Deborah J. Ross's Blog, page 95

Short Book Reviews: Demonic Tattoos Embellish this Urban Fantasy

In the Hellmaw series, a war in the daemon land Araunt has left exiles stranded on Earth, some at perpetual war with one another and other desperate to return to their homeland. This novel, set in contemporary London, features tattoo artist Quills who collects magical "essence" as she inks designs onto humans and fellow daemons alike. That’s all the backstory you need to enjoy this delicately nuanced, suspenseful urban fantasy. Despite being labeled Hellmaw 7, it’s easily a stand-alone. The narrative was strong and clear, the characters memorable, and the mystery and its resolution provided enough twists and turns to keep me turning the pages late at night. The leader of one of the daemon factions has been killed, and the crime is going to be pinned on Quills unless she can discover who really did it. I especially loved that although Quills can assume any shape, she prefers the dark skin favored by her grandmother. Added to this are the natural color of her luminous blue eyes and the way her own tattoos can glow. And move. My all-time favorite tattoo is a wing that, when properly positioned on her body, can fan open to reveal a secret carrying place (in which she stores essences taken from other daemons). I also loved the historical flashbacks that poignantly illustrated how Quills has been changed by her contact with humans, shaping her contemporary relationship with her human companion, AJ. Besides its aspects as a thriller, it’s a tender romance and story of letting go and truly becoming your own person. Hellmaw: Of the Essence is a satisfying read on many levels and marks Harbowy a talent to watch out for.

Squashalypse!

Okay, we've all heard the warnings. In summer squash season, do not leave the window of your parked car down or you will find a 20 lb zucchini on the passenger seat. And every year we (as do many others) suffer a memory lapse and plant -- well, too many squash plants. (This applies only to summer squashes like zucchini, pattypan, and crookneck; winter squashes like butternut, buttercup, and acorn aren't a problem because they can be stored and enjoyed over the course of months.) However, we have devised several strategies for dealing the the bounty that do not involve breaking and entering our neighbors' vehicles.

The first strategy is the careful selection of summer squashes. Most varieties, like ordinary zucchini, become woody once they pass a certain size. The seeds get large and tough. You can cut around the seed area and use slabs for zucchini lasagna or brush with olive oil and slap them on the grill. But really, how much zucchini lasagna can you eat? We found a variety, romanesco zucchini, that stays tender (and small-seeded) even when it attains considerable size. It's a delicious squash with a sweet, nutty flavor. Here's what it looks like on the vine. This squash is about 18" long.

Romanesco zucchini
We usually pick them at this size or smaller, but occasionally, one hides from us...
Sarah displaying the culprit
What to do with such an edifice of squashness? Strategy Two of the squash abatement program is to chop it fairly small and freeze it for winter. No summer squash tolerates freezing well enough to eat plain, but the small cubes go beautifully in pasta sauces and soups. The first step is to wash and slice it. You can see why we call it "steampunk squash." The seed cavity is really just a spongy central area, and the seeds are tender.
Steampunk squash with iced hibiscus tea
Typical instructions for home freezing call for blanching in a hot water bath, then plunging into ice water. Clearly, those folks have never heard of modern appliances. My short-cut is to microwave the cubes until they are just steaming but not cooked, then quickly seal them in freezer bags and pop them in the freezer. Here are pint-sized bags ready to go into the big chest freezer. The monster squash yielded 7 pints.


Frozen diced romanesco zucchini

Hot Jupiters and Other Wonders

Exo-planetary discoveries abound in current popular and technical astronomical literature. Authors throw around terms like "hot Jupiters," "ice giants," and "brown dwarfs," (of course, the fantasy lovers among us imagine something quite different when we read the latter two terms), often assuming their readers (a) have read articles in which those and many other, related terms were defined; and (b) remember those definitions. With the number and types of newly-discovered planets circling stars other than the Sun increasing in leaps and bounds, how is an interested lay person to keep them all straight?

The wonderful astronomy website, Universe Today: Space and Astronomy News. They've put together a primer on "gas giant" planets that's straightforward and easy to follow.

