skygiants: Beatrice from Much Ado putting up her hand to stop Benedick talking (no more than reason)
My Yuletide recipient wrote me an absolutely phenomenal letter this year with like five different prompts that I wanted to fill, leaving me paralyzed with indecision ... I eventually decided that, in the spirit of Yuletide, I should try from the rarest fandom and work my way back to see what else I could manage to write, which is how I ended up inaugurating the tag for Caroline Stevermer's When The King Comes Home with the memory of paint, a story about Hail Rosamer and Ludovic Nallaneen and artistic semi-immortality.

And then I had to do some unexpected travel and got a little bit sick and thought perhaps I wouldn't have time or energy to write anything else, but fortunately the day before Christmas I got possessed by the muse and wrote A Midwinter Night's Folly; or, Laugh, Lie, Love, a Twelfth Night story about Sir Toby & the gang that is mostly just thirty dick jokes in a trenchcoat (though no one has yet caught my stealth Christmas pun, contributed by [personal profile] genarti.)

(As a side effect, I have now fully brainwashed myself into becoming a 'Sir Toby and Sir Andrew have absolutely banged' truther; if the 'accost, Sir Andrew, accost!' scene is not Toby optimistically angling for and completely failing to land a Toby/Andrew/Maria threesome then I don't know how else to explain it.)

I also jumped in to contribute a little bit to [personal profile] genarti's Operation Mincemeat Hester-focused epistolary pinch-hit, Moments in the Middle of the War, for which she has kindly given me co-author credit even though all I did was write 250 words of largely-redacted largely-nonsense letter. Anyway, the vast majority of it is her excellent work and well worth reading!
skygiants: Nellie Bly walking a tightrope among the stars (bravely trotted)
I am very glad Caroline Stevermer has a new book out and is Back on the Scene, but The Glass Magician feels like it's in a sort of weird place halfway between the kind of books I usually associate with Stevermer and the kind of books I associate with Current Marketable YA.

The premise: it's the Gilded Age, only the upper-crust are also magical shapeshifters, called Traders because they trade shapes with animals and also presumably because they have built vast robber baron merchant empires, although it's not entirely clear how these things are linked. Other people, called Sylvestri, have tree magic, and everyone else (Solitaires) has no magic and just goes about doing normal Gilded Age things. (The thing where every type of person has a Category that Starts with a Capital Letter is definitely one of those things I associate with Current Marketable YA.

Also, as a sidenote, Stevermer very assiduously introduces everyone by race and magical status -- 'a white Solitaire,' 'a black Trader,' etc. -- which, I do appreciate the earnest effort to make it clear that this is not an all-white cast, but because .a) she never references anything other than 'white' or 'black' and b.) there's no indication of how the entire separate magical caste system has affected nineteenth-century race relations and thus what race means in this context, it took me forever to figure out that was actually what she was doing and this wasn't some additional descripter to tag the type of magic. ANYWAY.)

Thalia, Our Heroine, is an orphan young stage magician who unfortunately has begun to suspect that she might also be a Trader, which would be deeply inconvenient for her career.

Other inconveniences to her career:
- the rival magician who has somehow managed to get a clause in his contract stating that anyone else who does the Bullet Trick in any major theaters of the syndicate is in breach-of-contract
- the manticores who wander the city attempting to drain the magic of inexperienced Traders
- the stage manager/mentor who is turning out to have Secrets
- the upper-class Trader potential love interest, Ryker, who wants to hire her to convince his headstrong teen sister Nell that she really doesn't want to become a stage magician, however much she might think he does

Okay, the upper-class Trader potential love interest is not actually an inconvenience to her career, but he is an inconvenience to me personally because he is such a Privileged Asshole YA Love Interest and I dislike him so much ... I deeply resented every second he was on the page. A pity, because I have in the past usually found Stevermer love interests charming!

Anyway, Stevermer is very good generally at fantasies of craft and I really wanted the book primarily to be about the conflict between Thalia's new magic and her career plans and stage magician-craft. And indeed, whenever the book is in fact about stage magician-craft, it's a lot of fun and I truly appreciate all the loving research that Stevermer has put into not just the techniques of the stage effects themselves, but also the practical and logistical and business elements of the stage magic community.

However, we don't get anywhere near as much of it as I would like; instead the book is primarily about her learning to tap into her new powers under Ryker and Nell's wing, and secondarily about attempting to resolve the issues with her stage manager while also solving a murder mystery, and not very much about Thalia's own dreams and drives at all. It feels like perhaps that part of Thalia's journey is intended for a second book?

