I mentioned in an earlier post that I’d recently read a Beauty and the Beast retelling. That book was The Beast’s Heart by Leife Shallcross, and it’s the Beauty and the Beast story from the Beast’s perspective. While there are a few elements from the Disney version that showed up (the curse is his punishment for being shallow, the library!), it mostly draws upon the fairy tale — the version with the down-on-his-luck formerly wealthy merchant with three daughters — and is a really nice fleshing out of the story.

One thing I loved was that this telling fixed the Stockholm Syndrome issue that can make this story uncomfortable. Isabeau, our “Beauty,” isn’t the Beast’s prisoner. He does initially demand that the merchant send his youngest daughter or he’ll kill him, but he never planned to follow through and is surprised when she actually shows up. He immediately feels terrible about it, apologizes to her, and explains that he was hoping to have someone who could remind him how to be human again (he’d gone feral for a while and had recently found his castle again and started living more like a human before her father showed up). He’s been all alone and is afraid that if he doesn’t interact with someone, he’ll lose whatever humanity he has left. He asks her to stay with him for a year, but she can leave at any time. She stays in part because she feels bad for him, but also because since her father lost his money, she’s been the one acting essentially as the servant for her father and sisters, and she could use the break. Let her sisters figure out how to cook and clean for a while. Meanwhile, he doesn’t learn until later how the curse can be broken, so he isn’t setting all this up to use her, either.

That idea that she’s on vacation and can leave any time she wants makes a difference in how the relationship feels. They’re much closer to being equals, and in novel form, we get to spend a lot more time on the development of their friendship instead of compressing it into a musical number. It’s also interesting getting his perspective, with the story told entirely from his viewpoint (in first person), so he has to guess at what she’s thinking, and he’s very much out of practice of reading other people.

One little detail I loved was that his grounds while the castle is enchanted contain gardens that stay in each of the seasons. So, say, if it’s a hot summer day, you can go to the winter garden and play in the snow. I’m not sure how the spring and autumn gardens would work, since those are transition seasons. Does the spring garden shrink back to the end of winter every so often, as soon as the trees are fully leafed out and the spring flowers have died back? Does the autumn garden re-grow the leaves after they fall? Or maybe the seasons rotate among the four gardens, so that it’s always one of the seasons in one of the gardens, but each garden goes through all the phases. They’re just out of sync with normal time so that there’s always a garden where it’s winter, fall, etc. I would pretty much live in the fall garden, I suspect, though I do also like spring.

The plot sticks fairly closely to the fairy tale, so there’s no real villain or external conflict. It’s mostly about the Beast getting his act together, and then there are some issues between the Beauty and her family. If you’re looking for a nice relaxing read that makes you feel good, this is an excellent choice. It’s going on my keeper shelf because I think it will make a good “comfort food” sort of book.

Apologies for the delayed post. My web server was having issues yesterday and wouldn’t let me post anything. All seems to be fixed today!

Earlier this year when I was looking for examples of that journey/quest that starts with bickering but turns romantic trope, I dug up some old fantasy novels I read during my college days that I thought might have been how that trope got into my brain. The first one did involve a quest and it turned romantic, so I figured I’d re-read it. It turned out not to fit, but it started a pleasant journey down memory lane of what I think of as Old School Fantasy.

The first book in this trilogy is called The Ring of Allaire, by Susan Dexter, and it has all those fantasy elements that make this book a “comfort food” sort of book. We have the somewhat inept wizard’s apprentice, the lost heir, the offstage powerful villain, the rescued damsel, and the spunky servant girl, plus a twist or two. I suppose now it might be considered a bit trite, but the first book was published in the early 80s, so all those elements weren’t quite as familiar then, and I think they’re executed well enough that I enjoyed the re-read even now, with all the books I’ve read and written. It’s fun to re-read a book when it’s been so long since you last read it that you don’t remember much about it. I did remember more of the plot elements of the first one, including the big twists, but with the second and third books in the series, I remembered just enough to be sure I’d read them before, but otherwise it was like reading a new book. In some cases, I still remembered my mental imagery of scenes from when I originally read them, but I got different mental images this time around, and I was holding both in my head at the same time. I discovered the first book in the series at the library, on one of those paperback spinner racks, during the summer between my junior and senior years of college. The library didn’t have the rest of the trilogy, so I tracked them down and bought them, along with the first one.