Like all things astronomical in nature, gas giants are diverse, complex, and immensely fascinating. Between missions that seek to examine the gas giants of our Solar System directly to increasingly sophisticated surveys of distant planets, our knowledge of these mysterious objects continues to grow. And with that, so is our understanding of how star systems form and evolve.

Beginning with the difference between rocky (terrestrial) planets and gas giants (a term, by the way, coined by science fiction author) James Blish, the article takes you through the classification of various giant planets as they is currently understood, often giving historical perspective for those of us wrestling with the discrepancies between what we learned a decade (or more -- the term "gas giant" has been around since the early 1950s!) and what we read in the science news today.

Highly recommended as background for the general science reader and a resource for science and science fiction writers!

Summer Bounty

It's late summer and the garden keeps giving. This afternoon I picked a basketful of cucumbers: Russian Brown, English Telegraph, and lemon cukes. The Russian Browns are nice in that, like the lemons, they don't get bitter. When they're ripe, the skin turns rich brown and sometimes gets crackles. We will eat 1 or 2 per bowl of salad. (you can see a little container with purslane from the garden at the upper left.)




Then there are the pear trees. One is a Comice, the other a variety we haven't been able to identify. It's a little like an Asian pear but tastes terrible raw. When cooked, however, it is flavorful and intensely sweet.



I picked a couple of baskets, including bird-pecked ones, chopped and seasoned them with cinnamon, cooked them until just tender, and canned them in quart jars. I brought some extra to a gathering at the home of a friend, where they were much enjoyed. Some years I will slice and dry them, too -- sweet as candy -- but I still have some left from last year.





This process will go on for a while, many quarts' worth, as the "Asian pear" tree bears heavily. I'll refrigerate the Comice pears to eat fresh.

Then there are 2 apple trees...but those are fine when chopped, tossed with a little sugar and ascorbic acid, and popped into ziplock bags and the freezer. They are slightly spongey that way but go wonderfully in oatmeal, where the cooking softens the texture just right.

[political rant] I cannot keep up with Trump's sh*t

Let me get this straight. It's Friday, August 25 and:


Trump pardoned convicted ArpaioTrump signed the transgender military banTrump's close adviser (and Bannon ally) Seb Gorka is quittingMueller  issued subpoenas for officials with ties to Manafort North Korea just fired short-range missiles
Oh, and there's a hurricane bearing down on Texas (although it seems to be losing power and may be downgraded to a tropical storm...too bad the same cannot be said aboutTrump's atrocities)
What's Trump's response? A Tweet that says "Good luck" as he takes off for a vacation at Camp David, leaving the rest of us mortals to deal with the unfolding crises. Plural, many of his own making.
I am so appalled, there are no words.
You can read more details in the Washington Post article.

A Jewish Heroine of the Renaissance

Here's the story behind the story: "Unmasking the Ancient Light," in Nevertheless, She Persisted (ed. Mindy Klasky, hot off the press at Book View Cafe and other vendors)
Back in the 1990s, when themed anthologies were all the rage, I heard about one that was right up my alley and open to submission. Ancient Enchantresses, to be edited by Kathleen M. Massie-Ferch and Martin H. Greenberg for DAW. The editors wanted historical fantasy featuring strong women characters and magic, as is clear from the title. As I cast about for a subject, I found myself more and more – excuse the pun – disenchanted with Western European historical characters. It seemed to me that the women of interest had been portrayed more than frequently enough, and I had little interest in Celtic mythology. When I lamented my lack of inspiration to a friend – not a fantasy writer, but the director of a pre-school at a Jewish community center – she suggested I take a look at Written Out of History: Our Jewish Foremothers, by Sondra Henry and Emily Taitz (3rd ed, Biblio Press, 1988). Posthaste, I ordered a copy of the book and then pored through it. The chapters were short, more summations than in-depth histories. Although quite a few of them piqued my interest, only one suggested a story, that of Dona Gracia Nasi. The section began:

Unlike Benvenida Abrabanel, Beatrice de Luna belonged to a family that had chosen to become Marranos [converts to Catholicism – also known as conversos] so that they could remain in their home in Portugal. They had a successful business and a rich life. Beatrice was born in 1510, thirteen years after the expulsion of all practicing Portuguese Jews. Those remaining in Portugal worked hard to hide any Jewish allegiance from the world…

