strange and random happenstance

Heather Rose Jones is an interesting mix of modern and historical. Be it biotech or linguistics, she seems perfectly suited for whatever time period she lands in if a time machine were to show up on her doorstep and take her on a journey. Her early life was far flung, from the various corners of the continental United States to several European countries, though she currently calls the Bay Area home. Growing up in an academic family surly spurred her passions for research and teaching. She loves "to share my knowledge with anyone who will stand still long enough to listen." Though who knows how long that would be given her fascinating and diverse interests! Heather has a BS in zoology, after which she spent a decade in medical research, only to go back to school for a PhD in Linguistics from U.C. Berkley where she specialized in the semantics of Medieval Welsh prepositions. While she might have come to my attention due to her fiction writing, I'm amazed at the sheer scope and dedication to all her various interests.

Her "Skin Singer" series of short stories have appeared in Marion Zimmer Bradley's Sword and Sorceress anthologies, but you can surly guess by now that she wouldn't limit her prodigious talents and interests to just one writing outlet. Heather has written for many non-fiction publications as well on topics ranging from biotech to historic costume to naming practices. As for her Alpennia books, think of them as historical fantasy with a detailed belief system with lesbians. In fact her passion project is the Lesbian Historic Motif Project she began to change the unexamined assumptions about the place and nature of lesbian-like characters in historic fact, literature, art and imaginations. She is also a total geek for historic textiles and clothing, making little doll reproductions of archaeological clothing finds. Is it any wonder with these passions coupled with geeking out over linguistics, historic cooking, and much more that she is a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism? There she's known by a far more Welsh handle than Heather, she's Tangwystyl verch Morgant Glasvryn. I should just let Heather, or should I say Mistress Tangwystyl verch Morgant Glasvryn, take the wheel.

Question: When did you first discover Jane Austen?

Answer: I have a sheepish confession that I read her books well after I’d fallen in love with a number of movie treatments and with the Regency romance genre in general. I was certainly aware that she was the ur-text on which the genre was based. And it isn’t as if I had any aversion to reading novels of the era. (I read Thackeray’s Vanity Fair just for fun back in 1975, after all.) I’m still working on getting a complete collection of the works of Georgette Heyer.

But at some point about 15 years ago I realized I’d never actually read Austen herself, so I marched off to the bookstore and picked up a complete set and read them all straight through. I certainly have my favorites and my less preferred works. (I seem to be alone among my friends in liking Emma, but every time I re-read Mansfield Park, I want to throw it across the room.) I also have audio versions of my favorites in heavy rotation on my anti-insomnia program. (My favorites are the free recordings at Librivox.org, and my favorite narrator is Karen Savage.)

Question: What do you think Jane Austen would think of her impact with so many literary offshoots, from parody to pastiche?

Answer: I tend to be wary of trying to second-guess authors’ attitudes. Even the authors I know personally can surprise me in their take on questions like this. Given the circumstances of her life, I can guess that one of her reactions might be, “Gee, I wish I could have gotten a cut of the take!” I suspect she might be astonished that her work is remembered at all two centuries later. But I refuse to guess at what she might think of all the people re-purposing her stories in the vastly different ways we’ve seen. People have very individual and emotional reactions to that sort of thing, and all of them are valid.

Question: Where do you get your inspiration from?

Answer: My stories are, at heart, the stories I wish other people had written so that I’d have been able to read them at important points in my life. So I’m inspired by the echoing gaps in my literary life that are begging to be filled. I’ve spent most of my life searching through bookstore and library shelves for books that recognize and respect core aspects of my identity: being a woman, being a geek, being a lesbian, being an intellectual. One gets very tired of being told implicitly that one doesn’t exist, or at least, that one isn’t worthy of being included in stories.

On a more practical basis, I’m inspired by the life-long love of European history that began when I spent a year in Prague at the age of ten. (My father was a university professor on sabbatical.) I love immersing myself in the everyday material culture of places, times, and peoples different from my own.

Question: What makes the early 19th century mesh so well with magic?

Answer: Is is heresy for me to say that I don’t think there’s anything special about the early 19th century that makes it suited to magic? Every age, every culture, and every literary genre inspires particular flavors and approaches to magic. I think that the existing popularity of the Regency setting (and of the Regency romance genre in general) made it inevitable that fantasy writers who loved that setting would look for types of magic that fit into it well.

