I seem to have overcome my reading slump. I’ve read several books since I started doing more pleasure reading a couple of weeks ago. Some weren’t the best, but were easy, fun reads. I did bail on a couple because I could tell I wasn’t going to enjoy them, for reasons related more to me than to the books themselves. One I really enjoyed sits right at the intersection of fantasy and romance, being both a good fantasy and a good romance. This book is Wooing the Witch Queen by Stephanie Burgis.

It’s the story of a young archduke who’s been under the control of his “advisors” since he took the throne as a child. Even as an adult, he’s essentially a prisoner and a puppet ruler with things done in his name that he would actually oppose. His only hope is to escape and throw himself on the mercy of the queen of a neighboring kingdom, a powerful witch. But there’s a bit of a mix-up when he arrives at her castle because she’s expecting a new librarian to come organize her library for her. He can do that, so he settles in. She really likes the new librarian, who’s sweet and a bit geeky, but good at what he does, and he finds that a lot of the stories about the dreaded witch queen are exaggerated, other than the extent of her power. There’s just the problem that she’s sworn to kill the archduke she believes is a threat to her kingdom, and then there are internal threats she’s battling, as well, as she tries to secure her throne after taking it back from a usurper. And his “advisors” who really run his land are gearing up for a terrible war.

This is more of an intimate fantasy than an epic fantasy, as it focuses mostly on a few characters and one location, but it digs deep into those characters. I loved the hero of this book. He’s exactly my “adorkable wizard” type. It’s so nice to read a romantic hero who’s kind, smart, and gentle, not a blustering jerk. The relationship developed not just based on physical attraction but also because these two people had common goals and values at heart, and they both had overcome trauma in their pasts.

There are fun little touches of humor, especially in the interactions with the sidekicks. It’s not quite a romantic comedy, but there are elements of that, and it’s not too dark. This really is the perfect book for a relaxing weekend when you want to escape to a magical world.

A few weeks ago, one of the things going around social media was discussion on the terrible novel you wrote when you were fourteen.

I didn’t really write a novel at fourteen. I scribbled a lot in spiral notebooks, but it was more story ideas and character development, with very little actual writing. Most of what I worked on during my teens was an epic fantasy novel a long-distance friend and I were “writing” together. Again, there was little actual writing. We made and mailed each other cassette tapes (talking into a tape recorder like we were talking to each other) brainstorming characters, situations, and scenarios, but I don’t think we actually wrote very much. I guess you could say it was kind of like a roleplaying game, but without the rules and dice. The main characters were two princesses forced to flee the palace for some reason (I’m now fuzzy on the details). She had her character and I had mine, and they split up to have separate adventures, so it ended up being basically two books that might weave in and out with each other. I came up with ideas for my character’s adventures and she came up with her character’s adventures.

The only thing I really remember about my part of the story was that my fugitive princess ended up in the woods (I guess I’ve always had a thing for forests) where she ran into a mysterious young man who took her home to where he lived with his mother, who was a kind of sorceress who lived in a cottage in the forest. Somewhere along the way we learned that he was actually the twin brother of the enemy king. The mother had been worried what her husband would do with a twin who might complicate the succession, so she had one of her advisors, a sorceress, smuggle him out of the palace and raise him in hiding. He was basically a male Briar Rose (from Sleeping Beauty), only there was still a prince at the palace. I think part of the resolution of the plot involved this princess marrying him, and it ended the war when he took his place as king (maybe they got rid of the other king and he pretended to be his brother?). I don’t know that we ever got as far as figuring out the actual ending because I didn’t learn how to plot a book until years later. I’d come up with characters, situations, and maybe an inciting incident and some scenes, but then it all fell apart.

But thinking about this long-abandoned story during the week in which we in America celebrate our break from being ruled by a king made me think about how royalist the old-school fantasy that influenced and inspired this story idea was. Fantasy authors seemed to take the concept of the divine right of kings and the belief that there was actually something different and special about royalty to extremes, making kings somehow magically ordained for their position so that having the rightful king would fix everything. That’s where we got all those farmboy who turns out to be the rightful heir stories, and it was better for a farmboy who had no experience in running a kingdom to be on the throne if he had the right bloodline than for someone without the bloodline but who was experienced in administration. The villains were often the viziers or royal advisors who seized power, then everything fell apart because they weren’t the rightful heirs, but the kingdom could be healed if the guy with the right bloodline showed up, even if he had no clue what he was doing.

Some of that might come down to the idea that anyone who actually wants power isn’t suited to have it, so the power-grabbing vizier is bad but the innocent farmboy who’d have been content herding pigs is good, but it still has to be the right farmboy who has the magical bloodline. They can’t just grab a clerk who knows how the kingdom is run but who doesn’t want to be in charge and make him king.

