Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 230

Fathers in Romance Novels

I’m revisiting this topic because I recently read a romance that offers a really great father/daughter relationship. Not central, of course, because this IS a romance. The central relationship is obviously between the female lead and the male lead. But the female protagonist happens to have solid relationships with both her mother and her father, and these relationships are important to the story.

I said in the previous post on this topic that I’d read three of Carla Kelly’s novels and in all of them the father was pretty bad to terrible. Well, not in this one.

In Borrowed Light, we have Julia Darling, whose father is the vice president of a bank and whose mother is affectionate and intelligent. Both parents are drawn well. The solid family bonds are, as I said, important to the overall plot even though we see the parents only briefly in the beginning and then a little more extensively partway through the novel.

Despite her good relationships with her family, Julia is unhappy because she’s engaged to a man she doesn’t much like. A graduate of the Fanny Farmer cooking school, she answers an add from a rancher in Wyoming who’s looking for a cook. And so the story unfolds.

Things to love about this story:

1. The characters. Julia is a sympathetic protagonist, genuinely nice but not unbelievably saccharine. Because of her background, she has a good deal of confidence and good sense — but she does have some growing up to do. The male lead, Paul Otto, is quite possibly the nicest guy I’ve met in literature this year, but again, not in an unbelievable or saccharine way. The secondary characters are complicated and interesting and generally quite likable. Again, the family relationships. I particularly liked how Paul Otto related to Julia’s father when they met.

2. The setting. Carla Kelly makes me believe in her stories because they’re set on such solid foundations.

3. The treatment of religion. This story is, I guess, aimed at a Mormon readership. I gather the publisher is a Latter Day Saints publisher. If I’d known that, I might not have been inclined to pick this book up, but actually I found that Kelly perfectly captures the centrality of religion and spirituality in the early 1900s without losing any of her skill with character or setting. Quite the reverse. I don’t think the reader needs to be all that familiar with LDS beliefs to thoroughly enjoy this story.

4. This is a book without a real villain, but there’s plenty of tension. Life was sometimes pretty tough in the early 1900s. Kelly kept my attention all the way through.

5. The writing. Many delightful details. I thought naming a character “Julia Darling” was ridiculous — until it turned out that Mr. Otto addresses all his employees just by their last name. Hah!

Slight flaws:

1. The denouement was a touch predictable, though still a pleasure to read.

2. I did not really find the character arc that Kelly gave to James, the boy taken in by Mr. Otto, very persuasive. Some of the details of that sub-plot just did not really work for me.

Overall: Totally charming. I’m looking forward to reading more by Carla Kelly, including quite possibly the next Latter Day Saints book in what is apparently a loosely-linked series.

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Home again

I’m home! As you may have gathered, internet access was not great during the cruise. The ship apparently had WiFi, but (a) it was expensive and (b) I couldn’t really get it to work very well anyway. I was only able to connect easily when in Barcelona.

So thank you all for visiting and commenting while I was out of touch! I appreciate it and I hope you found the scheduled posts entertaining. I scanned through the comments briefly once I had access, and I will now read them more carefully.

Regular posting will resume shortly.

Also, I am beginning to sort through the many pictures I took during the trip, so you can expect to see some of those in the near future. I was more interested in getting a general feel of the towns and cities than photos of the spectacular buildings, or I though I was, but I sure took a lot of pictures of spectacular buildings too. A few general comments:

1) Really, why not ditch modern architectural styles and go back to classical Hellenistic styles? It’s pretty sad we have such marvelous examples of beautiful buildings and yet continue to built soulless cubes and rectangles all over the place.

2) My, Medieval cities were crowded. Beautiful, but crowded. Tiny narrow streets, multi-story buildings that mostly share walls … I knew that, but I know it better now.

3) Gosh, the Mediterranean climate is dry. I knew that, but again, I know it better now. It’s quite remarkable, seeing all those beautiful white towns of Santorini spilling across and down the tops of basically desert islands. They must have had quite a system for cisterns and water collection before they had desalinators.

4) Wow, is there ever a lot of oleander used in the landscaping. I hope parents in those regions have quick reflexes if their tots try to eat a flower or something.

My favorites, roughly:

Rome. We had an amazing tour of the Vatican.

Venice. We had an amazing tour of the doge’s palace.

Zatar, Diocletian’s palace. Not quite as amazing as the doge’s palace, but that’s setting a high bar. It was amazing enough.

