unfinished?

  More often than not, I put down a book because I hear a crash as my three-year-old gets into something she shouldn’t, and then by the time I finish cleaning up the mess, I realize I’m late for this or that and next thing you know, three days have passed. So unless the book has some kind of insane siren-like hold on me, chances are it gets forgotten. To answer the spirit of your question: the books that reel me in are always the ones with characters who seem real and who create such a personal, intimate, emotional response in me that I worry about them the way I would a friend. I get obsessed and have to check back in on them, even if dinner is burning or the kids are drawing on each other’s faces with Sharpies or whatever.

  If you could experience one book again for the first time, which one would it be?

  With the caveat that I’d have to have the exact same experience, which is impossible as I’m twenty years older now, I’d have to go with Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay. Long after I had forgotten every word of the book itself (ironic, if you’re familiar with it), I still remembered the way reading it absolutely shattered me, and the way it influenced me as a writer. I tried rereading it again recently, and while it’s still a wonderful book, I can never get back that first experience — the absolute shock of it — and I’d love to have a chance to relive that.

  Have you read any good books lately? Anything you’d recommend?

  If you haven’t read Uprooted by Naomi Novik, you should; it was exactly the sort of siren call I was talking about above. So was Seraphina by Rachel Hartman, an amazing YA fantasy whose sequel is still beckoning temptingly from my to-read list. Also the Ancillary trilogy by Ann Leckie is a wonderful combination of rollicking space opera and trope-challenging brain gymnastics. Last but not least, if you like Borderline you should definitely check out everything Daniel José Older is doing right now, because he does it way better than I do. I wish I had something more off-the-beaten-path to recommend, but given all the restrictions on my reading time, I have been mostly confined to the ones Everyone Is Talking About.

  What’s next for you?

  Phantom Pains! That’s book two of the Arcadia Project, and I am hugely excited about it. I’m contracted for a third book as well. I have at least three other series ideas as well, so I’d better live to be at least eighty.

  Keep up with Mishell: Website | Twitter

  About Borderline:
  A cynical, disabled film director with borderline personality disorder gets recruited to join a secret organization that oversees relations between Hollywood and Fairyland in the first book of a new urban fantasy series from debut author Mishell Baker.

  A year ago, Millie lost her legs and her filmmaking career in a failed suicide attempt. Just when she’s sure the credits have rolled on her life story, she gets a second chance with the Arcadia Project: a secret organization that polices the traffic to and from a parallel reality filled with creatures straight out of myth and fairy tales.

  For her first assignment, Millie is tasked with tracking down a missing movie star who also happens to be a nobleman of the Seelie Court. To find him, she’ll have to smooth-talk Hollywood power players and uncover the surreal and sometimes terrifying truth behind the glamour of Tinseltown. But stronger forces than just her inner demons are sabotaging her progress, and if she fails to unravel the conspiracy behind the noble’s disappearance, not only will she be out on the streets, but the shattering of a centuries-old peace could spark an all-out war between worlds.

  No pressure.

• geekdad - https://geekdad.com/2016/03/author-mishell-baker-geeks-out-about-gaming/

  Author Mishell Baker Geeks Out About Gaming
  Posted on 8 March, 2016 by Fran Wilde • 0 Comments
  MBWalking-200x300
  image courtesy Mishell Baker.

  Mishell Baker’s urban fantasy series The Arcadia Project begins with the novel Borderline, just released this March. The series is narrated by Millicent Roper, a snarky double-amputee and suicide survivor who works with a ragtag collection of society’s least-wanted, keeping the world safe from the chaotic whims of supernatural beasties. Mishell’s short fiction has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Daily Science Fiction, Redstone Science Fiction, and Electric Velocipede.

  When Mishell isn’t convention-hopping or going on wild research adventures, she lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two changelings. When her offspring are older, she will probably remember what her hobbies are. In the meantime, she enjoys sending and receiving old-fashioned handwritten paper letters.

  I always hesitate to call myself a “gamer,” since my tastes are so specific. But within the very small subcategory of “story-driven fantasy RPGs for PC,” the term “enthusiast” doesn’t even begin to cover my obsession or these games’ effect on my writing. Here are five RPG series I could easily play (and geek out about) endlessly:

  Quest for Glory – My first gaming addiction was Sierra’s classic Quest for Glory series, by Lori and Corey Cole. I grew up right along with the game’s hero as I played and replayed a tale that is by turns silly, suspenseful, and heartbreaking. I began the first installment—in which a naive young hero saves a small town from a curse—at age twelve. By the end of the fifth installment, I was in my mid-twenties, and my hero was king of a powerful nation. Talk about epic!
  Guild Wars – This one had me at the tutorial. I painstakingly discovered lush forests and fields, quest by quest… and then the moment I completed the introductory section I watched everything I’d just explored get blasted into noxious wasteland. I was traumatized… and hooked. Both the original game and its follow-up Guild Wars 2 gave me plenty of opportunities to crawl back through the ruins of that first memorable area and experience a strange mix of grief and nostalgia. I love trying to recreate this feeling in my work: trying to identify readers’ strongest first impressions, then finding ways to tease, twist, and distort those memories later on.
  The Elder Scrolls – The lore of the Elder Scrolls’ world of Tamriel has changed the way I approach world-building. Unlike the typical coherent mythology created by a singular author, the books and scrolls you find lying about in the Elder Scrolls games reveal diverse and uncomfortably irreconcilable views of theology and history that only suggest, never reveal, the truth. The second book of the Arcadia Project series owes a lot to my fascination with this startlingly realistic approach to world lore.
  Everquest – EQ was the grandmother of MMORPGs, and it’s where I discovered online roleplaying. During my time in EQ and EQ2, I practiced my character creation and dialogue skills and met some amazing writers. Most importantly, it was while playing Everquest 2 that I first invented a deadpan gloved warlock named Caryl Vallo. She didn’t thrive in that world; too many other strong-willed characters steered her story in directions that didn’t satisfy me. So I plucked her out of Norrath, gave her a different backstory, and found her a new home in my debut novel Borderline.

  BorderlineCover-300x453
  Image Courtesy Simon & Schuster. Available on Amazon.
  Dragon Age – Put off by the blood-spattered marketing campaign, I tried the first Dragon Age game only reluctantly. But within a week I was wholeheartedly immersed in the world of Thedas, and immediately after finishing the game for the first time I surprised myself by bursting into tears. All three Dragon Age installments differ radically in interface and design (a common criticism), but the world and characters consistently enrapture and move me to the point that I find myself irritated when I have to actually fight monsters to earn another 24-karat nugget of story. BioWare’s writers are astonishing; their games are master classes in how to set up and pay off emotional effect.

  I’ve loved computer games as a storytelling medium all my life, and to this day it affects the way I construct story. As a writer I try to address what I think the readers will want to explore, not what I, as the Authority, feel the need to explain. The fun in plotting for me, as it may well be in game design, is trying to guess what the audience would choose. In deciding when it’s best to indulge them and when it will satisfy them more in the long run if I frustrate or subvert their desires. If I’ve learned anything from games it’s that when a story is well designed, losing can be almost as fun as winning.