I think some of the key characteristics of Regency magic have to do with the eras and movements it balances between. The Industrial Revolution creates some major challenges for designing a magical world. Do you view it as a threat to pre-industrial magic or as a context for a new industrial-based magic? The social and political shifts in Europe from the remnants of old-style monarchy to more populist governments similarly present a challenge to motifs of magic as an echo of aristocracy or as the basis for a “everyman makes good” plot. To the extent that magic is viewed as anti-rational, any 19th century understanding of magic needs to be in dialog with the 18th century Age of Enlightenment and its consequences for philosophy and religion.

Questions of this sort exist for any historic setting. A Renaissance magic setting will similarly be driven by and need to deal with the social and technological changes in which it operates. The entire genre of Urban Fantasy asks the question of what magic can look like in our current world. So to return to my original answer, I don’t think magic necessarily meshes better with a Regency setting in comparison to other eras. But the setting will certainly generate a particular flavor of magic unique to that era.

Question: The world building and system of magic varies greatly in the regency fantasy genre, how did you go about creating yours?

Answer: I had the setting before I decided/realized it was going to include magic. (The very first ideas for the Alpennia books were much more along the lines of an ordinary historical romantic adventure.) I wanted a form of magic in which it would make sense that the existence of magic hadn’t created massive divergences from our own timeline and historic development. So I looked to existing mystical themes in history and asked, “What if, sometimes, for some people, this actually worked the way that people at the time believed it worked?”

In Daughter of Mystery, the main magical focus is religious in nature. I started with the proposition: what if aspects of folk religion, and especially the folk-religious aspects of the cults of the saints in Catholicism, were a bit more...functional than they are in our world? What if some people could work “miracles” fairly reliably? But what if the nature of those miracles was such that it was impossible to turn them into a science? It was also important to me to treat the religious basis of the magic in a respectful way. As an atheist, it meant the world to me when various of my Catholic friends told me I’d “gotten it right.”

In the world of Alpennia, people have varying levels of ability of magical causation. Some have none; some have so little that you’d need a lot of people working in concert to make anything happen; and very rarely some people have enough ability to produce “miracles” on their own. But alongside this, I imagined that the ability to detect miracles was similarly distributed. Some people can’t see anything unless it has a direct visible manifestation--and most often that could be explained away as chance or coincidence. Some people can perceive the workings of magic itself in sensory form: visions of the forces at work, auditory or tactile sensations. Very rarely, someone has both the ability to work magic and to see the mechanisms by which it works well enough to develop their talents into a reliable practice. If they have the proper guidance. And if society thinks it’s appropriate for them to do so. And if the results of their efforts don’t cause them fatal problems.

Channeling the understanding and practice of magic through religious ritual both created a context for passing along “effective” practices, but also for diluting them into mere rote ceremony. So I had my context in which there was the possibility of a particular individual having and developing significant magical skills, but where that possibility didn’t translate into the development of a “technology of magic”.

In later books, we see that religion isn’t the only context in which the magic in my world manifests. The Mystic Marriage centers around alchemy--a field that my characters treat as if it were purely scientific, but where it’s clear to the readers that the same mystical forces that lie behind miracles are driving the results of alchemical experiments. In my current work in progress, Mother of Souls, we see mystical forces being channeled through other practices such as music and art. But in all cases, the effects can range from barely perceptible to world-shaking, depending on the practitioners and the practice.

Question: If you had to choose between writing only period literature or only fantasy literature, which would win?

Answer: I’ve always refused to accept false dichotomies. I’ve spent most of my writing life feeling like I had to choose between writing characters like me and writing characters that I could sell stories about. Or between writing the stories I wanted to read and writing the stories other people wanted to read. When I had the finished manuscript of Daughter of Mystery in hand, I had to make the very important choice of whether to try to publish it as a mainstream fantasy novel or as a lesbian novel. I refuse to be boxed. I’ve sold purely historic stories (“Where My Heart Goes”, a historical romance short story set in 16th century Italy). I’ve sold purely fantasy stories (the “Skinsinger” series in the Sword and Sorceress anthology series). And I’ve sold historic fantasy set in both the Regency and medieval periods. I will not erase any part of my writing self, not even just for fun in a quiz.

Question: Be honest, have you ever dressed up in Regency clothes just to pretend for a moment you are in the past?

