Hey folks, I’ve gotten in a couple entries now on my Safe Upon the Shore of Faerie contest, but I’d really love to get more! Don’t forget, I’ll be taking entries until the release date of the new Great Big Sea album, which is July 13th!
Looking forward to seeing what other creative little snippets might show up on the post! And y’all should come over anyway and see what Jess and GutterBall have already submitted, ’cause they gave me some lovely little bits of prose, too!
Aw yeah, now we’re talkin’. Doranna Durgin’s Sentinels series, in Books 1 and 2, was only mildly entertaining me–but with Book 3, I jumped up to actively enjoying it. This time around, we have the story featuring one of the characters only passingly mentioned in the first two books, Nick Carter, who leads the Sentinels of his part of the country. He’s a wolf-shifter–and the Atrum Core want to take him down. They do it by sending in Jet, over whom they have a strong and urgent hold, and giving her orders to immobilize Nick with an amulet that will poison him.
It’s not much of a spoiler at all to say that Jet, unlike every other shifter character we’ve met so far, is not human–she is in fact a wolf forced into sentient human shape by Atrum Core magic. This comes out very quickly early on in the story, and it’s a trope Durgin’s done before with great effect in her fantasy trilogy about Dun Lady’s Jess. I found her refreshingly blunt and straightforward, lacking a lot of baggage that someone who’s been human from day one would have; in short, I totally bought her as a wolf forced into bipedal, thinking shape. Moreover, I also very much liked her chemistry with Nick, and how she immediately realizes that the Core have pulled a fast one on her, by trying to convince her that the amulet wouldn’t “harm” Nick.
Most of the story is therefore about the two of them having to deal with the aftermath of her initial, failed assault, and how they can turn this to their advantage to take down the Core. At the same time, there’s a nifty little subplot involving traitors in the Sentinels’ midst, one who’s having deep second thoughts about what she’s being asked to do, and one with no repentance whatsoever! I liked the repentant one, and seriously would expect her to be the next in line to have a story starring her, if Durgin does more.
All in all this was good fun, and I do hope there will indeed be more on the way. Four stars.
It must be time for another Book Roundup! Purchased or acquired lately by me:
blackairegfishI think that’s everything, and that brings me up to 162 for the year.
The Intarwebz are informing me today that he is apparently going to be in a remake of the 80’s TV show The Equalizer. My fangirly brain was dubious about this, and had the following conversation with itself:
Rational: Oh god not another remake!
Fangirly: But, but, but, RUSSELL! Shooting things!
Rational: But it’s ANOTHER REMAKE!
Fangirly: What part of RUSSELL SHOOTING THINGS are you not getting here?
Rational: This is yet another movie that’s standing between him and making a Master and Commander sequel.
Fangirly: …… well, you do have a point there.
I remember when The Equalizer was out, mind you, though I never watched it; I was too young to be its target audience at the time. Intellectually I can appreciate though that it seems like Russell would be a good match for the character. Wikipedia says the show was well-received and ran for four seasons, which matches my own vague recollection of it.
Anybody out there actually watch the show? If you did, what are your recollections of it?
I was yakking about this on Twitter tonight, mostly light-heartedly, but I thought I’d delve into this in more depth here: in the Ideal World According to Me, the next Tolkien movie after The Hobbit would be the story of Beren and Luthien.
I think I’ve mentioned before on LJ posts that their story should totally be a movie. It’s got everything that would make a movie great: an epic forbidden cross-species romance, a quest at the behest of an angry king, a great and loyal hound, monsters, magic, and most importantly, the heroine standing up to not only Middle-Earth’s biggest badass ever but even death itself for the sake of her man. I mean, seriously. You don’t get much more classic than this.
Since this is the Ideal World According to Me, I would of course cast Russell Crowe as Beren. (Actually, I’d have cast him as Boromir in Lord of the Rings, but this’ll work too!) Beren is not a young pup in the story; he’s already got several decades of experience under his belt by the time he sees and is absolutely smitten by Luthien. So Russell’s current general age and slightly grizzled look would be perfect. Not to mention that man, just the thought of seeing him do Beren’s being literally struck dumb by the first sight of Luthien gives me delicious shivers. I can see it now: the camera lingering on his awestruck face, so intense that he looks like he’s about to weep on the spot. Yum.
