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The Cherry Pit

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 04:23:52 GMT

by: Donald Harington
review by: aka_gomer

This is one of Harington's earliest novels, which I believe was written in and is set in the fifties. It is about a small man named Clifford who lives a dull and humdrum life in the north with his indifferent and passively aggressive wife. Though they have only been married for a few years, their marriage is awful. A recent surprising event causes Clifford to return to his hometown, Little Rock, AR, in order to try and discover who he is and what he wants from life. Once Clifford returns home, everything that he had expected turns out to be not at all what he expects.

The story twists and turns from place to place and character to character, so it keeps you reading, but it doesn't have a strong plot. Every character in the book seems to develop strongly and grow except for our main character, Clifford, which left me really frustrated once I finished the book. Everyone but Clifford seems to come out of the novel as having learned something and as having a better life ahead of them; Clifford does not.

The Cherry Pit is an excellent book for capturing what it feels like to be twenty-something years old and having no clue what you're doing with your life; at first I loved it for that. As the book continued, though, I found myself wondering where in the world Harington was going with it. As Harington himself told me, it is one of his first novels, and he feels that it strives for too much--too much feeling and emotion trying to be carried out in one book, which left me with an over-the-top sort of feeling.

Harington also told me that The Cherry Pit is a book about virginity. Indeed, the book feels very young and very, very new. Though it has strong aspects of sexuality, I feel that virginity in The Cherry Pit goes a lot further than that. It accounts for the twenty-something year old feelings, nostalgia, and yearnings for adventure and new things as well as for its shaky start as one of Harington's first novels.

I know that Harington is a very celebrated Southern writer who is now in his seventies. He wrote The Cherry Pit when he was in his twenties. It is the only book of his that I have ever read. I don't judge my anticipation of his other books by it because it's such a young novel and because, overall, I was pretty disappointed with it for its immaturity. If anything, The Cherry Pit is great to read simply to see what it was that Little Rock used to be.

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Compass of Affection

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 05:44:20 GMT

by: Scott Cairns
review by: buddha_gazelle

Scott Cairns' poetic credentials are impressive. He's a Guggenheim Fellow and director of Creative Writing at one of America's top-tier programs, the University of Missouri. And he's one of a very few emerging mainstream poets to openly deal in religious history, ideas and doctrine with considerable skill. Cairns' most recent work is a refreshing answer to an American culture still dominated by the post-Enlightenment rift between the mind and the body.

Compass of Affection, published by Paraclete Press in 2006, is Cairns' first anthology. It has selections from the poet's four previous books, as well as a section devoted to new poems. As such, the collection is scattered and flows awkwardly: major transitions in ethos and style are mere pages apart. This means, unfortunately, that the only way to speak of Compass as a unit is to frame it as a portrait of the author's artistic and spiritual development over the past two decades. The first half of the book covers 1985 to 1994-- The Theology of Doubt, The Translation of Babel, and Figures for the Ghost. The second half contains a very large chunk of Philokalia plus forty pages of new poems.

Although there's no such formal division it's useful to speak of this book as two halves. The eight years that separate Figures for the Ghost from Philokalia span an event that had a major impact on Cairns' style: his discovery and entrance into Eastern Orthodox Christianity. One of the most obvious results is a transition from what I'll call "spiritual" to actively religious poetry. The later books speak openly of concrete doctrinal ideas like theosis or mysterion; the earlier works are layered more heavily of a veil of earnestly uncertain metaphor.

The first sampling, The Theology of Doubt, is named for a rambling and largely uninteresting contemplation of oak leaves and rotten apples. More exemplary of Cairns' early, whimsical style is "Approaching Judea," about the difficulties of hunting moose outside Jerusalem:

                                   I'm convinced
     moose can get along anywhere. And where better
     than a holy land for the holiest of beasts?

Other poems in this book similarly approach doubt and faith as a quixotic and frustrating, but absolutely necessary, search.

The Translation of Babel, published five years later in 1990, weights the previous collection's whimsy with a bitter humor. A pretty girl pretends to shop for dresses she can't buy, a guilty onlooker averts his eyes to avoid the halt and the lame, and a dead father is mourned. There are some real gems in here, though they're emotionally tough. "In Praise of Darkness," for example, tortures and interrogates a senile Borges:

     And you will hit him again, and split

     his skin; you'll invent pain and slowly
     let him know what it is you've made.