I suspect some of this comes from fairy tales, where there’s often something magical that sets royalty apart, like The Princess and the Pea, where only a true princess would be so delicate that she’d feel the pea under piles of mattresses. There’s also the Authurian mythology, where only the rightful king can pull the sword out of the stone. The British class system probably also plays a role. There seemed to really be a belief that the upper class was actually physically different from the lower classes. Even writers who were progressive for their time have hints of that showing up. In a couple of her books, Charlotte Bronte has her teacher heroine be surprised that the coarse peasant girls she teaches are actually capable of learning (instead of realizing that peasants were only ignorant because they were denied the kind of education the upper classes got and had to spend their days working in order to survive, so didn’t have time to sit around reading poetry and history and translating things from French and Latin).

Tolkien gets into the rightful king story with Aragorn, and how things are going to be better now that he’s shown up and the right bloodline is on the throne, and I suspect that was a huge influence on the fantasy of the 70s and 80s that influenced my teenaged self. In the very early 80s there was also the big royal wedding and Princess Di, so royalty was on the brain. Americans may have broken away from having a king but a lot of Americans are still fascinated with royalty and bloodlines, so it found its way into even American-written fantasy. Maybe there’s some fantasy to the idea that instead of having messy elections, there would be a way to know for certain that someone was the proper leader who could make everything better.

I think more recent fantasy has veered away from the idea of the rightful king who makes everything better because he’s meant to be on the throne. If there is a ruler who makes things better, it’s because he’s a good person who makes good policy (like The Goblin Emperor). Terry Pratchett had fun with the trope by having the rightful king who has all the usual signs not want to be king, and the people who could put him in power don’t want a king. He just steps up when there’s a crisis and provides leadership, then goes back to being a member of the guards. Still more recent fantasy focuses on people away from the throne. It’s ordinary people or people who have trained for a role having adventures, and the goal isn’t about putting the right king on the throne. Writers are also exploring forms of government other than monarchies in fantasy worlds.

I have to admit that there’s still something fun about the idea that the person nobody would notice is actually the person destined for greatness. That’s where a lot of the story my friend and I worked on as teenagers came from. In fact, it started as a portal fantasy in which her character was whisked away from her high school to a fantasy world where it turned out she was a princess, and only as we worked more on the story did we remove that part of it. When you’re feeling overlooked and outcast in high school, it’s fun to pretend that you’re royalty and no one knows about it.

This realization has made me think about my own fantasy worlds. The more history I read, the more it seems like European royalty was actually genetically inferior rather than superior. There was way too much inbreeding going on.

Due to a random chain of events, I ended up rewatching the Bleak House miniseries over the last couple of weeks. There was an article in the paper about a man who learned that his ancestors were involved in one of the legal cases that inspired the book. Meanwhile I was reading a Star Wars book set nearly 20 years after Return of the Jedi, in which Wedge Antilles was a major character, and it occurred to me that the actor who played Wedge had one of the leading roles in Bleak House, though I think he’s older in that than Wedge was in the book. Anyway, I was in the mood for that sort of thing and it made for good background noise while I measured and pinned up some curtains I’m hemming.

But watching that made me wonder if anyone has used the works of Dickens as an inspiration or basis for a fantasy novel. There are a number of fantasy retellings based on the works of Shakespeare, whether directly and obviously or more subtly. For instance, Rachel Caine’s Prince of Shadows is Romeo and Juliet told from the perspective of one of the secondary characters, giving background info that doesn’t appear in the play, like the fact that Romeo and Juliet were under the influence of a love spell (which would explain a lot). On the other hand, the Kingfountain series by Jeff Wheeler draws upon some Shakespeare plays, but set in a fantasy world. I don’t think he hides the inspiration, but it’s not too obvious. I remember reading one, getting midway through it and going, “Oh, he’s doing Richard III.”

But has the same thing been done with Dickens? It would seem particularly suited for epic fantasy, given that his books often cover long stretches of time and have large casts of characters. The setting is so much a part of the story that it’s practically a character, so it has tons of worldbuilding (even if the books were set in the real world, the details chosen to convey that world so that it’s vivid even to people who never saw that setting require the same sort of effort as portraying an imaginary world). The plots would translate easily into court intrigue. There are several of his books that fit the “farmboy with destiny” type trope of fantasy, with obscure young men who rise in the world and turn out to have some kind of inheritance. Fantasy might even make some of his plots make more sense, like his fondness for entirely unrelated people who look so much alike that people mistake them for each other.

I’ve learned that a fantasy retelling of A Tale of Two Cities has just come out, which uses changelings as the explanation for the two unrelated people who look the same. I’ll have to find that one. But is there a fantasy Great Expectations or Our Mutual Friend? I could have fun figuring out how to put Our Mutual Friend in a fantasy world, with the inheritance being a crown instead of the proceeds from a dust heap. Bleak House is just made for a gothic retelling with sorcery.

And now I want to rewatch the miniseries of Our Mutual Friend. I don’t think I’m going to try to delve into reading Dickens right now. I’ve managed to ease my way out of my reading slump by reading shorter, more straightforward books without a lot of subplots. Trying to read Dickens right now would probably be a lost cause. That may be my winter project.

I’ve been in a weird reading slump since I started the moving process. I’ve only read about two novels (I’m almost done with the second) since I started packing back in early April, and that’s slow for me. I might manage to read a few pages at night before I go to sleep, but if I sit down to just read, I get distracted and restless and end up getting up to do something.