In fact there's quite a lot that feels intended for a second book, as most of the major relationships are left somewhat unresolved and a bombshell reveal is dropped at the end that gives Thalia a clear Next Step to explore. I also kept expecting some kind of worldbuilding reveal that would at least a little critique the extremely rich Gilded Age Traders and their monopolies on powers and money markets, rather than representing them as pretty much uncomplicatedly aspirational, and this did not in any way happen ... but I would like to give Stevermer the benefit of the doubt on this and hope that she does intend to do so when she does the rest of the things that are not finished in this book. On the other hand, the book so far as I can tell is being marketed as a standalone, so who knows! I will for sure read a sequel if it happens, anyway; I really would like to give Stevermer the chance to sell me on this world and narrative even though this first book did not quite get me there.
skygiants: (wife of bath)
Is there a specific name for the subgenre of fantasy that's focused on craft or artisanship? Like, it's second world and there's magic but the protagonist is mostly interested in leveling up their art/music/blacksmithing/beekeeping? I'm thinking things like much of Robin McKinley's oeuvre, The Golden Key, The Stars Dispose, the Pern trilogy that's focused on Menolly ...

Anyway, if you have a name for this let me know, and if you have other examples also let me know because it's a genre I really enjoy, as I have been reminded by reading Caroline Stevermer's When The King Comes Home, which [personal profile] kate_nepveu was extremely correct to recommend to me an age and a day ago.

The protagonist: artist's apprentice Hail Rosamer, who has recently become obsessed with the work of Famous Historical Artist Maspero, who lived about two centuries prior and did a lot of work around the profile of Historically Good King Julian.

This means that when Hail stumbles over a distressed-looking hobo under a bridge with Good King Julian's exact profile, she knows exactly what to do.

HAIL: omg you're Good King Julian returned, just like in the stories! I recognized you from Maspero's art!
A MAN WITH GOOD KING JULIAN'S EXACT PROFILE: well, it's complicated, and there's an evil necromancer that -
HAIL: TELL ME ALL ABOUT MASPERO. 😍 WAS HE AMAZING. 😍 WHAT COLOR PALLETTES DID HE USE
A MAN WITH GOOD KING JULIAN'S EXACT PROFILE: ... you mean the Maspero who occasionally moonlighted as an artist?
HAIL: YES 😍
A MAN WITH GOOD KING JULIAN'S EXACT PROFILE: ..... I mean I can tell you he drank a lot and owed me money?
HAIL: OKAY BUT WHAT ABOUT HIS LINEWORK 😍

Obviously, the fact that a dead king has been brought back from the dead by an evil necromancer does in fact turn out to have sociopolitical implications in which Hail becomes inextricably involved ... mostly by trailing around on various efforts to stop the necromancer, attempting to engage anyone and everyone in conversation about Maspero and his artwork until they're all thoroughly sick of it. I love her? I love her. 3/4 of the way through the book she participates in some important art magic and also is forced to grudgingly admit that Maspero's color work may not have always been up to the highest standards.

I mean, don't get me wrong, the tone of the book is as much wistful melancholy as anything else -- the underlying themes are about death and the inevitability of loss and the myths we tell ourselves about the past -- but also, it is truly an enormous amount of fun to watch the entire plot unfold through the lens of a hyper-focused art student.

ExpandSome of my other favorite scenes are mid-book spoilers )
skygiants: the aunts from Pushing Daisies reading and sipping wine on a couch (wine and books)
To continue the trend of catch-up reviewing fluff I've read over the past month, the Cecelia and Kate novels recently came out in super-cheap omnibus edition, so I spent my work trip back in September rereading them for the first time in about 12 years.

For those unfamiliar, Sorcery and Cecelia: or, the Enchanted Chocolate Pot is basically the ur-example of the Regency fantasy genre recently taken up by such folks as Mary Robinette Kowal and Galen Beckett. It's an epistolary novel co-written by Patricia Wrede and Caroline Stevermer, featuring two sprightly young Regency cousins, one of whom (Kate) goes to London to have her Season with a melodramatic magician, while the other (Cecelia) stays home, starts picking up magic, and bickers with a cranky local squire. Kate and Cecelia write each other copious letters to complain about their respective love interests, gossip about their aunts and siblings, and exchange information regarding important magical conspiracies and also about important new dress patterns, and it's all incredibly charming.