Lucca. Surprisingly, the town of Lucca stood out as a delightful and somewhat less touristy place to visit.

Pompeii. I wish I could have taken the whole day just to wander through the ruins and think about what life was like in that city all those years ago.

Santorini. Again, I would have liked to have a much longer time to wander through the less touristy areas. Super crowded, the bit we explored.

And, of course, in general, the amazing architecture.

Still, though the trip was great, I’m very glad to be home. No huge disasters while I was gone, but Pippa does have an appointment for my vet to look at her eye — she has been squinting for a couple of days, though my mother started her on the eye drops I keep on hand for this problem.

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Recent Reading: A Long Desire by Evan S Connell

In A Long Desire, Connell describes some of the great explorers of history. Also some of the craziest and some of the most vicious. Connell’s essays are suffused with this wonderful tone of understated irony as he details these absolutely hellish journeys into, for example, the depths of the Neotropics. Particularly striking are his explanations about the way these explorers often sought wonderful places or great treasures on the flimsiest and most remarkably ill-founded rumors.

For example, Connell describes the search for the Seven Cities of Cibola, founded by seven Portuguese bishops – the tale of how that legend morphed and grew and changed over time is a testament to the power of wishful thinking. The seven cities were at first supposed to be on an island. One presumes it would have had to be quite a large island if it had room for seven cities, especially wealthy cities as the legend claimed. But later, when no such island could be found, says Connell, the legend made a different claim: By the early sixteenth century they [the cities] were thought to be on the American mainland. Why? Nothing could be more obvious. These cities existed – obviously they existed, otherwise men would not be searching for them; consequently, if they did not exist in the Atlantic, they must be someplace else, and beyond the Atlantic lay America . . . but they could not be found on the littoral, which meant they must be inland. This brings us to one of history’s classic bunglers – a most unpleasant personage even among odious companions, the conquistador Pánfilo de Narváez.

The tale (after a good many complications) continues, Narváez landed on the west side of Tampa Bay in April of 1526, authorized by Charles V to “conquer and govern the provinces which should be encountered from the River of Palms to the cape of Florida.” He had 42 horses and about 600 men, but not for long. First he divided his forces, ordering his ships to proceed up the coast. Then he led his cavalry and infantry into the swamps. Accidents, alligators, snakes, dysentery, malaria, hunger, and misanthropic Indians began to pick them off. …

Nearly all of them died miserably, of starvation and disease. Four lived long enough to be made slaves by one or another native tribe, eventually escaped, and, eight years after the expedition set forth, finally made it to Mexico City.

Eight years. It’s hard to wrap your mind around, it really is. Yet this book is filled with stories like that. It’s particularly remarkable how many men barely survived one expedition only to turn around and plunge back into the jungle on another mad search for conquest and treasure.

On the other hand, every now and then the tales of tremendous treasures were actually true, which I suppose does go some way toward explaining this enthusiasm to engage in horribly dangerous and amazingly uncomfortable journeys of exploration. The success of treasure hunters was, of course, often more to be mourned than their failures. I knew the Spaniards melted down a lot of Incan gold, but I had no idea what an atrocity they performed in strictly artistic terms until I read Connell’s essay “GoldGoldGold.” Listen to this:

Replicas of Indian corn, each gold ear sheathed in silver, with tassels of silver thread. Innumerable gold goblets. Sculpted gold spiders, gold beetles, gold lobsters, gold lizards. A gold fountain that emitted a sparkling jet of gold while gold animals and gold birds played around it. Twelve splendid representations of women, all in fine gold, as lovely and complete as though they were alive. And the sandals, or slippers, that women like – these were reproduced in gold….The list goes on and on … until one can hardly relate all of what was there. Nevertheless, after the death of Atahualpa, some Inca nobles poured a bucket of corn out in front of the Spaniards, and one of them picked up a grain and said, “This is the gold he gave you.” And then, pointing at the heap on the ground, “This much he has kept.”

And a page or so later, again:

Sarmiento writes that in the Corichancha [the Golden Enclosure, a temple complex] every utensil, every ornament – everything – was either silver or gold: religious censers, ewers that held sacrificial water, the pipes that conducted water through subterranean channels, even the agricultural implements used in the gardens.

And at the heart of this spectacle, surrounded by the various shrines, stood a perfect replica of a field of maize, each stalk carefully contrived of gold and planted among golden clods. Here, too, on good authority, stood at least twenty-three life-size llamas with their young, all made of gold, with life-size Indian shepherds to guard them, each shepherd fashioned from gold, each with a golden sling and a golden crook.

