And a unexpected Christmas surprise for me!

Maybe I should give Freda Warrington another try. She’s turned up on more than one recommendation list lately, and if someone also has the good taste to like your work Warrington’s might have improved. I read something by her YEARS ago….. BLACKBIRD IN SILVER, probably, and it drove me crazy. There was a good story trying to get out through some mediocre to awful writing and the worldbuilding (as I remember it) or cosmology (as my husband remembers it) was impossible. Geometrically, and physically impossible. Whichever, it was apparently physical, so the impossibility mattered. OF course, that could have been part of the awful writing. She may have been trying to convey a metaphor and it didn’t work.

Congratulations on the dog breeding. I look forward to puppy photos in time. :-)

A while back you asked what Megan Lindholm (as Lindholm, not as Robin Hobb) I’d recommend. I had to think about it. What popped to mind immediately was WIZARD OF THE PIGEONS, which was a sort of urban fantasy before it became a genre. It’ was unique for its time and still seems so, but I can’t pull out from under the first impression it made on me. (Sometimes I can.) Wizard is a homeless man in Seattle who may be magical, as all the street people are. Or maybe there’s something else going on. Either way I found it deeply moving. Thinking about it now, it might be comparable to Dan Well’s HOLLOW CITY…. i really should fish it off the shelf again. After I finish a batch of library books.

The very first Lindholm I read worked for me, and that was the second Ki and Vandien book, titled WINDSINGERS – her second published novel. As it is a novel with a split plotline, backing up to start with her first novel HARPY’S FLIGHT might be a good idea.

And lots of people praise her collaboration with Steven Brust highly: GYPSY.

I haven’t reread any in a while, though. I’d be interested in your verdicts