Author: Rebecca Demarest

Beyond the Pale

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In my campaign to read as many novellas as possible, I came across The Lifted Veil, by George Eliot, who you may know as Mary Anne Evans. This novella was out of character for her, being of a speculative nature, and I was intrigued.

 

I had been hoping for something horrific and accessible and what i got was something horrifyingly dense. A lot of literature during this era tended towards the overly dramatic, which is fine, but there is just something about George Eliot’s prose that was indecipherable. I found myself retreating time and again and attempting to scale the mountain once more. After the opening bit, I started to get the hang of it, but it was difficult going right through to the end.

It is, once you get through the thicket of verbosity, a fascinating tale of a young man who is given the ability to see into the future, and how that talent alienates him and makes his life miserable, all the way until his death. It would have been much more interesting if it didn’t take three times as long to read as it should.

If your goal is an enjoyable read, I’d steer clear of this one, but if your goal is to get an idea of Eliot’s work, or the history of seers in literature, this is an excellent piece for you to pick up.

Campaign Update

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First thing, first, thank you to everyone who has already pre-ordered Undeliverable, you’re my hero! We made our goal in the first 16 days of the campaign, which will let me get the book professionally formatted into an ebook. This also means that everyone who donates to the campaign, for any amount, will get a free ebook. $1, $5, whatever you want to contribute, I’ll be sending out ebooks just as soon as they’re ready!

But Halloween was this week, and we’ve celebrated the first milestone in the campaign, but here’s where things start to get really fun.

Celebrating meeting the milestone at our Halloween Party last weekend…no one knows how to party like Mary Poppins and Burt the Chimney Sweep!

If we can manage to reach $3,000 by the end of November, I’ll be able to afford to do an audiobook of Undeliverable, as well as pay to have Thea of Oz turned into a well-formatted ebook. For you guys, it means that if I make it there, you’ll get free Thea of Oz ebooks as well as free Undeliverable ebooks, regardless of your donation level, so get to sharing this campaign with your friends! Also share it to help you win yourself some signed artwork, it’s beautiful.

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It’s also worth mentioning that my birthday is coming up and, if you were feeling so generous, you might make a birthday present out of your donation…

How Do You Like Your Eggs?

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I have been a huge fan of Jasper Fforde ever since picking up The Eyre Affair one of the long lonely summers I spent in England. I promptly read every book in the Thursday Next series, but had fallen out of touch with Fforde’s work. Then I stumbled across The Big Over Easy.

This starts a new series which takes place in the primary world of the Thursday Next books, but follows a whole different subset of characters: nursery rhyme characters that don’t know they’re characters and the poor detective and his new side kick who have to deal with the Nursery community’s squabbles and crimes.

As with all of Fforde’s work, The Big Over Easy was a brilliantly funny read, with all sorts of tawdry jokes and dry humor. For instance, Jack Spratt, the lead detective, is given quite the hard time for all the giants he’s killed, though they’ve all been accidents or good shooting according to the police and he maintains that only the first one was actually a giant. All the rest were merely tall. This particular novel follows the death of Humpty Dumpty after a particularly nasty fall from a wall, and who/what/how he was murdered, which isn’t as straightforward as you might think.

I highly recommend this to anyone who loves the British dry wit as much as I do, as he is a fabulous author with a fantastic imagination who really brings these characters to life.

A New/Old Battle

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I am an avid fan of Tamora Pierce, and have been since my mother first let me buy Wild Magic  to entertain myself at summer camp when I was still in single digits. I love her stories, the strong female characters, the fantastic world building, and the strong plots and character arcs. Last month, she had another Magic Circle book come out, Battle Magic.

As always, I had it preordered to hit my doorstep on pub date, but I was in the middle of moving and didn’t get to it until last week. But it was worth the wait. In The Will of the Empress, Briar, Evvy and Rosethorn hint at a rather nasty war with Yanjing that they ended up helping out with, and in Battle Magic, Tamora goes back to give us that story.