Subsequently Wrede and Stevermer wrote two sequels, The Grand Tour and The Mislaid Magician, or: Ten Years After, which are still enjoyable but do not have the same spark. The Grand Tour is written as a combination of diary (Kate) and court deposition (Cecelia) about events that occurred on their honeymoon trip, which means, first of all, that the book feels sort of unbalanced, because Kate is going on and on in her diary about her magical new nights with her new husband while Cecelia is like OK PALS HERE'S THE FACTS; but also, second of all, neither format really works as well as epistolary for conveying either the voices of the characters or the dynamic between the cousins. Like, they spend all book in the same place, but they don't actually spend much time talking to each other. Which is sort of frustrating!

The Mislaid Magician is better, because it's back to epistolary, but it also incorporates letters from the respective husbands (James and Thomas) along with the ones between Kate and Cecelia, and -- well. Hmmm. You know, I used to like James and Thomas a lot? And it's not that I dislike them now, but all the things they sort of take for granted as Regency dudes grates on me much more now than it did when I was 18. They're not awful! They're perfectly fine! But Sorcery and Cecelia, both Kate and Cecelia spend a great deal of time challenging and deflating the assumptions and self-importance of their love interests, and once they're married -- especially with Thomas and Kate, of whose married relationship we see a great deal more -- it settles into much more of a Regency household status quo. Like, there's a sort of layer of paternalism, an assumption of the husband's rights to Forbid Things and Act Protectively that is of course thoroughly plausible, and it's probably likewise plausible that it wouldn't bother Kate. But it bothers me, a little, though not enough to ruin the books.
skygiants: Princess Tutu, facing darkness with a green light in the distance (elizabeth book)
I reread A College of Magics recently, which I loved all over again, although also I had forgotten how very weird it is, pacing-wise.

A reminder/recap: A College of Magics is the one about a young duchess from a Ruritanian country who gets shipped off to British magic college by her half-wicked uncle, and then brings her best and most extremely British school friend with her to deal with her complicated Ruritanian politics and also fix some magical danger while she's at it.

Last time I read the book I thought it was like a three-volume novel, with school as the volume and wacky road trip as the second and Ruritanian politics as the third; on a reread, though, it's almost more like a two-volume novel, with the college hijinks very strangely divorced from the rest of the story. Like, Faris makes a whole bunch of friends, and has some teacher-mentors, and does some schoolwork, and after the first hundred pages precisely NONE of this is relevant except for one single friendship. The meat of the book is Faris and her Best British Friend Jane and her Hot Competent Bodyguard Tyrion having a fairly epic trans-continental adventure.

And it is pretty epic! The pacing stuff is actually just a sidenote to what I really want to talk about, which is Expandspoilery )
skygiants: Princess Tutu, facing darkness with a green light in the distance (ooooh)
I think it was [personal profile] kate_nepveu who told me about the existence of Magic Below Stairs, a kid's novel set somewhere around the middle of Stevermer-and-Wrede's epistolary-Regencies-with-magic series.

This was another one of those "MOVING IS STRESSFUL, BRING UNTO ME THE FLUFF" books for me and for that it served its purpose very well! It is a very sweet kind of book aimed squarely at ten-year-olds; it has a plucky-and-conscientious orphan boy who goes into service, and a helpful supernatural creature, and the sort of mundane magic ("and now, mysteriously, I can tie a perfect cravat every time! WHAT WITCHERY IS THIS") and mild but big-for-a-ten-year-old moral dilemmas that you would expect. There are high stakes somewhere for somebody in there but they're sort of buried in among sweet and pleasant domesticity. I've seen comparisons to Diana Wynne Jones, but even the sweetest and most pleasant DWJ books have a definite and substantive bite to them that this does not, which is not to say that Sophie Hatter and Frederick would not have anything to talk about, because they would.

Basically you will probably know very well if and when you're in the right mood for this book. And it MAY WELL BE when you're trying to shove everything you own into a box and wishing you had a helpful supernatural critter to do it for you. I'm just saying.
skygiants: Princess Tutu, facing darkness with a green light in the distance (Default)
A Scholar of Magics is probably a more coherent book than A College of Magics, but it doesn't hit so many of my personal fictional buttons - there's not nearly as much ladyfriendship or dorky schoolgirl hijinks, the drama is not as dramatic, and it's a bit less full of ladies crankily and competently saving the day.

