skygiants | (no subject)

When I was young I was formatively influenced by a portal fantasy trilogy by Nick O'Donohoe in which vet students go patch up unicorns and griffins. However, my personal copies disappeared mysteriously sometime in the two thousands. For years I have been scouring libraries and used bookstores, but the only one I could find was the third book in the trilogy. This did me absolutely no good if I wanted to embark on a complete reread, which I absolutely wanted to do (especially after

rachelmanija's recent reread.)

However! As of my recent trip to Powell's in Portland, I finally hit the jackpot! So I've just reread the first one, The Magic And the Healing, and will be progressing on accordingly.

The heroine of the The Magic and the Healing is West Virginia vet student BJ Vaughan, who is on the verge of failing out of med school because she's just learned that she has a strong genetic risk factor for Huntington's chorea and is, as a result, incredibly depressed.

Before she can drop out of school, however, she is invited on a mysterious special rotation with Cool Professor Sugar Dobbs, who dumps a unicorn horn and some mythological material in her lap and tells her to be ready to present next week. Shortly thereafter, BJ and her classmates are making regular trips back and forth to the land of Crossroads, where Magic Is Real but Centaurs Still Might Need Prenatal Care.

Other vet students include:

Lee Ann, the extremely Southern one
Annie, the extremely Christian one
Dave, the extremely bro-y one (I feel like there's maybe a rule that all portal fantasies featuring several university students need to include one bro-y guy named Dave)
Laurie, the cool cynical older one who is not actually in the rotation, appears for literally one scene early on in the book, and towards the end is suddenly revealed to have been having a star-crossed love affair with a griffin the entire time! Mercedes Lackey, eat your heart out!
DeeDee, the sugary-sweet one who is also not actually in the rotation, appears for all of two scenes early on in the book, and towards the end is suddenly revealed to have been helping the Big Bad steal morphine from the lab for the purpose of creating a drug-addicted werewolf army, for absolutely no reason that I can remember; I don't actually think DeeDee's motivations are ever explained! LET ALONE how she knew about Crossroads to begin with! I'm not really mad about this, I find it kind of hilariously emblematic of Nick O'Donohue's approach to portal fantasy stuff -- like, stuff and people are going back and forth between Crossroads and West Virginia all the damn time, and our heroes are trying so hard to stealthily sneak griffins in for surgery or whatever, and then it turns out basically EVERYONE RANDOM SIDE CHARACTER IN THE BOOK already knows that there's a magical land just down the road anyway! How? SOMEHOW. The faun waitress goes to our local church every Sunday, it's fine.

So, A-plot is BJ discovering magical wonders while also dealing with depression, suicidal ideation, and the possibility of having an incurable, eventually fatal genetic disease; and then the B-plot is a jaunty story about our ragtag band of vet students jaunting between Crossroads and West Virginia, bonding with the locals and each other, and flailing about how to apply their current real-world veterinary knowledge to mythological species.

And then there is a C-plot about an invading army that wants to come to Crossroads and murder everybody in its path, but it's almost hilariously irrelevant for most of the book until you get to the end and suddenly our ragtag band of vet students have to join in pitched! battle!! for the survival of Crossroads!!! right before they all graduate and go off to join local vet practices. Like honestly you could probably just skip the occasional chapters where the king of Crossroads goes undercover in the evil army and you would not be missing a thing, nobody cares about this, get us back to the logistical challenges of getting the appropriate blood type for griffin blood transfusions already!

Anyway, spoiler alert, Crossroads is saved and BJ doesn't die. My memory of the next two books in these series is that stuff keeps on happening A LOT; I don't remember just about anything that happens in the second one, but the third one is burned into my memory for what remains (to me) one of the most bizarre romantic plot twists of all time. I'm looking forward to the experience!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Wow! This sounds like something I would love to read, if it were findable.

To be fair I think it's pretty findable via Amazon, I was just stubbornly and crankily refusing to order it because I hate buying things over mail except as an ABSOLUTE LAST RESORT. I wanted serendipity! And eventually my patience was rewarded. :D

I look forward to your review of book two, which I found awesomely depressing.