Likewise, it should surprise none of you that I’d totally be casting Alan Doyle as Daeron, who also loves Luthien and winds up betraying her a couple of times to her father, out of jealousy for her love of Beren. He later repents and writes laments for her loss. Wikipedia describes Daeron as “the greatest minstrel of the Children of Iluvatar”; frankly, if there’s any other role that would have “Alan Doyle” written all over it, even more than “Allan a’Dayle” did, I can’t think of it! (And I’m not fangirling for the opportunity to see Alan with pointed ears! Well okay, not much. Though I’ve always found Alan rather more puckish than your typical Tolkien elf would be, I’ve always suspected a touch of the fey about him. 😀 )
In my Ideal Movie World, they would of course do this movie with all the same loving attention to detail that Jackson’s done with LotR and which hopefully will also be done with The Hobbit. No garishly obvious CGI. Make it look real. Make it look right. The great hound Huan must not under any circumstances look fakey. Nor should Carcharoth, the monster wolf who bites off Beren’s hand that holds the Silmaril. Though I have a hard time visualizing how to do Morgoth–who, as an even bigger badass than Sauron, as in fact the original Big Bad of Middle-Earth, should be even scarier and more intimidating than Sauron was!
And you would of course need a proper Luthien. If she hadn’t already played Galadriel I’d be totally eying Cate Blanchett. But failing that, you’d need somebody who could pull off not only unearthly but even angelic radiance even when rescuing her man from the grimmest, most hellish places on earth. (Since Luthien is not only just an elf, she’s also part Maia.) You would need someone who could sing, or else someone with a heavenly voice dubbed in for when the character must sing–because this is after all a big driving force of the story.
(Side thought: if they dubbed in a classically trained singer for Luthien’s singing voice, one presumes she would be a soprano. Since that would seem fitting for “Tinuviel” meaning “Nightingale”.)
Okay, and in the Ideal Fangirl World According to Me, Luthien would of course be played by me. But I’m thinking of this in terms of the Ideal Movie World, not the Ideal Fangirl World. Mostly. 😉
So many vivid characters to be cast here, overall. I passionately hope somebody writes this into a script at some point and that it gets filmed. And that for the love of all that is holy, that nobody tries to do it in 3-D.
Y’all know what banishes the sting of two rejection letters in one week? A CONTEST, that’s what!
If you’ve hung around my other blog or its LJ or Dreamwidth mirrors for more than five minutes, you’ll have figured out fast that I’m a raving fangirl for Great Big Sea, a high-energy Celtic/folk band out of Newfoundland. I love these guys with the fiery passion of a thousand burning suns. I particularly love them right now, because on July 13th, they’re going to put out a brand new album.
And this is where you guys come in! When they announced the album’s release date, they also released a shot of the cover art. The very first thing that popped into my head when I saw it was “gosh, that looks like the cover of a novel, I wonder what the story of those two people is!” And I want all of you to tell me!
You can see the cover art right here, since the album’s available for preorder on Amazon. Go take a look. Then come back and give me one of the following:
Bonus points will be awarded for clever humor, use of any element of the Faerie Blood universe, or anything referenced in the titles or lyrics of Great Big Sea songs. Extra bonus points will be given for use of more than one of these!
The winner of the contest will receive either a copy of the album, a copy of Faerie Blood, or a copy of Defiance, their choice!
If the winner chooses the album, I will either buy them a copy directly off of greatbigsea.com, or else send a gift certificate to the vendor of their choice from which they may purchase it themselves. If the winner chooses a physical CD, I will require a snailmail address to which to send it.
If the winner chooses either of my books, I will provide an electronic copy of same in the format of their choice.
Here are the official rules and other important things you need to know:
(And oh yeah: if you haven’t heard GBS before, or if you want a taste of the new album to help you decide whether you want it, scamper up to greatbigsea.com and look for their streaming player. Three songs from the album are currently available there. The title track, “Safe Upon the Shore”, is my current favorite; it’s full of tasty, tasty harmony! Go check it out.)
I liked Lion Heart, Doranna Durgin’s second paranormal romance featuring her Sentinels shapeshifters, a bit more than the first book–possibly just because I found the scenario that brought the lead characters together more fun this time around.
Joe Ryan is a Sentinel in exile, believed to have been involved with the death of his former partner. But troubling fluctations of power are happening on the mountain where he’s living, and so Lyn Maines is sent in to investigate them along with Joe. It doesn’t take her instincts long to decide that Joe is innocent, although her more rational brain must be dragged kicking and screaming to that conclusion, along with admitting her attraction to him. Of course, then they have to actually convince the other Sentinels, so that they can all band together to face the actual threat on the mountain.
Overall I found the insistence on Joe’s guilt, not only from Lyn but from the Sentinel power structure, kind of thin; there was a lot of “guilty until proven innocent” going on here, and what glimpses we got of the actual backstory involved didn’t let me come away with any real impression that Joe had bothered to do anything at all in his own defense. That however was my only real beef with the book.
Lyn winds up having decent reasons to be a bit more obsessive than other Sentinels might have been in her investigation of Joe, and I particularly liked that her animal form is an ocelot. That struck me as nicely unusual for a shifter-based story, and the descriptions of her interactions with Joe in his mountain lion form were nicely detailed; I was totally able to envision their distinctly differently-sized feline forms. There’s good continuity here with the events of Book 1 as well, with some followup to the actions of that story’s antagonist.
Overall I’d actually call this a bit more than three, but not quite up to four, stars.