On the previous post. Have no idea why. So if you want to make a comment about THE GIRL OF FIRE AND THORNS, drop it in here! Have you read it yet, and if so did you love it as much as I did?
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I haven’t read THE GIRL OF FIRE AND THORNS… But my roommate’s birthday is coming up, and she is a Latina who has frequently mentioned to me how difficult she found it growing up when NONE of the books she read had protagonists who looked like her. So, based on your recommendation, I ordered her a copy for her birthday–fingers crossed she enjoys it!
And while I was on Amazon, I splurged a bit and bought a copy of THE FLOATING ISLANDS for myself, thereby completing my collection of Rachel Neumeier books. Looking forward to reading it this weekend!
I hope she loves it as much as I did! And, of course, I hope you love THE FLOATING ISLANDS, too.
Plus, wish me luck . . . one of the mss my agent’s just started sending out? The protagonists are from Mexico. Not quite OUR Mexico, but Mexico.
I was supposed to save THE FLOATING ISLANDS for this weekend…but it showed up at my door yesterday afternoon, and I devoured it in a few hours last night. Here’s the 5-star review I left on Amazon:
I discovered Rachel Neumeier’s books only a year or so ago, and every book I read is better than the last. “The Floating Islands” is categorized as YA, and though it’s appropriate in theme and content for teen readers it shouldn’t be dismissed by adults. This is one of the rarest of all books: a book with well-developed characters, fascinating world-building, intricate plot, gorgeous prose, and difficult but ultimately uplifting messages. It’s about family and loss and grief and hope, about losing everything you thought made life worth living but learning to live and laugh again all the same. It has magic and dragons and cooking and warfare, and every word is carefully chosen. Even the names are a delight to say.
Neumeier’s writing reminds me a little of Patricia McKillip, in her luminous prose and the sense of the wonder magic brings to her world. But she’s more grounded, in a way; her characters are real and solid and true-to-life, even when the living wind is tugging them off their feet. I can say without reservation that if you like McKillip, you’ll like Neumeier. And if you’ve ever closed a McKillip book thinking, “That was beautiful, but what the heck happened?” … well, try Neumeier. She’s mastered both beauty and clarity, and “The Floating Islands” is a shining example of both.
I’ve just gotta reiterate that I love, LOVE the naming systems in all your books–they were SO fun in the Griffin books, and I loved in THE FLOATING ISLANDS how you could tell a person’s gender and country of origin just by reading their name. And although I was a little sad that there weren’t more female characters in the book, Areane was awesome enough to make up for their lack. I would have LOVED reading a heroine like her when I was 13, and I still loved her at 26. (I’m also trying to decide if I should wait till my 7-year-old niece is a little older before giving her the book, or if she could handle it now.)
Best of luck with the new manuscript! Is it BLACK DOG? I’ll keep my fingers crossed. I’ve been looking forward to reading that one ever since I saw the first excerpts on your blog!
i have read Girl of Fire and Thorn. The world building was stellar, the prose also. The characterization was stellar, but I never quite made connections with Elisa. I’m not sure why.
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Maybe it was the inverse of ‘competence is hot’ that Marie Brennan’s been writing about. Elisa is not competent at first. Even when she becomes so, she’s still somewhat internally uncertain and it is first person narrative so I can’t escape it. It’s not that I find this implausible, it is very human – I think I am reacting badly to it in a book. That’s all. I’ll look for the sequel, though, from the library perhaps, but I will look for it. According to Carson’s webpage she planned for the story to be a trilogy.
One of the many elements I enjoy in your books is that the focus characters are competent, or if not actually so in some direction or other (Trei doesn’t know how to fly, frex), they come across as internally collected and willing enough to try to become so when necessary.
Wishing you great luck and a great contract with the new manuscript!
And actually I get dinged for characters being too collected and too competent, sometimes. Thus we see how tastes differ.
Actually I thought Elisa was highly competent — she just didn’t necessarily perceive herself as competent. That’s why I could connect with her: if she’d really been incompetent, I wouldn’t have liked her nearly as much.
Well, hey, that certainly makes my day! What a pleasure to read a review like that, and thanks for taking the time to post it on Amazon.
Especially glad you enjoy the names! Not everyone thought the griffins’ names were fun, but hey, what can I say, I grew up loving Celtic names in fantasy and I like playing with the sounds of words and the way they look on the page.
And yes, one of the new mss. is BLACK DOG. The other is called THE MOUNTAIN OF KEPT MEMORY, and through an odd series of events involving a pretty elaborate revision of BLACK DOG, I wound up finishing them both at just about exactly the same time. That means I’ve got the fingers of both hands crossed . . .
I loved The Floating Islands, is there a chance of a sequel? I have read the book several times over the past year that I have owned the book. I enjoy the different kinds of magic that are introduced though the book, from the natural magic of the wind riders, to the controlled magic of the mages.