The spiritual themes of Cairns' early work are implicit but buried; the light and dark grins of the first two books tackle theology explicitly in 1994's Figures for the Ghost. In this very Presbyterian collection Cairns meditates on the Trinity, on Advent, on the Creation, the sacraments, the Creed... you get the idea. The finest of these pieces depart from the general theme. Take "The History of My Late Progress," which presents a midlife crisis:

     I agreed to continue
                                     as if I'd gained
     new enthusiasm for simple things
     like fishing, breathing, looking around.

While the religious themes of the 1994 collection hint at what's to come, Philokalia marks a radical shift in Cairns' style and direction. The meditations in Figures for the Ghost are earnest but tentative, exploratory. In Philokalia, the expedition has found its goal. Most of this book's pieces, as well as the new poems, are drawn from the Eastern Christian hesychast tradition (philokalia means "love of the beautiful" and is the title of a well-known Athonite volume on prayer of the heart). Some of the best pieces come from the Beatitudes ("if the pure are anywhere present we wouldn't know them, which is surely to their advantage") and from New Testament Greek: a series of "Adventures" explore metanoia, hairesis, nous, mysterion, and apocatastasis.

One one level the poems of Philokalia-- and the new poems that conclude Compass-- are unapologetically apologetic. The piece on mysterion, in particular, articulates Eastern Christianity's unity of symbol and symbolized far better than I've ever managed:

     Receiving it, you apprehend how near
     the Holy bides. You cannot know how far.

But they're poems, not sermons, and they're beautiful poems. One needn't be an Eastern Christian or even religious to delight in Cairns' accomplishment: he points towards a bridge over that old mind/ body rift with a splendid vision of the unity of word and flesh which the Orthodox call Incarnation.

The poet's newest book is a memoir-- Short Trip to the Edge-- of his pilgrimage to the monastic republic of Athos. I'm interested to read it but even more excited about the poems that will surely follow. Scott Cairns' very best work, I'm convinced from reading what he's done these past twenty years, is right around the corner.

Selections from Compass of Affection can be found at buddha_gazelle's weblog.

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Poisons: From Hemlock to Botox and the Killer Bean of Calabar

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 19:25:44 GMT

by: Peter Macinnis
edited by: Emma Cotter
review by: sonnetjoy

I bought a library discard copy of Poisons yesterday, partially because of my friend Ailanna's mild toxicomania, partially because the cover is an alluring yellow, and partially because it was 50¢. The combination turned out to be deadly for me.

Any sales of Macinnis' book are doubtless due to the lurid appeal of the topic, not because Macinnis is a fine writer. The original Australian title is The Killer Bean of Calabar and Other Stories; in addition to being more elegant than the American counterpart, this title better conveys what this book really is: chain-storytelling.

Reading this book gave me the sensation of being trapped at a party by a Macinnis who was trying too hard to be subversively impressive. I found myself entertained for the first thirty minutes, only to be a polite hostage for the hours-long barrage following . Each story about cynanide's suffocating effects on the cellular level or John Harley's recommendation of hemlock for hyperactive children ranged in length from a few sentences to two scant pages. As you can imagine, when there's 224 pages of bullet-fast prose like that, the details bleed together. Honestly, the entire book reads like an introduction. The reader isn't even allowed the formality of subheadings or segues to aid in the transition. Maddening.

Adding insult to injury, some of the stories aren't about poison. Example: there's about 1 1/2 pages about Lake Nyos in Cameroon which, due to some unique geological circumstances, occasionally sends out an asphyxiating flood of carbon dioxide. In 1986, just such a flood killed about 1,700 people who had the misfortune to live nearby. Macinnis blithely notes that "carbon dioxide might be a suffocating agent rather than a poison, but the end result is the same." No excuse! Stuffing Saran Wrap into the windpipes of the victims would have had the same effect, but a good editor wouldn't have let it slide into a book of poisons.

Macinnis feels that jokes are necessary to enliven his stories. There's generally one distracting aside or poorly-warranted dig per story, some of which are blatantly unfair. I'm sure the prose is meant to be "conversational," but instead it feels flippant and sloppy. I'm up for wry wit, but Macinnis doesn't have it. .

