Thumbs up for Daughter of Mystery and The Mystic Marriage by Heather Rose Jones. Fantasy/romance.
It is safe to say that historical fantasy lesbian romance is not my genre. So why did I read these? Because the author said something intelligent (I don’t even remember what, now) in response to one of my tweets. Empires are built on less, my friends. I downloaded a sample of Daughter of Mystery, said “hm, interesting, not my thing”…and then I kept thinking about it. And thinking. And then I broke down and shelled out $10 ($10! for an ebook! Oh the humanity!) and by the time I was 3/4ths of the way through I had ordered a paperback of the next book and signed up for a kaffeeklatche with the author at Worldcon. The characters! The worldbuilding! The derring-do! The alchemy! The interesting magic system! The romance! (Neither sappy nor over-eroticized, bless you Ms. Jones.) Even the Alpennian language was well-thought-out! I DREW FAN ART, OKAY? I’m not going to pretend they are paced like lightening, but I couldn’t put them down. If you’ve ever enjoyed Austen or Heyer or Susanna Clarke stop reading this blog and go buy the first one right now. I don’t care if you’re not a lesbian; I’m hideously straight and it didn’t matter. JUST GO.
Barbara pointed to a phrase where the glosses in the margins ran several layers thick. “He doesn’t exactly claim that. Remember that he was constantly dodging accusations of heresy, so he wrote in such a way that nothing he said could be pinned onto his own beliefs. Everywhere it’s ‘were this the case’ and ‘it emerges in consequence’ and ‘it would need to be concluded that.’ I think there’s one entire chapter where every single verb is in the subjunctive. But what he says here is that if you observe the nature of miracles and that if logic is applied to those observations, then if it were the case that God’s laws for miraculous events are not capricious and arbitrary and that God has not chosen to garb a capricious and arbitrary world in the garments of law and logic, then certain patterns regarding the nature and manifestation of miracles emerge.”
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