The story is your basic fantasy plot about the offstage super-powerful magical being whose influence is spreading throughout the land, bringing earlier and harsher winters. The wizard who might have the knowledge to fight him gets killed, leaving his not very adept young apprentice to follow his instructions and finish his mission. He has to find a lost magical stallion and the heir to a long-empty throne to go on a quest to the villain’s stronghold to retrieve the imprisoned princess whose magical rings hold the power to fight the villain.

While this plot may be standard-issue by now, the characters are utterly endearing. Our young apprentice is competent enough in a lot of areas that his sometime ineptitude when it comes to magic isn’t that annoying. He’s an adept fencer, and while he fumbles some spells, he’s also capable of magical improvisation. He’s also kind, brave, and resourceful. Then there’s his “familiar,” a cat whose thoughts he can hear in his head, and his sidekick, a little canary whose bravery is much bigger than his body. We’ve also got a blustery knight who might be the lost heir and a “damsel in distress” who’s got more gumption than you’d expect.

It’s a fun read that’s got enough familiarity to be comforting while still feeling fresh enough to be entertaining. The sequels get a little more serious and intense as they have to solidify the victory of the first book and then take the fight to the villain. I can’t say too much more about them without spoiling the first book.

I think my readers might enjoy these. They’re character-centered fantasy without the grimdark nastiness. It looks like the author has got the rights back and has reissued her own editions, so you can still find them online. I’d love to find more books like these.

I really have been lax in discussing my reading. I’m finding books even farther back in my records that I haven’t mentioned. Today, I’ve got a book that I think might appeal to adult (and maybe older teen) readers who enjoyed Rebel Mechanics: The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow.

This is an alternate history fantasy in a world where there really had been witches, before they were hunted down and burned. Their knowledge has survived in nursery rhymes and charms, seemingly harmless bits of magic, but there may be more out there. A trio of sisters who’ve been separated all find each other again when they move to a city where women are organizing to try to get the vote, and they realize that there’s other power they could reclaim, while they’re at it. But women with magic and the vote are very threatening to those who already have the power.

This book has a very dreamlike quality. I don’t so much remember reading it as I remember seeing the events play out, like the words in the book are merely a portal you travel through to enter the world of the story, and then you find yourself wondering if you really went there or if it was just a dream. That may be why I didn’t remember to discuss it. On the one hand, the story seems very grounded in actual history, reflecting the kind of cities that existed in the late 1800s, but on the other hand it’s a fantastical world where magic exists and there are shadowy threats. Our heroines are three very different sisters who fit the “strong female character” description without being what that cliché usually brings to mind. There are no Rambos in drag here, just intelligent, determined women who stand up against the things that are with the hope that they could be different.

Like Rebel Mechanics, this is an alternate history set in a different version of Victorian-era America with magic and a kind of revolution taking place, with an underground movement against the powers that be. It’s written for adults, so it’s a bit grittier than Rebel Mechanics with what might be called “mature themes,” but I do think a lot of my readers might like it. In some respects, it also reminds me of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, though in a different setting and time period—it’s got that element of magic being something forgotten and revived and a magical figure from the past playing a role. Plus that dreamlike quality that makes you wonder if you really read it or if all those events were just a dream.

I also recommend The Ten Thousand Doors of January by the same author. It’s sort of a portal fantasy, about a girl adopted by a mysterious man whose mansion is full of strange things. She finds a notebook that tells about intersections with other worlds. It’s also got that dreamlike quality that makes it hard for me to describe what the book’s actually about even as my mental images from reading it remain intensely vivid.

I have yet another recommended read. This one is for the Jane Austen (or Georgette Heyer, or Regency or Georgian romance in general) fans. If you love all those stories about the social season/marriage market and young women who desperately need to marry well in order to save their family fortunes, but you wish they had more magic in them, check out The Midnight Bargain by C.L. Polk.