Answer: I’ve been deeply involved in historic re-creation for the last 40 years. In terms of organized events, it’s been mostly in the Society for Creative Anachronism, but I’ve worn costumes from Bronze Age Denmark and pharaonic Egypt all the way up through the 1930s. I love participating in historic themed “set pieces”, especially dinners and similarly structured events. I’ve prepared historic meals scattered over several millennia. (You should see my historic culinary library!) At Worldcon last year, I brought some Alpennian pastries as refreshments for my author’s kaffee klatch, based on a French cookbook of the same era. But I confess, I haven’t yet made a specifically Regency-era outfit. I have the fabric sitting in my stash and I know exactly which dress from my books I want to make. It’s just a matter of time and of having the excuse of what to wear it for.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Daughter of Mystery, Heather Rose Jones, Jane Austen, Lesbian Historic Motif Project, Linguistics, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Mystic Marriage, Prague, Regency Magic, SCA, Sword and Sorceress, Vanity Fair, Welsh

Heather Rose Jones is an interesting mix of modern and historical. Be it biotech or linguistics, she seems perfectly suited for whatever time period she lands in if a time machine were to show up on her doorstep and take her on a journey. Her early life was far flung, from the various corners of the continental United States to several European countries, though she currently calls the Bay Area home. Growing up in an academic family surly spurred her passions for research and teaching. She loves "to share my knowledge with anyone who will stand still long enough to listen." Though who knows how long that would be given her fascinating and diverse interests! Heather has a BS in zoology, after which she spent a decade in medical research, only to go back to school for a PhD in Linguistics from U.C. Berkley where she specialized in the semantics of Medieval Welsh prepositions. While she might have come to my attention due to her fiction writing, I'm amazed at the sheer scope and dedication to all her various interests.

Her "Skin Singer" series of short stories have appeared in Marion Zimmer Bradley's Sword and Sorceress anthologies, but you can surly guess by now that she wouldn't limit her prodigious talents and interests to just one writing outlet. Heather has written for many non-fiction publications as well on topics ranging from biotech to historic costume to naming practices. As for her Alpennia books, think of them as historical fantasy with a detailed belief system with lesbians. In fact her passion project is the Lesbian Historic Motif Project she began to change the unexamined assumptions about the place and nature of lesbian-like characters in historic fact, literature, art and imaginations. She is also a total geek for historic textiles and clothing, making little doll reproductions of archaeological clothing finds. Is it any wonder with these passions coupled with geeking out over linguistics, historic cooking, and much more that she is a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism? There she's known by a far more Welsh handle than Heather, she's Tangwystyl verch Morgant Glasvryn. I should just let Heather, or should I say Mistress Tangwystyl verch Morgant Glasvryn, take the wheel.

Question: When did you first discover Jane Austen?

Answer: I have a sheepish confession that I read her books well after I’d fallen in love with a number of movie treatments and with the Regency romance genre in general. I was certainly aware that she was the ur-text on which the genre was based. And it isn’t as if I had any aversion to reading novels of the era. (I read Thackeray’s Vanity Fair just for fun back in 1975, after all.) I’m still working on getting a complete collection of the works of Georgette Heyer.

But at some point about 15 years ago I realized I’d never actually read Austen herself, so I marched off to the bookstore and picked up a complete set and read them all straight through. I certainly have my favorites and my less preferred works. (I seem to be alone among my friends in liking Emma, but every time I re-read Mansfield Park, I want to throw it across the room.) I also have audio versions of my favorites in heavy rotation on my anti-insomnia program. (My favorites are the free recordings at Librivox.org, and my favorite narrator is Karen Savage.)

Question: What do you think Jane Austen would think of her impact with so many literary offshoots, from parody to pastiche?

Answer: I tend to be wary of trying to second-guess authors’ attitudes. Even the authors I know personally can surprise me in their take on questions like this. Given the circumstances of her life, I can guess that one of her reactions might be, “Gee, I wish I could have gotten a cut of the take!” I suspect she might be astonished that her work is remembered at all two centuries later. But I refuse to guess at what she might think of all the people re-purposing her stories in the vastly different ways we’ve seen. People have very individual and emotional reactions to that sort of thing, and all of them are valid.

Question: Where do you get your inspiration from?

Answer: My stories are, at heart, the stories I wish other people had written so that I’d have been able to read them at important points in my life. So I’m inspired by the echoing gaps in my literary life that are begging to be filled. I’ve spent most of my life searching through bookstore and library shelves for books that recognize and respect core aspects of my identity: being a woman, being a geek, being a lesbian, being an intellectual. One gets very tired of being told implicitly that one doesn’t exist, or at least, that one isn’t worthy of being included in stories.

On a more practical basis, I’m inspired by the life-long love of European history that began when I spent a year in Prague at the age of ten. (My father was a university professor on sabbatical.) I love immersing myself in the everyday material culture of places, times, and peoples different from my own.

Question: What makes the early 19th century mesh so well with magic?

Answer: Is is heresy for me to say that I don’t think there’s anything special about the early 19th century that makes it suited to magic? Every age, every culture, and every literary genre inspires particular flavors and approaches to magic. I think that the existing popularity of the Regency setting (and of the Regency romance genre in general) made it inevitable that fantasy writers who loved that setting would look for types of magic that fit into it well.

