The Gossamer Mage by Julie Czerneda

First off, Julie Czerneda’s new fantasy novel The Gossamer Mage is due out on August 6 from DAW books, but I’ll be talking about it here next Monday, 29 July — because, dear readers, I was the recipient of an advance copy way back in February/March, and will finally be sharing What I Thought as part of Julie’s launch razzmatazz.

I’ll tell you right now that I liked it A LOT, but you’ll have to come back next week to find out why. And just btw, isn’t that cover fabulous?! 🙂

To check out my thoughts on other, recent publications by Julie Czerneda, click on:

What I’m Reading: Search Image (Web Shifters’ Library #1)

What I’m Reading: The Only Thing To Fear

Where We Land by Tim Jones

Secondly, another friend-in-writing, Tim Jones, launched his latest work, the novella Where We Land, on July 16. It’s a climate change, near-future dystopia set in New Zealand, and published by The Cuba Press as part of a novella series. I didn’t have the opportunity to preread this one but I have preordered. 😉

Tim writes poetry as well as prose, and I’ve featured his work here several times in the life of the blog. 🙂

The Sea

Angela Carter

The Stars, Natasha

Thinning

Fun With Friends On SF Signal: Tim Jones

‘Men Briefly Explained’ — Tim Jones

The Heir Of Night Guest Author Interview Series — Tim Jones

The First Artist On Mars

USA

The About The Characters post series focuses on the minor characters in The Wall Of Night series, in large part because:

“I think it’s the presence of the smaller characters that “makes” a story, creating texture around the main points of view.”

~ from my Legend Award Finalist's Interview, 2013

Initially, the series focused exclusively on characters from The Heir of Night, but now I’m continuing on with minor characters from both The Gathering Of The Lost and Daughter of Blood simultaneously — in alphabetical order, of course!

(The quotes, together with the covers, indicate the books in which the character appears.)

—

UK/AU/NZ

Herun: a tracker on the Northern March of Emer, in the Southern Realms of Haarth

Lord Falk, standing just inside the chapel door, stopped his captain with a gesture. Erron and Manan were waiting at the far end of the nave, by the desecrated altar, while the tracker, Herun, knelt to one side of the corpse. Carick tried not to look at the body too closely, or the stake and the blood splashed everywhere. Pushing aside the smell was harder, but he swallowed back another lurch of nausea and made himself focus…

~  from © The Gathering Of The Lost, The Wall of Night Book Two: Chapter 15 — The Chapel of Serrut

Every now and then I go on a ‘book browse and buy binge’, i.e. I go into a bookshop, browse all the sections, and choose an array of books in different genres, usually based solely on the interest sparked (in sequential order) by cover art, back cover synopsis, and my perusal of the first few pages.

Milkman is not one of those books. BUT it immediately predates such an expedition by being an airport book, purchased at the start of the journey that incorporated the ‘book browse and buy’ session, so I’m including it in the books I’ll be reporting back on, as a result of that process. And let’s face it, the Airport Read has to be another of the great book acquisition processes. (AR & BB&BB, just to go wild on acronyms.)

In terms of the book reports you can expect, last week’s post on Frankie McMillan’s My Mother and the Hungarians was the first of the BB&BB grab-bag.

Principle No 1 with this process is that ideally all the books should come from different genres or classes of literature. So My Mother and the Hungarians is a collection of flash fiction on broadly contemporary realist topics, whereas Milkman is a novel and a blend of recent historical and contemporary realist fiction. It’s set in the 1970s period of the Troubles in Northern Ireland—half a century ago now—but still close enough to us to seem as much contemporary as historical.

Milkman is also 2018’s Man Booker Prize winner, although I must confess I completely missed that sticker on the book cover: a classic example of hiding in plain sight, or reader’s myopia! But I did think the back cover synopsis sounded really interesting—and I was not wrong about that. Milkman is a really interesting story. It’s also a really tough read in many ways and one that requires concentration at times, so not necessarily one for the beach holiday or late at night when you’re tired. Warning: This book requires your full attention. (I do not, by the way, say that like it’s a bad thing.)

