Spring Is In the Air

 We're in that short window of time when things in my yard are actually blooming.

The dogwood and the azaleas around the front oak tree are actually slightly past their peak, though the azaleas next to the house are just getting started. In the shade garden by my side door, the lungwort is still looking good, as is my little Amethyst Ice primrose. There are lily of the valley blooming by the side of the house (although they're supposed to be naturalizing and the only place they seem to want to spread is into the driveway); we'll see if they last 'til May Day. Most of my irises are showing color at the tops of their buds, and they don't seem to be bothered by the current cold-dipping-toward-frost snap. Dracula's Kiss has bloomed.

I'm still reading A Conjuring of Assassins; the only art I've done today is to watch the April lagniappe for Let's Make Art journaling. It's Earth Day, though, so I think a post that's basically just yard pictures counts as appropriate and not slacking. 

Chimera Book Two

An Illusion of Thieves wrapped up well, with an ending that would be in acceptable but that fully set up there is more to come. (I suppose I'll avoid spoilers for that last chapter.) In fact, Glass' author bio at the end of the novel does a good job of characterizing the series; Glass, it says, is "a writer of fantasy adventure novels" who "also dabble from time to time in epic fantasy." Indeed, while some of the set-up hinted at in Thieves, especially about the history of the gods and magic, suggested a series that is headed to epic places, the last chapter suggested instead a new caper or adventure--a "next mission" approach rather than a "continuing to develop this story." There's a parallel with TV series that episodic versus serialized. The "next adventure" model leans episodic, but as we know from TV, there's a large ground of semi-serialized, "have your cake and eat it, too" territory. From the opening of A Conjuring of Assassins, Book Two in the Chimera series seems to fall squarely in this semi-serialized bucket. Romy and her accomplishes have accepted the new mission revealed at the end of Thieves, but Romy has also already had a troubling dream that suggests some epic secrets about the origins of magic will be revealed.

Placidio is looking pretty good on that cover. I'm about a quarter into Conjuring, and it's been pretty eventful. I'm not sorry this is a somewhat slower read than my recent batch of romances. I don't need to be reading a book every night. Maybe the Chimera trilogy will even last me through the weekend!

Every so often I'll Google (OK, or Amazon search) an author I haven't read anything from in a while, just to check that I haven't missed any new released, or sometimes to let the Algorithm suggest something with a similar mood to me. Not long ago, I searched for Carol Berg and was surprised to see a YA-ish trilogy by Cate Glass cropping up in the results. It turns out Glass is a pen name for Berg, and An Illusion of Thieves, published by Tor, is the first of her new Chimera trilogy. Like other Berg books, the setting is rich (Renaissance-Italy-inspired but with a backdrop of forbidden magic and a historic natural disaster that turned the boot into an archipelago) and you get a real sense of milieu. I'd say the pace is a bit quicker than typical Berg, and the protagonist seems perhaps a bit more worldly. Her situation changes dramatically in the opening scenes, and the book follows her re-establishing herself, then getting drawn into a high-stakes caper. I'm looking forward to seeing how this all turns out, but I'm even more curious about what might come in the sequels--inter-city warfare? religious revival? an artifact-hunting expedition? I'll find out soon. 

The Mermaid, The Witch, & The Sea

Random but notable: It hailed this morning. Emphatically. Hail the size of hominy (smallish hominy, but still).

Relevant to book blogging: The Mermaid, The Witch, And The Sea by Maggie Tokuda-Hall is an enjoyable YA fantasy (with another very lovely cover, this one illustrated by Victo Ngai). It's set in a world ruled by the expanding Nipran Empire (apparently mostly modeled on historical Japan, although there are some elements that suggest Britain's colonial history). Evelyn Hasegawa is the daughter of noble but indebted parents who learns she has been promised in marriage to an Imperial officer and will be a "coffin girl," sent overseas to a colony with her possessions packed in her own coffin. Flora, or Florian, is a reluctant pirate on the Dove, which books passengers in port only to turn slaver at sea. The first part of the book does a good job of establishing Evelyn and Florian as characters and building their relationship, with Evelyn unaware  of the danger she's in. After Flora and Evelyn escape the Dove, the change of setting and storyline at first seems abrupt, but the pieces start to come together as the two learn more about themselves and about those left behind on the Dove. Parts of the final two sections seem rushed, but there is plenty of action and adventure. The book has a unique take on mermaids, and the role of the Sea is well handled.

