Hey, Sherwood Smith aka sartorias has a new book out, The Trouble With Kings!

You can read more about it and/or buy it here:
http://www.mybookstoreandmore.com/product_info.php?products_id=870

Here's a blurb. It's fantasy romance.

Princess Flian finds herself the unwilling object of desire of three royals. Is the one she wants a villain—or a hero?

Waking up in a strange place, Flian Elandersi at first doesn’t know who she is. One wicked prince tells her she is secretly engaged to an even more wicked king who wants to marry her right away. But before that happens, yet another wicked prince crashes through a window on horseback to sweep her off her feet.

Memory returns, and Flian realizes that all any of them seem to want is her considerable wealth, not her pleasant-but-ordinary self. She longs to escape the barracks-like, military atmosphere and return to civilization and her musical studies.

Flian endures another abduction, this time in the middle of a poetry reading. Who is the villain? Prince Garian Herlester—languid, elegant, sarcastic? Prince Jaim—he of the dashing horsemanship? Or King Jason Szinzar, whose ambiguous warning might be a threat?

Flian decides it’s time to throw off civilization and take action. The problem with action is that duels of wit turn into duels of steel—and love can’t be grabbed and galloped away.

I know I've been scarce, but I do love to come here for book recs. For, once again, my son, who is now 13 years old and still difficult to buy for. He's outgrown a number of series (owl and cat, can't remember their names).

But lately he has read and loved:

• Sherwood Smith's Inda series.


• Megan Whelan Turner's The Thief, The Queen The King series.


• Anthony Horowitz's Alex Rider and The Power of Five series.


• The Pendragon series. (Forget author.)


• Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and the Olympians series (starting with The Lightning Thief).


• Harry Potter (of course).


• Oh, and Jim Butcher's Codex Alera series (which tend to have "Fury" in the title).

I can't get him to read certain books, like Diana Wynne Jones or The Dark is Rising or Lloyd Alexander. He does seem to be drawn to recently published books, though that's not an absolute. He is definitely not drawn to books with adult-like teen girls gracing the covers—I see a lot of those in the teen section. Enough that I sometimes feel that teen section=teen girl section. (Probably not accurate and simply a reflection of my frustration with finding my son books.)

Anyway, there must be more out there for him and if anyone has suggestions, I would very much appreciate it!

Thanks.

I've been trying to ignore this trilogy for a while. That is The Thief, The Queen of Attolia and The King of Attolia. Why ignore it? Because I've been busy and I don't usually turn to YA.

Despite my efforts, people on livejournal kept writing up accounts of these books, usually account I couldn't read because of spoilers galore. This made me curious.

I'll just say this before the cut. These books are well-written and engrossing, and use excellent narrative technique. I am even reminded of the Lymond Chronicles, because Megan Whalen Turner manages to hide information without cheating. The main character is less brittle and a little warmer than Lymond. In fact, I adore Gen.

Don't read further if you haven't read all three books.

( Spoilers! )

Other reviews:
oyceter: The Thief, The Queen of Attolia, The King of Attolia. Lots of links to other reviews there.

It would seem I'm not in the minority to love The Queen best, although I liked The Thief quite a lot.

Also, sartorias talks about Attolia and YA.

I've been crazy busy. As you may or may not have noticed, I haven't been around much. I must drastically cut back my friends list or I won't be able to read it at all :(

Hope everyone is well and I can comment more often in the future.

Teresa of Making Light reviews Charles C. Mann's 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, a book I read a little while ago. Lots of good stuff in the comments, too.

Because I loved Inda so much, I'm starting a roundup:

sugangel7 at readplease here:

I found the fantasy world she'd created so utterly complex and fascinating. This book is the first in what will be a trilogy so this first one starts with Inda as a child and shows as he grows up. I'm not very good at describing books without giving everything away, but this one's all about loyalty and trust, command and skill, treachery and betrayal. I loved reading about the boys learning how to fight at the academy, the political scheming, the relationships between brothers, the discovery of the overwhelming feelings of desire. And did I mention there's pirates?

lady_schrapnell here:

Great characters, story, world, wisdom - no wonder it's hard to know where to start! The world is fascinating, as can possibly be seen from the paragraph above - everything feels lived-in, rather than cookie-cutter mediaeval-like secondary world. Everything makes sense, everything has consequences, and - though a lot of reasons are still unknown - it's pretty clear those reasons, just like RW ones, are likely to be long-standing and complicated.

gwyneira here:

What I was most impressed with in Inda is the worldbuilding, which is fantastically deep and rich. Particularly interesting to me was the relationship between men and women, which isn't at all the standard medieval fantasy world one of "men fight, women don't". Inda's society is war-oriented, constantly on guard, skirmishing, and occasionally conquering.

beth_bernobich here:

INDA is a feast of reading. It is simultaneously a book you can devour for the excitement--swashbuckling and battles, intrigue and betrayals--and a book you can sip and savor for its thoughtful observations on friendship and loyalty. INDA's plot sweeps across a vast and complex world; it also pauses to look within a character's soul.

I have this time travel idea. I've had this past week to get a lot done. I have procrastinated way too much, though I have my excuses. Heat. School's out.

But the real problem is the story's framework makes no sense. I pushed through five pages yesterday and motivation is a bitch, because why the #*&% is S. doing what she's doing? I don't have a clue.

When I work with smaller ideas I can wing it. But if I want to work with this idea, I need to know more.