So what is it about, beyond the Troubles? That in itself is a challenging question because the book is about many things: the transition of a young woman from adolescence to adulthood amid family and (extreme) societal pressures; relationships, including dealing (or not dealing) with sexual predation; community tensions; and the overarching pressure of the Troubles which informs and shapes every aspect of life. So it’s not a book where it’s easy to glibly say, “Well, it’s about xyz…”

If pressed, though, I would say that this book is about a society under pressure and how that pressure pervades and distorts every aspect of individual, family, and community life.

Milkman is told entirely in first person point-of-view, but you never (I’m pretty sure)  know the name of the protagonist or many of those about her. This works in the context of the story but it’s also part of the reason the reader has to pay attention, because being stream of consciousness, the focus of the narrator’s perspective slides about a bit.

One of the thing’s that struck me about the book as well, is that the lens on people and events is frequently humorous. But that’s not at all the same thing as being comic, and very often the humor is downright dark or has dark overtones. What it does show, though, is how humor—dark, savage, wry—can be an important part of mental and emotional survival.

And it was only as I typed the word “survival” that I realised that is, of course, a really important element of what this book is about: personal survival and maintaining the bonds of personal relationship and community in the face of the extreme conditions cited above.

I think Milkman is a terrific, though challenging, read and I really recommend it. If you’ve enjoyed books like Kate Atkinson’s When Will There Be Good News? or Life After Life, Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven, or Nadine Gordimer’s No Time Like The Present, I believe you may enjoy it, too.

As I’ve already indicated above, I purchased my copy of this book, which is the mass market paperback edition, 348 pp, published by Faber & Faber in 2018.

The Wall of Night Series map; artist Peter Fitzpatrick

The A Geography of Haarth post series is traversing the full range of locales and places from The Wall of Night world of Haarth. Each locale is accompanied by a quote from the relevant books where the place occurs.

From January 25, 2013 to November 25, 2014, the series explored locations encountered in The Heir Of Night and The Gathering Of The Lost. Now the series has resumed to ensure the geography of Daughter Of Blood (The Wall Of Night Book Three) is included in our “grand tour”, epic fantasy style. 😀

The new series comprises updates of previous entries as well as the new listings. At present, we’re deep in the terrain of “T.” 😉

—

Terebanth:  a city of the River
.

UK/AU/NZ

USA

“Tarathan of Ar and Jehane Mor, heralds of the Guild,” one of Nhairin’s stewards roared out, above the hubbub. “From Terebanth, on the Great River.” Silence crashed down as every face turned toward the man and woman who stepped through the door. The man had multiple braids of chestnut hair flowing below his shoulders, while the woman was fair, with a single plait twisted around her head like a crown. They were both of middle height and clad alike in gray, their long cloaks cast back. A badge pinned each cloak on the left shoulder and a dagger was sheathed at their belts. Both their faces were drawn and weary, their clothes mired from the road, but they walked steadily through the watching, silent hall until they stood before the Earl’s chair. There they stopped as one and bowed, first to the Earl and then, slightly lower, to the woman at his side.”

~ from © The Heir Of Night, The Wall of Night Book One: Chapter 2 — Heralds of the Guild

UK/AU/NZ

USA

“Spring came to the River in a flurry of blustering winds and driving rain that turned the local roads into quagmires and hurled the first fragile blossoms to the ground. Two heralds were blown out of the city of Terebanth with the weather and turned east toward Ij, following the great Main Road that had endured since the days of the Old Empire.”

~  from © The Gathering Of The Lost, The Wall of Night Book Two: Chapter 1 — The Road To Ij
.

UK/AU/NZ

USA

Asantir replaced the longsword on the stand, her expression reflective. “I acquired this pair when I journeyed into the River lands with Earl Tasarion, before he became Night’s Heir. I had taken cover from a spring downpour in a dark, narrow little shop in Terebanth.” She paused. “I learned later that the trader, Gray Taan, was famous. As soon as I entered, he said that he had something that might interest me.”