I think some of the key characteristics of Regency magic have to do with the eras and movements it balances between. The Industrial Revolution creates some major challenges for designing a magical world. Do you view it as a threat to pre-industrial magic or as a context for a new industrial-based magic? The social and political shifts in Europe from the remnants of old-style monarchy to more populist governments similarly present a challenge to motifs of magic as an echo of aristocracy or as the basis for a “everyman makes good” plot. To the extent that magic is viewed as anti-rational, any 19th century understanding of magic needs to be in dialog with the 18th century Age of Enlightenment and its consequences for philosophy and religion.

Questions of this sort exist for any historic setting. A Renaissance magic setting will similarly be driven by and need to deal with the social and technological changes in which it operates. The entire genre of Urban Fantasy asks the question of what magic can look like in our current world. So to return to my original answer, I don’t think magic necessarily meshes better with a Regency setting in comparison to other eras. But the setting will certainly generate a particular flavor of magic unique to that era.

Question: The world building and system of magic varies greatly in the regency fantasy genre, how did you go about creating yours?

Answer: I had the setting before I decided/realized it was going to include magic. (The very first ideas for the Alpennia books were much more along the lines of an ordinary historical romantic adventure.) I wanted a form of magic in which it would make sense that the existence of magic hadn’t created massive divergences from our own timeline and historic development. So I looked to existing mystical themes in history and asked, “What if, sometimes, for some people, this actually worked the way that people at the time believed it worked?”

In Daughter of Mystery, the main magical focus is religious in nature. I started with the proposition: what if aspects of folk religion, and especially the folk-religious aspects of the cults of the saints in Catholicism, were a bit more...functional than they are in our world? What if some people could work “miracles” fairly reliably? But what if the nature of those miracles was such that it was impossible to turn them into a science? It was also important to me to treat the religious basis of the magic in a respectful way. As an atheist, it meant the world to me when various of my Catholic friends told me I’d “gotten it right.”

In the world of Alpennia, people have varying levels of ability of magical causation. Some have none; some have so little that you’d need a lot of people working in concert to make anything happen; and very rarely some people have enough ability to produce “miracles” on their own. But alongside this, I imagined that the ability to detect miracles was similarly distributed. Some people can’t see anything unless it has a direct visible manifestation--and most often that could be explained away as chance or coincidence. Some people can perceive the workings of magic itself in sensory form: visions of the forces at work, auditory or tactile sensations. Very rarely, someone has both the ability to work magic and to see the mechanisms by which it works well enough to develop their talents into a reliable practice. If they have the proper guidance. And if society thinks it’s appropriate for them to do so. And if the results of their efforts don’t cause them fatal problems.

Channeling the understanding and practice of magic through religious ritual both created a context for passing along “effective” practices, but also for diluting them into mere rote ceremony. So I had my context in which there was the possibility of a particular individual having and developing significant magical skills, but where that possibility didn’t translate into the development of a “technology of magic”.

In later books, we see that religion isn’t the only context in which the magic in my world manifests. The Mystic Marriage centers around alchemy--a field that my characters treat as if it were purely scientific, but where it’s clear to the readers that the same mystical forces that lie behind miracles are driving the results of alchemical experiments. In my current work in progress, Mother of Souls, we see mystical forces being channeled through other practices such as music and art. But in all cases, the effects can range from barely perceptible to world-shaking, depending on the practitioners and the practice.

Question: If you had to choose between writing only period literature or only fantasy literature, which would win?

Answer: I’ve always refused to accept false dichotomies. I’ve spent most of my writing life feeling like I had to choose between writing characters like me and writing characters that I could sell stories about. Or between writing the stories I wanted to read and writing the stories other people wanted to read. When I had the finished manuscript of Daughter of Mystery in hand, I had to make the very important choice of whether to try to publish it as a mainstream fantasy novel or as a lesbian novel. I refuse to be boxed. I’ve sold purely historic stories (“Where My Heart Goes”, a historical romance short story set in 16th century Italy). I’ve sold purely fantasy stories (the “Skinsinger” series in the Sword and Sorceress anthology series). And I’ve sold historic fantasy set in both the Regency and medieval periods. I will not erase any part of my writing self, not even just for fun in a quiz.

Question: Be honest, have you ever dressed up in Regency clothes just to pretend for a moment you are in the past?