On the other hand, it does have cranky minor-character undergraduates accidentally saving the day while pursuing their professor to just GRADE THEIR PAPERS ALREADY, THEY NEED THEIR GPA, which is almost as good!

Also it has the fabulous Jane coolly being fabulous as she relentlessly mocks the all-boy's British magical college to which she has come On A Mission From Faris, and a new awesome character in Sam Lambert, who is basically the most adorable gun-toting rugged Wild West cowboy ever to appear in a work of fiction. Sam's an obviously incongruous figure in this book, a sharpshooter who's been hired by aforementioned very upper-crust British magical college to help them with developing a Mysterious Weapon by demonstrating his Sharpshooting Skills, and - okay, one of the romances of the story is Jane/Sam and it's extremely cute, but the other main romance of the story, and arguably the more important one, is Sam/University. Sam just wants to broaden his horizons, guys! He loves books and has a secret fondness for the opera, and he enjoys telling very straight-faced tall tales with absolutely zero swagger, and people are constantly patting him on the hand and telling him he's a lamb and he is like "a lamb? really? D:" and I laughed every time. Basically he is a sweetheart, and, okay, I apologize to half my flist here, but I sort of sympathized with his quiet despair at the inevitability of always, always being offered another cup of tea.

So I did love Sam, and I did also love Sam and Jane - Caroline Stevermer is an author who is really good at showing the way that long road trips wear on people, by the way; a romance that survives six cranky, sulky hours in the car with inadequate directions is a romance that may indeed last! - but all the same I missed Faris, and the mixture of quiet good sense and WILD RURITANIAN MELODRAMA that characterized the end of the last book.

I also now desperately want a crossover with the Chrestomanci books. I mean - Jane and Christopher. Jane and MILLIE. It would be glorious!
skygiants: Princess Tutu, facing darkness with a green light in the distance (royaume inconnu)
I spent many years inexplicably convinced that I had read Caroline Stevermer's A College of Magics as a kid and hadn't much liked it, which explains why it actually took me so long to get around to reading it despite the fact that it is relevant to my interests in a number of ways. Comedy of manners, awesome ladies with an extravance of style, gentle mockery of the Ruritanian romance - and let's face it, the entire thing would have been worth it solely for the passage where Jane solemnly excuses her presence in the plot by explaining the inexplicable English passion for rushing off places to restore long-lost kings while on holiday.

- but that does not do much to describe the actual plot, so okay. The title is actually kind of misleading; it takes the form of a three-volume novel (another bit of gentle mockery), and the bits are actually somewhat disconnected in tone.

Part the First: Our Heroine, Faris, who will be the duchess of a small European country once she come of age, gets sent off to school by her Wicked Guardian Uncle. There she Makes School Chums And Rivals, Gets Into Scrapes, Fails to Attend Class, Reads Three-Volume Novels, and sort of possibly maybe hints at the potential of learning magic. This is a fairly classic fantasy girl's college novel in short form and reminded me quite a bit in places of Pamela Dean's Tam Lin.

Part the Second: Victorian road trip adventures! Faris, her extremely awesome school bff Jane (now graduated and a full-fledged magician-professor who is fully capable of not only transforming a bomb into a hat, but making sure it is a very stylish hat while she's at it), Hot Valet-Bodyguard 1 (Tyrian, notable mostly for extreme quiet competence at everything, such as pouring tea and picking locks) and Hot Valet-Bodyguard 2 (Reed, who fills the function of being The Sane One) jaunt around Europe avoiding assassins and complaining about terrible carriage rides. Faris also discovers a Destiny. Tyrian gets sulky because Faris saved his life, but every time he tries to save hers someone else gets there first. Jane goes shopping and continues to be extremely awesome.

Part the Third: RURITANIAN ROMANCE. Faris gets home to her duchy and all of a sudden everything gets significantly more dramatic. All the political schemes come to a head; there are kidnappings and doomed romances and revolutionary plots and dramatic magical disguises and Great Sacrifices. Also, lions. I will admit I found myself somewhat startled by just how dramatic/bittersweet the ending was, because my brain kept persisting in reading the whole thing as light and clever comedy of manners even though it patently was not that anymore.

If I remember rightly there is a sequel that centers on Jane! I AM EXCITED FOR THIS. Has anyone read it?

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skygiants: Princess Tutu, facing darkness with a green light in the distance (Default)
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