I have no idea what Dee's motivations were, come to think of it, or how the hell Morgan found her/she found Morgan. I think Dee was addicted to morphine herself but I don't know why she was stealing it for Morgan. The obvious reason is that Morgan was paying her (in gold?) but I don't think this is ever actually stated.

Laurie is a student? For some reason I thought she was a young professor. Or something.

I thought DeeDee wasn't actually addicted to morphine herself in book 1, but that part of the punishment the Crossroads people concocted for her was shooting her up with morphine and shoving her into the arms of the law so it looked like she was addicted and stealing for herself? Which still doesn't explain how she met Morgan or why she was like "sure, I will risk getting myself kicked out of vet school to steal supplies for you!"

I was always sort of confused about Laurie's status, but actually, maybe you're right and she's somewhere in between a student and a professor? She definitely was a student not long ago, because I'm pretty sure she commiserates with BJ about classes, but she might be a resident or an assistant professor or something at the time the story begins. IT'S ALL VERY UNCLEAR.

Oh, yeah, you're right. Well, now I really have no idea. I'm going to go with money. Lots of money. I guess Morgan just wanted to drug-addict her wolfsoldiers so she sent someone out to find a vet student with no morals? It's not like Crossroads is that hard to get in and out of. Everyone says it is, but people are coming and going left and right.

Having read more of book 2 last night, I can now confirm that Laurie is a former student who is now an anesthesiologist at the vet school lab. ONE MYSTERY SOLVED. How she found Crossroads/met a griffin/started dating a griffin is still unclear but, as you say, apparently it happens to basically everyone at that school at some point or another. Maybe it has to do with the fact that the secret book of secret roads to get into fantasyland was never restricted-access.

(....and also the local librarian has some sort of objection of principle to making it restricted-access, like this is never a thing that libraries do, which is SO WEIRD to me -- like, obviously librarians are pro open access on the whole, but it's not like the concept of restricted access is a completely foreign one! WE DO IT LITERALLY ALL THE TIME.)

There is a small but nonzero possibility that those used to be my copies of that trilogy, unwisely culled some while back. (I still own, however, a copy of O'Donohoe's other even weirder book, Too Too Solid Flesh ....the Asinovian-android-actor murder mystery set in a production of Hamlet.)

It's ENTIRELY possible, especially if you donated them in between February 2015 and now, because they definitely weren't there in February '15 when last I looked!

(I have never read the android-actor-murder-mystery Hamlet one BUT I WANT TO VERY MUCH. I'll find it someday!)

I thought that one was really good. It has some gender issues, but as a work of literature, it's very successful. Very intense, dark atmosphere, but consistent and not in a accidentally hilariously OTT way.

I have that one! I would give it to you! I am not actually sure how to, from state A, extract it from my parents' house in state B, and convey it to you in state C. bother.

This seems like a complex series of operations. Maybe just keep it in mind if you ever end up back in State C for unrelated reasons? >.> (Which I hope you do anyway as it would be nice to see you!)

I will retrieve it from my parents' house next time I visit them, and hang onto it for the next time I come through state C! It would be lovely to see you, and hopefully next time I will not be quite so tired and preoccupied as the last time (hope springs eternal).

(it would indeed be lovely to see you! At some point I will circle back through state C and I will collect the book from my parents' house next time I am there; inevitably, I will forget to bring it with me to state C, but then I will have another excuse to try again.)

The first one in the series may have been mine because I know I purged mine around then and sent a bunch of books off to Powell's.

When I was young I was formatively influenced by a portal fantasy trilogy by Nick O'Donohoe in which vet students go patch up unicorns and griffins.

I still haven't managed to read the third book (or re-read the first two) since

rachelmanija's review, but every time I think about this series, it feels more and more like two diametrically opposing kinds of idfic stuck inside the same covers.

I am now nearly done the second book and there is literally and hilariously a dividing line -- PART ONE is all vet-related baby werewolf frolicking and PART TWO is suddenly "AND NOW EVERYTHING IS AWFUL!!!!"