Answer: I’ve been deeply involved in historic re-creation for the last 40 years. In terms of organized events, it’s been mostly in the Society for Creative Anachronism, but I’ve worn costumes from Bronze Age Denmark and pharaonic Egypt all the way up through the 1930s. I love participating in historic themed “set pieces”, especially dinners and similarly structured events. I’ve prepared historic meals scattered over several millennia. (You should see my historic culinary library!) At Worldcon last year, I brought some Alpennian pastries as refreshments for my author’s kaffee klatch, based on a French cookbook of the same era. But I confess, I haven’t yet made a specifically Regency-era outfit. I have the fabric sitting in my stash and I know exactly which dress from my books I want to make. It’s just a matter of time and of having the excuse of what to wear it for.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 2 comments  

Labels: Daughter of Mystery, Heather Rose Jones, Jane Austen, Lesbian Historic Motif Project, Linguistics, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Mystic Marriage, Prague, Regency Magic, SCA, Sword and Sorceress, Vanity Fair, Welsh

Days of Blood and Starlight (Daughter of Smoke and Bone Book 2) by Laini Taylor
Published by: William Morrow
Publication Date: November 6th, 2012
Format: Hardcover, 528 Pages
Rating: ★★★★★
To Buy

"Once upon a time, an angel and a devil fell in love and dared to imagine a world free of bloodshed and war. This is not that world."

Karou's homeland has been destroyed. The man she loved in another life, in another body, destroyed it because of her death. Akiva never thought, never even dared to hope that he would one day be with her again. His destruction of her people has sealed his fate and his chance at happiness. A happiness he never expected is lost yet again to him by his own hands. The monsters have all been destroyed by the Seraphim. There are only a few holdouts of Chimera hidden here and there in Eretz, and the Seraphim are flushing them out.

Yet there is hope... Karou. Her name literally means hope. Little did she realize that in spending two lives in the company of Brimstone she has been able to learn the art of resurrection, the secret to the Chimera's ability to thwart the enemy. Of course helping the Chimera means she must ally herself with the man who was her intended, Thiago. Oh, and he is the one who happened to have her executed the first time around. Going by the theory the enemy of my enemy is my friend, she agrees to be Thiago's resurrectionist, in the hope that this will save her people by creating a rebel band of Chimera.

But will a band of rebels be able to thwart the might of the empire? Or is it in Akiva and Karou's old dream of creating a new world that a future for Eretz might be found? Either way, the Seraphim and the Chimera must come together, must be willing to see past the war that has consumed their lives, or in the case of the Chimera, multiple lives, and look to what comes next.

For some time now I have had several friends who where verging on the insistence level of drug pushers to read Daughter of Smoke and Bone. I mean, every single time I talked to or emailed them, it would end with, "by the way... have you read it yet?" The day the second book came out the amount of texts I got might have been able to crash my data plan. Needless to say, as soon as I had the time I agreed I would finally read it. After the harsh semester of school I had I spent quite literally all of December sick and under a blanket somewhere. Now the "best" part about being sick is that you are literally incapable of doing anything other than lounging... which means reading! Ah December... I might not have been able to speak without hacking up a lung, but you passed in a haze of crisp fonts and snowy white pages. I devoured Daughter of Smoke and Bone quite quickly. I was intrigued by the world. There where things I loved, and there where things I raised my eyebrows at, angels, really? But I was sold enough to need to pick up the next volume immediately... or in this case, send someone forth to get me said volume because you aren't allowed to drive a car when on a codeine based cough syrup.

What the first book hadn't prepared me for was the awesomeness of the second book. By reading blurbs and snatches of reviews the second book seemed to veer very much into the war of otherworldy creatures category with Karou playing Frankenstein... which seemed, well, I'll say it, I thought it would be lame. I thought taking Karou out of this wonderful little world she lived in in Prague with her lovely diminutive if occasionally violent friend Zuzana was a mistake. No more sketchbooks and art school and evil exes. It was rewriting everything the first book was and giving us a map of another world. Side note, I usually love books with maps of other worlds, I just wasn't expecting this series to go that way. I think that's why I loved Days of Blood and Starlight, it went where I didn't think it would go and brought me along for an amazing ride, thankfully I didn't have to be in a beat up truck in Morocco for real.

Yet it is the believability of the world building that has made the narrative work. Laini has created a beautiful and brutal world, but it has humor in it. The surest way to get complicity is to make someone laugh. Zuzana was my entry into this world of monsters. She was so funny and her connection to Karou made a character who might not be completely relatable, I mean Karou is a monster resurrected into the body of a blue haired teenager with amazing drawing skills, real and likable. Their quippy emails and how Monty Python is used to bring levity yet also hint at the truths behind the words made me love this book all the more. Add in magic, a trio of mismatched angels, a mysterious island and some very wicked Guerilla tactics,  and I am not only beyond excited for the next installment, I want it now!