Okay, if you put all that in a fantasy novel, it would just not be believable. Not unless you put it in a magical Fairy kingdom. You couldn’t put in stuff like this and get readers to believe it had all been made by ordinary people. A field of maize, all made of gold! Golden spiders and beetles and life-sized llamas with their shepherds! Golden clods of dirt! No one would believe it.

That it all really existed and really was wantonly destroyed and then was actually – much of it – lost at sea … well, that last part serves the Spaniards right, I guess, but it’s a painful thought nevertheless.

A Long Desire is best read in small doses so that you have time to absorb the occasional heroism and remarkable doggedness, the frequent depravity and the scope of disasters, the pathos and tragedy, and most of all the sheer, remarkable distance between the past and the present. The attitudes and actions of almost everyone featured in Connell’s essays are literally almost unimaginable today. If I were teaching history, I’d probably find a part of this book to use – perhaps the part about the Children’s Crusade. The past is truly a foreign country. Essays like this make that plain.

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Are there any subjects you avoid?

Over at Kill Zone Blog, a very simple, short post. Here it is in its entirety:

Are there any subjects you avoid completely in your writing? For example, is there anything you avoid writing about because it might be too disturbing to readers?

Then the comments, which are of course the point of the post. Click through and read them if you feel so inclined. Naturally someone declears that “nothing should be off-limits” which is of course true but does not address the question. Just because topics aren’t off the table for the entire literary world doesn’t mean I’m going to write (or read) books that include certain topics and tropes.

So, my personal response:

There is nothing I avoid because it might be too disturbing to readers. There are plenty of things I avoid because they are too disturbing to me, or because they’re simply distasteful and not necessary to include. I could probably write a top ten list for those things. In fact, I’ll take a stab at doing so:

1. I am very, very unlikely to kill a dog, or any sort of pet. Dogs that are ghosts at the beginning of the book don’t count, and in fact if you decide to make the animal into a ghost during the course of the story and then keep it around as a character, that’s fine.

2. I am even more unlikely to kill an important child secondary character, not once the reader has been offered a chance to get emotionally attached.

Destroying a whole city is different from killing a specific animal or child character. I wouldn’t show the people of that city to the reader in detail and encourage emotional attachment before destroying it.

3. I don’t expect ever to kill a point-of-view protagonist.

4. I doubt I would ever write an evil point-of-view protagonist. I almost always hate any chapters in books that are from the villains’ points of view. I almost never think that is necessary and I am not interested in reading the pov of a villain. Yes, I’m thinking of Game of Thrones here, but there are lots of other examples and I hate them all, or all I can think of right this moment.

5. I detest almost all betrayal plotlines, unless they are part of a larger redemption arc and sometimes even if they are. I am very unlikely to insert that kind of plotline into one of my books.

6. I really dislike petty, selfish, unlikable, mean-spirited characters and generally don’t write them. I often skim over their scenes in other authors’ books.

7. Detailed descriptions of torture are not something I would generally consider writing, although I can tolerate them in books I read (usually). I cannot tolerate them in visual media, it turns out. For me, violence is fine but torture is out when it comes to tv and movies.

8. The sort of plot where the protagonist makes one terrible decision after another and slowly self-destructs is SO AWFUL. I would never write this and I can’t read it. SO. AWFUL.

9. In general, I see no need to discuss, describe, or even mention certain natural functions of the human body. Too much detail of that type turns me right off in other authors’ books too.

10. This is not a subject or topic; it’s an element of storytelling: If the bad guy actually wins at the end of the book, I am done with the author. I would never write that kind of ending in a million years. Never. I mean, I hate to spoil the suspense if you wondered whether the bad guy would win in one of my books, but: No.

Now I am thinking of In the Woods by Tana French here. A wonderfully written novel with (a) an important betrayal plotline; (b) an important character-destroys-his-own-life plotline; and (c) the bad guy wins at the end.

After that I am never touching another book by Tana French, ever, no matter who recommends it.

How about you? What element would you never, ever touch in a novel of your own? Does it also mean an automatic Never-Buy rejection of an author if you see that element in a book you read?

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Typos Breed in Your Manuscript

Just got the second-to-last typo corrections back for the Black Dog novellas that are coming up later this summer. Thanks, Linda!