Equally as irritating was the bizarre use of gray text boxes. While in midsentence about the toxicity of oxygen to anaerobic bacteria, the page would suddenly be interrupted by a gray text box which adds pertinent information on - guess what? - the toxicity of oxygen to anaerobic bacteria. This happens repeatedly throughout the book. It usually feels as though Macinnis had written two versions of the same paragraph, and gleefully decided to use both.

Why not incorporate the information rather than set it off in this distracting manner? The only answers I could come up with is that text boxes are visually appealing to a bookstore browser ("Hey cool - gray!") and that it's easier to highlight poor paragraphs than to rewrite them well, with, you know, segues and everything.

Poisons: From Hemlock to Botox and the Killer Bean of Calabar does have an exhaustive bibliography, so if a reader cares to, he can follow up on any poison or poisoner which interested him. Thank goodness, because Poisons rouses curiosity but refuses to satisfy it.

Not recommended. If you have a book to recommend on poisons, I'd be happy to hear it.

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The Big Over Easy

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 06:29:00 GMT

by: Jasper Fforde
review by: sonnetjoy

Fairy-tales and other traditional "nursery" literature always seem ripe both for mockery and revision; the Shrek films, "Fractured Fairy Tales", Ella Enchanted, Wicked, and The Stinky Cheese Man are just the first six examples I thought of off-hand. What makes Fforde's The Big Overeasy a little different is the treatment.

In The Big Overeasy, Detective Inspector Jack Spratt is in charge of the NCD (Nursery Crime Division) of the Reading PD, UK. He and his new partner, Detective Sergeant Mary Mary, are called upon to determine the cause of death for that womanizing, money-laundering, philanthropic lush, Humpty Dumpty. (It's all there in the nursery rhyme you know - second and third verses.) At the same time Spratt is trying to solve this mystery, he's feuding with more popular detectives, translating binary, fondly trying to patch his ugly car together, and flirting with his wife. He's an altogether likeable policeman.

Fforde weaves a novel that is a send-up for many familiar literary characters, quotations, and conventions AND a genuinely good mystery: no small feat. Some of the homages are quite subtle, which make them the more rewarding when the reader recognizes them. When I spotted a well-mangled Dorothy Parker quote, I wondered how much other cleverness flew under my radar. In the final chapters, I found myself shouting incredulously to my husband in the next room (who had finished it the day before) "THAT PERSON did THAT to THIS PERSON?" and he would reply "It gets better!" And it did.

I'm told that The Big Overeasy is disappointing work for Jasper Fforde in light of his Thursday Next series. If that's the case, then I need to get my hands on Thursday Next immediately. Excellent escapism.

Recommended.

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God is My Broker

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 04:00:00 GMT

by: Brother Ty with Christopher Buckley and John Tierney
review by: buddha_gazelle

It's a sad commentary on the state of American religion that I didn't immediately recognize this book as a parody. I was scandalized, to be sure, but briefly believed that a billionaire monk really did want to help me get rich. That it was shelved in the library's fiction section should have clued me in, but instead it was the name Christopher Buckley-- New Yorker humor columnist and author of Thank You for Smoking -- that gave me the hint.

God is My Broker is (praise God!) a work of fiction styled as a self-help book. Its purported author Brother Ty (short for Tycoon) is a recovering alcoholic Wall Street broker-turned-monk who helps the dilapidated Monastery of Cana rise out of debt into fabulous wealth by getting stock tips from his daily Scripture readings. Despite the setting, the comedic barbs are aimed neither at monasticism nor at Christianity but at the self-help brand of pop "spirituality" epitomized by Deepak Chopra. Every chapter ends in a Spiritual Law ("God loves the poor, but that doesn't mean He wants you to fly coach"), a Market Meditation ("Is God ever out of cell phone range?"), and a prayer ("Grant, too, that the customer will not learn of my inventory problem until after his credit-card number has been obtained").

Like much satire, God is My Broker begins with understated, dry wit-- not quite, but almost plausible-- and collapses by the end into reckless absurdity. I'd have enjoyed the book more if it'd hadn't been *quite* so outlandish (the monastery adds to its winery a theme park with a log flume; the gift shop sells wind-up action figures that beat their chest and squeak "Mea culpa!"; and the story climaxes in a BATF raid). Still, the book is cleverly written and its buffoonish characters are entertaining-- there's an inquisitorial German cardinal (it's easy to believe that Buckley, an erudite Catholic, was caricaturing the erstwhile Cardinal Ratzinger) who sends an epicurean investigator more interested in fine wine and Italian soccer than in cataloging the monastery's extravagances; an addled abbot who markets Chilean table wine as the monastery's finest and has his monks reading Chopra and Tony Robbins instead of Scripture; a bewitching marketing consultant who turns out to have a soul after all; and of course the hapless Brother Ty, who came to seek God but found Mammon clinging to his cowl.