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 2 comments  

Labels: Akiva, Chimera, Daughter of Smoke and Bone, Days of Blood and Starlight, Eretz, Frankenstein, Karou, Laini Taylor, Monty Python, Prague, Seraphim, Summer Series, Zuzana

Daughter of Smoke and Bone (Daughter of Smoke and Bone Book 1) by Laini Taylor
Published by: Little Brown
Publication Date: September 27th, 2011
Format: Hardcover, 432 Pages
Rating: ★★★
To Buy

"Once upon a time, an angel and a devil fell in love. It did not end well."

Karou might be just as she seems, a gifted art student in Prague. Yet the fantastical beasts that she fills her sketchbooks with aren't a figment of her imagination. They are her family. And like most family, they sometimes have favors to ask of her that take her away from the normal life she is trying to live. A life that is about to end. All over the world black hand prints are appearing on doors, burned into the wood by winged strangers. One day it is the door Karou takes to visit her family. She is cut off from them, she doesn't know if they are alive or dead. What will she do if she is cut off from all that she knows?

Yet what of the winged strangers? One of them, Akiva, sees Karou and cannot believe his eyes. She looks just like his lost love. But she is dead and gone. Their love was forbidden. Two star crossed lovers on different sides of an otherworldly war. There can not be a connection between the two women. Yet Akiva's heart is telling him differently. Could Karou be his lost love? Could she love him again in this new life once she knows the whole truth?

If someone had said to me that I would become enamoured with a book series about "devils" and "angels" I would have laughed. Angels to me have never seemed the stuff of literature, more the stuff of Sunday School. Yet there are angels out there that have fascinated me... Loki and Bartleby in Dogma, Balthamos and Baruch in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series for example. So, add to this many of my friends clamouring that I must read this book now, which increased a hundred fold once the second book came out, I caved and fell in love with this world.

What I adored was the world building. The seamless twining of reality and fantasy. Prague was the perfect choice in it's character to couple it with an imaginary land. The history and the Gothic feel of the city make it totally believable that you might accidentally stumble upon a chimera walking down a twisty back alley. Or a winged creature might descend from the skies and accost you. There's a part of me that wishes I had been raised in that little office of Brimstone's where wishes were made, literally. Add to Taylor's creatures and continents this elaborate currency of wishes and their effectiveness, and it's so alive and real that I really thought I might be able to barter some teeth for a scuppy or a shing to give myself really cool colored hair like Karou...

Though, I did have a hard time after becoming so invested in Karou's life as it revolved around Prague, that when we are pulled out of that life and into her previous life as Madrigal I was so jarred that I didn't really take to her previous life. Having already read the second book, I know that there is a merging of the two halves of herself that takes place that then makes everything make sense, but at this point in Daughter of Smoke and Bone was when my love for it wavered. I needed to know the full history of Akiva and Karou's previous life when she was Madrigal, but at the same time, this fearless warrior that was Madrigal, was so different from Karou, that my heart hardened a little towards her. Madrigal is what Karou would have been/was in a different world. A "person" I just didn't take to. Thankfully this was rectified in the second book, which is one of the most amazing books I have read in a long time.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Akiva, Bartelby, Chimera, Daughter of Smoke and Bone, Days of Blood and Starlight, Dogma, His Dark Materials, Karou, Laini Taylor, Loki, Madrigal, Philip Pullman, Prague, Scuppy, Seraphim, Shing, Summer Series

Days of Blood and Starlight, Daughter of Smoke and Bone Book 2 by Laini Taylor
Published by: William Morrow
Publication Date: November 6th, 2012
Format: Hardcover, 528 Pages
Rating: ★★★★★
To Buy

"Once upon a time, an angel and a devil fell in love and dared to imagine a world free of bloodshed and war. This is not that world."

Karou's homeland has been destroyed. The man she loved in another life, in another body, destroyed it because of her death. Akiva never thought, never even dared to hope that he would one day be with her again. His destruction of her people has sealed his fate and his chance at happiness. A happiness he never expected is lost yet again to him by his own hands. The monsters have all been destroyed by the Seraphim. There are only a few holdouts of Chimera hidden here and there in Eretz, and the Seraphim are flushing them out.

Yet there is hope... Karou. Her name literally means hope. Little did she realize that in spending two lives in the company of Brimstone she has been able to learn the art of resurrection, the secret to the Chimera's ability to thwart the enemy. Of course helping the Chimera means she must ally herself with the man who was her intended, Thiago. Oh, and he is the one who happened to have her executed the first time around. Going by the theory the enemy of my enemy is my friend, she agrees to be Thiago's resurrectionist, in the hope that this will save her people by creating a rebel band of Chimera.