Meanwhile, it's very frustrating. I think I should write a scene here and there and keep hoping I'll come up with a better framework. Or start that other, smaller project with the beta hero and the kickass heroine.

(Also, I need to restrict my visits to blogs of writers who produce 6+ books a year. I honestly have little problem with writers making great deals with big houses. It's talk of writing output that outstrips mine by an order of magnitude that totally flattens me.)

So congratulations to sartorias aka Sherwood Smith whose wonderful book INDA is now shipping!! Happy release day!

In any event if you're Canadian and want to buy it from Chapters you can go here. Or at amazon.ca here.

ETA: Sherwood has a wonderful new webpage with tons of information.

I could swear there's a word for the word one uses to tell someone in a mock/staged/not quite real fight, that you've had enough. That is, to stop.

Help?

Even though I have a weakness for girl disguised as boy, I would not have rented this on my own. My kids wanted to see it.

Anyway, She's the Man is inspired by Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, apparently. In a nutshell, girl twin Violet disguises herself as her brother Sebastian in order to play on the boy's soccer team. Violet likes her roommate Duke who likes Olivia who likes Violet-disguised-as-Sebastion.

Not all that interestingly done when it has so much potential. No exploration of same sex romantic feelings, that's for sure. And Amanda Bynes, though not without talent, is not my favorite young actor. (Even if she isn't plastered all over the mags like the super-talented hard-partying Linsday Lohan.)

But I have to admit, and I don't think it's just the biceps, that I was rather won over by Duke's inarticulate bashfulness. Never mind it was a 26 year old playing a teen. His expressions when he didn't know what to say to Olivia, or when he felt he'd said too much to Violet-as-Sebastian… Well, I was charmed.

In sum, a good ironing shirts movie.

So I completed Colin G. Calloway's One Vast Winter Count. Interestingly, his conclusion is totally in line with Mann's in 1491. That is, the devastation from disease, mostly small pox, emptied out the country, making the Americas appear to newcomers as ageless wilderness full of bounty. Mann concentrated on the east coast in the 15th century while Calloway concludes this while describing the west coast in the 18th century.

It's a sad sad brutal history.

It is instructive to read Colin G. Calloway's One Vast Winter Count right on the heels of Mann's 1491. Calloway is a less energetic and emotional writer. When he gets to the point where he details just what was accomplished by Native Americans in engineering corn from the native teosintle, I felt like shouting that's HUGE. Why aren't you yelling about how huge it was?

But that's Mann's style *g*

For Mann, European contact was an appalling devastation unparalleled in human history. Calloway doesn't use superlatives but his matter-of-fact description of Spanish brutality, rape and destruction is the more chilling account. Even if Calloway is less interested in just how much devastation smallpox wrought, or just how many people were living in the Americas pre-contact, he makes it clear that what is now the southern US was changed utterly by the Spanish.

Also, Calloway is not particularly interested in revealing how problematic and difficult, if not racist, the personalities behind paleo-Indian studies have been.

Anyway, Calloway's book has the larger scope and it was relief to move on from the Spanish to the French who, while not without their problems (like somewhat inadvertantly destroying the Huron and spreading disease elsewhere), are not quite so unrelentingly violent and brutal.

I knew horses transformed the west but I didn't realize the extent of that transformation—aided by guns, disease, slave trade, and epidemics of course.

So has anyone read 1491: New Revelations of the Americas by Charles C. Mann? Its purpose is to describe life in the Americas before Columbus. Mann's thesis is that the Americas were heavily populated with cities larger than those in Europe, the land massively landscaped and the wilderness far from pristine, and the agriculture incredibly sophisticated. Then disease wiped out most of the population and left Europeans thinking they were coming to untouched wilderness.

He's an engaging writer and much of what he writes makes sense, although not all of it is new to me—and I'm far from expert. However, he's so gungho at times I don't quite trust him. He does allow that some people believe that this new take on the numbers of people in the Americas and the sophistication of their lives is some kind of eager political correctness gone wrong. And I can certainly see why there would be resistance in acknowledging just how devastating the arrival of Europeans was. The loss of life is appalling, let alone the knowledge.

Otoh, he comes up with things in a kind of weird defense of Native Americans that don't quite add up. For example he says they had no schizophrenia. Uh, well, maybe there is good reason to state this, but it's not in the book. Or he wants to claim that the Spanish did not in fact have an advantage over the Inka and so fighting with horses is not an advantage. He gives an example of a battle (from another historical context) where the foot soldiers won over the cavalry but my son, the battle expert, claims this is terrible example, because in that instance, the foot soldiers were technically far superior.

Anyway… babble babble. I was wondering how this book was received. If anyone knows.

Am now reading, on forodwaith's rec, A Vast Winter Count by Calloway. He seems a little more matter-of-fact.

If you have a flight of stairs where there's a flat square in the middle, usually at a corner, that flat square is called the landing, isn't it?

1. I kinda sorta finished the story last night. It feels very crappy right now which is dispiriting. It's not the worst thing I've ever written but it's the worst I've written for a while and falls far short of what I was hoping. But. That's what revisions are for.

2. I'm reading and enjoying Cut to the Quick, the first in Kate Ross's Kestrel series. I'm enjoying the sharply written dialogue, the character of Julian Kestrel who is observant and kind and clever, and the omniscient point of view. I'm not much of a mystery reader, but this one is working for me.

3. I swear I will mail off two agent queries today.