Phantom Pains
Kristine Huntley
113.12 (Feb. 15, 2017): p40.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Phantom Pains. By Mishell Baker. Mar. 2017. 416p. Saga, paper, 515.99 (9781481484756); e-book (9781481451932).

The follow-up to Bakers imaginative first entry in the Arcadia Project series, Borderline (2016), finds Millie Roper with a steady job working as the assistant to a movie producer. She's out at the Arcadia Project, but not for long; Stage 13 at the studio where she works still bears the marks of the supernatural showdown that ousted Millie. When Millie's old boss, Caryl, shows up to investigate, the two discover the ghost of Millie's former partner on the stage, an impossibility, Caryl claims, since ghosts aren't real. But it's only the tip of the iceberg, Millie discovers: soon Caryl has been arrested for the murder of a fellow Arcadia Project official, and Millie and her fey counterpart, the appealing Claybriar, have to summon the Unseelie king in the hopes of clearing Caryl. When they discover what's really afoot on Stage 13, they realize there's a major threat to the Seelie realm. In her second outing, Baker expands on the rich world she created and adds new dimension to Millie, who remains a thoroughly appealing and complex heroine.--Kristine Huntley

YA: The jaded but appealing heroine, the wealth of magical beings, and the Hollywood backdrop might appeal to teens. KH.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Huntley, Kristine. "Phantom Pains." Booklist, 15 Feb. 2017, p. 40. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA485442547&it=r&asid=cead8e24e8a532f3a728ec84f59a65d9. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A485442547

Phantom Pains
264.5 (Jan. 30, 2017): p183.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
* Phantom Pains

Mishell Baker. Saga, $15.99 trade paper

(416p) ISBN 978-1-4814-5192-5

Picking up four months after the end of Borderline, Baker once again immerses readers in a modern-day fantastical Los Angeles, blurring the line between perception and reality with breathtaking ease. Many of Hollywood's biggest stars and directors are secretly paired with fairy Echoes, who boost the humans' creativity in exchange for a taste of mortal life and talents. Series protagonist Millie, a would-be filmmaker, has developed coping strategies for her physical and mental disabilities that prove surprisingly useful for dealing with these supernatural entities. Seeking independence, she pulls away from the Arcadia Project, the quasi-official bridge between humans and fairies, and gets a job at Valiant Studios, her own apartment, and a workable therapeutic routine. But her friendship with her former boss, Caryl, and the potential of a relationship with her own Echo, Claybriar, keep pulling her back into the project's realm of influence. The continued struggle between the Seelie and Unseelie fairy courts is echoed in the ripples caused by the climax of the first book, and, when a new threat looms, Millie must untangle fairy and human secrets before both Earth and Arcadia are irreparably damaged. Baker has a wonderfully subtle touch with delicate emotional, psychological, and romantic elements, and she builds a solid foundation of complex and interesting characterization upon which she layers heart-pounding action and a brilliantly twisty plot. Each word is deliberately chosen for maximum effect. Everything readers think they know about both worlds will be upended by this enthralling installment. Agent: Rachel Kory, Scovil Galen Ghosh Literary. (Mar.)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Phantom Pains." Publishers Weekly, 30 Jan. 2017, p. 183. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA480195187&it=r&asid=3c5d611af9fa30727833bc5a0aa2d69b. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A480195187

Borderline
Kristine Huntley
112.13 (Mar. 1, 2016): p56.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Borderline. By Mishell Baker. Mar. 2016. 400p. Simon & Schuster/Saga, $25.99 (9781481453066); paper, $15.99 (9781481429788); e-book, $7.99 (9781481429795).

Once a film student with a promising directing career ahead of her, 26-year-old Millie Roper attempted suicide, which cost her both her aspirations and her legs. Diagnosed with borderline personality disorder and recuperating in a Los Angeles psychiatric center, Millie has no idea what's next for her, until a mysterious woman named Caryl walks into her life and offers her a trial position with the Arcadia Project. Millie soon learns that Caryl and her cohorts, including handsome but standoffish Teo, Southern belle Gloria, and forbidding Tjuan, help regulate contact and traffic between the parallel world of the fey and our own. Millie partners with Teo to track down popular actor John Riven, who is actually a fey nobleman. The hunt brings Millie to the door of a personal hero--legendary director David Berenbaum, who shares a deep creative bond with Riven--but it also tests her patience and her control over her disorder. Boasting a truly unique heroine whose flaws only make her more compelling, Baker's debut is an exciting entry into an imaginative new world.--Kristine Huntley

YA/M: Millie's physical and emotional recovery, set against the backdrop of the rich world Baker has created, might strike a chord with teens. KH.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Huntley, Kristine. "Borderline." Booklist, 1 Mar. 2016, p. 56. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA447443615&it=r&asid=ffdb2794f2c1c6766d6e0100da7dc406. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A447443615

Borderline
263.3 (Jan. 18, 2016): p68.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
* Borderline

Mishell Baker. Saga, $25.99 (400p) ISBN 978-1-4814-5306-6

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Fully articulated, flawed, and fascinating characters combine with masterly urban fantasy storytelling in Baker's debut novel. Millie, a former filmmaker, is a lost soul in soulless Los Angeles. A suicide attempt has left her body broken, and a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder both shatters and relieves her. She's at loose ends until a mysterious woman named Caryl comes to the mental institution where Millie lives to offer her a job with a secret group called the Arcadia Project. A fae noble has gone missing, and Millie's unique skills and perspective are needed to bring him home before inter-dimensional war breaks out. Not only does Millie have to learn to navigate life outside an institutional setting, but she also has to transition to a new normal, one that incorporates both mental and physical challenges. The richly nuanced presentation of Millie's multiple diagnoses allows for a deeper knowledge of the character, which, in turn, serves to enhance an already beautifully written story that is one part mystery, one part fantasy, and wholly engrossing. Agent: Rachel Kory, Scovil Galen Ghosh Literary (Mar.)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Borderline." Publishers Weekly, 18 Jan. 2016, p. 68. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA440821816&it=r&asid=c20827dbb0016aa681aa54662d1beccf. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A440821816

Baker, Mishell. Borderline
Marlyn K. Beebe
62.6 (June 2016): p119.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/
Baker, Mishell. Borderline. 400p. (The Arcadia Project: Bk. 1). Saga. Mar. 2016. Tr $25.99. ISBN 9781481453066.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Millie Roper has been at the Leishman Psychiatric Center in Los Angeles for more than six months, having checked herself in after a failed suicide attempt that resulted in the loss of her right leg. She's visited by a woman who wants to recruit her for something called the Arcadia Project, which she describes as a nonprofit employment project partially funded by the L.A. County Department of Mental Health, but refuses to provide any more details unless Millie meets her the following day. Intrigued, Millie packs up her belongings (wheelchair, crutches, cane, prosthetic limb, and suitcase) and takes a cab to the designated location. Thus begins a roller-coaster ride through Los Angeles and environs, as Millie is tasked with locating a missing actor. What she doesn't realize until she's well into the case is that fairies and other magical creatures live among the residents of her reality and that one needs only a special pair of sunglasses to be able to see them. Millie is a delight--outspoken to the point of rudeness, with a wry wit and (despite her history) a healthy sense of self-preservation. The supporting characters are a motley crew, all with physical or mental issues of some kind and of varying ethnic backgrounds, and the story is an entertaining mix of fantasy and mystery noir. VERDICT Most comparable to Jim Butcher's "Dresden Files," this should appeal to his fans as well as followers of Charles de Lint and Mary Janice Davidson.--Marlyn K. Beebe, Los Alamitos, CA