In this world, once women are married, they’re stopped from being able to use magic. One young woman is determined not to have that happen to her. She wants to be a sorceress, but her family needs her to marry well. Things get complicated when she meets another young woman from a very wealthy family who also would rather pursue magic than marriage, but then there’s her handsome brother, who really likes our heroine. As handsome and kind as he is, is he worth losing magic for? Both young women are running out of time to make a decision and take action because their families are trying to arrange marriages for them.

I’m definitely in the “I love Jane Austen, but those books could use more magic” camp, so this book was right up my alley. It’s a secondary-world fantasy, so it’s an imaginary world, not Georgian England, but it still has all those things we like about stories set in that world, while also having a lot of other cultures, social rules, and magic. It’s a much richer world than in your typical Regency romance, and while some of the ways women are constrained seem harsh, they’re probably not any worse than the way women really were treated in our world. The characters are endearing and spirited, and speaking of spirits, there’s the luck spirit who gets summoned and enjoys the opportunity to live vicariously through her hostess. Seeing the spirit’s joy at so many simple pleasures made me think about taking opportunities to savor moments, to eat strawberries and run on the beach (or woods; I’m not really a beach person and there isn’t one handy).

While there’s a lot of romance in this book and the most obvious comparisons are to Regency romances, it’s not actually a romance. It’s mostly about the struggle to obtain all the magic they can get before they can be forced to marry and the way they’re trying to navigate in this challenging world that’s set up to go against them. Having everything they want will require them to change their world.

I obviously like New York stories, given how many of my books take place there. I suppose in a way New York was my fantasy world when I was growing up. I knew that was the place where Broadway was, which was where I wanted to be. Later, I thought of it as where the news networks were headquartered and as the setting for most of the romantic comedies, so it was where my fantasy adult life took place. That shows in my books, I think, because I write New York as a fantasy world that’s accurate in some respects (you could probably map the city based on my descriptions, and it takes the right amount of time to walk places) but is probably wildly inaccurate for the actual experience of living in the city.

If you want a probably more truthful view of the city but still with fantasy elements, check out The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin. It’s kind of an updated Lovecraftian horror (without the racism) about the thing from the realm beyond that’s trying to make its way into our world, taking advantage of the moment when New York becomes a living city. Tapped to fight the battle for the city are people who become avatars of the boroughs, and they have to find the avatar of the city as a whole before the thing gets to him. Meanwhile, they have to find a way to deal with the inroads the thing is making, as it manifests in very real horrors, like alt.right trolls, gentrifying foundations that are backed by corporations, and “Karens” who call the police like they’re trying to speak to the manager.

This is a powerful, thought-provoking book that I could barely put down. It gave me a very different perspective on New York than my usual tourist point of view and made me think about the many different kinds of people who make up the city. The sense of place was so strong that it made me homesick for New York. It’s been far too long since my last visit. I was a little leery of the horror elements, but it’s not that scary. I think the more “realistic” horrors were more frightening. They may not be powered by eldritch horrors from another realm (or are they?) but “Karens” do exist. I’m less worried about giant tentacles from beyond. The characters really grew on me, getting under my skin so that I couldn’t help but emphasize with them, even though they were all very different from me.

I’d recommend this for those who like the Enchanted, Inc. books but are up for something grittier and scarier and who want to broaden their horizons about what New York is.

One more book in my recent reading was Mexican Gothic, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. If you were like me and devoured the Mary Stewart gothic/suspense novels as a teen, all those books about spunky young women visiting spooky houses and dealing with wealthy men who were potentially shady, but you wished there was something truly uncanny about them and not just atmosphere, this is the book for you.

A Mexico City debutante in 1950 gets an unsettling letter from her recently married cousin, and her father sends her to check on the cousin, who now lives with her husband’s family in the manor by their defunct silver mine in the mountains. Once she gets there, she finds that this family is deeply weird and something seems to be seriously wrong with her cousin, who tries to warn her of danger. The only person in the house who seems to be reasonably sane is one of the husband’s relatives, but she’s not sure she can trust him, either. She needs to figure out what’s really going on in order to save her cousin and get back to her life, but she’s not at all prepared for the truth of what this family’s secret really is.