I devoured the section, all four pages of it, from Beatrice inheriting her husband’s share of an immense commodities business to her flight from one country after another, the Inquisition hot on her heels, to her imprisonment in Venice, her transformation into Dona Gracia Nasi (her childhood Jewish name), to her eventually settling in Turkey. But all this was so abbreviated as to be tantalizing without deep substance.
In the footnotes, however, I discovered that historian Cecil Roth had written an entire book about Gracia, The House of Nasi: Dona Gracia (Jewish Publication Society of America, 1947). Although the book was out of print, I was able to borrow a copy from a local university library. Within those scholarly pages, I discovered a story as dramatic, tragic, and inspiring as anything out of Hollywood or New York.
I could have tried to tell Gracia’s entire story, but that would have meant either another Il Ghetto, the old foundry district. I cut out an image from a tourist brochure of a person in the traditional Mardi Gras costume called bauta (including a white mask, tricorne hat, and a black tabarro, a short cloak) and pinned it on my bulletin board, hoping to find a story that would capture the sense of brooding menace. (As an aside, I’m not comfortable with clowns, either.) Armed with image, memory, and scholarly text, I embarked upon the tale. abridged version or an extensive tome. I decided, therefore, to focus on a shorter period of her life: the flight from Antwerp (when Queen Marie of Burgundy, Regent of the Low Countries and sister to Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire, schemed to marry off Gracia’s young daughter to one of her courtiers) to Venice. I’d visited Venice briefly during the time I lived in France (1991) and had vivid memories of the shadows under the bridges over the canals, the ancient plazas and towers, and the omnipresence of the sea. I wandered through the original ghetto,

“Unmasking the Ancient Light” is a tribute to the perseverance of a woman under extraordinary reversals and dangers. Life was perilous for European Jews in the Renaissance, as it had been in centuries earlier. Jews had been expelled from (among others) England (1290), France (1182, 1306, 1321, 1394), Spain (1492), and Portugal (1497). The series of expulsions forced Jewish communities to find safe (or safer) havens, in the Netherlands, Venice, and Islamic countries, such as the Ottoman Empire. They developed international systems of commerce and banking, as well as close familial and communities ties. Gracia’s family was no exception. From Spain (“convert, leave, or die!”) they relocated to Portugal, then to Antwerp, and so forth. While in Italy, Gracia dropped the pretense of a converso and began finding ways to support her fellow exiles, whether lending material aid to individuals to becoming a patron of the arts to creating a printing house to publish Jewish texts in Hebrew and also Spanish (the Ferrera Bible) for those unable to read the ancient languages.
The list of Gracia’s accomplishments could easily fill the word count of a piece of short fiction, but I wanted her story to be more than a list of the amazing things she had done. I wanted to capture the spirit of the woman – if not historically accurate, as is always the challenge with fantasy – but one that would speak to the hearts of readers as Gracia had spoken across the centuries to me. I focused, then, on her struggle to survive the political intrigues and animosities of her time while preserving and nourishing the spirit of her people. The magic, as it were. Here I found a second inspiration in various treatments of the feminine aspect of the divine and the equivalence of the Shekhinah, sometime called the Indwelling Spirit, with light, without getting too dogmatic or theological.


As a final note, since I dutifully returned Cecil Roth’s book to the university library, my husband presented me with a copy of The Woman Who Defied Kings: The Life and Times of Dona Gracia Nasi, A Jewish Leader During the Renaissance (Andree Aelion Brooks, Paragon House, 2002). If you want to know more about her, I recommend this highly accessible book (which has a ton of footnotes, for the historians among you).

Deborah's Excellent Solar Eclipse Adventure

Tailgate party at LassenI've posted earlier about my trek up to Lassen to view the annual solar eclipse in 2012. My same friend organized an expedition up to Oregon for this year's total eclipse, but for various reasons I didn't go. However, my older daughter, Sarah, and I did get a grand view of it from near home (about 72%).

