Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 391

Girlie-girl heroines

Never thought of this topic, but actually I do like a protagonist with killer fashion sense. So much not me, but naturally I always wished I had an unerring instinct for fashion, right?

So, this list is heavy on romances, but you know, you do get some SFF titles that draw on this kind of fashion-instinct for giggles, or, actually, sometimes not just for giggles.

An example of the former is Betsy The Vampire Queen by MaryJanice Davidson. That series is light, fun, charming, and is enhanced by Betsy’s obsession with killer shoes. Writing light, humorous stories is a gift and Davidson does it well.

But! You know another example that comes to mind? Nina Kiriki Hoffman’s A Fistful of Sky, a book I love — it’s my favorite by Hoffman, and WHAT a great title — with a wonderful take on magical curses. This is not a light, humorous fantasy in the Betsy style; it’s actually a serious story about family relationships. But it has plenty of comedy in it. All the curses are clever and fun, and one involves being cursed with Killer Fashion Sense. Which is not entirely a curse, as long as you can turn it off, see.

Anyway, fun list, but I’m sure there are tons more SFF examples as well as examples from romance. Anybody got another?

Literary cooking: Calamansi muffins, butternut squash soup, and November cakes

So, lots of cooking this weekend! I made lots of stuff, actually, starting with calamansi muffins. You will recall these muffins from Cover (Story) Girl by Chris Mariano, right? I made twice the recipe (because I had slightly over half a cup of calamansi juice) and baked half as an 8 x 8 cake and half as muffins, and from now on I may just bake this recipe as a cake, because I can’t always get the muffins to release from the muffin tin, but with a cake, no problem.

Then I made Martha Wells’ butternut squash soup, which she posted about on Facebook. It was very tasty and I may very well make it again — this fall, even. It’s the curry paste that makes this soup for me.

Since the recipe is given in a casual paragraph style on Facebook, let me give it here in a more formal way:

Martha Wells’ Butternut Squash Soup

Four strips bacon (or more, because hey, bacon)

1 large leek, cleaned and chopped

2 tsp red curry paste (or more, if, like me, you like spicy)

1 medium to large butternut squash, peeled, seeded, and cut into chunks

4-5 C. chicken broth

1/2 C sour cream (or plain Greek yogurt, which is what I always have on hand)

1 tsp cider vinegar, if desired, to brighten the flavor (I didn’t add this)

Cook the bacon until quite crisp and remove from the pot. Saute the leek for five minutes. Add the curry paste and saute, stirring, for one minute. Add the squash and chicken broth. Cook until the squash is very tender, about twenty or twenty-five minutes. Remove from the heat and puree. If you have an immersion blender, use that. If you don’t, this would be a great time to try one out, so why not buy yourself an early Christmas present and get one before you make this soup? Anyway, add the sour cream or Greek yogurt and blend to combine. Taste and add the vinegar if desired. Ladle into bowls, sprinkle each serving with some crisp bacon, and serve to general acclaim.

Okay, after the soup, I made which are actually, as you may remember, basically sticky buns with a butterscotch sauce poured over them. I’ve wanted to make them for ages, and hey, it is now November! Well, okay, almost November, and that’s close enough.

I did simplify my life by making the dough in the bread machine — which may be why I wound up adding a lot more flour; it seemed like a very, very wet dough to me. Has anybody else made these and did you follow her exact recipe and did the “Cakes” come out well?

For me, this was a nice, sweet, sticky bun type of dessert (and, this morning, breakfast). I added a little extra calamansi juice to the sauce and skipped the icing. Mmm.

The best and the worst books you read . . . or didn’t read . . . in school

I got the idea for this post from the blog Good Books and Good Wine — specifically from a post on The Top Ten Books I was Forced To Read. Which is actually a list of Allison’s six favorite books she was assigned in school, and her five least favorite. Not just high school, let me add, but school period, so that opens up the field a bit.

As it happens, I have read precisely two of the books on Allison’s list. (She liked both, I sorta-kinda-liked one and thoroughly disliked the other.) (To Kill A Mockingbird and Heart of Darkness, if you wondered.)