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Beebe, Marlyn K. "Baker, Mishell. Borderline." School Library Journal, June 2016, p. 119. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA453920261&it=r&asid=69f94a69d1a5b5a834df0a7e9da26ad6. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A453920261

Huntley, Kristine. "Phantom Pains." Booklist, 15 Feb. 2017, p. 40. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA485442547&asid=cead8e24e8a532f3a728ec84f59a65d9. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017. "Phantom Pains." Publishers Weekly, 30 Jan. 2017, p. 183. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA480195187&asid=3c5d611af9fa30727833bc5a0aa2d69b. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017. Huntley, Kristine. "Borderline." Booklist, 1 Mar. 2016, p. 56. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA447443615&asid=ffdb2794f2c1c6766d6e0100da7dc406. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017. "Borderline." Publishers Weekly, 18 Jan. 2016, p. 68. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA440821816&asid=c20827dbb0016aa681aa54662d1beccf. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017. Beebe, Marlyn K. "Baker, Mishell. Borderline." School Library Journal, June 2016, p. 119. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA453920261&asid=69f94a69d1a5b5a834df0a7e9da26ad6. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017.

• npr
  http://www.npr.org/2016/03/02/467413538/borderline-is-urban-fantasy-with-a-cinematic-punch
  Word count: 785

  Borderline' Is Urban Fantasy With A Cinematic Punch

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  March 2, 20167:00 AM ET

  Amal El-Mohtar
  Borderline
  Borderline

  by Mishell Baker

  Paperback, 390 pages
  purchase

  Chances are, if you don't have firsthand acquaintance with neurodiversity, disability or mental illness, your ideas of what they can look like come from films or books that get made into films. This is certainly true of me: I first learned about autism and schizophrenia from films that grossly misrepresented them, and had never heard of sociopathy or borderline personality disorder before watching Girl, Interrupted in my midteens.

  These representations are mostly as dominant as they are misleading, which is all the more pernicious because of how often mental illness is a plot point or focus of the story, instead of something real people deal with on a day to day basis without being inspirational or cautionary to everyone else.

  That is why I particularly loved that Borderline's Millicent Roper — bisexual, in her mid-20s, living with BPD and prosthetic legs after a failed suicide attempt — is a filmmaker.

  Millie has been in a psychiatric center outside Los Angeles for six months, ever since she leapt off her prestigious film school's roof and ended a promising career. While there she's approached by an organization called The Arcadia Project, which is supposedly in the business of enabling creative people living with mental illness to find employment in film and television.

  It seems too good to be true — and is, as in truth The Arcadia Project manages the presence of fairies in our world, facilitating their relationships with humans and policing their comings and goings according to complicated protocols. When a highly regarded fairy nobleman goes missing, Millie quickly gets in over her head, trying to manage her physical and mental conditions while serving as an amateur detective and not blowing her shot at working in Hollywood.

  I adored Millie. Brash, angry, incisively self-aware, she's the kind of furiously intelligent protagonist I love to read. Her first-person narration walks an amazing line between conveying her personality and explaining the way BPD interacts with it, while never actually making it or her disability the focus of the plot or giving the book an After-School Special feel. In fact, in stark contrast to the troubling tendency in fantasy to represent mental illness as magical, Millie is anathema to fairies: As a consequence of her suicide attempt, her body is full of steel, such that she can disrupt most magic with a touch.

  I adored Millie. Brash, angry, incisively self-aware, she's the kind of furiously intelligent protagonist I love to read.

  Millie is, first and foremost, a filmmaker — someone who examines, curates and constructs narratives, and there's a constantly engaging satisfaction to watching her do that with her own life. Even while she's lashing out and tearing that life apart, her narration is framing the shot and building up the story.

  This is a novel in which people are frequently horrible to each other, and I was a bit spellbound by how well it was done. The supporting cast is delightfully unlikable; Millie's housemates in Residence Four are all unapologetically dealing with their own problems and unwilling to allow Millie's to take center stage. Mishell Baker's dexterity with Millie's voice manages the difficult trick of making everyone simultaneously sympathetic and hostile: Millie understands and empathizes with why, for instance, a little person might take "I didn't see you there" as a dig instead of an honest statement, but her awareness doesn't undo the damage or mitigate her own prickliness at being misunderstood.

  I also very much enjoyed the fairies. I'm confident that fans of the old Changeling: The Dreaming role-playing game will love this book, and I mean that as a compliment; the fairy court divisions, class politics and magic systems all felt very familiar to me as a longtime lover of that game system and the fantasy novels of the late '80s that inspired it. It's a feature rather than a bug; Baker's doing so much innovative work with voice and character that some stock urban fantasy bones are a welcome anchor.

  Borderline is Mishell Baker's first novel, and I want the next one. It's a remarkably smooth and assured launch for her Arcadia Project series — a fast-paced story of high costs laced with humor that goes from light-hearted to scathing with the flip of a coin. It navigates the borderlands of friendship and enmity, trust and betrayal, with shrewd and unrelenting grace.

• jim c hines
  http://www.jimchines.com/2017/04/borderline-by-mishell-baker/
  Word count: 606

  Apr 10, 2017 / Uncategorized
  Borderline, by Mishell Baker

  Mishell Baker, Review /

  Borderline: Cover ArtJust finished reading Borderline [Amazon | B&N | IndieBound], by Mishell Baker. This is a Nebula award finalist, and having raced through the book, can see why. Here’s the official description:

  A year ago, Millie lost her legs and her filmmaking career in a failed suicide attempt. Just when she’s sure the credits have rolled on her life story, she gets a second chance with the Arcadia Project: a secret organization that polices the traffic to and from a parallel reality filled with creatures straight out of myth and fairy tales.

  For her first assignment, Millie is tasked with tracking down a missing movie star who also happens to be a nobleman of the Seelie Court. To find him, she’ll have to smooth-talk Hollywood power players and uncover the surreal and sometimes terrifying truth behind the glamour of Tinseltown. But stronger forces than just her inner demons are sabotaging her progress, and if she fails to unravel the conspiracy behind the noble’s disappearance, not only will she be out on the streets, but the shattering of a centuries-old peace could spark an all-out war between worlds.