Hear Me Roar

OK, still not feeling like a long blog post--though the Bromance books are fun and deserve a write-up (I finished the third, Crazy Stupid Bromance today). Instead, I thought I'd mention something else I've been reading this weekend (besides romance novels and magazines): the guidebook for artist M.J. Cullinane's ROAR oracle card deck. I bought the deck primarily for the art. ROAR is filled with portraits of notable woman--I'm not adding photos here for copyright reasons, but if you're reading this, you should definitely check out the art on Cullinane's website, because it is beautiful. (I don't know exactly how she creates the images, many of them based on photos--digital collage?)

There are familiar figures who drew me to the deck--including authors such as Octavia Butler, Maya Angelou, and Mary Shelley. There's a strong representation of women associated with New Age and spiritualist movements, including Pamela Colman Smith, who I learned just this year was the illustrator and co-designer of the "Rider-Waite" (now often known as "Smith-Waite." or "Waite-Smith" or "Rider-Waite-Smith") tarot deck. Perhaps most intriguing to me are the figures who are new or virtually new to me, like Wild West mail carrier "Stagecoach" Mary Fields; Maud Wagner, first known female tattoist in the U.S.; and Ida Lewis, lighthouse keeper known for her lifesaving rescues (she now has a U.S. Coast Guard cutter for a namesake). 

Saturday Night Post

Oh, I'm really not in the blogging mood. I'm not necessarily in an anti-blogging mood, though, so it'd be a shame to break my streak. I'm reading the third of a fresh series of romances, which I'll probably write about tomorrow or later next week. My other main reading today was periodicals, including flipping through the latest Eating Well, which apparently ate Cooking Light about a year ago. I'm not wild about the switch (the paper quality has gone done, for instance), although it hasn't been as bad as I feared. This issue isn't packed with too many recipes I'd like to try, although there's an interesting article on ethically sourced spices from Vietnam that includes an intriguing pork satay recipe as well as a roasted potato recipe that looks a little involved (it's basically a much more complicated version of a shake-n-bake) but still yummy. 

Spoiler Alert

I had actually started a novella but just wasn't gelling with its mood, so I started Spoiler Alert. I think this had probably come up in my recommendations before, but I was spurred to order it in part by a positive review from K.J. Dell'Antonia, author of The Chicken Sisters. Spoiler Alert by Olivia Dade is a fangirl romance, much in the spirit of Rainbow Rowell's Fangirl or Conventionally Yours, another recent read. Spoiler Alert is perhaps an even more literal fan fantasy, since it includes a celebrity romance--the female protagonist, April, is a fanfic writer and shipper of Lavinia and Aeneas from vaguely classically inspired cable fantasy megahit Gods of the Gates, which just finished filming its final season. When she posts a cosplay picture on Twitter and receives some online harassment for daring to post a plus-size photo, she's contacted by the show's Aeneas, who asks her out to dinner. But is it all just a PR stunt?

The most fun of this book is the not-so-thinly-veiled snark directed toward Game of Thrones and its final seasons. Finding the parallels between Gods and Game is amusing; the male protagonist, Marcus Caster-Rupp, is clearly a Nikolaj Coster-Waldau type. Well, who can blame April or Olivia there? (By the middle of the book, we're starting to see potential pairings among Marcus' former castmates, so Dade is clearly planning a series.) There's more fun from the fanfic snippets interspersed between chapters, as well as occasional script segments from Marcus' previous, not-exactly-A-list roles (the chef in love with his "sweet spicy sous chef"; the ineffectual scientist in Sharkphoon; the eponymous sea creature in Manmaid). 

Another winning feature of Spoiler Alert is that both parties have interesting conflicts and back stories--there's drama among Marcus' caste mates as he vacillates over what to do next and whether to drop his pretty-but-dumb media person. April's a geologist and amateur costume designer, nervous about showing her true self to the fan community, and hurt by the sudden absence of her best fandom friend and beta reader. Both have deep unresolved conflicts with their parents (and, given the characters are in their late 30s, this felt both cringeworthy and satisfying). Because there are so many threads and we see both April's and Marcus' point of view, the action of the book is face-paced, leading up to a finale at the big Convention that's definitely worth the price of admission.