My lists are of course completely different, but hey, why stop at the five you liked most (or disliked least) and the five you truly loathed? How about the five you wish you had been assigned but weren’t?

Okay, so:

I actually rather liked* a surprising number of books, once I started thinking about putting together a list. On the other hand, there aren’t many assigned books I would ever read again voluntarily. So I cheat a bit with the final item, including some non-books that I really, really loved.

1. The Old Man and the Sea (Hemingway) — tragic, but elemental, and maybe because of that, it’s not tragic in the way that repulses me.

2. The Diary of a Young Girl (Anne Frank) — because, I mean, what a story.

3. The Bear (Faulkner) — I know it is, strictly speaking, a novella, but I don’t care because it stands out as a classic I actually did enjoy. The fantastic dog didn’t hurt.

4. The Black Pearl (Scott O’Dell) — I think even as a kid I was more drawn to a story with a great setting, and actually there’s a very fantastic tone (as opposed to realistic) to this story.

5. And, as I said, I’m cheating here, but most poetry. I actually memorized not only “The Walrus and the Carpenter” but also Poe’s “The Bells” — I mean, voluntarily, no one was forced to memorize any poetry. I just did anyway. The tintinnabulation of the bells, yay! I loved the grim iron bells, too — the rolling, rolling, rolling on the human heart a stone. Whoa.

I totally loathed –

1. Animal Farm (Orwell) — you could not design a book to appeal to me less. An ugly, grim tragedy the reader can clearly watch unfolding AND with animal characters.

2. Lord of the Flies (Golding) — I hardly think it’s true that a group of stranded people will necessarily devolve into savagery, and if they do, I don’t want to read about it, thanks.

3. Heart of Darkness (Conrad) — Allison’s reaction aside, no. Just, no. The heart of the story was too dark for me.

4. “A Streetcar Named Desire” (Williams) — I despised Blanche and actually disliked all the other characters, too, so at that point, the story doesn’t even matter.

5. And . . . the book I hated the very, very most . . . Madame Bovary (Flaubert). Which I was assigned to read TWICE. To this day, I can’t imagine why I didn’t just pick up the cliff notes the second time around. I can’t even tell you how tooth-grittingly horrible this reading experience was for me. Talk about loathing all the characters. Words fail me.

So! What books do I really, really wish had been assigned rather than the awful Madame Bovary? In no particular order:

1. Why, why, why, did I never take a class that required Crime and Punishment? I will probably never read it now, and I wish I had.

2. Why did OTHER people luck out and have Pride and Prejudice assigned? Why not me? That is so unfair. Thankfully, I discovered Austen on my own.

3. I have A Tale of Genji on the shelf in my house, but if I haven’t picked it up yet, when will I ever? I wish some teacher had assigned it. In college, preferably, so I would have been a little older and more likely to appreciate it.

4. I have always loved The Count of Monte Christo. It would have been fun to have covered that one in class. I think? It would be a shame if I liked it less after having it taken apart in class discussion.

5. Every now and then, I read a bit of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. It’s a pity I was never assigned this book, because I don’t know that I will ever sit down and just read it straight through, and I would like to.

* Yes, I very much enjoyed Shakespeare’s plays, when I saw them on stage, at least the comedies — but not when read. So I’m discounting them for this list.

I think I’ll steal this idea –

Merrie Haskell is running a “page number game” for her soon-to-be-out CASTLE BEHIND THORNS. It’s entertaining! Check it out.

On Being a Reader –

Thanks to Twitter, just found a nice post up at fantasy-fiction on, as you have no doubt gathered, being a Reader — and specifically a reader of SFF. As opposed, primarily, to not being a Reader at all, and doesn’t it shock you to meet someone who claims never to have read a single book that wasn’t assigned in school? I mean, seriously?

Whether reading is just a way of leaving behind the real world or a bone-deep instinct that cannot be quelled, there is something undeniably special about science fiction and fantasy. GRRM has the right of it when he suggests there’s something true and timeless to be found within the genre.

Which of course there is, because all fiction is about people and about the human condition, basically, and so obviously the most secondary of secondary-world settings doesn’t reduce by one iota the truth in a well-told story. So I roll my eyes when a guy I know tries to persuade me that narrative nonfiction is superior because it’s true. True! As if, right? And as if the factual basis of events in the story is anything other than trivial anyway.

