Rachel Manija Brown's Blog, page 70

Just so you know

...I've been sick in bed fotmr the last five days with some nasty bug that is definitely not covid. Everyone has been tested and we're all negative (not to mention all vaccinated).

I suppose this a sort of noncon juice cleanse. If I emerge with glowing skin and all ills cured, I will let you know.

It has been thrilling trying to close on a house when you're literally flat on your back, let me tell you.

So if you were expecting something from me, that's why you haven't gotten it.

Comments locked to prevent unwanted medical advice.

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We Will All Go Down Together, by Gemma Files

A fix-up novel concerting five families who made an ancient deal with a fallen angel. This is never a good idea. Their descendants are mediums, warlocks, and (due to a changeling in one of the families) fae.

Not the cool, electric guitar playing fae. Not Tolkien's elves either. These are the fae from old folklore, the spectacularly creepy kind, like the ones Katherine Briggs collected stories of, then had illustrated with paintings like this, the nuckelavee (a skinless centaur). Files' fae are terrifying, sometimes beautiful, very alien, and profoundly tragic; most of my favorite stories involved them.

The book also has excellent stories involving conflicted quarter-fae priests, warrior nuns, formerly-possessed girls, time-traveling witches, and more. One of the main characters is Carraclough Devize, a genderswapped Benjamin Fischer from The Legend of Hell House! She's great. But my very favorite character was Ygerna Sidderstane, a throwback nix who only wanted to live a normal life and not be a horrifying predator "dripping in the dark." Everything about her is inventive, terrifying, and haunting.

Read the book in order. While some of the stories were published on their own, not all were, and it works as a kind of mosaic novel.

I liked Experimental Film a lot, but I loved this. For one thing, it's much scarier. Particularly the first story.

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Bear Vet, by Zoe Chant

Who do you call when you spot a baby hellhorse? Shifter Vets!

Judy desperately needs to find a home for her nineteen rescue horses. Waylon desperately needs to rein in his headstrong teenage daughter's quest to tame a wild hellhorse. And what both of them need most desperately is love...

Waylon, a bear shifter and veterinarian for magical animals, instantly recognizes Judy as his mate. But a few things stand between them and true love, namely...

1. Waylon's secret.
2. Waylon's daughter Raelynn's secret.
3. Judy's "Save the Horses" Instagram campaign's lack of likes.
4. The young hellhorse that starts wildfires every time it gets excited.
5. A dangerous beast shielded by its living armor.
6. A fire-breathing chicken.

Coming together to make a new family isn't easy. But Vets For All Pets--and the magical animals its shifter vets care for-- has lots of practice at creating love against the odds.

Bear Vet is a sweet, feel-good shifter romance full of love, laughter, and adorable animals, perfect for reading before bedtime. If you'd love to have a pet miniature pegasus or a kitten with wings, Bear Vet is for you!

This is a book about a teenage girl who tames a wild hellhorse, told primarily from the point of view of her dad and her stepmom-to-be. I wanted to write a magical horse book and also pay for my house, so this is what I came up with. It's the sequel to Unicorn Vet but stands on its own.

If you'd like a copy direct from me, please email me at Rphoenix2@gmail.com and specify what format you'd like. (Mobi for Kindle, epub for most other ereaders. I cam also do pdf.) You can PayPal me $3.00 to Rphoenix2@hotmail (NOT gmail!!!) if you like. If you're saving money, you don't need to pay me.

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Can I lure you to a fic exchange?

I'd like to lure more people into participating in the AU Exchange, for alternate universes!

Both canon divergence (What if Narnia isn't destroyed after Calormen wins? What if different characters survive the plague in The Stand?) and actual alternate universes (what if Edward II's Isabella had a dragon? What if the Jeeves & Bertie Wooster stories were set in space?) These are all actual tags, by the way.

You can select from available fandoms and types of alternate universes here in the tagset - the types of alternate universes are under "freeforms," sorted by ones specific to certain fandoms and ones that can be applied to any, labeled "ALL." So, for instance, you select Heian Jidai | Heian Period RPF as your fandom, Murasaki Shikibu/Sei Shonagon as your characters, and ALL: Noir AU or ALL: Character(s) forced into circus run by evil being as your AU. And so forth.