God is My Broker is a classic by no means, but it's a quick summer jaunt and lots of fun. You'll have to read the book to find out whether Cana Monastery survives a simultaneous inquisiton, federal raid, and 60 Minutes special; but Brother Ty's conclusions are startlingly sober: a man cannot serve two masters, and if you seek God for personal gain then it isn't God you're seeking. Beyond the hilarious excesses of the theme-park monastery and the pointed jabs at the prosperity gospel remain a sincere affirmation of traditional Christianity and the ascetic calling: God indeed loves the poor, and you don't need a cell phone to hear from Him.

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Gaudy Night

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 02:13:57 GMT

by: Dorothy L. Sayers
review by: sonnetjoy

Gaudy Night is perhaps the most famous of Sayers' seminal Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries, which are considered classics in the genre. Even though I normally eschew mystery novels, I found this one rich and stimulating. My copy of Gaudy Night is one of those precious gifts from my former professors which is liberally sprinkled with marginalia, revealing what my mentor thinks about the very passage I'm engrossed in.

The setting is the fictional all-female Shrewbury College in Oxford during the Great Depression. Harriet Vane, a mystery author with a disreputable and public past, returns to her alma mater reluctantly for a homecoming event called Gaudy Night. While she is there, she does what one normally does at such meet-ups: listen to boring speeches from administrators, run into old acquaintances (both welcome and unwelcome), and discover disturbing anonymous notes and drawings tucked up her sleeve. In fact, a rash of "poison-pen" letters and sinister pranks attacks the College with an unhinged vehemence, and the administrators need someone to quietly and without publicity figure out what's going on before the illustrated bloody threats get carried out. Enter Harriet.

Several aspects about Gaudy Night enchanted me. The first was the culture of 1930s Oxford academia, a time when professors and students were still expected to attend lectures in academic garb (yes, with mortarboard) and calling a woman by her first name was still a sign of intimacy. Authentic details soak through the prose without drawing attention to themselves. Reading Gaudy Night filled me with a profound nostalgia for a world I've not lived in.

Second was a general expectation Sayers has of her audience: a curious and educated mind. Rather than relying solely on the mystery to keep her audience engaged, Sayers also brought complex and enduring issues to the fore, such as gender roles and the appropriateness of "acting on principle" when the action might injure a family. Are principles more important than people? These concepts are interwoven seamlessly with the plot and characters and are never sermonized.

I found myself needing a dictionary about once a chapter, and there is at least one quote in Greek, two in Latin, and one in German. No need to tremble; they're nuances rather than crucial points, and what with Google and all, quickly translatable.

On lesser notes, I enjoyed the novelty of a protagonist who is not the detective, and finally, to my unbounded delight, American tourists asking ignorant questions were lampooned. Soundly. It was lovely.

I didn't find Gaudy Night a fast or easy read, but an immensely witty and rewarding one none-the-less. My only real complaint is the difficulty with keeping track of the characters, who are introduced rapidfire, for the first 50 pages or so.

Recommended.

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Orbiting the Giant Hairball

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 11:30:02 GMT

by: Gordon MacKenzie
review by: sonnetjoy

I keep my copy of Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool's Guide to Surviving with Grace for three reasons.

1) It was a gift from a friend now lost to the ravages of moving repeatedly.
2) It has a double-blink-worthy title.
3) It is a visually stimulating book, liberally sketched with cartoonish illustrations which interact playfully with the text.

Observe:

You've guessed it by now. Gordon MacKenzie, who worked for Hallmark as a sketch artist, manager, and in a specially-created position called "Creative Paradox," wrote a book about (let's sigh in unison) business practices. Luckily, it relies on an extended series of bizarre analogies, stories, and inside jokes to demonstrate MacKenzie's insights. In fact, the book reads very much as though Mr. MacKenzie has walked barefoot into your living room, sat on your lap, and began telling you stories about life in corporate Hallmark, with a sketchbook in hand. This is a good technique: the only way I would ever submit myself to hearing about business practices.