I checked a bunch of books on gardening out of the library, but I couldn’t even focus on those other than flipping through and looking at the pictures. I realized I’m nowhere near being ready for that, and what I need now isn’t a book that tells me what to plant but rather a book that tells me what to kill. I gave up and returned them all to the library.

Now that I’m finishing that second novel, I need to find something new to read. I have plenty of books on the to-be-read shelf, but if it’s languishing there, I’m probably not super interested in it. I need to make a library trip to find something that makes me want to sit down and just read.

Fortunately, I don’t seem to be in the kind of slump where I’m not interested in any books. It’s mostly been a distraction issue. But I probably need something that really captivates me and that isn’t too complicated to get over the distraction. Summer tends to be my chick lit/romcom phase, and I can usually tear through one of those pretty quickly. That might make a good thing to get for a starter book for getting back in reading mode. I have a few more curtains to hang and a piece of furniture to put together, and then there’s that crazy yard, but otherwise I’m getting to a point where I should be able to allow myself to sit and read and relax on a Sunday afternoon instead of working around the house.

I don’t think I have anything particular on the schedule for the weekend unless my next-door neighbors throw another spontaneous party like they did last weekend, other than church Sunday morning and an outing Sunday evening, so I think I’ll hit the library on Friday when I go out to run errands and then plan to spend some time during the weekend just sitting and reading and see if I can get back into the swing of things.

Before my life became consumed with moving and getting my house set up, I read a book that was a fun mix of two things I like, the Regency/Victorian house party comedy of manners and fantasy. A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher is what you get if you love Jane Austen type books but think they could use more magic.

An evil sorceress whose previous benefactor has proven unsatisfactory is on the hunt for a husband, and she settles on a wealthy squire, contriving a situation that gets her and her browbeaten teenage daughter invited to come stay with him and his spinster sister. The daughter, experiencing the kindness of good people for perhaps the first time in her life, can’t bear to let her mother hurt these people, and she joins forces with the squire’s sister to try to thwart her mother. And part of the scheme is a house party, as the sister invites her friends to come meet their new friends (and have backup).

The book reminds me of the movie Love and Friendship, which was (loosely) based on some of Jane Austen’s short fiction that wasn’t published in her lifetime. In fact, I kept picturing the villain as Lady Susan from that movie, as played by Kate Beckinsale. Just give that bitchy, manipulative woman magical powers that allow her to control others, and you have a similar situation.

A lot of the Regency romance tropes are present, including the awkward teen with the marriage-minded mother, the handsome old flame of the older woman, and lots of drawing room intrigue, but all with the awareness of magic at work and non-magical people having to figure out how they can stand against powerful magic. The book was both fun (and funny) and scary, and it was rather moving at times. It held my interest at a time when my brain was beginning to spiral with distraction.

I haven’t been able to read much since then because I get very easily sidetracked by things I feel like I should do, or else I get an idea for solving a problem in the house and get lost in online research to see if the products I need exist. I try to read a little bit before bed, but I fall asleep within a few pages. It seems that a day full of physical activity is good for your sleep.

I have my downstairs great room (kitchen, living/dining room) more or less set up, though there are some things in there that will need to be put away elsewhere when I have the way cleared for them. My new office furniture is supposed to be delivered tomorrow, so I can get my office set up. Then next week I’m going to make a road trip to the D.C. suburbs to hit Ikea and see if the loveseat I like online will actually work, plus I’ll pick up some organizing and storage stuff for my clothes and some pantry shelving. That will make it easier to finish unpacking. I’m hoping once everything is more or less where it belongs and there aren’t piles and boxes everywhere it’ll be easier for me to focus on both reading and writing.

I recently read a book that was absolutely warm and delightful, perfect for if you need something that makes you feel good and believe that humanity may be worthwhile after all. I think a lot of my readers might want to check out The Teller of Small Fortunes, by Julie Leong.

The book is about an immigrant fortuneteller who travels with her mule and wagon, telling only small fortunes—not major events or big futures, but little things that might affect individuals in small ways. She’s been fine being alone, but then she finds herself traveling with others as they join up with her. There’s a former thief and his former warrior friend who’s searching for his lost daughter, then later an aspiring baker seeking adventure. They all team up to travel in search of the lost child, but then the fortuneteller catches the attention of the mages, who believe anyone with any power has to work for them.

This book has a lot of things I love in a story. There are great arcs for all the characters. There’s a lovely sense of found family, with strangers coming to form bonds and look after each other. People make good decisions. The ending is so satisfying. I got this from the library, but I think I’ll be buying a keeper copy because this is very much a comfort read kind of book. There is some tension, but it’s not uncomfortably stressful.

You may want to have baked goods and tea handy for reading, though. All the talk about the tea the fortuneteller serves and all the talk about baked goods will make you hungry for tea and rolls. You find yourself wanting to drink tea, eat baked goods, and hang out with these people.

This is essentially a standalone novel. Everything is wrapped up for these characters, but it looks like there’s another book set in this world coming later in the year. I’ll definitely be looking out for that.