The Princess and the Hound, Mette Ivie Harrison (365 Books, Day 137)

Via janni.

A YA fantasy romance which reminds me both of Shannon Hale (note: not a positive association for me) and early Robin McKinley (note: very positive association for me).

George is the prince of a kingdom in which animal magic-- the ability to communicate with, and sometimes turn oneself into, wild animals-- is punishable by death. Naturally, he has inherited animal magic from his mother, and has to hide it at all costs. He doesn't even have the ability to take comfort from household animals, because animals who live too much with humans lose their own languages and cannot be spoken to.

Since he's perpetually hiding huge chunks of himself and can't get close to anybody, George hopes for civility and nothing more out of his arranged marriage, with the princess, Beatrice, of a neighboring kingdom. Beatrice, however, though she doesn't have the magic, is inseparable from her gigantic hound-- and just as miserable as George is.

You might think, from this description, that this is something of a typical-nowadays YA angst-fest. ... yeah, kind of. But it's quite well done; the reason it reminds me of McKinley is its portrayal of people who have complimentary damage that nonetheless does not make them easy with each other. I approve of books in which even the relationships that are obviously going to work out do not settle down into being simple and straightforward. And it's reasonably well-plotted, in ways which I'm not going to go into, because while I did not find them surprising, I am incredibly difficult to surprise. As in, I think one book has managed it this year. This is probably a book with good plot twists for people who are not perpetually internally trying to hack the plot of all books in advance, but that's a thing about myself I can't actually turn off.

So I'm not saying this is spectacular-- I have about had it up to here with the standard European-cod-medieval fantasy-country setting in which everyone is white and straight and somehow has reasonable teeth-- but it is so much better than it needed to be, and its characters are genuinely good, its darkness dark, its bits of light well-worked for. I will probably read the sequels.

The Princess and the Hound, Mette Ivie Harrison (365 Books, Day 137)

Via janni.

A YA fantasy romance which reminds me both of Shannon Hale (note: not a positive association for me) and early Robin McKinley (note: very positive association for me).

George is the prince of a kingdom in which animal magic-- the ability to communicate with, and sometimes turn oneself into, wild animals-- is punishable by death. Naturally, he has inherited animal magic from his mother, and has to hide it at all costs. He doesn't even have the ability to take comfort from household animals, because animals who live too much with humans lose their own languages and cannot be spoken to.

Since he's perpetually hiding huge chunks of himself and can't get close to anybody, George hopes for civility and nothing more out of his arranged marriage, with the princess, Beatrice, of a neighboring kingdom. Beatrice, however, though she doesn't have the magic, is inseparable from her gigantic hound-- and just as miserable as George is.

You might think, from this description, that this is something of a typical-nowadays YA angst-fest. ... yeah, kind of. But it's quite well done; the reason it reminds me of McKinley is its portrayal of people who have complimentary damage that nonetheless does not make them easy with each other. I approve of books in which even the relationships that are obviously going to work out do not settle down into being simple and straightforward. And it's reasonably well-plotted, in ways which I'm not going to go into, because while I did not find them surprising, I am incredibly difficult to surprise. As in, I think one book has managed it this year. This is probably a book with good plot twists for people who are not perpetually internally trying to hack the plot of all books in advance, but that's a thing about myself I can't actually turn off.

So I'm not saying this is spectacular-- I have about had it up to here with the standard European-cod-medieval fantasy-country setting in which everyone is white and straight and somehow has reasonable teeth-- but it is so much better than it needed to be, and its characters are genuinely good, its darkness dark, its bits of light well-worked for. I will probably read the sequels.

You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there.

a question and another thing

A question: D.C. and Northern VA types, do you know whereabouts I might be able to purchase Special Effects Blue Velvet hair dye? Illness and brain-fog have destroyed my Google-fu, and my hair is decidedly fading and now very much in the purple phase, from which it will proceed to look terrible. Bonus points if the place also sells bleach, but my roots can probably go a bit longer than the rest of it. Other brands considered but very much not ideal, and that Hot Topic house brand is terrible.

