I’m taking a day off today, just because I can (and have lots of casual OT I’ll lose at the end of this month). I’ll take advantage of that to roast a small chicken for Erev Rosh Hashanah. I was hoping to row, but the timing is being difficult, since I need to go at the same time as someone else – the boathouse is crowded enough that I need help getting my boat out without banging into other boats on the rack. I could row at 10:30 or 2:30, but that really cuts into the day – so I may just blow it off. On the other hand, the weather is perfect and it seems like a shame not to go out.
My priority for today is just relaxation – work has been ridiculously busy and will continue to be so. In a couple of weeks I will be flying into Japan on a Sunday, fly home Thursday, take Friday to unpack, do laundry and repack, then get back on a plane on Saturday to head to the US. The plan for today is sleep late (well, that one didn’t work out), and do the idle sort of shopping I never have time or opportunity for, then pick up my chicken and come home and roast it. They have tiny pre-seasoned birds here, which only take about an hour and a half to roast and then make tasty soup. Maybe if I row at 10:30 and get my groceries on the way home from rowing, I’d still have enough of the afternoon left to enjoy.
My spell of bad books is broken. Yesterday evening, thanks to someone’s post on Facebook showing a book add, I realized that The Princess Curse, Merrie Haskell’s first book, came out two weeks ago – I didn’t have the publication date written down and had missed it. Oops. Thanks to the Kindle, I was able to rectfy that error immediately, and finished the book by bedtime last night.
It’s always a bit scary to read a book by someone you know, because what if you don’t like it? That has happened to me, but fortunately not this time. I’ve known Mer as long as I’ve known anyone from the blogoverse, since 2001 or so back on Diaryland. (I have online blog-friends from before that, but those are people I already knew from mailing lists.) She’s wanted to be a writer for all of that time and long before, so it was very exciting to see her finishing this book and getting a contract for it. Also exciting, though hardly surprisingly from the author of The Girl-Prince, is that I like it a lot. It’s a retelling of the fairy tale about the Twelve Dancing Princesses, set in a small kingdom somewhere in the vicinity of Rumania and pulling on the lore of that region. Lots of research on mythology and herb-lore went into it, clearly. I guess it would be MG rather than YA, or maybe somewhere straddling the two. There’s no sex, but the story isn’t simple and I don’t think a YA-aged reader would be bored. I certainly wasn’t. And a younger reader might miss some of the subtleties, though that won’t damage their enjoyment. It’s got themes of self-determination, making your own choices and abiding by consequences that would be appropriate for either age group. Another nice thing is that no one and no relationship in the bok is perfect; people care about each other despite flaws and mistakes in dealing with each other. The heroine, Reveka, takes time to figure out how to deal with the different people around her.
One interesting thing about the book is that, much as I enjoyed it and despite the question left open at the end, I find myself not really wishing for a sequel. We don’t know exactly what will happen next, but we know enough of the world and the characters to make a pretty good guess at it – it sort of feels like it’s left just open enough to let the reader fill in the gaps in his or her own mind without really needing to be told everything. Maybe this is a good book to kick-start a new generation of story-tellers.
I’m so glad the book worked for you–but I’m a thousand times gladder you enjoyed the open ending. While I’m totally interested in writing a sequel because I would have fun doing it (and have plenty of material to cover), I never felt it was *required* by that openness. I appreciate that lots of readers want a sequel, but I’m a bit taken aback by the people who think that the ending, as it is written, detracts from the overall experience! I mean, sure, that’s their opinion so it’s totally valid, but frankly, I wrote the kind of ending I like to read.