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May. 3rd, 2010 12:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsFirst things first: I woke up yesterday morning to the BEST SURPRISE EVER, which is that someone had come along and illustrated my most recent fic! Look look look! (Seriously, every time I look at Selim's TINY ANGRY FACE I start cracking up all over again.) You all should go here and tell ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
he03 how awesome she is; as a bonus there are hilarious King Bradley/Mrs. Bradley comics! (HIS TINY FACE.)
Aaaaand now back to our regularly scheduled booklogging, which in this case is our regularly scheduled fangirling of Laurence Yep. City of Fire is the start of a new Laurence Yep fantasy trilogy, in which Laurence Yep was clearly just like "I am going to write about EVERYTHING I THINK IS AWESOME." It is totally the everything-and-the-kitchen sink approach to worldbuilding; the main characters include:
1. A diplomat's daughter/semi-princess from the Kushan Empire (which in this AU has survived into the 1940s) whose dream is to join her big sister in the Elite Amazon Warrior Guard
2. Her tiny griffin friend, who seems to be a cross between a Companion and Zazu
3. Two streetwise San Francisco orphans with ~secret identities~ (one of them involves dramatic and tragic reincarnation backstory; the other one involves WEREBADGERS)
4. A DRAGON ASSASSIN who spends most of her time disguised as a Pinkerton agent
5. The Hawaiian goddess Pele. (Why, you might ask? Laurence Yep's answer, clearly: WHY NOT.)
The plot: our Ragtag Band of Misfits weathers an attack from the evil industrilists who are stealing priceless artifacts from a museum, chase the evildoers to Hawaii, hook up with Pele, and encounter five million more mythological creatures (Kappas! Norse fire giants! Hired goons who are walking sharks!) There is also lots of dramatic surfing. I have to admit, I kind of love Laurence Yep's gleefully all-encompassing approach to stealing bits of mythology in this book; you can't accuse him of privileging any one mythos over another, because basically he's just throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks. All the actual emotional development kind of seems shoehorned in in the shuffle (oh wait, is this character supposed to be grieving for a suddenly dead mentor figure? Okay, obligatory grief-check, can we get back to the DRAGON SURFING now?) but I don't even care; Laurence Yep is clearly having way too much fun with it, and so was I.
he03 how awesome she is; as a bonus there are hilarious King Bradley/Mrs. Bradley comics! (HIS TINY FACE.)Aaaaand now back to our regularly scheduled booklogging, which in this case is our regularly scheduled fangirling of Laurence Yep. City of Fire is the start of a new Laurence Yep fantasy trilogy, in which Laurence Yep was clearly just like "I am going to write about EVERYTHING I THINK IS AWESOME." It is totally the everything-and-the-kitchen sink approach to worldbuilding; the main characters include:
1. A diplomat's daughter/semi-princess from the Kushan Empire (which in this AU has survived into the 1940s) whose dream is to join her big sister in the Elite Amazon Warrior Guard
2. Her tiny griffin friend, who seems to be a cross between a Companion and Zazu
3. Two streetwise San Francisco orphans with ~secret identities~ (one of them involves dramatic and tragic reincarnation backstory; the other one involves WEREBADGERS)
4. A DRAGON ASSASSIN who spends most of her time disguised as a Pinkerton agent
5. The Hawaiian goddess Pele. (Why, you might ask? Laurence Yep's answer, clearly: WHY NOT.)
The plot: our Ragtag Band of Misfits weathers an attack from the evil industrilists who are stealing priceless artifacts from a museum, chase the evildoers to Hawaii, hook up with Pele, and encounter five million more mythological creatures (Kappas! Norse fire giants! Hired goons who are walking sharks!) There is also lots of dramatic surfing. I have to admit, I kind of love Laurence Yep's gleefully all-encompassing approach to stealing bits of mythology in this book; you can't accuse him of privileging any one mythos over another, because basically he's just throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks. All the actual emotional development kind of seems shoehorned in in the shuffle (oh wait, is this character supposed to be grieving for a suddenly dead mentor figure? Okay, obligatory grief-check, can we get back to the DRAGON SURFING now?) but I don't even care; Laurence Yep is clearly having way too much fun with it, and so was I.
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