(no subject)

[skygiants]

fahye recommended me Catherine Jinks' Pagan books a while back, and, as I have now read Pagan's Crusade and Pagan in Exile and am planning on acquiring the rest, I think it is safe to say that I liked them!

Pagan is the irreverent, pragmatic squire of a Heroic Templar Knight, and a lot of the fun of the books comes from his first-person narrative - the writing and voice actually remind me a fair bit of L.A. Meyers' Jacky books (and in my secret heart I want a crossover EVEN THOUGH Pagan and Jacky are separated by around six hundred years of history. What logistics? Maybe there can be TARDIS adventures!). The other driving force of the books is the Odd Couple partnership between Pagan and his master Lord Roland, who is pure-hearted, devout, Extremely Heroic (I said this already but it bears repeating), etc. etc. and prone to going into fits of disbelief and despair when confronted with the Evil of the World, which is when he needs Pagan to kick him out of it. I do wish we got a few more recurring sympathetic characters; the focus is very often on Pagan And Roland Against The World, and you all know my thing for ensemble. On the other hand, I also have a thing for snarky sidekicks, so it mostly balances out!

Also, the author is actually really good about portraying all the twisty politics of the era; even though our protagonists are obviously on the side of a Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem, the text makes it pretty clear that it's a lot more complicated than that. And I really like how explicit she makes Pagan's alienation in the second book, when he follows Roland to Norman France - Pagan is half-Arabic, and not only looks different from everyone else, but is used to a very different culture and (higher) standard of living than the ones common in Europe at the time.

(Also, unspoilery, but: the second book contains some truly beautiful moments of AWKWARD.)

Comments

[fahye.livejournal.com]

YAY, you found them! I can tell you that the third book has more sympathetic characters (though interestingly, it takes a while for them to appear so, because everything is Pagan's POV and he is just so USED to everyone around him being an enemy) and the fourth & fifth books introduce entirely new protagonists.

[skygiants]

I did! The New York Public Library continues to be my dear, dear friend in this regard. :D And oh, hey, sympathetic characters who are not Tragically Doomed Love Interests, I am kind of excited for that! And curious to see how Pagan looks through someone else's POV. Also I think I vaguely remember reading something in one of your and Ashie's comment-threads on the books about Jordan popping back up? Which I am curious about too!

(Also, completely unrelatedly: I don't remember how you came up in this email discussion Gen and I were having about Return to the Secret Garden, but Gen said: But Fahye would totally write the grown-up version of this childhood classic, in which there is a triad of skewed and ambiguous codependence and Colin's health issues are an excuse for lots of medical terminology used in symbolic description of the angles of wrists and of power dynamics. And I feel the need to share with you. *laughing*)

[fahye.livejournal.com]

You will like Isidore, the protagonist of the fourth book. He is very unPaganish, but ADORABLE. And yeah, Jordan pops up in that same book, in the most awesome possible manner.

(*GRINS* One day someone will bet me money to write a fic not involving power dynamics or angles of wrists, and I will fail miserably. It is highly likely that I would write that fic, and I suspect I only haven't because other people have (http://lassiterfics.livejournal.com/77656.html#cutid2).)

[skygiants]

Yay! Jordan intrigues me - I was worried at first he was going to be That Creepy Evil Stereotype, you know, but I think she manages to keep him on the other side of that line and in 'complex and interesting and kind of cool' territory. And I want to see what he's like away from the rest of the Unilaterally Horrible Family.

(Ummmm. I am sure I have read Larklight fic-snippets of yours that did not involve angles of wrists! *giggling* Of course that might be because they were not long enough, given a few extra pages they would probably have snuck back in.

- also, man, awesome! I am very wary of SG threesome-fics over all unless they are very very well-done, which your hypothetical fic obviously would b,e but that one is very very well-done. :O)

[ashen_key]

Oh, Jordan. I kinda love Jordan. And in the fourth book, he is just...all kinds of interesting.

[skygiants]

What's that you say, Ashie? You love the morally ambiguous one with brother issues? This right now, this is my SHOCKED FACE. *very solemn*

[ashen_key]

:P!