Anyway, the post is worth reading if you want to click through.

Georgette Heyer

You know, I’ve read just one book by Georgette Heyer — THE CORINTHIAN. Which was totally charming. I know, I KNOW, there are ten thousand regency romances out there, but Heyer’s are just so charming, which I expect you all know already, right?

I’d heard that FALSE COLORS was good, so I picked it up from Audible. It’s got a mistaken-identity plot involving identical twins, one of whom has vanished (shortly after getting engaged), and the other of whom takes his place so that the engagement won’t founder.

Of course this is ridiculous, but the story is amazingly engaging. Somehow. Despite the huge number of pages devoted to people just standing around talking. How does Heyer do that, anyway?

Well, the charming dialogue, that’s one key; and then the characters are also engaging and charming. I do really love Kit (the twin who is the protagonist) and his flighty, irresponsible, charming mother; and the sensible Cressie (his twin’s fiancee).

So I asked Maureen E for suggestions for other Georgette Heyer books to try. This turned out to be a really good idea because I got this link to a whole lot of Heyer reviews! And Deb Coates weighed in, too. All very helpful and that should take care of my Audible needs for a while!

That leaves just one question. Should I go on with FALSE COLORS for twenty minutes twice a day while driving back and forth to work? Or set it aside until November 1st when I have a five-hour drive? Decisions, decisions . . .

In the meantime, though, Heyer fans can certainly enjoy checking out Maureen’s Heyer page. And, if you have a particular favorite, which one is it?

Recent Listening: Out of the Easy by Ruta Sepetys

So, Out of the Easy.

What an interesting story. A little out of the ordinary for me: the setting is 1950s New Orleans, which I sort of perceive as almost-but-not-quite contemporary, if that makes sense. Honestly, I usually prefer my historicals more historical. But setting is important to me in a story, and I love the 1830s New Orleans presented to us in Barbara Hambly’s outstanding Benjamin January series, so I thought I might enjoy Out of the Easy as a different look at New Orleans. I was right, though I will admit that in practice the semi-familiar world of the 1950s didn’t appeal to me as much as the more distant world of the 1830s. Of course your mileage might well differ; if the 1950s particularly appeal to you, then this is definitely a novel you should consider picking up, because the setting is very well drawn.

And Josie’s backstory seemed well designed to drive interesting, appealing character development. And, though I know, I know, it’s silly to put too much emphasis on these things, I like the title and the cover.

Anyway, this is a story about a girl, a young woman, the daughter of a prostitute, who has grown up in the French Quarter and is now trying to overcome some fairly serious obstacles as she sorts out what kind of woman she wants to be – it’s very definitely a YA story, in other words. There is a romance subplot, but this does not occupy the front and center of the story. There’s a murder mystery, but this, too, is part of the story’s background architecture, a plot driver rather than the central focus. The actual plot is very much centered around the internal story of Josie growing up.

I selected this story from Audible mainly because I’d heard of it via this review by Heidi of Bunbury in the Stacks, which reads in part:

“I found myself for the first time in many many reads to be incredibly stressed out over the choices a character might make. I was so involved in this story, and yet, I found myself avoiding picking it up when we would reach a crossroads because I had so much fear for what was to become of Josie. The best part of Out of the Easy for me was the fact that my fears, though often justified, never took me in the direction I expected. Josie didn’t take the predictable path, nor the easy one, and in the end I came to see that it was the only path she could have taken to come out of the world she so longed to leave.”

And despite Heidi’s comment about not really getting why Josie felt so connected to Forest Herne (the murder mystery element centers around Herne), that wasn’t an issue for me — I was willing to accept that and let it stand as an important plot driver. I had other issues, but this wasn’t one of them.