After getting Linda’s corrections back for Shadow Twin, I was not (very) surprised at the number of typos she found for the short stories. She found 124 typos, or typo-level things to query. After Shadow Twin, I expect there are even some she missed – there is one more person who I hope will have time to look over the manuscript before publication.

But, one hundred twenty-four! It’s amazing. Some of these are stories that have been written for some time and that I have gone over repeatedly. To be fair, I found and corrected … let me see … 20% of these typos myself, during content revisions before Linda send me her list. Also, roughly another 20% of her queries concerned artistic judgment rather than typos: “Should there be a comma after this word?” Sometimes yes, sometimes no. These are not errors as such; they’re questions about technical correctness versus the rhythm of the sentence. Sometimes, given this sort of query, I decide one way and sometimes the other. It depends on the specific situation.

That leaves roughly 75 typos, some pretty egregious.

Probably the most common issue: missing words. Shouldn’t there be a “to” in this sentence? Did you mean “a disaster” or just “disaster?” Did you mean “put away” or just “put?” Amazing how easy it is to just read straight across a word that ought to be there but isn’t.

One type of query where the answer is always No: “Did you mean to use this particular word three times in this paragraph?” “Was the repetition of “order” in this paragraph intentional?” At least 98% of the time, the answer is No, I didn’t; and No, it wasn’t. Repeated words are a plague, and remarkably hard to spot, at least for me.

Here is the typo I think is funniest: Pinchers when I meant pincers. What can I say? I spell the dog breeds’ names far more often than I use the word “pincers.” I may never have typed the word “pincers” before in my entire life, whereas I like Doberman pinchers a lot and have no doubt discussed the entire pincher/schnauzer group of breeds from time to time.

The most embarrassing typos are the ones that make me look illiterate. “Too” for “to” or “There was few other sounds” for “There were few other sounds.” Typing the wrong to/too/two is rare for me, and failing to catch it is seriously rare, but it can happen if I’m tired. So can errors like meaning “people” and typing “pebble” (I did that once and didn’t catch it till later).

I think – I hope – that it is impossible for me to make verb tense errors in just straight-up writing. I am pretty sure mistakes like that happen only when I change the sentence, but not quite all the way. But how stupid mistakes like that look. So glad Linda caught the few errors of that type.

Content errors: any time a beta reader or copy editor queries a sentence with “This doesn’t sound right to me,” I will probably revise (or delete) the sentence. Nearly all the time, such a query means the sentence really is confusing or awkward in some way I missed.

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How Hard Could It Be to Repopulate the Planet?

At Wired, this post: How Hard Could It Be to Repopulate the Planet?



IN THE 1950S many science fiction writers explored the idea of a global disaster that leaves behind only a single man and woman, who would then have to carry on the human race. According to science fiction editor Gordon Van Gelder, a popular variant of this idea featured a twist ending in which the last man and woman turn out to be Adam and Eve.

“It was one of those stories that science fiction would lend itself to so readily, and newbies would be drawn to it, like ants going to a sugar cube,” Van Gelder says in Episode 308 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast.

The idea became so overused that magazines would specifically prohibit writers from submitting “Adam and Eve stories.” And while such stories would remain the bane of science fiction editors for decades, the theme of repopulation also produced a number of interesting thought experiments, many of which Van Gelder collected in his recent book Go Forth and Multiply.

Interesting! Also, a fun idea for a book.

Go Forth and Multiply came out last summer. It appears to be available only as a physical book, which seems like a peculiar decision. Perhaps there was some issue with copyrights or something?

Here’s what Amazon’s description says:



There was a time when science fiction magazines abounded with tales of repopulating a planet. Brave (well, sometimes they were brave) men and women teamed up in great acts of self-sacrifice to save humanity. These stories fell out of fashion over time, but now this volume collects a dozen of the finest – and a fine batch they are! ‘Mother to the World,’ Richard Wilson’s award-winning novella about the last man and woman on Earth. ‘No Land of Nod’ by Sherwood Springer, perhaps the paradigm of the repopulation story. ‘Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang’ by Kate Wilhelm, a classic of repopulation through cloning. ‘The Queen Bee’ by Randall Garrett, one of the most controversial stories ever published in the SF genre. Other contributors to the book include Poul Anderson, Marion Zimmer Bradley and John Jay Wells, John Brunner, Rex Jatko, Alice Eleanor Jones, Damon Knight, Robert Sheckley, and E. C. Tubb. Some of these stories are classics, others have never before been reprinted. Combined, they make for a great reading experience and a fascinating look at a compelling subgenre

I actually have Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang on my TBR shelves. The others, I don’t know. I’m curious about “The Queen Bee” now, though.