But will a band of rebels be able to thwart the might of the empire? Or is it in Akiva and Karou's old dream of creating a new world that a future for Eretz might be found? Either way, the Seraphim and the Chimera must come together, must be willing to see past the war that has consumed their lives, or in the case of the Chimera, multiple lives, and look to what comes next.

For some time now I have had several friends who where verging on the insistence level of drug pushers to read Daughter of Smoke and Bone. I mean, every single time I talked to or emailed them, it would end with, "by the way... have you read it yet?" The day the second book came out the amount of texts I got might have been able to crash my data plan. Needless to say, as soon as I had the time I agreed I would finally read it. After the harsh semester of school I had I spent quite literally all of December sick and under a blanket somewhere. Now the "best" part about being sick is that you are literally incapable of doing anything other than lounging... which means reading! Ah December... I might not have been able to speak without hacking up a lung, but you passed in a haze of crisp fonts and snowy white pages. I devoured Daughter of Smoke and Bone quite quickly. I was intrigued by the world. There where things I loved, and there where things I raised my eyebrows at, angels, really? But I was sold enough to need to pick up the next volume immediately... or in this case, send someone forth to get me said volume because you aren't allowed to drive a car when on a codeine based cough syrup.

What the first book hadn't prepared me for was the awesomeness of the second book. By reading blurbs and snatches of reviews the second book seemed to veer very much into the war of otherworldy creatures category with Karou playing Frankenstein... which seemed, well, I'll say it, I thought it would be lame. I thought taking Karou out of this wonderful little world she lived in in Prague with her lovely diminutive if occasionally violent friend Zuzana was a mistake. No more sketchbooks and art school and evil exes. It was rewriting everything the first book was and giving us a map of another world. Side note, I usually love books with maps of other worlds, I just wasn't expecting this series to go that way. I think that's why I loved Days of Blood and Starlight, it went where I didn't think it would go and brought me along for an amazing ride, thankfully I didn't have to be in a beat up truck in Morocco for real.

Yet it is the believability of the world building that has made the narrative work. Laini has created a beautiful and brutal world, but it has humor in it. The surest way to get complicity is to make someone laugh. Zuzana was my entry into this world of monsters. She was so funny and her connection to Karou made a character who might not be completely relatable, I mean Karou is a monster resurrected into the body of a blue haired teenager with amazing drawing skills, real and likable. Their quippy emails and how Monty Python is used to bring levity yet also hint at the truths behind the words made me love this book all the more. Add in magic, a trio of mismatched angels, a mysterious island and some very wicked Guerilla tactics,  and I am not only beyond excited for the next installment, I want it now!

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Akiva, Chimera, Daughter of Smoke and Bone, Days of Blood and Starlight, Eretz, Frankenstein, Karou, Laini Taylor, Monty Python, Prague, Seraphim, Zuzana

Shadow of Night by Deborah Harkness
Published by: Viking
ARC Provided by Viking
Publication Date: July 10th, 2012
Format: Kindle, 592 Pages
Rating: ★★★

To Buy

Diana and Matthew did it! They have successfully arrived in 1590 at Matthew's house in Woodstock. Diana thought that getting there would be the hard part, but that was easy compared to being thrown directly into the middle of the School of Night. The smartest and savviest and most renowned and infamous men of the age seem to view Matthew's house as their home... and they do not care for Diana, at first, or forever as the case may be with the lovestruck Marlowe. Soon it becomes apparent that maybe this wasn't the best idea. Matthew has drastically changed from the man he was then, not to mention the lack of a beard. And Diana... well, she obviously doesn't fit. From language to comportment to behaviour. She. Doesn't. Fit. Though as scary as being found out is, the summons from Matthew's father is even scarier. He could bring this world down around them in a flash.

Travelling to Sept Tours and living amongst Matthew's past is trying for Diana, as is the fact they have done nothing that they planned to do. She is still ignorant of her abilities and Ashmole 782 looks as if it is never to be found in the past. Matthew and Diana are buffeted around by all the people who have a claim on them, from Philippe to Queen Elizabeth to Emperor Rudolf II to the Congregation, from France to London to Prague, they try to fit there lives and their needs among the demands of these great people. As time goes on, there is more and more of a chance of effecting the past and there is more and more of a need for Diana to learn her craft and find her book and get home. Luckily, fate does seem to occasionally shine on them and sometimes their tragedies turn into greater joys.