  That description sells the book short, in that it ignores a huge part of the book. Those “inner demons” are a reference to the fact that Millie has borderline personality disorder. In fact, everyone who works for the Arcadia Project has some form of mental illness, for reasons that are gradually explained and explored throughout the book.

  I don’t know enough about BPD to judge how true Baker’s portrayal is, but it’s clear she’s done her research. Some of Millie’s comments about therapy and the techniques she’s learned to manage it ring very true to techniques my wife (a mental health therapist) has talked about. It feels respectfully written, which shouldn’t come as a surprise if you’ve read some of Baker’s posts and essays about mental health.

  The central idea of fey serving as muses for big Hollywood names, and the effects and consequences of that magic, sets up a good story. But it’s the characters that really elevate the story. (I think Caryl was my favorite by the end.) They’re all portrayed with a sense of honesty and respect. BPD affects a lot of how Millie processes and reacts to things, for example, and sometimes that goes pretty badly. The story doesn’t try to justify or excuse Millie’s actions in those cases, nor does it condemn her as a horrible person. It’s presented as part of who she is, and we see her awareness and her struggles to manage being borderline.

  The same holds true with Millie’s physical disability. Baker clearly did a lot of research about Millie’s prosthetics and the other effects of her disastrous attempted suicide. The metal in Millie’s body disrupts fey magic, but it isn’t played as just a clever way of giving her an advantage over the fey. I don’t have first-hand experience here, but it’s handled and written in a way that feels true to me.

  The ending felt a little bit rushed, and got a little darker than I’d expected, but it worked well both to wrap up the story and lay some groundwork for the sequel, Phantom Pains, which just came out a few weeks ago. I’ve already added it to my reading list.

• tor.com
  https://www.tor.com/2016/02/29/book-reviews-borderline-by-mishell-baker/
  Word count: 1141

  Magic in the City of Broken Dreams: Borderline by Mishell Baker
  Emily Nordling
  Mon Feb 29, 2016 2:00pm Post a comment 1 Favorite [+]

  When Millie Roper is recruited to the Arcadia Project, she is finding her way back from rock-bottom. After losing her legs in an attempted suicide, she has spent the past year picking up whatever pieces of herself she finds worth preserving and making peace with her new reality. And now, her recruiter Caryl tells her, that reality will include fairies. Millie accepts the existence of the Seelie and Unseelie courts as graciously as you’d expect of someone whose life has already been upended a dozen times. After all, in Hollywood, it makes perfect sense that writers and actors would do anything to find a mystical muse, a bit of magic that they can use to make themselves immortal on screen. When a noble fey goes missing, though, sparking talks of war between the human and fairy worlds, Millie finds that she might just be in over her head.

  Mishell Baker’s new Arcadia Project series is off to a thrilling and glamorous start with Borderline. That’s only fitting of its Hollywood setting, of course; cinematic in its scope and its style, the novel is every bit as engaging and sharp as a top-tier film (and considerably more diverse).

  The novel follows Millie from the confining, comfortable walls of her in-patient therapy center to the vast and seemingly incomprehensible world of fairies and magic. Armed with her diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder and all her accompanying coping methods from therapy, Millie is determined to take her second chance by storm. She may have thrown away her filmmaking career, but the Arcadia Project will bring her into contact with big-shots from all over Hollywood. She may have lost all of the people she loved prior to her suicide, but her new colleagues—a moody Latino man that could out-cook any top chef, and a cold young genius whose dragon familiar shows more emotion than her owner—might just be weird enough to be her friends.

  Millie learns the rules of the Arcadia Project as she goes; for instance, a fey’s magic starts to fade when they’ve been spending too much time in the human world. Which is exactly why their search for Rivenholt—a missing Seelie nobleman—is so vital. If Rivenholt has fled or been kidnapped, his human counterpart’s inspiration will be sucked dry, and the world will lose the fantastic filmmaking of acclaimed director David Berenbaum. And, of course, there’s the fact that the Seelie court might blame humans for Rivenholt’s disappearance and, at best, cut off relations, and at worst, wage an interdimensional war. Needless to say, Millie’s first job for the Project turns out to be far more than she or her colleagues bargained for. It will take all of the grit and determination that she learned as a filmmaker, and as a survivor, to navigate her fantastic new world.

  I at first assumed that the novel’s title—Borderline—referred to the border between this fantastic fey world and the more mundane human one. The revelation that Millie has BPD in the first chapter made me reconsider the notion, but only briefly. The further I read, the more convinced I became of Borderline’s web of meaning, and of Baker’s brilliance in tying her protagonist’s disorder to the very nature of the world she inhabits. Millie often describes herself as divided between an “emotional” brain and a “logic” brain, a phenomenon that is particular (though not exclusive) to people facing a variety of mental illnesses. The world of fey—of inspiration and magic and true, visceral feeling—is similarly divided from the bureaucratic, orderly world of humans. The book wouldn’t be nearly so compelling, of course, if this divide was set in stone. The space between human and fey, emotion and reason, is murky territory, in constant flux and flow, interdependent and sometimes impossible to determine.

  Baker isn’t didactic in her muddying of this particular binary. She doesn’t seem to be making any grand statements about how people experiencing BPD should view their minds, and she doesn’t romanticize their (or any non-neurotypical) experiences. In fact, Baker breaks down a spectacular number of tropes surrounding mental illness in a short amount of time. Borderline is free of inspiration porn, of magical cures, and of characters pulling themselves up by their metaphorical bootstraps! Most significant, though, is its treatment of the artistic process.

  Creativity is tied inextricably to mental illness in our cultural imagination. From the idea that art drives us to suicide and addiction, to our understanding of inspiration as a kind of madness that sweeps over us—every creative person I know, including myself, has had to grapple with this question in some form or other. Borderline brings all of this to the forefront and makes it literal in one fell swoop: fey have not only inspired human creativity for centuries, fey are inspiration, they are the magic that humans spend their whole lives seeking. Some destroy themselves doing so, and some create great things in the meantime. Millie and the other Arcadia Project members fall into both of these categories, constantly complicating them along the way. Their mental illnesses in some ways give them access to this amazing new world, but striking a balance is necessary for survival.

  I don’t want to give the impression that Borderline only has to offer an (incredibly refreshing) perspective on mental illness. Baker has given her audience urban fantasy at its finest—visceral and real in its sense of space, and dancing on the uncanny edges of our vision. Los Angeles is far from the parody of itself that we’ve come to expect; the unflagging ambition and the glistening beauty are all there, but they’re given a human (and sometimes inhuman) guise. The Arcadia Project is filled with characters that would be every bit as interesting as Millie in the role of protagonist. They all have their own stories and their own demons carefully tucked away—some in the form of a condescending smile, and some in the form of a magical dragon familiar.

  Despite having some complaints with the narrative as I read (primarily, Millie’s unflagging self-awareness, even in real-time as she makes life-altering missteps), they all seem negligible when I consider the book as a whole. Borderline is dark and creeping and smart as a whip. It is also Baker’s debut novel, and an exceptional one at that. I am beyond excited to read more from her, whether it’s in the the Arcadia Project series or otherwise.