~ from © Daughter Of Blood, The Wall of Night Book Three: Chapter 28 — Field of Play

Recently, I’ve been talking about short fiction (just a little, here and here.) Also, June 22nd was NZ’s National Flash Fiction Day and one of NZ’s foremost exponents of the short fiction art, and flash fiction in particular, is undoubtedly Frankie McMillan.

So there seemed no better way to round off the short fiction posts than to tell you about Frankie’s collection, My Mother and the Hungarians. (Hungarians, for short. 😉 )

Just to get to the most important things first, I really enjoyed reading it. My Mother and the Hungarians is flash or very very short fiction, in many ways a Siamese twin to prose poetry. In this case, though, themes run through the collection, to the extent that it works together as a cohesive whole.

Frankie McMillan has a ‘voice’ that I’ve always found particularly distinctive. In the spirit of Emily Dickinson, she has a slantwise take on the world and people in it, a take that picks out the curious and downright strange, oddities and absurdities—to the extent that I always think of her work as subversive: not so much in a political sense but in terms of received wisdoms and traditional ways of looking at the world.

For me, Hungarians really worked in terms of its keen observation, humour, and pathos, as well as a sequence of connected short fictions. Clearly, I’m not alone in my appreciation either, since it was longlisted for the Ockham National Book Award in 2017.

If you like (very) short fiction and a slantwise look at the world, I recommend My Mother and the Hungarians. I know it’s still available in good book shops because I purchased my copy in Unity, Wellington. 🙂

Frankie MacMillan

I also note that an interview with Frankie appeared in the latest edition of Takahe magazine. The interviewer was Zoë Meager.

By way of the usual disclosure, yes, Frankie and I really are on first name terms. 😉 I also esteem her creative voice highly. Because of this, I have featured her work on my blog several times, so you might like to check out:

Out Of The Blue, 28-9-2010

My Father, The Oceanographer (17-01-2012)

Cathedral of the Poor (21-5-2013)

The house on Holloway Street (23-8-2016)

I also featured Frankie’s work on The Tuesday poem blog:

“Hourglass” and “at night my dead mother appears wanting soup” (17-3-2015)

UK/AU/NZ

The About The Characters post series focuses on the minor characters in The Wall Of Night series, in large part because:

“I think it’s the presence of the smaller characters that “makes” a story, creating texture around the main points of view.”

~ from my Legend Award Finalist's Interview, 2013

Initially, the series focused exclusively on characters from The Heir of Night, but now I’m continuing on with minor characters from both The Gathering Of The Lost and Daughter of Blood simultaneously — in alphabetical order, of course!

(The quotes, together with the covers, indicate the books in which the character appears.)

—

USA

Hawk: of Barrowdun, an Emerian Hill chieftain

…“And those few who have survived report uncanny things.” Carick caught the flicker of something that could have been fear in Hawk’s fierce eyes. “They speak of creatures who are half man and half beast, demons whose shapes change and shift beneath the moon.”

“On every raid,” Hirn concluded harshly, “they have left something behind—a weapon of Barrowdun in the Hillholt camp, a token of Hillholt in the ruins of a Barrowdun farmstead. Someone, my lord, wants war in our Hills.”

“And on my March,” said Lord Falk softly.

~  from © The Gathering Of The Lost, The Wall of Night Book Two: Chapter 17 — Oak and Hill

Yep, you guessed it — it’s the 1st of the month and that means Supernatural Underground! For this year, it also means my Year of Romance in Fantasy Fiction (#YOR #RIFF) is rocking on, alternating between more recent books and titles of longer standing.

This month, I’m heading back to 1988 and shining the spotlight on Katharine Kerr’s Daggerspell, her inaugural Deverry novel. In particular, I’m highlighting Jill and Rhodry, candidates for “love at first sight”, as well  as “fated love” and a few more of the romance traditions. 😉

I love this book, so if you don’t already know it and Katharine Kerr’s writing, rock on over to Supernatural Underground and find out more.

Romance In Fantasy Fiction: Katharine Kerr’s “Daggerspell” and Love At First Meeting

Of course, it’s not really the first, although Jill and Rhodry don’t know it… 😉

Have fun!