I wouldn’t have thought this was my kind of book from the publisher description (they forgot to mention Mary Stewart) because I don’t like horror and scary things, but I ended up devouring it. It’s just so beautifully atmospheric. I could see the setting so vividly. One thing I absolutely loved was that the heroine was allowed to be smart. There was never a point when I found myself trying to give her advice or telling her not to go there or not to do that. She made all the right moves, based on the information she had available, but she was up against something bigger and weirder than she could have realized, so even while doing smart things she ended up having to struggle. I appreciate that so much because I get frustrated by plotting that relies on dumb characters who cause their own problems to create conflict. I also enjoyed the setting. I remember liking the globe trotting of those old Mary Stewart books that allowed me to visit interesting locations, and this one gives us a view of Mexico that’s very different from the usual American pop culture depictions (and my own experiences visiting border cities).

I don’t know if this book has been optioned for film, but it would make an amazing movie because it’s so visual. I’d love to see the heroine’s wardrobe on the screen, and then there’s that house that’s the sort of project production designers drool over.

I’m definitely looking up more of this author’s books. I think she just had a new one come out this week.

Back to more book discussion …

I’ve been on a fantasy kick for at least the last six months, really diving in to epic fantasy, and as much as I love it, I’ve got to admit that it gets kind of monotonous after a while. Those quasi-medieval European fantasy worlds start to blur together. And yet I can’t get enough of that kind of story, the quests, missions, prophecies, courtly political intrigue, magic, monsters, multiple storylines on a collision course, etc. If you feel the same way, I’ve got just the book for you.

Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse is an epic fantasy that has all those things you love in epic fantasy, but instead of a setting based on quasi-medieval Europe, it’s a secondary world based on pre-Colombian America. That injects a shot of real originality into the story and makes those old fantasy tropes come to new life from a different perspective.

The complex story tracks a young man marked from childhood as a prophesied chosen one trained to carry out one life’s mission, the sea captain hired to get him where he needs to be faster than anyone has managed to make that voyage, the outsider priest trying against great opposition (and betrayal) to be more relevant to the people, and the warrior torn between what his clan expects and the underground movement he’s starting to believe in. They’re all coming together on the winter solstice, when an eclipse is happening.

I plowed through this book pretty quickly, even though it’s rather long, and I hope the sequel is coming soon because I immediately wanted more of the story (the ending does wrap up the main events but immediately sets up new ones). I found the setting and the cultures fascinating and really pulled for most of the main characters. It scratched that epic fantasy itch, but in a new and exciting way.

I’ve seen this book recommended for fans of Game of Thrones, and while I wouldn’t have thought to compare the two, I can see some similarities, and I do think that if you like that series you’ll like this. It has a few bloody moments, but I definitely wouldn’t call it “grimdark,” though. It’s less of a “people suck, life sucks, nothing is fair” world than Game of Thrones is.

This may turn into a book blog for the next few weeks because I realized I haven’t talked about what I’m reading for a couple of months and I need to catch up. I had to keep kind of quiet about what I was reading for a little while because I’m the Assistant Nebula Awards Commissioner, and one of the perks of my position is that I could see which books were likely to end up being finalists so that I was able to get a jump on reading the probable finalists. Then I knew who the actual finalists were a couple of weeks before they were announced. And since I was reading the nominees before that was public knowledge, I figured it was probably best that I didn’t say anything about what I was reading, lest some clever person put two and two together and figure it out. But it’s all public now, and I can talk about what I’ve been reading. I’m getting to these books in no particular order, and this isn’t covering everything I read or even liked. These are just the books I think my readers are most likely to be interested in.

One book that I’d already bought before it started showing up with a lot of nominations was A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking, by T. Kingfisher. How could I resist a book with a title like that? Since I had the e-book on my tablet, this was what I read during the dark nights of the power outage. In some respects, it was the perfect book to read by candlelight while huddled under blankets in a dark, freezing house because it was fun and light and kind of cozy. In some respects, it was a bad idea because it made me desperately want to bake, and I couldn’t because I had no power. It also made me hungry for scones. The first morning I was sure my power would stay on, I baked scones.