• reading the end
  http://readingtheend.com/2017/03/20/review-borderline-mishell-baker/
  Word count: 872

  Review: Borderline, Mishell Baker

  What’s that you say? Somebody wrote a book about creepy fairies and mental health treatments? YES THANK YOU, I DON’T MIND IF I DO.

  Borderline has been garnering all the accolades this past year in SFF circles, most recently a well-deserved Nebula nomination. It’s about a filmmaker called Millie who has borderline personality disorder (BPD hereafter) and is a double amputee following a suicide attempt the year before. A mysterious woman named Caryl shows up at her mental hospital and offers her a job with the equally mysterious Arcadia Project. Work with us for a year, says Caryl, and at the end of it we’ll get you a job in Hollywood. Figuring it’s the only way she’ll get back into the movie biz, Millie agrees and is instantly put on a missing persons case — or to be more specific, a missing fairy case, because it turns out the Arcadia Project manages human/fairy relations. Delicately.

  Borderline

  I was nervous to read this book (despite the fab cover and raves from all sides), partly because depictions of mental health in SFF can be hit or miss for me (with a lotttttt of miss), and partly because borderline people are bad at boundaries and I am made up of ~95% boundaries so I was worried that if the book accurately portrayed BPD, it would put my back up and I would have a hard time enjoying it.

  Borderline pooh-poohed all my concerns: It portrayed BPD in a way that was absolutely familiar to me from borderline people I have known, and gave me a ton of insight about what it’s like from the inside if you are self-aware and trying to deal with it, and got into the nitty-gritty details of cognitive behavioral therapy work1 that BPD-havers can do to lessen the impact of their symptoms, and showed how BPD both helps and hurts Millie in her work with the Arcadia Project. What a great fucking book.

  The world of the fey that Mishell Baker explores here is wonderfully weird and specific. If the explanations Millie gets from her colleagues at the Arcadia Project occasionally feel like visits from the Exposition Fairy, those moments are quick and well worth the reader’s time (especially given that this is the first book in a planned series). The mystery Millie is assigned to investigate throws out an exactly correct number of clues, red herrings, and conspiracy, leaving behind a satisfying solution and some loose ends for the second book to explore. The last time I enjoyed urban fantasy this much was War for the Oaks.2

  My one single gripe is that the character of Gloria bummed me out. She’s a blonde Southern bitch whose polite words have barbs behind them:

  “Don’t mind Teo,” said a cloying, high-pitched Southern voice. “He’s a Grouchy Gus.” . . . . She giggled, in that cute way Southern women do instead of punching you in the teeth.

  Ha ha yeah totally, we are cloying assholes down here.

  Whereas with other characters at the Arcadia Project, Baker gives you a sense of what lies behind their behavior toward Millie, Gloria pretty much seems like she’s being a bitch to be a bitch. (She Does Good at points in the story, but in general she’s pointlessly shitty, passive-aggressive, and insincere to Millie.) The fake-nice blonde Southern lady is a stereotype I’d like a break from, given how closely the fakeness and the blondeness seem to be linked. While individual writers who write this type of antagonist for their heroes to clash with probably don’t intend it this way (it’s clear Baker doesn’t), the uncritical reproduction of this stereotype nevertheless reinforces a dichotomy of honest vs. deceptive gender performance that I do not love.

  On the other hand, I am a blonde polite Southern woman who has spent a lot of time around people that think that list of adjectives tells them everything they need to know about me, so maybe I’m just annoyed on behalf of my people. You decide!

  Overall though, I absolutely loved this book. Couldn’t put it down, talked about it to everyone, will read the sequel in a hot second when it comes out. I already know it’s going to be one of my favorites of 2017. Thanks so much for Sarah over at The Illustrated Page for putting me on to it!

  I love cognitive behavioral therapy so much, and it has helped so many people, and I almost never see it depicted in fiction, so that was awesome. ↩
  Aha, says the perceptive reader, you must not read very much urban fantasy. Correct, I do not; it does not often tempt me. ↩

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  Author Gin JennyPosted on 20 March, 2017Categories 4 StarsTags Borderline, cognitive behavioral therapy, creepy fairies, fantasy, I heart boundaries, I would marry boundaries if I could, Mishell Baker, Mrs Jenny Boundaries I call myself, srs talk about gender performance

  rhapsodyinbooks

• speculative chic
  http://speculativechic.com/2017/03/23/shaking-up-the-genre-a-review-of-mishell-bakers-borderline/
  Word count: 1000

  Shaking up the Genre: A Review of Mishell Baker’s Borderline

  By Nancy O'Toole Meservier March 23, 2017 1 Comment

  Borderline (2016)
  Written by: Mishell Baker
  Genre: Urban Fantasy
  Pages: 400 (Hardcover)
  Publisher: Saga Press

  Why I Chose It: We’re reading the Nebula Awards here at Speculative Chic! Out of the nominees for best novel that I had not already read, Borderline is the one that intrigued me the most.

  The premise:

  A year ago, Millie lost her legs and her filmmaking career in a failed suicide attempt. Just when she’s sure the credits have rolled on her life story, she gets a second chance with the Arcadia Project: a secret organization that polices the traffic to and from a parallel reality filled with creatures straight out of myth and fairy tales.

  For her first assignment, Millie is tasked with tracking down a missing movie star who also happens to be a nobleman of the Seelie Court. To find him, she’ll have to smooth-talk Hollywood power players and uncover the surreal and sometimes terrifying truth behind the glamour of Tinseltown. But stronger forces than just her inner demons are sabotaging her progress, and if she fails to unravel the conspiracy behind the noble’s disappearance, not only will she be out on the streets, but the shattering of a centuries-old peace could spark an all-out war between worlds.

  No pressure.

  There are no spoilers for Borderline in this review.

  Discussion: A few years ago, I found myself disillusioned with the urban fantasy genre as a whole. Despite being one of my gateway drugs into speculative fiction (through the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer), after years of books, TV shows, and (mostly terrible) movies, I found myself bored with sexy vampires, dominance-obsessed werewolves, power-creeping spellcasters, and the fay and their combating courts. Every new series I picked up just felt like a rehash of another, better work, and with the wide variety books available in a post-Twilight world, I found myself desiring more from my paranormal books then just the presence of werewolves or faeries.

  Fortunately, I found a few titles that brought me back into the genre, the big ones being Rachel Aaron’s Heartstriker books, and Seanan McGuire’s InCryptid series. These books took the things that I loved about urban fantasy (swift pacing, supernatural elements, engaging character voice, and mystery and romantic subplots), but didn’t just recycle what had been done before. Instead, each author made sure to add in their own unique spice. This is something that Mishell Baker’s Borderline, the first book in The Arcadia Project, does wonderfully.