An unrelated other thing, which I considered putting under friendslock and then decided not to:

so I've been direly ill with the Sinus Infection That Will Not Die since the middle of October, and it has been and is drastically awful. And one of the awful things about it has been having much less energy than usual (and I am not ordinarily a person with huge reservoirs of energy) and therefore I have not been able to do a lot of the things I usually do. My novel, for example, is lying fallow. And today I was sitting about being depressed about the lack of motion on the novel and the way I have been unable to get the chutzpah to query about the short story that is sitting at a market and has been forever and the way I can't get the brain to revise the other short story or finish the other other one and I didn't even have the energy for Yuletide and what the hell kind of writer am I anyway?

... and then, because it was not a mentally rhetorical question, the answer came back: a working writer. I have written anything between a couple of hundred and a couple of thousand words, and released them to the public, every day for the last one hundred and thirty-seven days. And I have spent anything from half an hour to eight hours in associated reading every day of that. How is that not being a working writer?

And then my brain said, it does not count, because a lot of the time it is really easy. Granted, with the sinus thing sometimes it has felt like removing the words from my brain with a putty knife, but still. Reading is not hard, book reviews take thought but they are not incredibly difficult for me usually. And then I said back to my brain, look, just because it is easy sometimes does not mean it isn't real work. Just because I do it every day and it has become a habit doesn't mean it's not real work. I care about it and I put thought into it and I worry about the quality of the results. It must be real work.

If anyone catches me claiming I'm not doing enough writing work between now and August 30th, 2011, you have my permission to give me a good swift kick in the pants. Because it is patently silly of me.

And the reason I thought I'd leave this unlocked is that I, at least, sometimes need the reminder that the things I do every day sometimes count as actual possibly-useful-to-someone work that not everybody could or would do, and so other people probably need that reminder too, on occasion. Consider yourselves reminded. It's probably real work.

a question and another thing

A question: D.C. and Northern VA types, do you know whereabouts I might be able to purchase Special Effects Blue Velvet hair dye? Illness and brain-fog have destroyed my Google-fu, and my hair is decidedly fading and now very much in the purple phase, from which it will proceed to look terrible. Bonus points if the place also sells bleach, but my roots can probably go a bit longer than the rest of it. Other brands considered but very much not ideal, and that Hot Topic house brand is terrible.

An unrelated other thing, which I considered putting under friendslock and then decided not to:

so I've been direly ill with the Sinus Infection That Will Not Die since the middle of October, and it has been and is drastically awful. And one of the awful things about it has been having much less energy than usual (and I am not ordinarily a person with huge reservoirs of energy) and therefore I have not been able to do a lot of the things I usually do. My novel, for example, is lying fallow. And today I was sitting about being depressed about the lack of motion on the novel and the way I have been unable to get the chutzpah to query about the short story that is sitting at a market and has been forever and the way I can't get the brain to revise the other short story or finish the other other one and I didn't even have the energy for Yuletide and what the hell kind of writer am I anyway?

... and then, because it was not a mentally rhetorical question, the answer came back: a working writer. I have written anything between a couple of hundred and a couple of thousand words, and released them to the public, every day for the last one hundred and thirty-seven days. And I have spent anything from half an hour to eight hours in associated reading every day of that. How is that not being a working writer?

And then my brain said, it does not count, because a lot of the time it is really easy. Granted, with the sinus thing sometimes it has felt like removing the words from my brain with a putty knife, but still. Reading is not hard, book reviews take thought but they are not incredibly difficult for me usually. And then I said back to my brain, look, just because it is easy sometimes does not mean it isn't real work. Just because I do it every day and it has become a habit doesn't mean it's not real work. I care about it and I put thought into it and I worry about the quality of the results. It must be real work.

If anyone catches me claiming I'm not doing enough writing work between now and August 30th, 2011, you have my permission to give me a good swift kick in the pants. Because it is patently silly of me.

And the reason I thought I'd leave this unlocked is that I, at least, sometimes need the reminder that the things I do every day sometimes count as actual possibly-useful-to-someone work that not everybody could or would do, and so other people probably need that reminder too, on occasion. Consider yourselves reminded. It's probably real work.

You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there.