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That’s certainly doing it the hard way

I recently happened across this fascinating article: The Long Way Round: The Plane that Accidentally Circumnavigated the World

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, the crew of Pan Am flight 18602 were forced to do something almost impossible: return to America the long way round….

The sudden burst of sound from the radio caught the controller by surprise and he scrambled to try and stop his cup of coffee from falling to the floor.

LAGUARDIA TOWER LAGUARDIA TOWER. THIS IS PAN AMERICAN CLIPPER NC18602 INBOUND FROM AUCKLAND NEW ZEALAND. DUE TO ARRIVE PAN AMERICAN MARINE TERMINAL LAGUARDIA IN SEVEN MINUTES. OVER.

The confused controller gave up trying and let the cup drop, shattering on the floor.

This made no sense, he thought. It was still before six and there were no seaplane flights due. Then, a new wave of confusion hit him: New Zealand was — almost literally — on the other side of the world from New York. There was no Pan Am route between those two places. No airline flew that far from the East Coast!

Wonderful article. Click through and check it out if you have a moment.

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How Freeman Dyson saw Richard Feynman

A quite wonderful collection of letters from Freeman Dyson, some of which concern his ongoing professional and personal relationship with Richard Feynman.

The post offers excerpts. If you’re at all acquainted with Feynman, perhaps through his fascinating autobiography, then definitely click through and check out these excerpts from Dyson’s letters.

March 8, 1948

Yesterday I went for a long walk in the spring sunshine with Trudy Eyges and Richard Feynman. Feynman is the young American professor, half genius and half buffoon, who keeps all physicists and their children amused with his effervescent vitality. …

September 14, 1948,
17 Edwards Place, Princeton

My tremendous luck was to be the only person who had spent six months listening to Feynman expounding his new ideas at Cornell and then spent six weeks listening to Schwinger expounding his new ideas in Ann Arbor. They were both explaining the same experiments, which measure radiation interacting with atoms and electrons. But the two ways of explaining the experiments looked totally different, Feynman drawing little pictures and Schwinger writing down complicated equations. The flash of illumination on the Greyhound bus gave me the connection between the two explanations, allowing me to translate one into the other.

Freeman Dyson’s remarkable humility and pleasant nature comes through clearly; so does Feynman’s ebullience. I’m not very into physics, but maybe I will go on to pick up the collected letters, which have been published as Maker of Patterns: An Autobiography Through Letters by Freeman Dyson.

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Pluto is so a planet

In a brief article at The Washington Post, David Grinspoon and Alan Stern declare Pluto is too a planet.

Three years ago, NASA’s New Horizons, the fastest spaceship ever launched, raced past Pluto, spectacularly revealing the wonders of that newly seen world. This coming New Year’s Eve — if all goes well on board this small robot operating extremely far from home — it will treat us to images of the most distant body ever explored, provisionally named Ultima Thule. We know very little about it, but we do know it’s not a planet. Pluto, by contrast — despite what you’ve heard — is.

Click through and read the whole thing for a look at the history behind Pluto’s demotion, and a passionate defense of its planetary status. I enjoyed the sharp tone with which the authors of this post critique the decision to demote Pluto:

Even within our solar system, the IAU scientists defined “planet” in a strange way, declaring that if an orbiting world has “cleared its zone,” or thrown its weight around enough to eject all other nearby objects, it is a planet. Otherwise it is not. This criterion is imprecise and leaves many borderline cases, but what’s worse is that they chose a definition that discounts the actual physical properties of a potential planet, electing instead to define “planet” in terms of the other objects that are — or are not — orbiting nearby. This leads to many bizarre and absurd conclusions. For example, it would mean that Earth was not a planet for its first 500 million years of history, because it orbited among a swarm of debris until that time, and also that if you took Earth today and moved it somewhere else, say out to the asteroid belt, it would cease being a planet.

Shiny knife you just stabbed that definition with. Good job!

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Recent Reading: A Variety

I really haven’t been reading much this year, relatively speaking. Except for re-reads; I’m definitely re-reading more books this spring than new-to-me books. This is partly – mostly – because I’m working on stuff of my own, which always puts a damper on reading new-to-me fiction.

