I'm Revisiting Dealing With Dragons By Patricia C Wrede Again. Such A Good Comfort Read. I Love This

I'm revisiting Dealing With Dragons by Patricia C Wrede again. Such a good comfort read. I love this series. I have a feeling I'm about to reread the whole rest of the series too (library permitting)

I ended up snagging Moving Pictures from the library bc why not

Yall

Did you know this is the first book where Ridcully is introduced? I remembered it was a Wizard book but it's been so long and the main dude is some dude I dunno he hasn't shown up yet and I think this is only the 2nd or 3rd time I've read this one

RIDCULLYYYYYYY I love him

This one also has the fabulous line about the final--or at least penultimate--frontier. And some good Alchemist jokes too

"The Mountain in the Sea" by Ray Nayler. Update 1

It's good so far. I'm 5 chapters in and progress is flowing nicely. I am still eager for the cephalopods to show up though.

The MC has met an entity (an AI) and struggles with what pronouns to use, then resolves to use a Turkish pronoun (o) to get away from the English gendered pronoun issue, but the narration sticks with an English they/them. This isnt a criticism, just an observation. I am interested in options for how a book written in English can handle characters who are multilingual.

Looking forward to having more time to read more:)

November's book!

Solstice Wood by Patricia A McKillip

I picked this one up (used of course) on something of a whim. Someone was talking about books where magic was intimately connected to “mundane” and everyday aspects of life (such as in Tamora Pierce’s “Circle of Magic” books, which I love).

In this book, there is a Fiber Arts Guild which, is turns out, is actually a... coven? All the women who are guild members are actually weaving (and sewing and knitting and crocheting haha) spells to keep out the... fair folk.

That part of it, I really like! The rest of it, I’m so-so on. I’ve had this book for a long time and haven’t finished it. We’ll see if I make any more progress this month...

Finished rereading Illuminations! Still good. I got emotional at the end, although it is hard to tell if it's because of the story or if it's just my fragile emotional state 👍👍👍

Solstice Wood, Patricia A McKillip

Okay I finished the book!

Thoughts (and spoilers) under the jump

1. I wasn’t sure I was going to finish it. I bought it months ago, possibly even a year ago, and it sat about 1/3 read on my nightstand for months--that usually bodes ill. Then, of course, I decided to make it the November book so that, one way or another, it’d be taken care of by the end of this month.

2. I picked this book up more-or-less at random after seeing it discussed in a thread about “books that have a magic system that hinges on something ordinary/everyday rather than Great and Obscure Spells” (a la Tamora Pierce’s Circle of Magic books). In this case, the magic is worked through needlework and threadcraft--the witches’ coven in the book is the local Fiber Arts Guild. They work their magic through sewing, quilting, crochet, knitting, macrame... and they use it to maintain and defend the boundaries between the mundane world and the Fair Folk.

3. The magic system is awesome! What we see of it. It’s not explained much, but it does get some description, and I loved that. The plot is... okay? Like I said, I plowed through a little less than half of it and then didn’t feel the need to finish it. Normally my favorite books get their momentum up before then. But more on this in a second.

The chapters are have varying character POVs, but it’s not really used to a super amazing extent (for the most part). If it wasn’t for the chapter headings like “Chapter 2: Steve” I’m not sure I could have told you who was narrating which chapters? Not to toot my own horn but I think even I have stretched myself a lot re: having the narration be really flavored by the POV character, and I think the characters’ voices could have been more deeply developed.

3b: Plot: having damned with faint praise re: plot and pacing just now, I will say that when I did pick the book back up again, the book did start to snap along pretty well. When the changeling appears, things really get moving. I think I said something like “oh man I hopped off too early this is actually kinda good,” so if you can get over that hump, it’s easy to finish. That said, I really don’t think authors generally intend for their books to sag in the early-middle.

4: Philosophically speaking, I did like the conclusion. Instead of ending in a big battle or dramatic sacrifice or big violent orgy, the book wraps with the matriarch of the family (and the head of the Fiber Arts Guild)... changing her mind. She has a perspective change, and she changes her previous stance of “the Fae must be kept out at any cost, they can never never never be allowed in our world” to “maybe we can see what happens if we stop reinforcing our spells. Maybe we can see if they’re as dangerous as we always believed, or if they’re only as dangerous as human people.” She doesn’t do a full 180 and suddenly embrace Them, but she does realize that maybe, in keeping out what she is afraid of, she is also keeping out too much. (Also, a great number of people she cares about turn out to be either part-fae or in love with a fay, so she changes her mind largely for them because she doesn’t want to drive them away any farther than she already has.) And I do love a book that has that sort of shift at its heart.

5: In conclusion: I’m glad I read the book, I’m glad I stuck with it and finished it. It definitely has some good points, and I think they largely outweigh the so-so things about it. But I’m not keeping the book, and I’m not sure I’d recommend it. It feels like a “if this seems like your kind of story, go for it. But if you’re not quite sold on it, maybe just see if you can get a library copy.”

And that’s November’s book: Solstice Wood, Patricia A McKillip.