This story is about a world in which wizards have one power, in a very specialized way, and our young heroine’s power is baking. She can make bread rise properly, make scones come out perfectly, and make rolls bake to just the right degree of doneness. She can also make gingerbread men walk, and then there was that incident with the sourdough starter, who now lives in the basement and manages pest control for the bakery. This doesn’t seem like the sort of talent that would get anyone in trouble or make someone seem like a threat, but she finds a dead body in the bakery one morning, and then she learns that wizards all over town are being killed. There seems to be a conspiracy to destabilize the city while the army is off fighting a battle and there’s an enemy army approaching. Our heroine may be the last wizard left in the city, but how can she defend the city by baking?

This book is so, so much fun. It’s sold as YA, but I think that also applies to the young at heart. It kind of reminds me of the Tiffany Aching books by Terry Pratchett, only instead of a sentient, bad-tempered cheese, there’s a sentient, bad-tempered sourdough starter. We’ve got a smart, practical heroine putting her specialized knowledge to use in an unorthodox way, with a lot of whimsy, heart, and humor. This is the perfect book to read if you’re having a bad day (like your power being out when it’s 10 degrees outside), but it might be a good idea to bake some scones or cookies first because you will get hungry while reading. If you’re a baker, you’ll want to bake, but you’ll never look at gingerbread men the same way again.

I’ve been reading some of what I jokingly call Old School fantasy, the books published in the 80s (sometimes the 70s, but with sequels published in the 80s). In part, I wanted to get back to my own fantasy roots, the things I read after discovering Tolkien that ended up leading to me wanting to write fantasy. I’m not exactly following my reading trajectory, but I am picking up some of the books on that line that I haven’t revisited in a long time. One other reason I’m rereading these books is that I thought it would be a good idea to read the things I was reading when I first came up with the idea I’m working on to see what bits of influence might have crept in.

I have found that some things from books I remember reading around that time are in my story idea — not so much that it’s any kind of outright copying or plagiarism, just some tropes showing up. I think part of this is that a lot of my story ideas come from reading a book that’s almost, but not quite, exactly the book I want to read. There’s something in it that really appeals to me, but it focuses on something else or does it in a way I’m not crazy about. Then I think of how it could go the way I want it to go, and a story idea is born.

One thing that seemed to come up a lot in that era — and that’s in the book I came up with — is the evil wizard who’s controlling the weather and using it as a weapon. Except in most of the books I’ve read with that plot element, the wizard makes it winter. I’m doing one in which the wizard makes it hot and dry, creating a dust bowl. Being from Texas, I find that a lot more nightmarish. Well, I did until last week, when it was freezing and I didn’t have power. It did kind of feel like some evil wizard had suddenly zapped us. The good guys must have won, though, because it was about 80 degrees warmer yesterday afternoon than the low temperature was a week earlier. It’s bizarre to think that last week I was bundled up in blankets and freezing, with snow on the ground, and this week I’ve been sitting out on the patio to work.

Another trope I’m seeing a lot of — and that I’m not using in this book — is the inept apprentice wizard who’s actually some new kind of wizard who can do unusual things, but they don’t realize that at first because he does things in a different way, so trying to do magic conventionally doesn’t work for him. And this kind of wizard always seems to be a klutz. I do like the idea of the person who only seems incompetent because he’s in a league of his own and his teachers have been trying to force him into the standard mold, but I don’t see why this character always has to be tripping over his own feet and knocking things over.

Noticing the plot elements and character types that seem to have been top of mind when I came up with the idea allows me to be conscious of these influences so I can avoid duplicating earlier books without realizing it. As long as it’s been since I came up with this story idea, there’s a real danger that something might have seeped in without me being aware of it. I remember the strangest bits from these old books, and there’s a lot I didn’t recall as being specifically from these books but that’s still been churning around in my brain.

And I’m not going to tell what books these are because I don’t want anyone looking for influences. Maybe I’ll discuss them some other time in a different context.