Shadow of Night literally picks up right where A Discovery of Witches ended. While I enjoyed the first book, though didn't view it as a staggering piece of genius, but more as Twilight for the more educated adults out there, I found myself liking this book more. There were still times when I felt it was too Twilighty, what with the importance of Matthew's family, his desire for a wedding before coupling, the desire for Diana mixed in with feelings of blood lust, but at least it's obvious that Harkness knows this and she does parody it with a conversation about modern literature at Sept Tours. There where a few other mild annoyances I will mention here because they seem to fit this "Twilight" category versus any other. If Diana and Matthew had only been together for 40 days, how could her period be "off" when it barely had time to be on? Supposedly her torture changed her cycle... but only having your period different once doesn't indicate a trend of irregularity. Continuing in the vein of bodily functions, some of there sex scenes where veering towards the eww versus the aww.  "With my spine bowed, he was poised at the entrance to my womb." Icky, no thanks!

Now, let's discuss what really annoyed me, Diana's ignorance. For someone who is supposed to be a historian written by a historian, I might add, Diana is really dumb sometimes. Diana mistook a silver shaker, aka a Pounce Pot, for a salt shaker. Even if you don't know the technical term, anyone who has watched any period drama knows that there is a silver shaker that is on all writing desks that contains sand, or a similar substance, and it is an aid for absorbing excess ink in letter writing. Not one person I know would go, "oh look, salt" and then complain about it's grittiness. Grrr Diana. Also, how does a historian not know that at the time of Queen Elizabeth St. Paul's wasn't the St. Paul's by Christopher Wren, seeing as that wasn't for almost two hundred years and a great fire needed to happen. Then there's the use of the word tisane, which is an herbal tea. I can allow that Diana would use it, because she's from modern times, but the fact that others would understand it is impossible. It's from the 1930s! Then there's the quintain. I've known what a quintain was most of my life, probably because I have a younger brother who loved medieval jousting. Again, Diane must have seen a movie or a reference to the sandbags on pivots used to train in jousting. Even if she didn't know the name, she should at least know it's NOT a gibbit. The real shocker of ignorance though was when she asked a kindly Jewish man why he had a golden ring embroidered on his clothing. Facepalm Diana, facepalm. Even the Nazis used a similar method for the demarcation of being Jewish. Girl, you need to catch up on some history.

The School of Night was also another note of contention for me. Mainly because we are thrown, with Diana, head first into this group of intellectual men and have to spend the entire first part of the book listening to them bickering and sharing barbs and witticisms while desperately trying to remember who's who. These people are nothing to me. They are historical figures that are there to add to the mystique of Matthew's past, but instead just pissed me off. I liked Kit being a bitchy little boy, but other than that, I could take them or leave them. Which is much how I felt for many of the historical sections of the book... oh, who am I kidding, almost all of the historical sections. When I had an investment with Diana or Matthew or another character, than the history mattered and fascinated me. The characters she created of the young witch Annie and the street urchin Jack where lovely and broke my heart. When they where in Prague I couldn't put this book down. Yet previously I felt that we where being led on a tour of Elizabethan England. I was reading a travel guide for the time, not historical fiction. I quite literally cheered when Diana said it was "time to stop treating our sojourn here as an advanced seminar in Shakespeare's England." Because that was what the book was! Hundreds of pages of exposition, when they came to search for the Ashmole 782 and get Diana learned in the dark arts. I didn't need them playing Elizabethan house for the whole first half of the book!

Though the negatives, which I can pinpoint, while occasionally taking me out of the book (tisane, grummble grummble), didn't take away from the fact that this is a fun book. Once everything started to come together that is. When the magic started to be incorporated and we didn't dwell on the barbs and witticisms of the men, I felt the book finally became what Diana had set out to find. The way that spells are different than magic, at least for witches other than Diana. The familiars that would reside in you. Also, the way other religions magic was touched on, like the Jewish witch's Golem. A total aside, but golems are awesome, ever since I read Terry Pratchett's Feet of Clay I have been a friend of the Golems! Though not Tolkien's Golem, just so we're clear, my preciouses. This was when the book became what I was hoping it would be. We went beyond the typical challenges of a girl and a vampire love story and Harkness brought something new and interesting. Of course, seeing as this is the second book in a trilogy, we where left hanging to some extent, but at least I was satisfied enough till the next book.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: A Discovery of Witches, Ashmole 782, Deborah Harkness, Emperor Rudolf II, Golem, History, Marlowe, Prague, Queen Elizabeth, School of Night, Sept Tours, Shadow of Night, Terry Pratchett, Twilight