The first 7/8ths of the book are phenomenal. We get to see Briar and Evvy at their best, ripping apart armies with the help of Rosethorn, and playing with the gods, the first overt and characterized interaction with religion in the Magic Circle set of books. It was a fun change of pace and worked well with the world, even though until this point, this set of series had steered well away from actually characterizing the gods of this universe. It was the last bit of the book that rankled.

SPOILERS FROM HERE UNTIL THE LAST PARAGRAPH!!

Tamora pulled a trick from another of the Circle of Magic books and puts everyone to sleep, but this time, it actually works for the bad guys. At least for a little bit. Then the gods decide to actually step into the confrontation. I grumbled. It was a bit too deus ex machina for my taste. I would have much preferred for Briar or Evvy to convince the God’s to step in, or at least take an active hand in the final confrontation with the Emperor of Yanging. As it was, it just felt too pat.

Beyond that bit of machina putting a burr under my saddle, I loved the book. It was a fantastic expansion to their world, and I loved seeing Evvy and Briar again. And, of course, Rosethorn as well. However, the book I’m really excited for is Arram which is slated to come out next year, and its about damn time. I have wanted this back-story for Numair since she first announced the concept years ago, and its finally coming of age. See you with that review next fall! Until then, I’ll just have to be satisfied with other offerings…

 

Indiegogo Update

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Thanks to those of you who have donated already, you’ve pushed me past the halfway mark! As of right now, I am at $625 and that means I only have to raise another $375 before everyone gets a digital copy of Undeliverable along with the swag from their pre-order level.

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To this end, don’t forget to send the campaign to your friends and family! Anyone you think might enjoy a good read or support the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Also, the more of your friends, coworkers, family, and pets that donate, the greater your chances of winning the signed prints from Thea of Oz!

 

 

 

Problems with Characterization

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So, a good friend of mine encouraged me to read the Divergent and Insurgent books by Veronica Roth. I was a bit skeptical at first, considering they were touted as being the next Hunger Games and I had only barely managed to enjoy the first of those, but I was game and borrowed the first one.

This is the story of a girl shoe-horned into an artificially restrictive human collective where the population is divided strictly along moralistic lines, depending on what you value most highly, be it courage, or truthfulness, or selflessness, or amicability, or intelligence. And each faction values these selected virtues to a ridiculous degree.

Therein lies the problem. The world building is fantastic, the characters are believable enough for a YA novel, but the society…as a psych major I cannot in good conscience recommend these books. They feel like one of those philosophy mind games that they call ‘experiments’ wherein humans are given choices that no sane human would ever choose between; options that aren’t even a possibility with human nature such as it is. I wasn’t going to pick up Insurgent after finishing Divergent but my friend insisted that it all made sense by the end of the second book and I gave in and read it.

It did not get better.

There is absolutely no way a human society would be able to function in such a fragmented way. It would crumble much faster than a single generation. Hitler’s Nazi Germany lasted for less than a generation, Roth should have taken that as a lesson in human tolerance to stupidity. So, regardless of how well it might actually be written, or how strong the characters an world building actually are, I just could not stomach one more moment in that distastefully false universe. Needless to say, I will not be picking up the third book, Allegiant, when it hits shelves next year.

Pre-order your copy of Undeliverable!

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So, this weekend, I launched the pre-order campaign for my novel, Undeliverable! It is nerve-wracking to be sure, but I promise to keep the updates to a minimum and only let you know when the truly exciting things are happening. As for the five people who have already donated (Chris, Joanna, Susan, Fritz, and Noah), thank you so, so much!

The goal of this campaign is to raise enough money mainly to market the book. Spots in the Kirkus Review are not cheap, nor is professional conversion to e-book formats. Thus, I come to you, dear readers, hoping that you can chip and help defray those costs!

The campaign is running for the next month, so, even if you can’t place your order now, maybe you can place it as a birthday present to me on November 21st!