  The heroine of Borderline is a welcome addition to urban fantasy. In a genre dominated by able-bodied protagonists, Millie stands out as a double amputee struggling with Borderline Personality Disorder. The level of detail provided on both of these aspects of Millie’s life is quite impressive. Baker has clearly done her homework here, and is skillful enough of a writer to deliver this information in a manner which never feels text book-y, or overly pitying. I also found the fact that Millie is such a flawed character to be quite refreshing. In a genre where most leads (the female ones especially), must achieve an acceptable status of “likableness,” Millie is a character who frequently makes some poor choices and must suffer the consequences. Under a lesser writer, this might leave the reader feeling frustrated and dissatisfied, but Baker does such a great job of getting inside of Millie’s head and explaining her mindset, so this never was a problem for me.

  Interestingly, the majority of Borderline‘s side characters also suffer from some sort of mental illness or trauma (there is a plot reason for this, and it does not feel contrived at all). This adds an interesting layer of tension between the characters. At first, I found myself feeling frustrated at the secondary characters. From the start, they are pretty unpleasant to Millie, and are completely insensitive to her physical handicap, which seemed pretty dickish to me. But the more I got to know these characters, and understand what made them tick, the more they grew on me.

  Beyond characterization, Borderline also succeeds in the worldbuilding department. Yes, we’re once again dealing with faerie courts, but it’s the relationship the fay share with humanity that’s the most interesting. The concept of an “echo” is a unique, twist on soulmates that I hope to see further explored in future books. I also really enjoyed the Hollywood setting, and the role that the fay came to play in our world of movie making. Borderline also contains some satisfying mystery elements. Whether it’s in handling the missing person case, or raising questions about the shadowy Arcadia Project, Borderline does a great job of keeping the readers guessing and wondering what’s going to happen next.

  In Conclusion: Borderline is a strong start to a new series that has so many of the things I love about the urban fantasy genre, but isn’t afraid to shake things up a bit. I love the way that Millie’s physical disability and mental illness was explored, and the fact that she was such a flawed protagonist. I enjoyed the greater cast of characters, the worldbuilding, and mystery-filled plotline. I flew through this 400-page book, and I can’t wait to see where Baker takes Millie and company next. The follow up, Phantom Pains, just came out this week, and I will be picking it up at some point. Having not read all of the Nebula nominees for best novel, I can’t honestly say if it deserves to be recognized above them all, but there’s no denying that I really enjoyed reading it, and will definitely be back for more.

• litstack
  http://litstack.com/litstack-review-phantom-pains-by-mishell-baker/
  Word count: 823

  LitStack Review: Phantom Pains by Mishell Baker
  Sharon Browning 18 April, 2017 Fantasy, Magical Realism, Urban Fantasy

  Phantom Pains
  The Arcadia Project, Book 2
  Mishell Baker
  Saga Press
  Release Date: March 21, 2017
  ISBN 978-1-4814-8017-8

  Millie Roper, the central character in Mishell Baker’s Arcadia Project urban fantasy series, is a very intriguing hero, not because of her virtues, but because she perseveres despite her challenges. In the initial book in the series, Borderline, we are introduced to this young woman with a borderline personality disorder and two prosthetic legs (due to a botched suicide attempt). Millie outwardly faces struggles with cynicism and snarkiness while inwardly showing the reader a tenacious front against vulnerability, doing so without being cloying, without lecturing, and without falling into a media-induced disability stereotype.

  We get handed a heckuva lot more, as well, such as the existence of the Arcadia Project, a secret diplomatic organization that oversees relations and polices traffic between our world and the world of the fey, which exists in a kind of parallel reality, complete with sidhe – Seelie and Unseelie factions – and magic galore, some benign and some far more nefarious. Yup, I said faeries and magic. It’s a very rich and complex relationship.

  So rich and complex that this is one of those book series where I don’t feel you can pick up the second book without reading the first one. Not only will reading Borderline allow you to become familiar with Millie and her associative characters, but it will keep you from getting lost in the references that set up much of the action in Phantom Pains. And you’ll want to know what’s going on, because Phantom Pains is an entertaining, and I daresay unique, take on “our” relationship to the land and culture of faeries, as well as their kith and their kin.

  Author Mishell Baker paints this relationship as dreadfully messy – which is a very good thing. Our lives are messy, with our social norms, our inner turmoils and outer banalities; faerie life is even more so, with its centuries old resentments, one-upmanships, class stratifications, and all sorts of petty and bombastic expectations.

  Too often fantasy fare that incorporates both worlds tries to posit the faerie realm as full of gossamer and dewdrops and woodland frivolity, or else as primordial and aloof and terrifying. Ms. Baker manages to make both worlds – ours and the fantasy kingdom – feel astonishingly believable, by giving us characters that are less than perfect and yet not tragic tropes, characters that we can understand, even if we strain to realize what put them on the paths they travel, and stretch to realize how they fit together, despite the odds. It’s a hard thing to articulate, but a wonderful thing to behold.

  Set against the backdrop of Hollywood and the entertainment industry, we also get an interesting play of what is real against what is presented as real, and how even the best of intentions won’t always win the day. One of the most intriguing examples of this is Millie herself, who, due to the steel used to reconstruct her broken body after her suicide attempt, is, on one hand, impervious to spellwork, but also cannot be in physical contact with those from the faerie world without exposing them and causing them pain – something that definitely puts a damper on her relationship with Claybriar, the LAPD detective/faun who is her “Echo” (a preordained pairing between a human and a fey creature that brings out the best in both).

  In Phantom Pains, we learn that the death of the scheming Unseelie countess Vivian at the end of Borderline does not mean that her supposedly diabolical plan to destroy the magical portals between the worlds has been thwarted, merely delayed. And when an officer from the Project’s national headquarters is gruesomely murdered in a way that points a finger at Caryl Vallo, Millie’s former boss and friend, Arcadia leadership can only see their way to evoking a draconian justice rather than focusing on why the crime was set up to occur in the first place, giving the agents of the countess’s plot time to regroup. Add to this Millie’s uncovering of information regarding the very basis of spellwork itself that could upset the entire balance of power on the other side of the rift, and you have an intriguing story with lots of moving parts that keeps the action hopping, both in movement and emotional entanglement.

  And that doesn’t even take into account monsters of legend traipsing through Los Angeles in the guise of the mundane. Like a dog. A very large dog.

  Surprising, honest, energetic, candid, entertaining. And faeries. And doomsday. What’s not to love?

  ~ Sharon Browning

• SF Signal
  https://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2016/03/mishell-bakers-borderline-pure-perfection/
  Word count: 560

  Mishell Baker’s BORDERLINE is Pure Perfection

  Posted on March 30, 2016 by Shana DuBois in Book Review // 0 Comments

  MY RATING:

  BRIEF SYNOPSIS: Millie Roper lost her legs after a failed suicide attempt. Resigned to a life of routine and beige walls in the Leishman Psychiatric Center, she is shocked when offered a second chance and a job working with the enigmatic Arcadia Project.

  MY REVIEW:
  PROS: Snappy dialogue; engaging cast of characters; perfectly-paced plot.
  CONS: The next book featuring Millicent Roper isn’t out until 2017.
  BOTTOM LINE: A smart, witty, and engrossing book that made me laugh-out-loud and hold my breath as I fell under its spell.