I’ve been talking about my recent reread of The Lord of the Rings. I hadn’t read the book since seeing the movies, and I watched the movies about a year ago, so they’re reasonably fresh, and that meant I sometimes had a mental image clash between the movies and what’s actually in the book. One big difference is the pacing. I’d forgotten that there’s a big gap between Bilbo’s birthday, when the story begins, and Frodo actually leaving the Shire. It’s 17 years between the party and Gandalf coming back to warn Frodo about the ring, and then it’s months later before Frodo actually leaves. I can see why they’d want to tighten that up to give it more urgency. Then they spend a couple of months in Rivendell. Even after they get word that stuff is happening and time may be of the essence, they take a week or so to leave. It’s not as though we get details of what’s happening in the meantime. It skips straight to the next time something happens, so it’s generally only a paragraph or so later, but it still feels less urgent, and I can see why that had to change for the movies.

That time jump means that Frodo is older than I remembered. He’s 50, the same age Bilbo was in The Hobbit. Since Hobbits come of age at 33 and live longer than humans, I would guess that makes Frodo the equivalent of 30-something for a human, so an adult in his prime. On the other hand, Pippin is 29, so that makes him a teenager, the equivalent of 16 or 17 for a human.

I think one of the things I like best in the book is all the forests, and I suspect that was part of what made me fall into the story in the first place. The first time I read it, I was living in Germany, on the edge of the Odenwald, a major forest (and literally on the edge, as in on the other side of the fence from our yard) and we’d moved there from southwestern Oklahoma. Before that, we’d lived in West Texas. Neither of these places are known for their trees. Being in a real forest was absolutely magical to me, so all the forests in the book appealed to me. There was the forest in the Shire where Frodo and the gang ran into some elves and had a dinner party in a hall of trees. There was Tom Bombadil’s forest. There was Rivendell. And then Lothlorien. And Fangorn. I’ve decided I might be part Ent, one of the walking trees. I feel most alive in a forest. And yet somehow I ended up living in the plains …

Another interesting pacing thing is the way Tolkien handled multiple viewpoints with parallel storylines. Most books (and this was the way they handled it in the movies) use that to build suspense, ending on a cliffhanger from one storyline and moving to tell part of the story for another viewpoint, ending on a cliffhanger there and moving back, and so forth. But he tends to tell all of one story before going back to tell the other story, with time stamps to give a good idea of how the stories fit together. I wouldn’t recommend doing it this way in a current submission, but I think it works here, even though I entirely forgot where we left Frodo and Sam before we got the entire story of the battle and then returned to their storyline.

Apparently, Tolkien and C.S. Lewis disagreed about putting religion or religious allegory into fantasy fiction — though Lewis didn’t consider the Narnia books to be allegory. He considered Aslan to be the incarnation of Christ as it happened in that world, not a symbolic representation of Christ. But I found myself amused by how much Aragorn comes across as a Christ-type figure — he’s a prophesied king living a humble, nomadic life with his disciples (the Rangers). He has to walk the Path of the Dead where no man but he can go, and he brings out those who’ve already died, forgiving their sins and redeeming them for eternal rest. He won’t enter the city as king unless he’s invited. The people are looking for a great king, though there is a prophecy mentioning that he’ll have the hands of a healer, but he puts aside his kingly trappings after the battle to go about healing everyone and first enters the city as a healer rather than as a king. It may be that this isn’t meant as allegory but is more a case of Tolkien basing a character on someone he admired.

I can see why the movies skipped the Scouring of the Shire because it makes for weird pacing to have this big conflict after the climax. Including it would have made the end of The Return of the King drag on even more than it did. I suspect that bit is some historical allegory, the idea of returning from battle to find the world changed. Industrialization really ramped up during WWI, and Tolkien, who was rather anti-industrialization, must have been horrified to come back to England after the war and find the idyllic scenes of his youth corrupted with the smokestacks of factories. I saw a documentary on Amazon about the places that influenced Tolkien, and they mentioned some of the places he’d loved and the changed that had happened there.

Rereading this book has made me nostalgic for Old School fantasy, so I’ve found myself digging through my shelves and rereading books I read as a teen.