Nevertheless, in the last few weeks, I have managed to read a few new-to-me titles. So:

1. Murderbot: “Artificial Condition,” by Martha Wells.

I didn’t necessarily expect to love the second novella as much of the first (“All Systems Red”), because the first one set a high bar. It just won the Nebula,in fact and a well-deserved win that was, too. But I was hoping the second would make it over that bar. Well, I was very pleased because I think the second novella was just about as good as the first. I feared it would be hard to match the secondary characters from the first novella, but I really loved ART, and I liked the human characters as well.

Favorite detail with ART: When the ship started playing the Sanctuary Moon soundtrack when Murderbot was upset. What a nice touch.

Favorite detail with a human character: When Tapan says it was her fault and the Murderbot says it wasn’t and she says, “I kinda think it was.” Great exchange. Also, though the Murderbot is inclined to blame itself for things, Tapan is right. It was totally her fault. I like how she didn’t let it talk her out of that.

Can’t wait for the third novella. I don’t think it’s a super-long wait; I believe it’s coming out in August.

2. A Thousand Nights by EK Johnston.

My favorite kind of secondary world: tons of Arabic flavor, but not based on any historical Arabia, so Johnston could do crazy things with the metaphysics and significantly tweak the culture and so on. The smallgods are original, for example, and so is the balance between the Skeptics and the Priests. And, the demons, though I believe they’re meant to evoke djinn. There’s a smokeless fire kind of magic associated with the demon that has Lo-Melkhiior, for example.

The story has less emphasis on storytelling than I expected. Also, the plot covers nothing like a thousand nights. What was it, three months or so from start to finish? This is mostly a quiet story, rather slow paced. I like the quieter part of the story better than the fast-paced climactic battle, in fact, although when the protagonist creates all those creatures at the end, that’s pretty snazzy.

The writing is beautiful and rather unusual. The emphasis is so strongly on family that the first-person narrator never, or almost never, refers to family members by name – it’s always “my sister,” “my father,” “the sister of my mother.” That, and a formal manner of speech, do as much as the descriptive passages about the setting to give this story an exotic feel.

3. The 3,000-Mile Garden.

This is nonfiction. It’s collected letters exchanged between the American food writer Leslie Land and the English nature photographer Roger Phillips. The letters are very strongly focused on gardening and cooking, so just my kind of thing.

4. Frederica by Georgette Heyer.

Not my favorite Heyer … I believe that would be CotillionFalse Colors. But I liked it very much from the moment Frederica appeared. Teenage boys are rather unusual in Heyer’s books, and though the romance was okay, my favorite part of this one – by a mile – was the developing relationship between Frederica’s brothers and Alverstroke.

4. Dark Alchemy by Laura Bickle.

The raven saw it first.

His dark eye scraped the horizon, scouring the earth for movement in the lengthening shadows. The shadows crawled across the scrub and the sage, wrapping around lodgepole pines and flickering through bits of grass. A hot breeze ruffled the raven’s feathers, pulling him higher over the land. He sensed something old, something malevolent sliding under the fences and over the rocks . . .

The ravens are pretty neat in this one. Very strange magic all over the place, much of it creepy and disturbing. Alchemy, sure, but other, weirder stuff too. Though the alchemy is certainly weird and disturbing enough all by itself. This story is right on the edge between fantasy and horror … if you have read it, which side of the line do you think it comes down on? The writing is very good, which is crucial for building the creepy atmosphere.

The main protagonist, Petra Dee, is a geologist, so from time to time we get to see neat science-y stuff. Best thing about Petra: the way she refuses to let bad things happen without trying to interfere. Worst thing about Petra: my God, woman, when your father whispers from the spirit world Don’t Go, you might give a little more thought to Plan B and Plan C. Walking into a trap is never admirable unless you have seriously thought ahead about how to deal with that trap in some effective way.

Other comments: The coyote does not in any way resemble a coyote, other than physically. It is your standard fictional idealized-dog-that-we-are-calling-a-wolf, except of course that it’s supposedly a coyote. It has only the merest trace of coyote behavior appended over the dog behavior. I feel compelled to mention here, as no doubt I have before, that neither coyotes nor wolves have the same instincts or show the same behaviors as dogs. They just don’t.

However, as Sig is explicitly a spirit coyote rather than a normal coyote, I guess that’s more or less all right. I mean, the ravens are not exactly normal ravens, and I liked them fine, so I am trying to exercise the same tolerance for the coyote.

Also, my favorite secondary protagonist winds up in an unenviable condition at the end, but since this is the first book of a series, I imagine his situation most likely improves in the second book. There is reasonable closure in this book, so that’s good.

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