  This book. Seriously. This book is packed full of so much awesome.

  I sat down with Borderline thinking I’d read a few chapters and then make dinner. Three hours later I was nearly to the end, my hunger forgotten. I simply couldn’t put it down. Mishell Baker has written a pitch-perfect urban fantasy.

  Millie is a film student, a successful director of a few indie films, and she happens to have borderline personality disorder. After Millie’s failed suicide attempt results in the loss of both her legs, she ends up checking herself into the Leishman Psychiatric Center for rehabilitation and to help build new coping strategies.

  One day, Millie is approached by Caryl with the Arcadia Project and offered a job, a second chance at a life beyond the walls of the Center. Millie would join Caryl’s team, on a probationary status, to help monitor the border between our world and a magical fey dimension called Arcadia. The other agents on Caryl’s team all have equally troubled pasts and are working to find balance in their lives.

  Within the first chapter I knew Millie was someone amazing, intelligent and snarky — a real character with depth. My absolute favorite thing about Millie is her dialogue, both with herself and others. Baker is on par with Elmore Leonard when it comes to mastery in the art of dialogue. I laughed out loud in so many places and found myself thinking, “Yep, that is exactly what someone would say!” I learned more about the characters from their reactions to one another, their body language, their exclamations and simple conversations, than I ever would have from paragraphs of exposition.

  Another way this book soars is with the pacing. Some books feel rushed or become a bit snagged and move too slowly. Not Borderline. Like I said above, I didn’t look at the clock once in three hours. The book was polished to a high shine and it shows on every single page.

  I wish I could take this book door-to-door to place in every reader’s hands, if only because of the characters. Baker gives us a cast of characters that actually reflect real people. Millie and the agents, Teo, Gloria, Tjuan and the others, create the foundation holding Baker’s magical elements together. I cried with them, I felt their anger and pain, I connected with them deeply and saw parts of myself in each of them. That is one of Baker’s magical talents and Borderline is her gift to all of us.

• SF bluestocking
  https://sfbluestocking.com/2017/03/29/book-review-borderline-by-mishell-baker/
  Word count: 812

  Book Review: Borderline by Mishell Baker
  March 29, 2017 SF Bluestocking Leave a comment

  25692886I’m not a great reader of urban fantasy and I’ve been (sort of and unsuccessfully) avoiding new series, so I’d skipped Mishell Baker’s Borderline when it came out last year. I cannot tell you how glad I am that I finally read it. It’s a solid story that ticks off a lot of run-of-the-mill urban fantasy boxes while still being clever and original enough to be interesting. Baker takes a smartly naturalistic approach to describing the setting—I’m not a fan of L.A.-set stories in general, but she does a wonderful job of conveying a sort of warts-and-all love for the city without either romanticizing it or dwelling on ugliness. And Millie Roper is a fucking iconic protagonist with a strong and uniquely relatable (for me) narrative voice.

  While I don’t read a ton of urban fantasy, I like it better when the fantastical element is fairies, as opposed to vampires or werewolves, and I especially like the way Baker imagines fairies in this series. The Arcadia Project is a more-or-less government-overseen system that manages the interactions between Earth and Arcadia, which is otherwise a largely straightforward fairyland filled with the usual fairy creatures, high and low fae, and copious magic. It turns out that humanity relies on magic—specifically the inspiration of fairy “Echoes” (think personal muses for artists and thinkers of all kinds)—for most great human endeavors, artistic and otherwise, and the Arcadia Project acts as a sort of ICE for fairies traveling to and from Arcadia. To help maintain the secrecy of the Project, its administrators recruit agents primarily from psychiatric hospitals, with the idea that those who see the world differently may be more open to and accepting of the work, but also with the knowledge that those who are marginalized due to documented mental illness are unlikely to be believed if they do tell others about the Project. Millie, who has borderline personality disorder and is still recovering from a suicide attempt that left her a double amputee, is a perfect candidate for the job.

  Millie also has a background in film—she was going to film school at UCLA prior to her suicide attempt—and the film industry features largely in Borderline. Many of the secondary and tertiary characters are in some way involved in the industry, and much of the action takes place in a movie studio. It’s a very specific part of Los Angeles that I’ve seldom read about, mostly because I don’t find it particularly interesting, but Mishell Baker shows real skill in making the L.A. of the Arcadia Project feel real and lived-in. There’s a great sense of place and plenty of specific-feeling details so that even the places that are obviously invented for the book fit right in to the broader aesthetic. I wouldn’t quite say that it rises to the point of the city itself being a character, which is common in urban fantasy, but it’s a vividly immersive setting nonetheless.

  It’s Millie herself, however, who truly elevates the book and makes it one of the best and most interesting urban fantasies I’ve read in years. While I’m not sure how much of my own struggles with mental illness (mostly depression and anxiety) overlap with Millie’s, there’s so much about her experience that feels familiar, and I expect that this will resonate deeply with many people who have had similar issues. Many, many people have written and talked about the value of representation in fiction, and all of that is fully applicable here. Millie will be a highly relatable protagonist for many, and for many more she’ll be a character that will, hopefully, help readers gain some new understanding of an experience that isn’t often depicted in genre fiction. Here, too, Mishell Baker takes a naturalistic approach, refusing to sugarcoat the reality of Millie’s mental and physical conditions, and both Millie’s borderline personality disorder and her double amputations have obvious impacts on her ability to function, and sometimes just exist, in the world. Millie’s troubled relationships and fraught interactions with nearly everyone she meets make for compelling drama and add another level of specificity to the story that sets it well apart from other work in a subgenre often plagued by over-reliance on tired tropes and cliché storytelling conventions.

  I may have been late to the party on this series, but Mishell Baker is an author to watch, and I can’t wait to find out what Millie gets up to next. Borderline is a superb first novel and a great start to a freshly compelling new series.

• SFF Book reviews
  https://sffbookreview.wordpress.com/2017/06/05/eternally-hopeful-mishell-baker-phantom-pains/
  Word count: 1185

  ternally hopeful: Mishell Baker – Phantom Pains
  5. June 2017

  It’s no secret that I usually steer away from Urban Fantasy. But that only means the type of Urban Fantasy with scantily clad women on the cover, usually looking over their shoulder, carrying some kind of weapon, and with the title written over their wrapped-in-leather butt. But Mishell Baker makes Urban Fantasy so much fun! Even with the most broken (literally) heroine you can imagine, The Arcadia Project series takes you on wild adventures and leaves you just hopeful of the future, whatever it may bring.

  PHANTOM PAINS
  by Mishell Baker

  Published by: Saga Press, 2017
  Ebook: 416 pages
  Series: The Arcadia Project #2
  My rating: 8,5/10

  First sentence: Here’s the thing about PTSD: it doesn’t understand the rules.