I also listened to this book despite this review by Ana of The Book Smugglers. Which is surprising, because usually I’m pretty much right there when Ana spots a thematic problem with a story. But this time, when Ana says, “All the prostitutes there are portrayed as well-adjusted and moderately happy. You could also say they are all prostitutes with a heart of gold who have more of less have “adopted” the main character. … . All of these women … worry about Josie, want to protect her reputation and hope she will not become a prostitute – because they want better for her. Everybody thinks she is too good to be a prostitute …”

And I get Ana’s point, this would totally bother me, except I didn’t feel that this actually was the case. I didn’t see the whores in the story as “happy”, or at least not as well-adjusted happy women, but as damaged women making the best of a fundamentally bad deal – this may be because I can hardly imagine any woman choosing to be a prostitute in 1950s New Orleans unless she is desperate or damaged. But I will just state categorically that Evangeline definitely is not an emotionally balanced woman – and although Dora is nice, neither is she. (This leaves one other prostitute who is just hard to figure, since she does seem surprisingly well-adjusted — but I read this as a lack of information about her story, not as her actually being well-adjusted. I do basically think that all women are “too good to be prostitutes,” so it made sense to me that the people surrounding Josie thought she was too good to be a prostitute — including the women connected to the whorehouse. So again, though I had issues with this book, this wasn’t one of them.

Plus, though Ana found the presentations of class problematic in this story, I really didn’t. I would have really been annoyed if all the wealthy people in the novel had been presented as venal, hypocritical users; Josie’s friend Charlotte by herself wouldn’t have been enough to prevent that subtext, but actually I found the glimpse we’re given of Charlotte’s father does the trick. This may have worked for me because of the audio format, which is so slow you notice even very minor characters like Charlotte’s father.

Honestly, I don’t usually read a book so, I don’t know, so sideways to the way other people read it.

Okay, now, look. Josie is without doubt a character you can enjoy and sympathize with – intelligent and competent, yet grounded in the gritty reality of the French Quarter whorehouse where she lived as a child and still works (as a cleaning woman and general factotum of the madam). I definitely sympathized with Josie, who is torn between the strong friendships she has developed within the French Quarter and the deep, deep revulsion she feels against being perceived as the daughter of a prostitute. I imagine if her mother had been a different sort, Josie might not have felt such a strong need to get out of New Orleans and make a new identity for herself – Josie’s mother is, no joke, possibly the single worst mother in all of historical fiction.

Well, probably not, but you get the idea: the woman is dreadful. Not physically abusive, no, but vain, shallow, stupid, self-deluding, and pathologically selfish. You can totally understand how Josie can’t quite, quite bring herself to cut all ties with her mother – the woman is her mother, after all – but at the same time, you really wish she would just walk away and not look back. One of the lines I liked best in the whole book is when someone says to Josie, of her mother, “She was born without a compass like you have, Jo, so she’s always walking into all sorts of walls.” That’s probably not exact – audiobook, you know – but it’s close.

The woman who acts as a mother to Josie is Willie, the madam of the whorehouse – a curt, abrasive woman who isn’t nearly as hard-hearted as she pretends. A fairy godmother with the face of the evil stepmother, Josie thinks, and that’s exactly right. To me, I have to say, Willie was a little bit too much of a fairy godmother – a woman who can be expected to wave her magic wand and solve all your problems – and she sort of does, all the way through the story. THIS, now. THIS was the issue I had with the novel. In the end I did feel that Josie was prevented from having to make some of the hard choices she otherwise should have. Or more accurately, she was spared having to come up with her own brilliant solutions to get around the hard choices. This made Josie feel rather passive, when actually she is not a passive character. (Insecure, yes, but not passive.)

Yet, I liked Willie very much as a character; she was actually my favorite character; it’s really hard to imagine the book without her playing her important fairy-godmother role. But I would have liked Sepetys to find a way to both have her fairy godmother and restrict her ability to wave away Josie’s problems.

In the end, I’m going to weigh in on Heidi’s side on this one; Josie’s voice is believable and sympathetic, the setting and characters are beautifully drawn, the writing is lovely, I liked the thread of romance – Jesse is one of my other favorite characters and I’m glad this relationship worked out the way it did – and despite feeling that certain aspects of the plot were a little too pat, I definitely enjoyed Out of the Easy. I’m very likely to pick up another title by Sepetys one of these days — but perhaps not as an audiobook. The language was beautiful, a big plus for audio, but I would have liked to read this one much faster than the three weekends of driving it took me.