The Wall of Night Series map; artist Peter Fitzpatrick

The A Geography of Haarth post series is traversing the full range of locales and places from The Wall of Night world of Haarth. Each locale is accompanied by a quote from the relevant books where the place occurs.

From January 25, 2013 to November 25, 2014, the series explored locations encountered in The Heir Of Night and The Gathering Of The Lost. Now the series has resumed to ensure the geography of Daughter Of Blood (The Wall Of Night Book Three) is included in our “grand tour”, epic fantasy style. 😉

The new series comprises updates of previous entries as well as the new listings.

—

Tenneward Lodge: country house belonging to the lord of the Tenneward, in Emer
.

USA

UK/AU/NZ

Cicadas whirred and the poplar leaves rustled together although there was almost no breeze. Across the fields, Malian could see workers making their way home and towers of mellow stone rising above a low hill. She wondered what Lord Tenneward’s lodge would be like—and almost laughed out loud, a few minutes later, as the avenue ended in gates with stone lions, the entrance framing a house that looked larger than Normarch castle. The lodge was built of pale yellow stone, with tall windows and a creeper twining across its face. Stables and mews and kennels, all in the same yellow stone, were set on the far side of a wide graveled courtyard to the right of the house.

~  from © The Gathering Of The Lost, The Wall of Night Book Two: Chapter 30 — The Welcome Cup
.

USA

UK/AU/NZ

Her seeking became the windhover, gliding this way and that on the currents of the air and all the time looking, searching— until Malian saw it, a Winter Country cairn in the midst of the Gray Lands, with the Song of Haarth rising beneath it. The spark of life force before the cairn would be the hound, Falath. She had seen him in her vision outside Tenneward Lodge, keeping his lonely vigil by Rowan Birchmoon’s grave.

~from © Daughter Of Blood, The Wall of Night Book Three: Chapter 38 — Dawn Wind

Recently, I learned that the NZ mental health project Be Great has designated June 24-30 as Thankfulness Week.

The reasons why are summarised in The Thankfulness Project 2019 page on the Be Great website:

To lift spirits in the coldest darkest week of the year

June 24 – 30 is one of the lowest daylight hour weeks in New Zealand, a cold and dark time when people can struggle with depression. The goal is to help people in this time by inspiring them to think of all the good things there are about being alive as opposed to the cold and dark time of year it is.

The way I clicked onto the project, though, was from seeing an advertisement in my local newspaper (I know, so old school! 😉 ), heralding the week with the header question:

“What Are You Thankful For?”

I’ve known about the idea of ‘thankfulness’ and the connection to mental health for some time and have found it a useful exercise to occasionally take a moment of quietness “amid the noise and haste” (to quote Max Ehrmann’s Desiderata) and focus on the “good stuff”, aka those aspects of life and my experience of it that I’m thankful for.

This used to be my gym

I probably did it more regularly immediately after Christchurch’s February 22^nd 2011 earthquake, because it felt important to stay focused on the “half full” side of the glass, when there was so much “half empty” all around. Although this state has gradually eased, as you’d expect, over the past eight years, the need to stay grounded and remind myself of the plus side did continue well beyond the immediate event (a bit like the years of aftershocks, lol.)

In terms of continuation, those who’ve been through similar experiences will not be surprised to learn that the “disaster and heroic” phase was succeeded by what I described as the “grunge” transition of “everything broken, very little happening/changing”, then the subsequent iterations of “repair/rebuild” and “recovery”, which were characterized by an unrelenting grimness and grind of bureaucracy, insurance “settlements” (ha!), and negotiating the physical realities of the repair/rebuild process on a citywide scale.

Friends & neighbours, being the solution 2011

So as you’re probably guessing, reminding oneself of the positives, starting with being alive immediately post February 22^nd(!) was an important part of keeping going. It can be a little challenging to do it in a public way without seeming saccharine, so usually it’s a private exercise, but since this is Thankfulness Week, I thought getting on board with a post was a good way of showing support.