These are all also actual tags, by the way.

Here are a few intriguing alternate universe tags which you can request someone to write for you, or offer to write yourself:

ALL: Amateur theatre group AU

ALL: Character plays a game with Death in exchange for their/somebody else's life

ALL: Characters are soulbonded to psychic wolves

ALL: Characters Have Or Acquire Fire Lizards

ALL: Cosmic Horror/Eldritch Abomination AU

ALL: Cube (1997) Fusion

ALL: Dimension hopping to find a timeline that isn't doomed

ALL: Dinosaurs & Tropical-Type Climate & Flora Survived to Canon Time Period
ALL: Megafauna Survived To Canon Time Period

ALL: Everything is the Same but one Character is a Kitten

ALL: Everyone wakes up amnesiac
ALL: Everyone wakes up amnesiac on a spaceship

ALL: Finisterre (Cherryh Night Horses) Fusion

ALL: Female characters are the major players

ALL: Fuck/Marry/Kill Is Sometimes Magically Binding

ALL: Good Character Meets Their Evil Counterpart From Another Dimension (or Vice Versa)

ALL: Groundhog Day timeloop

ALL: Groundhog Peggy Sue
ALL: Possessed by time travelling future self

ALL: Magical Horticulturalists

ALL: Power Swap

ALL: Snowed in at a Haunted Hotel

ALL: Soulmate or 1000 Roaches AU (Context.)

ALL: Tethered (Us) AU

ALL: The Belles (Dhonielle Clayton) Fusion

ALL: With the right postage you can send letters anywhere anywhen

Dragonriders of Pern: Canon Dragon Colors Have Different Cultural Meanings

Dragonriders of Pern: Dragons Have Different Colors With Different Cultural Meanings

Marvel Comics: (Non-Empath) Hellions Join the New Mutants

Marvel Comics: Different Characters Trapped In Limbo

What tags are calling to you?

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Would you like some free F/F?

Want to get advance copies of new F/F books? Join the Kalikoi ARC team!

Kalikoi publishes F/F in genres including paranormal, fantasy, historical, and contemporary.

If you join, you will get free copies of all of our books in the hope that you will write HONEST reviews. They will be sent as ebooks. You don’t have to read every book, just the ones you’re interested in. Reviews must state that you received an ARC of the book for free with no obligation to review. Reviews can be very short, ie, one paragraph.

If you're interested, please comment here with your email address, PM me, or email me at Rphoenix2@gmail.com.

Please feel free to copy or link this anywhere!

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Recommend me an audio book

I have an Audible Plus membership, Amazon Prime is putting a bunch of audiobooks on sale right now, and I'm doing a lot of driving.

Please recommend me some audiobooks! I'm looking for books that are enjoyable as audiobooks, not just good books that have an audio edition. My favorite audiobooks include The Only Good Indians, Wylding Hall, Chiwetel Ejiofor reading Piranesi, Rob Inglis reading Lord of the Rings, and Donna Tartt reading True Grit.

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Experimental Film, by Gemma Files

In its purest form, done right, watching an experimental film is the closest you can come to dreaming another person’s dreams. Which is why to watch one is, essentially, to invite another person into your head, hoping you emerge haunted.

A beautifully written novel about two women separated by time, one a film critic and one a filmmaker, their autistic sons, a bit of extremely eerie folklore, and a haunted experimental film.

Lois Cairns is a Canadian film critic and teacher who recently lost her job, has a number of poorly managed chronic health problems, and is struggling with her son's recent diagnosis of autism - something which is stirring up a lot of semi-repressed feelings about the fact that she is autistic herself, though never diagnosed (and also about why she was never diagnosed.) It's with some relief that she discovers an excellent distraction by way of a snippet of a long-lost film by Mrs. Whitcomb, a woman who mysteriously disappeared (years after her autistic son mysteriously disappeared), and who just might be Canada's very first female filmmaker. If the last is true and Lois can prove it, it would revive her career.

Lois plunges into a search for more of the film and the truth about Mrs. Whitcombe (a spectacularly eccentric figure). This leads her to an incredibly spooky folk tale "Lady Midday" which Mrs. Whitcombe was obsessed with, and which obsesses Lois in turn. Needless to say, her search discovers that the past isn't gone, the dead may not be entirely dead, and the fate that caught up with Mrs. Whitcombe is just waiting for some curious researcher to start poking it with a stick...