Intellectual jokes –

Here are fifty “intellectual jokes” you may enjoy.

I got this link from Janet Reid’s blog, btw, which is often worth checking out. She has good advice up right now about things to do while an agent dawdles around with getting back to you about a full manuscript. Not that I am likely to ever read Bleak House. Too many books on my TBR shelves that are way more likely to be, you know, actually fun to read.

Anyway! I meant to pick a favorite joke, but actually it’s hard to choose, so here, a fairly random selection of four brief jokes:

“It’s hard to explain things to kleptomaniacs because they always take things literally.”

“Is it solipsistic in here, or is that just me?”

“Who does Polyphemus hate more than Odysseus? Nobody!”

“Did you hear about the suicidal homeopath? He took 1/50th of the recommended dose.”

Don’t you love it when someone *finally* reads one of your favorite books?

It’s like dragging a friend out to make her see a great movie, or making her come over to watch Firefly, or whatever. Of course *you* know perfectly well the plot twist that’s coming in The Sixth Sense or Ramius’ real intentions in The Hunt For Red October or whatever, but in a way it’s as much fun to watch someone else see those movies for the first time as it was to watch them yourself. Right?

And books work the same way. So I was really happy to see Thea at The Book Smugglers finally read Bujold’s The Warrior’s Apprentice. Yay!

And ditto for Heidi of Bunbury in the Stacks finally reading McKinley’s The Blue Sword. Double yay, because this is really one of my ultimate comfort reads, from the orange juice straight through the epilogue.

And yes, people, I now possess a copy of LeGuin’s Four Ways to Forgiveness, so I will let you know what I think when I get to it, fairly soon probably, for generous definitions of “soon”.

In the meantime, Inda is making me tense because I know things are going to get rough for Inda and his friends before they get better, and I’m waiting for the really bad stuff to happen, and, well, like I said, I’m tense. I think I will like the book better once Inda finds himself on the deck of a pirate ship, or whatever and can start dealing with that. The back cover copy makes it clear something like that is going to happen.

That’s quite a world, isn’t it? Very screwed up, in a lot of ways. Far too rigid as far as social determination of rank and marriage and everything. If *I* were Inda’s sister, whose name I have temporarily forgotten, sorry, but the point is, if I were her, I would definitely assassinate my intended fiance. I mean, it’s a really obvious solution to so many problems. I guess it’s easier for a reader to be brutally ruthless than it is for the character, though.

Recent Reading: It Takes Two To Tangle by Theresa Romain

So, you know, it turns out that a light, quick romance can be just the ticket when you’re finished with the heavy lifting of a revision and have an evening free before you get into the pain-in-the-neck detail work. Which for me, this time, means looking up rough Spanish translations for a lot of words and phrases so the manuscript of PURE MAGIC looks okay to the (non-expert) eye. (Having a friend who really speaks casual, colloquial Mexican Spanish fix everything is the crucial next step, you can bet.)

I also need to look up some maps and plot travel routes and see what towns are near other towns and all that. I guess it would be more sensible for me to set a contemporary-ish story near St. Louis, since I would just know a lot of that stuff, but whatever. If someone points out an architectural or geographic error, I’ll just remind them that, hey, this isn’t actually OUR contemporary world, just a near-twin.

Anyway, Laura Florand pointed me toward IT TAKES TWO TO TANGLE, suggesting that I might like the slow-building relationship between Henry and Frances – no doubt I had commented disparagingly about insta-lust somewhere or other. So I thought, hey, if Florand likes Theresa Romain, the actual writing MUST be good, right?

And it is. Like here:

He could see the grass beneath his feet now, still shadowed black under the faintly red light of the peeping sun. Dark as atramentum, ruddy as dragon’s blood. All the beauty of art was before him again this morning. Henry did not know whether it would turn still lovelier or if it would all turn ugly.

Henry is an artist, see, and this is Romain enjoying herself with the names of contemporary paints, but isn’t that a nice passage?