The exercise set out in the advertisement was to “look around and think of 10-20 things you are thankful for, such as life, family, friends, you, your body, this country, your vocation…”

My list actually has a pretty long tail depending on how far I did down in terms of detail, but for today I’m keeping it to the big hits:

• 

  River, Ocean, Sky…

  My life partner, who is smart, funny, an all-round good guy, and made of awesome #justsayin’ J

• Family – both my own immediate family but also my extended whanau, which includes my partner’s family and a network of cousins on both sides
  .
• Friends! So many of you and so mighty fine. Sometimes, like family, we come and go, connect and reconnect, but friends are definitely a big part of what makes my world go around.
  .
• Living in a relatively peaceful, relatively sane – most of the time anyway! – country. I say this while fully acknowledging the recent mosque attacks here in Christchurch which saw the mass murder of 51 people and serious injury of another fifty more. Nonetheless, I still believe the “relatively peaceful, relatively sane” remains true overall and that’s actually a pretty big deal on the thankfulness scale.
  .
• As I said in my Month of Joy post for Skiffy and Fanty a while back, “the colour blue” – particularly as it manifests in sea, rivers, and sky “all around us”
• 

  Very big trees

  As those who follow this blog *may* have picked up, nature in all its forms is something I consistently appreciate, from the small wonders and delights of my garden, to trees, wildlife, mountains…

• The cosmos, ie stars, planets, space and how it all works – as much as we know – is probably an extension of nature as per this planet, but I feel it’s sufficiently distinct to get its own category, especially as I can then add in the fascination of space exploration and Hubble telescopes et all without creating a separate category
  .
• As I also hinted in the Month of Joy post, writing and storytelling is a pretty big deal in the Life of Helen and something I value highly – even if it does kick my butt on a far too regular basis! — as I also value those who are part of the larger writing ‘whanau’, including fellow writers, my agent and her team, publishers and their teams, and last but very far from least, readers.
  .
• I am, of course, an avid reader myself so books, but also music, are big ticket items on the ‘thankfulness’ list.

Very small birds — Fantail; credit, B Miller

• I’m going to stop at ten, but also cheat a little because I’m going to say food (not least, having enough of it, most of the time, which is no small thing), both making it and sharing with others (back to family and friends, aye!) and also wine, especially to have with the food – which is a cunning 5 or 6 items in one. 😉

Anyway, that’s my list! Please feel welcome to join in via the comment, or just store “What I’m Thankful For” away as a tool for times when taking a step back and considering the good stuff seems the right way to go.

And be careful out there, amid the noise and haste.

—

Just to finish, here are a few ‘fellow writer’ snaps… 😉

“Double author trouble” — Mary Victoria ‘n’ me

Me’n Courtney Schafer, Sydney 2016

with Julie Czerneda, Natcon 2009

SpecFicNZ — Christchurch writers

…mainly a reminder that I have my Year of Romance in Fantasy Fiction post series going on there right now, with a new installation on the first of every month. 😀

I’ve even taken a leaf from my fellow Supe author, Amanda Arista’s book and given the series its own hashtags: #YOR (Year of Romance) and #RIFF (Romance in Fantasy Fiction.) 😀

The series will run for the rest of the year, and so far I’ve posted the following:

March 1:  “The Lord Of The Rings” Effect — aka When Romance Is Missing In Action

April 1:  My Enemy, My Love & Laini Taylor’s “Daughter Of Smoke and Bone”

May 1: Constancy Amid Tumult & Patricia McKillip’s “Riddle-Master” Series

and last but (I hope!) not least:

June 1:  Guy Gavriel Kay’s “Under Heaven” & When Your Ship Doesn’t Sail

And there will be more!
.

Amanda Arista

Amanda Arista

However, I mentioned fellow Supe author Amanda Arista and she also has a 2019 post series going: High Fives, which hones in on must-have lists for those pursuing the writerly life. Check out:

March 3: Reasons To Find Your People

April 3: Resources

May 4: Conference  Season

KimFalconer

.

Kim Falconer

Kim is another Supe author who always has a great line in posts. The 16th of the month is her day and although there’s no theme as such, take a peek at the goodness below:

‘Can’t Wait To be Read 2019’

Food That Goes Bump In The Night

The Art Of Inspiration

Novel-Inspired Visual Art

Choose Your Poison

Plenty to be going on with and to enjoy!