If you've read my Yuletide story You're Wrong About Misericorde, which is also about a fictional movie, Experimental Film is doing some similar things in terms of some things being absolutely true and some being fictional and you'll probably have to do some research to figure out which is which. Both my story and the book involve silver nitrate, its flammability, and a number of fascinating stories involving movies shot on it, so I was very tickled to read this book and know that Files and I researched the exact same things.

In contrast to the book's meticulous accuracy of everything about film that I know anything about, the bits that involve medical issues were either poorly researched or (I really hope this isn't true but it absolutely could be) based solely on personal or anecdotal experiences with extremely bad doctors.

(Ibuprofen is not addictive. If you are addicted to and/or dependent on multiple drugs, you should not get off them by going cold turkey all by yourself. There are effective treatments for migraines other than OTC painkillers and psychotherapy. If someone goes blind after a prolonged seizure and there's no clear cause for either the blindness or the seizures, it is absolutely insane to assume the blindness must be psychosomatic rather than caused by hypoxia-induced brain damage or whatever is causing the seizures - oh, wait, I ABSOLUTELY believe a doctor would assume that, but that doctor should not be treated as reasonable by the text.)

Also, Canadian police must either not have a lot of crime to deal with or are absolute jerks if, when fire alarms go off and emergency assistance finds a fire, a woman with an established seizure disorder having a seizure, an 110-year-old visitor from a local nursing home dead of a heart attack, and the woman's husband and a friend (who called them in) administering first aid, their reaction is to treat this as a crime scene and aggressively interrogate all the survivors. I live in LA where the police are notorious for being utter bastards, and even here they have established procedures for this sort of scene and they do not include taking the survivors down to the police station for lengthy interrogations, let alone interrogating a survivor at the hospital. All else aside, once the cause of death is established, it's over.

I can't comment on the parts about autism at all; I'd be curious to know what autistic readers think.

That being said, this is a beautifully written, thoughtful, creepy book, of particular interest to those who are interested in folklore and movies, like complicated and flawed female protagonists, and enjoy horror and dark fantasy of the creepy-not-gory variety. I fit all those categories, and will look for more by Gemma Files.

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Son of the Dragon, by T. S. Joyce

Vyr, son of the famous blue dragon Damon Daye, is the reviled and extremely dangerous red dragon. Due to many exciting events which I missed as I read this out of order but which are helpfully recapped in this volume, he is currently separated from his beloved crew and imprisoned in a hellhole prison for worst-of-the-worst shifters; I feel that it's not really a spoiler to say that illegal and immoral experimentation is also going on.

He is SUFFERING and DYING and they are in the process of KILLING HIS DRAGON, an excruciating process after which shifters tend to commit suicide. Because of this, one of his eyes is a DEAD DRAGON EYE. He's in solitary confinement IN THE DARK. But he is voluntarily not breaking out, which he absolutely has the power to do, because to do so would harm his friends, make all shifters look bad, oh yeah and also DESTROY THE ENTIRE WORLD because he can't control his dragon.

Enter Riyah, a telekinetic telepathic psychic therapist who has been recruited by Vyr's mom to pose as a prison counselor and so find out what's really going on in there, save his life, and possibly break him out. She is horrified by prison conditions and what they're doing to Vyr specifically. They can't speak freely because they're constantly monitored, but since she's telepathic they can have secret conversations, including when she's back home. This leads to one of Joyce's hottest sex scenes, conducted entirely long-distance. This is all much less objectionable than would normally be the case as they both know she's not really his therapist.

Typical Joyce characters, made extra fun by Riyah's powers and almost the entire romance occurring sub rosa while the hero is in prison.

Vyr's inability to control his dragon has an unexpected outcome. ( Read more... )

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The Unusual Second Life of Thomas Weaver and The Empathetic Life of Rebecca Wright, by Shawn Inmon

Shawn Inmon's Middle Falls Time Travel series is a set of interconnected but basically standalone Peggy Sue Got Married/Groundhog Day type of time travel books: a person dies, then is reset into their younger self. If they die before they've done what they need to do (some kind of self-improvement/self-knowledge) they reset to the same time.