The hairball of the title is an entangled pattern of bureaucratic procedures, rules, and traditions. Every new form, rubberstamp, or added signature line is another hair added to the hairball. Hairballs are based on what worked before, and so they stifle creative endeavors to solve current problems with new answers. According to MacKenzie, the hairball of Corporate Normalcy is necessary, but unfortunate.The best juxtaposition is not to be completely free of it, but instead to orbit it dreamily like a satellite, free to tap into your creative mindjuices.

Just how to orbit it, MacKenzie does not tell. He is justifiably skeptical of "Eight Ways to Fix Your Company Forever: A Powerpoint," but in avoiding it, he also avoids giving any practical ideas whatsoever. For all the wonderful stories and sketches (and they are glorious good fun), he does not write on how to orbit. Additionally, it seems that, unless your higher-ups are on-board with the whole orbiting notion, you're only going to make a nuisance of yourself in the workplace. Start writing your company's memos in limerick, and Boss-In-Charge might wonder if you have enough to do.

Orbiting the Giant Hairball is fun, and worth reading once. It offers no real practical ideas, except for the subliminal message that we should all get sketchbooks immediately and not worry whether our doodles are "art." What it does offer is wacky humor, worthwhile insights, and a fresh perspective. Like a high colonic, it does feel refreshing to read Orbiting the Giant Hairball, but you wonder whether it does any good, and you may not want to subject yourself to it too often.

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The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 14:45:27 GMT

by: Michael Chabon
Review by: buddha_gazelle

I've just finished reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon. It's a monumental novel; I'm scared just how good it is. Nobel quality, if the second world war can stomach any more literary garnish. The book is Jewish in the way that Saroyan's books are Armenian: the characters don't go around doing "ethnic" things, but their lives are filled with the peculiar details of survivors whose race is being quietly annihilated in some forgotten eastern land.

K & C is about magic, escapism, comics, the Holocaust, and the American Dream. It's perhaps this century's Great American Novel, with all the dreary claptrap that term implies. The novel deals in magic-- not incantations or mysticism but "the impersonal magic of life," described by one of its characters, that "was often, though not always, a sadder business sometimes beautiful, sometimes cruel. Here its stock-in-trade was ironies, coincidences, and the only true portents: those that revealed themselves unmistakable and impossible to ignore, in retrospect." Kavalier & Clay is chock-full of such enchantments, of fantastic escapes and brimming coincidences that border just on this side of the believable. It's maybe the opposite of magical realism: a realistic magic, where the laws of physics are neither ignored nor upended, but yet the probable slides into the amazing yet strangely plausible tales of-- well, yes, of two American kids with big dreams.

The book is another American bildungsroman, another Holocaust survival story, another disillusionment of the 1950s, another dismantling of that era's bright utopia. The charm is that this novel is nonetheless charming, dazzling and wild; it's a story chock-full of escapism; a story about an escape artist who creates The Escapist and of comic-book artists who believe wholeheartedly in Art; the legend of a defeated magician redeemed by the bizarre magic of life.

And-- this should be essential in any summer reading-- it's a page-turner. Six hundred thirty-six turns, and they do fly by. The dazzling comedy, the daring escapes, the gleaming horrors of Antarctica, the Empire State Building, and golem-haunted Prague, the brilliant passes and switches and stippled superheroes make The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay an unsurpassed delight.

As a bonus, some of the comics created by the novel's protagonists have been issued by Dark Horse Books as The Amazing Adventures of The Escapist, which I found at my local library. The volume includes the Escapist's creation-story and several of his adventures as well as those of Kavalier & Clay's other great hero, the gorgeous Luna Moth.

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Vows and Honor

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 15:36:44 GMT

Written by: Mercedes Lackey
Reviewed by: Mish

Although I’dforgotten about it, I first read a few chapters of the books from Vowsand Honor a few years before being introduced to the Valdemar series.Those chapters are short stories in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Sword and Sorceressanthologies, III and IV. Whether Valdemar was already in the making orthe shorts had something to do with that is hard to say, especiallysince there are only few references to Valdemar and its people.