The dialogue is also good, and fun, kind of Wodehouse-ian, really. Listen to this exchange between Henry and his sister-in-law Emily, which takes place near the beginning of the story, right after Henry has dropped a paintbrush on a carpet:

[Emily] waved a hand. “I understand artists are remarkably forgetful creatures. Once the creative mood seizes you, you cannot be responsible for your actions.”

“Are you giving me an excuse to be an aggravating guest? This could be entertaining.”

Emily’s mouth curled into the cunning smile that meant she was plotting something. “You’re much more than a guest, as you know. But you’re right. I should demand that you pay me a favor for spilling paint all over my possessions.”

Henry took the brush from her and laid it carefully across the palette. . . . “Let me guess. You already have a favor in mind, and you are delighted I have ruined your carpet, since now you can be sure I’ll agree to whatever you ask.”

Emily looked prouder than ever. “Excellent! We shall slip you back into polite society more easily than I could ever have hoped. Already you are speaking its secret language again, for you are correct in every particular of your guess.”

“I’m overjoyed to be such a prodigy. What, precisely, have I guessed?”

“Tonight, I am going to introduce you to your future wife. What do you think?” She beamed at him, as though she expected him to jump up and start applauding. Which was, of course, impossible.

Okay, I don’t know about you, but I laughed. And was intrigued! I thought it might be the jumping up that was impossible, but it turns out it is the applauding. Henry is back from the Continent, see, following Napoleon’s (second) defeat, and he didn’t get back unscathed. I liked Henry, and I liked how Romain made the consequences of the war permanent. (And I liked the note at the end where she explains what medical condition it actually is that has crippled Henry’s arm.)

Now, here’s the female lead:

Frances Whittier was too much of a lady to curse in the crowded ballroom of Applewood House. Barely.

But as she limped back to her seat next to Caroline, the Countess of Stratton, she found the words a gently bred widow was permitted to use completely inadequate.

“Mercy,” she muttered, sinking into the frail giltwood chair. “Fiddle. Goodness. Damn. Oh, Caro, my toes will never recover.”



I liked Frances, but what I liked best about her were her flaws. You watch her commit a slight error of judgment in her dealings with Henry and you think: Oops, that’s not going to work out well. Though of course this is a romance so naturally it does work out in the end, but with a painful interlude in the middle.

But the interesting thing is that this mistake is one that both echoes and arises from a mistake Frances – a widow – made with her first husband. I really appreciated the way this added depth to Frances – it made her non-perfect but still sympathetic, and it made her feel more like a real person.

Oh, and I enjoyed Frances’ eidetic memory. And her straightforwardness. And the way she competently defends herself against that cad Wadsworth. And the way, when she’s explaining that she likes teaching, she says casually, “I thought it my duty to help, yes, but I also dearly loved to be right.” Hah! Yes, I can relate. Frances is definitely a rounded, full character – especially for a romance that is light and charming and clever rather than heart wrenching (defining, say, Florand’s “Snowkissed”, for example, as heart wrenching rather than light and charming).

I enjoyed the secondary characters, too. I loved Frances’ relationship with her cousin, Caroline – Caroline was very entertaining, and it was nice to see a genuinely positive relationship between a lady’s companion and employer. I loved Henry’s sister-in-law Emily, and I turned out to love Henry’s brother, Jem, who had more depth than I initially expected. The bit where Henry actually asks Jem for advice, you know, and then the bit toward the end. I don’t want to spoil it, so I won’t provide the context, but I mean this bit:

Henry was breaking his unbreakable brother. The look on Jem’s face, more than anything else Henry had seen or thought in the last twenty-four hours, shamed him.

So, yes, I expect I’ll be picking up additional titles from Theresa Romain. I hear A SEASON FOR SCANDAL is good. The protagonist, Jane, is supposed to have “a mind like an abacus,” which sounds promising!

Though the book that is calling my name in the most beguiling tones at the moment is INDA by Sherwood Smith. And I just received FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS by LeGuin, and actually novellas may be just the ticket while completing the PURE MAGIC revision. I want to send that off to my agent no later than Monday and then maybe take time to read the INDA four-book series and then pick up a different project that’s been on hold – the HOUSE OF SHADOWS sequel, actually, which I rather think I would like to finish over Christmas break. So it may be a while before I really make a dent in my TBR shelves.