The books I've read so far are all interestingly different despite the same basic premise, the same setting, and all being clearly written by a very earnest middle-aged straight white guy with more kindness than sophistication. The kindness is a big draw. His characters do things like volunteer at animal shelters and go on the road to give talks on safe sex and work on their relationship with their brothers, and this is all just as important as stopping a serial killer or saving John Lennon.

Characters doing clever things with time travel is rather hilariously not Inmon's strong suit. They vary in terms of how good they are at making use of future knowledge, but I have so far read three of these and in terms of them doing things that are entertainingly clever to the reader, there is very little of that. Even when they use their knowledge smartly, they use it in obvious ways: investing in Microsoft, driving a boy home so he won't die in a drunk driving accident, using their future knowledge to convince people that they know the future so they'll believe a warning. At one point, a character reveals that she has been plotting for ages to put away a criminal. When her cunning plan is finally revealed, it's to... report him to the police.

But the series isn't about doing neat things with time travel. It's about the choices people make, and how hard it can be to do better, and that there's many paths to becoming better and leading a better life.

(The frame is a generally terrible but thankfully minimal cliche bureaucratic afterlife. One book has an angel named Semolina.)

I've been reading the series out of order, which was a good idea for me as I finally got around to the first book and found that he improved a lot as a writer as he went along. I don't think I'd have continued if I'd started there.

His first book actually is a more conventional time travel story, and it's the worst one I've read so far. At age fifteen, Thomas Weaver tries to drive his drunk older brother home from a party; since he doesn't really know how to drive, they get in a crash and his brother is killed. (Note how Inmon doesn't go for the more usual "brother drove himself home" - his characters tend to try to help out, even if they do it badly.)

Everything goes wrong from there, until he's a fifty-year-old unemployed alcoholic living with his mother and commits suicide, only to wake up fifteen again...

This book has a lot of problems, including a rushed ending (Inmon later does very long endings that are slow but satisfying), a way-too-graphic serial killer plot, and Weaver making a million inexplicable, unmotivated choices because Inmon doesn't know how to plot yet.

He already knows that one of his classmates grows up to be a serial killer, so he follows him into the woods and finds his lair of animal torture. Thomas's older brother spots him and says that he always thought that guy was creepy, why was Thomas following him? For literally no stated reason, Thomas lies about everything rather than telling his brother. He could have thought that maybe his brother is fated to die and is afraid that getting him involved in a serial killer plot might cause that, but he doesn't. Later, he sees the serial killer kidnap his dog, but covers up the whole thing plus the dog rescue, even lying about it to his mother who definitely would have believed him, again for literally no stated reason. (Actual reason: once the cops get involved, the serial killer is arrested and that plot line ends.)

Spoiler for how he saves his brother. ( Read more... )

Rebecca Wright is much much better, with a satisfying messiness about the odd turns people's lives take and not everything wrapped up neatly. Rebecca is an emotionally isolated, status and money-driven real estate agent in a loveless marriage, with a nanny actually mothering her kid. Her one genuine and loving emotional relationship is with her younger brother Duncan, and even that doesn't really blossom into intimacy until she finds out that he's gay when he gets AIDS and comes home to die.

She dies of old age, loveless and in poverty. And opens her eyes with her husband screaming that he's leaving her...

Rebecca proceeds to fix up her life, focusing on making tons of money in real estate. Inmon used to be a real estate agent, and you can tell: everything about her job is very plausible and fun. But she still lets the nanny mother her kid, and her attempt to save Duncan fails because he doesn't believe in her warning. She dies again, rich but unhappy. And opens her eyes with her husband screaming that he's leaving her...

This book took a number of turns I didn't expect. While her child is important, the really crucial relationship turns out to be with her brother. A lot of the book is the Rebecca-and-Duncan story, a lot of it a road trip including a lengthy and successful commercial for the Florida Keys, and when it finally does get back the "letting the nanny raise your kid" issue, it goes in an unexpected and delightful direction.

( Read more... )

If you're curious about these books, The Changing Life of Joe Hart or The Empathetic Life of Rebecca Wright are good places to start.

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