In short, the books follow the paths and quests of a sword-swornwarrior and a sorceress that carries a sword with a mind of its own.The characters and storyline aren’t as cliché as they seem. Lackeywanted Tarma and Kethry to be different from the usual “strong likebull, dumb like ox” characters that are all too often found in thefantasy realm.

The main themes are given away by the titles: oaths, vows, andhonor. These are shown in different perspectives: kith to kin, tooneself, from a leader to his or her people or vice versa, andreligious. There is also understanding and keeping one’s promise andthe possibilities if one doesn’t. Revenge also appears in differentguises and for different reasons. Other ideas that come up are family,home, purpose in life, power (gained and used), codes of conduct, andstrength.

I slugged my way through the Vows and Honor books: Oathbound, Oathbreakers, and Oathblood.The latter is actually a collection of Tarma and Kethry stories andincludes a few chapters from the two novels. I found out it wasunnecessary to read all three. At times, I read with the momentum withwhich I started, but otherwise I felt as if I were drudging along. Iwas glad to be done with them. It’s rare that I don’t finish books andthe light at the end of the tunnel was knowing that Exile’s Honor, which I really like, would be next.

So far, from what I recall, and in my humble opinion, Vows and Honoris the worst of Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar series. I remembered it asbeing better than it was this time around. The storyline and charactersvary from okay to good. In my humble opinion, they could be better. Itwas more the atrocious writing and repetition that I found reallyannoying. Another qualm I have is the overuse of italics. Its usage for mind speech, thoughts, or “foreign” terms is all right, but Mercedes tends to overstress words. There were times when I wondered if an editor wasinvolved at all. In fairness, these are some of Lackey’s earlierwritings, the first story being published in 1985 and the last one in1998. Her writing has improved quite a bit through the years.

Quotes:

“The hatched chick cannot go back to the shell, the falcon who has found the sky does not willingly sit the nest.”
“I am all that I claim to be. I simply have not claimed all that I am.”
“To have something, sometimes you must be willing to lose it.”
“The people who keep coping, keep trying, no matter how many blows Fatetakes at them. Nobody’ll make a song about them, but they’re heroes allthe same.”

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Brightly Burning

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 01:08:44 GMT

Written by: Mercedes Lackey
Reviewed by: Mish

From what I can remember of Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar series, Brightly Burning is the most biographical. As such, it centers around Lavan Chitward, a boy who earned his heraldic whites and the name Firestorm. It is one of the series’ four standalone books, including the novella in the Valdemar Companion.

So to speak, Heralds are the white knights of yore. They are the monarch’s right hand, trusted folk who act as peace keepers, judges, diplomats, and guardians of Valdemar. They also tend to be gifted, having abilities such as telepathy, healing, and empathy, to name a few. But in order to become a Herald, one must be chosen by a Companion, the proverbial white steed whose looks are deceiving.

Several ideas and questions are explored in Brightly Burning. Blood kin vs chosen family. At times, boundaries are meaningless when it comes to love. When is it right, if ever, to take revenge? Power can be used for good or bad, but who has control, the person or the power itself? Leaders, who become such for different reasons, come in different sizes and shapes. How can one overcome fear and adversity?

Although there are several reoccurring themes through the Valdemar series, Lackey approaches them from different aspects. This helps to keep them from getting stale. In the Mage Wars trilogy, a war started out of greed and its effects during and after are visited. In Brightly Burning, war is approached from a religious angle and the draft is brought to question. Because of the characters and continuous storyline, good and bad are constants. Still, these concepts are viewed differently through characters and plots.

And although I am one among numerous readers who want Lackey to write more for the series, I can understand why she hasn’t. If anything, I think this shows her integrity as a writer:

Hey, everybody needs a vacation, even from the best job. So, until I come up with a story set in Velgarth that is as compelling as the ones you’ve enjoyed in the past, I’m taking a break. The last thing I want is for my own favorite series to start limping along and go out with a whimper.

When I’ve finished my second lap around Valdemar I’ll just have to read something else by one of my favorite writers. Having read about 40 of her works (short stories included), “Misty” is also the one whom I’ve read the most of. Need I say that this book or the series are recommended?

Quotes from Brightly Burning:

“Without your actions, I would not be where I am and what I am at this moment.”
“It needs ashes, mountain winds, and winter storms to thrive…It can send its roots deep into the rock, and rise out of the ashes tall and strong. It needs adversity to thrive.”

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