  Four months ago, Millie left the Arcadia Project after losing her partner Teo to the lethal magic of an Unseelie fey countess. Now, in a final visit to the scene of the crime, Millie and her former boss Caryl encounter Teo’s tormented ghost. But there’s one problem: according to Caryl, ghosts don’t exist.

  Millie has a new life, a stressful job, and no time to get pulled back into the Project, but she agrees to tell her side of the ghost story to the agents from the Project’s National Headquarters. During her visit though, tragedy strikes when one of the agents is gruesomely murdered in a way only Caryl could have achieved. Millie knows Caryl is innocent, but the only way to save her from the Project’s severe, off-the-books justice is to find the mysterious culprits that can only be seen when they want to be seen. Millie must solve the mystery not only to save Caryl, but also to foil an insidious, arcane terrorist plot that would leave two worlds in ruins.

  Millie Roper has a job, regular therapy sessions, and her life mostly under control. After her adventures with the Arcadia Project, a bit of routine seems like just the thing to make her forget what she’s seen, and who she’s lost. But – as stories go – she is dragged back into Arcadia business soon enough where she has to fix a whole new mess. And of course she wouldn’t be Millie if she didn’t add an extra layer of messiness to an already difficult situation. But that’s exactly what makes these books so much fun.

  Phantom Pains picks up only a few months after the end of Borderline and while Millie is still struggling with her old demons and disablities (prosthetic legs, BPD, plus the newly-added PTSD), she is still the Millie I fell in love with. The hopeful one who knows herself all too well and doubts her every emotion, but believes in herself when it counts. She combines intelligence, humor, and pragmatism in the most sympathetic way and I hope I’ll get to read many more books featuring her. If more Urban Fantasy progatonists were like Millie, I’d actually read the damn things.

  But Millie’s life has changed in another major way since we last saw her. She knows and is in contact with her Echo, Claybriar, and as much as I love their relationship, it is super complicated! If, after her suicide attempt, Millie hadn’t been put together with metal screws and plates, she wouldn’t be Ironbones – basically poison to the fey but also WHAT A COOL NAME. Touching Claybriar, which she desperately wants to do, hurts him and also makes his facade disappear, showing him for the faun he really is. To say that their relationship is interesting is a huge understatement. Add to that the fact that they both sleep with other people (non-romantically), plus Millie’s complex relationship with Caryl, and you’ve got the makings of a thrilling story, even without the added crazy magic.

  This book advances a lot more than just Millie as a character, though. The entire world of the Arcadia Project opens up, introducing us to the head of the Project herself, as well as some very high up people from Arcadia. I had a blast getting to know these new characters and learning more about the world Baker has created. It’s always appreciated when it’s not just vampires and werewolves but anything else. And if that anything is internally consistent and has some sort of magic-logic to it, all the better. There are also some huge revelations to do with this particular magic that turn the entire world upside down but which I can’t go into detail because spoilers. But let me tell you, I had a really stupid look on my face when I read that chapter, and I felt about as confused and lost as Millie did.

  One thing about side characters: I absolutely loved loved loved Brand! If this book went my way, there would have been an additional 50 chapters, all involving Brand, preferably in combination with Tjuan. He added a weird but delightful sense of humor to the horrible things that were going on. You know, fate of the world at stake and all that, but at least I can laugh about and with Brand. Tjuan was already there in the first book but I really liked how we finally learn a bit more about him and how his character gets more depth. The same goes for Claybriar and Caryl. I don’t want to spoil anything here but even characters that don’t show up a lot feel like real people.

  The diversity in this series is amazing! There’s Millie to start with, but everyone working for the Arcadia Project usually has some sort of disability or disorder. In addition, there is an Indian woman and a trans man, and (because I know someone is going to say it) it’s not ticking off diversity points from a list. It feels organic and normal and wonderful simply because the characters are all different, and all in different ways. Whether it’s a schizophrenic POC, or an Indian straight woman, or a bisexual woman with Borderline Personality Disorder, these feel like real people to me and I want to get to know every single one of them better. Even the dicks.

  The plot was – just as I expected – always entertaining, never shying away from unexpected twists and turns, maybe even more action-packed than in the previous book without sacrificing character development. Pretty amazing, right? The ending was both great and terrifying, because I have no idea what’s going to happen in the next book, and (if you couldn’t tell already) I’ve come to really care about these characters. However, I am now in for the long haul, and hope that Mishell Baker gets the chance to write at least 10 more Arcadia books. Buy this book, people! You know you want to.

  MY RATING: 8,5/10 – Damn excellent!

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  Review: Phantom Pains by Mishell Baker (Arcadia Project #2)
  Posted by Beth on Apr 10, 2017 in Fantasy, Reviews | 0 comments
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  Phantom Pains by Mishell Baker // VBC ReviewPhantom Pains (Arcadia Project #2)
  Mishell Baker
  Published: March 21, 2017 (Saga Press)
  Purchase: Book Depository or Amazon
  Review Source: purchased

  Reviewed by: Beth

  Rating (out of 5): 5 stars

  Note: While this review will spoiler free, it may reference the previous book.

  Still trying to recover from the events of four months ago, Millie has left the Arcadia Project and found a job on the same television lot where those events occurred. As she tries to heal and move on, she inadvertently discovers the existence of a being that no one knew existed, and most would deny—even those in the Arcadia Project.

  However, those beings are still working on the plot that all assumed was over, and they are seen only when they want to be—after they’ve taken over a human body. To make matters worse, Caryl, Millie’s former boss at the Arcadia Project, has been framed for murder, a convenient way to remove her from her position. Millie needs to convince everyone around her that she’s not any crazier than she was before, while trying to save Caryl and both worlds from destruction. Just another day in the Arcadia Project.

  Phantom Pains picks up pretty much right away after Borderline, and the intensity picks up speed pretty quickly. Reading Borderline is not an absolute necessity to reading Phantom Pains, but it is highly recommended—there are a lot of references to the first book that will not make much sense otherwise. Millie is learning more about herself and her limits as a person with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), particularly as it relates to relationships and her work in and out of the Arcadia Project. She’s also in mourning, and dealing with that is a struggle compounded by her mental illness. Again, Baker has done an amazing job of creating a character that suffers from a mental illness, but refuses to be defined by it. Millie is a strong female character who chooses to define herself on her own terms, while realizing that those terms may be out of the norm because of her BPD. As far as the other characters go, they are written just as well as Millie, most of them strong enough that they could carry their own book. There isn’t a weak character in the bunch, a testament to the strength of their author.

  The setting continues to be current-day Los Angeles, and it’s written with the immediacy of one who is familiar with the city. There is also a trip to Arcadia, a place Millie has heard about but never gone before. A place where things are not always what they seem, and yet—in a weird way—even more of what they seem.

  It’s not often I pre-order a book, however Borderline was on my list of Top 5 favorites last year, so I bit the bullet and kept my fingers crossed that its sequel would be just as good. Thankfully, it was—and with an ending that I didn’t see coming. Things are about to get even stranger than they already are, and if the first two books are a good indicator, it’ll be a white-knuckle ride all the way.

  Sexual Content: None

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