Month: March 2023

Thoughts on The Girl Who Fell Into Myth

Are you looking for a new high fantasy series with rich worldbuilding and strong female characters? This is the perfect time to jump into Kay Kenyon’s The Arisen Worlds series, at the very beginning. The Girl Who Fell Into Myth was just published on March 1st, so you can read it before the second book (due in September) is published. This review was originally published in the January 1, 2023 issue of Booklist.

Kay Kenyon launches The Arisen Worlds high fantasy series with The Girl Who Fell Into Myth, as Liesa is reluctantly summoned from her father’s Numinasi “consulate” in rural Oklahoma to her ancestral home of Osta Kiya to learn the way of her parents’ people. Literally adding insult to injury – she is struck by lightning en route to Osta Kiya –  Liesa is immediately greeted with intolerance, forced to change her name to Yevliesza, a proper Numinasi name, and generally ostracized while learning about the culture. Her father, already ill, is imprisoned, primarily for his crime of not returning with her sooner. Despite unearned enmity from powerful members of the court, Yevliesza thrives, discovering her hereditary magic and joins a triad of young ladies learning to control the same power. When disaster inevitably strikes, Yezliesza learns who her friends and enemies are, and where her true power lies. Kenyon masterfully creates a world adjacent to our own that balances their fear of technology with the use of magic, creating a civilization that is both advanced and medieval.

Thoughts on The Lost City

Within the first minute of The Lost City, starring Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum, it became obvious that this movie was not going to take itself seriously. The protagonists’ of author Loretta Sage’s latest adventure romance novel expressions of admiration for each other as they’re tied up in an ancient temple quickly pan out to a gloating villain, followed by the hero, Dash, asking “Hold up. Are these- Are these your snakes?” This line of questioning continues… who feeds the snakes and why one snake is wrapping itself on a henchman’s leg and not biting the guy? Then the author kicks in with “Delete” on several aspects of the scene, switching to the reality of Loretta struggling to write the ending of her story and still coming to the terms of her husband’s death a few years before.

Minutes later, having found her ending, Loretta is on a book tour with her agent, reading awful online reviews before facing a live audience, and to her surprise, Alan, the cover model for her novels. Her agent, Beth, confiscates Loretta’s phone and sends her on stage in an uncomfortable pink sequined outfit, where she ultimately concedes to the audience’s demand to rip off Alan’s shirt, accidentally removing his wig. Arguments ensue and Loretta storms out into the waiting car of kidnappers employed by Abigail (a gender neutral name, she’s assured) Fairfax, played by Daniel Radcliffe, who noticed that her new book includes real translations for an archaeological site he’s excavating and wants her to travel to the Isla Hundida (“Sunken Island”). She declines; he takes her there anyways.

Meanwhile, Alan, having seen the car Loretta left in, tries to hop into her Uber with the stereotypical “follow that car” line; the Uber driver locks his doors. Police won’t help due to lack of evidence, so Alan reaches out to Jack Trainer (played by Brad Pitt), an ex-Navy Seal he met at a meditation retreat, and they track Loretta’s location using her smart watch (which had snagged on Alan’s wig earlier).

And then the real movie starts, with crazy rescue attempts and corny villain bits. There are a few serious moments as Alan and Loretta figure out how they fit into each other’s lives, but mostly this movie kept us laughing.

Will you join me in donating to support trans rights in exchange for RPGs?

I have a few things I want to post about – a fabulous movie we watched this week, a book or three I want to share – but this seems more important at the moment. Several states, including Florida, have recently passed bills targeting trans and queer people, including removing books from schools that mention LGBTQIA+ topics. Florida in particular is actively removing topics from their public universities, hampering the education students selected when they chose to pursue a degree there.

I don’t know if the politicians making these decisions honestly believe the bullshit they’re spouting, or if they’re just trying to rile up voters leading into the next (painfully long) presidential election cycle. What really matters is that they are hurting people in the process: LGBTQ youth who are unsupported by family or community as they figure out who they are in life have higher suicide rates.

Back to RPGs, or Role-Playing Games (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, Dungeons & Dragons is probably the most famous of those)… for a $5 (or more) donation, you can buy this bundle with 505 TTRPG-related items. (The TT stands for Table Top, as RPGs are traditionally played sitting around a table.) If you donate $10 or more, there’s an added supplement available to you (woot! 506 items!).

What are you waiting for? The offer is only good through the next 22 days.

A medically-oriented first quarter

I’ve had ongoing pain in one hip (and sometimes leg) for a while now, and finally made it into the Orthopedics office at the beginning of the year to address the issue. Noting that I highly recommend against dealing with pain for “a while”; I should have gone in sooner, so I won’t bother listing excuses.

After eight weekly visits for physical therapy (PT), there was some improvement, but also ongoing stiffness and pain, so my doctor sent me for an MRI. That was an interesting experience in several ways, starting with how I arrived twenty minutes early but checked in fifteen minutes late. (Someone forgot to unlock the main door.)

MRI stands for Magnetic Resonance Imaging, and there’s a fascinating explanation on Wikipedia about how it uses magnetic fields and radio waves to map out soft tissues. I was warned that it’s noisy… a “cacophony” of sound. The office fortunately provided both ear plugs (standard) and a headset (apparently this varies); the operator was able to talk to me via the headset.

I was concerned that I would get bored; I was told walking in that I needed to try to lay still for thirty-five minutes (without a book or cat!). Instead, I found the process interesting. Before each scan, the automated system told me the expected duration, and I almost immediately noticed that the sounds for each scan, and even within some of the scans, were different, and the direction the sound came from varied. After some thumps and murs and hums, I was released back into the world to await my results.

The scan results were sent to me online, followed fairly quickly by my doctor’s assessment, translating medical-ese into, well, slightly less medical-ese: “chronic degenerative changes to your labrum and hip impingement”. That’s about what it sounds like… I scheduled a follow-up appointment for today, and she clarified that it’s essentially wear and tear on my hip joint. We rolled straight into the possibility she had mentioned before scheduling the MRI: a cortisone shot.

Alas, it will be a couple weeks before I really know the impact of the shot, it takes the steroids a bit of time to do their magic to reduce the inflammation in the area. I was impressed with my doctor’s bedside manner, she talked through each part of the injection process as she approached it, from the pinch of the needle going in, to the sensations I’d feel as the different numbing agents were released into my system.

Now I wait and see.

Thoughts on A Killing Moon

I made a mistake at Capricon: I bought A Killing Moon, the first book in Alexis D. Craig’s Winged Guardians series.

I read the first couple chapters at the convention, along with pages 119 through 121 to be sure I’d be comfortable reading them out loud to an audience. The panel’s title was judging a book by page 119; the presenters skipped to 119 or thereabouts and read a couple pages, then the audience gauged whether they’d be interested in reading the book before the title was revealed. As I explained after revealing the cover, the book kicks off (in the prologue) with a sex scene, so I skipped ahead to see if the page selection was going to be appropriate for all ages attending the panel.

I can’t reiterate this enough: when given the opportunity to buy books directly from the author at an event, buy the whole damn series. I had to set A Killing Moon down for a couple review books, then breezed through it and wanted more… you know, those other three books that I failed to buy at the convention.

The book itself is a paranormal romance filled with shapeshifters, along with some assassination attempts and palace intrigue. The protagonists are a werewolf and were-crow, and many other were-species are mentioned in this robust hidden world intertwined with ours. Craig clearly has a knack for writing characters that obviously belong together both in and out of the bedroom (living room, and other places) and showing the character evolution as they reach that realization.

If you’ll excuse me, I have to go place a book order.