Our first thought was to walk up the street to a place unimpeded by redwood trees, but Sunday morning brought such a heavy marine layer, one that didn't clear until early afternoon, that we looked for an alternate plan. I called various friends farther inland and finally connected with one, about an hour's drive away, who hadn't ordered eclipse shades in time. So Sarah and I, eclipse shades in hand, hit the road very early in case there was significant rush hour traffic. There was.

So the eclipse began with me behind the wheel and Sarah peeking out the window through
Deborah viewing the 2017 eclipse
Sarah viewing the 2017 eclipseher shades going, "Wow." I tell you, if I had not already seen that first teensy bite out of the Sun, I would have been majorly bummed. Instead my reaction was one of joy -- my kid was thrilling to the very same thing I had loved.

It soon became apparent that we weren't going to arrive until the maximum coverage. I was talking myself into that being okay. Sarah called our friend, who said that the overcast was pretty heavy at their place. So, since we were in sun with only a few clouds, we pulled off the freeway, turned on to a side street and then the first open parking lot. It happened to belong to the Tzu Chi Foundation for Compassionate Buddhist Relief. We scrambled out of the car to see the eclipse at about 25%, with all the ooohs and aaahs and I remember how cool this is! excitement.

Then came the best part. The foundation offices looked closed, but a volunteer drove in and came over to see what we were doing. In huge excitement, I offered her my shades. "Oh, can you see it from here?" she asked. And then looked. Amazement and delight lit up her face. We talked about what was happening in the sky, she looked again and again...and then she ran inside to bring out all the workers she could find. All of them reacted in the same way. Including the special needs children who were doing a cleaning project. Later we toured the facility and talked about giving kindness and love. We didn't specifically talk about sharing wonder, but that was the high point of the eclipse for me. Not seeing it myself, but seeing the delight in someone else's experience of the heavenly wonders.

By the time we got to my friend's house, the skies and cleared. She'd tried to watch it through a colander, but the holes were the wrong shape, leaf-shaped instead of round, and it didn't work. But there was still about 25% left of the eclipse, so she and her family got to see it after all.

It's wonderful to view such a rare and glorious phenomenon. It's even more wonderful to make it possible for another person to have that same experience.

Breakfast, With Blackberries and Grapefruit

In the midst of all the political upheaval, trolls going sideways, and general upsetness, it's a good thing to take a deep breath and savor a meal. 



The grapefruit (about the size of an orange) is from our tree, which for some reason has decided to ripen the fruit several months early this year. The blackberries are from our neighborhood. Under the steel-cut oats are chopped pears from our trees, and this is the right season for them. 
The tea is Trader Joe's Mango Black tea.
Ahhh...

Tuesday Cat Blog: On the Scratching of Yoga Mats

Gayatri, the One-Eyed Pirate Wonder Queen here:

I wish to lodge a formal complaint about my owners on the subject of suitable scratching materials. Yes, I know this environment has been amply supplied with scratching posts. As a thoroughly civilized feline, I am acquainted with their appearance and use. I do use them, and my svelte figure at the august age of a decade is ample proof of my dedication to such exercise. However, they lack a certain je ne sais quoi. Such quoi was sadly lacking in my life until...

...the yoga mats appeared. O heavenly plushy stickiness, of the perfection for the sinking-in of claws and the ripping-forth with great satisfaction.

Needless to say, my monkeyswere Not Amused by the exercise of my natural rights. They rolled the mats up. I found them. They put the rolled up mats into the compartment of a cabinet. I found it, crawled in, and indulged myself.

I must admit that never once did my monkeys shriek, roll up newspaper, or throw their feces in my general direction. They are civilized monkeys.

And inventive. Recently when I searched out the cubby containing my now-favorite scratching material I found it was covered -- draped -- with a fleece blanket.

I present, therefore, my protest portrait.

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Cover Reveal: Lace and Blade 4

Here's the cover for my latest anthology editing project, the fourth volume of Lace and Blade, a series of elegant, witty, romantic fantasy short fiction, with occasional swashbuckling, derring-do, and duels with words and swords.





It won't be released until next Valentine's Day. Dave Smeds did the cover design. The table of contents is here.