#alpennia

[lgbtqreads]

Fave Five: Historical F/F Romance

Feminine Pursuits and Hen Fever by Olivia Waite Don’t Want You Like a Best Friend by Emma R. Alban The Spinsters of Inverley by Jane Walsh That Could Be Enough by Alyssa Cole A Little Light Mischief by Cat Sebastian Bonus: For cozy mystery/romance mashup, check out Proper English by KJ Charles Double Bonus: These are all realistic fiction, but for historical fantasy, try Heather Rose Jones’s…

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[ace-and-ranty]

"Power without prayer? Without ritual? I don’t think so. Don’t you think one of the mystery guilds would have taken note of it before this, if that were the case?"

Yeah, Margerit, I WONDER why no one IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH noticed you can have magic without prayer.

[andersdruv]

Re-read the Alpennia series (Daughter of Mystery and sequels) again! They're so good. The mix of early 19th century alt-historical Europe, a magic/religious system that's well thought out, and extremely competent women solving problems and falling in love with each other just really do it for me.

Antuniet Chazillen is honestly the best character! No one does it like her 😭😭😭

Here's a free short story kind-of-prequel:

(From Daughter of Mystery) …for a brief time, intrigued and flattered by the interest and starved for the human touch that she was denied in

[convenientalias]

Bella Books (my favorite sapphic fiction publisher) is having another big paperback sale due to moving. Some books at $4. I know I post about it every time this happens but I'm a big fan of theirs! I just want ppl to know.

Books I would recommend that are currently on sale:

THREE WHOLE BOOKS of the Alpennia series are on sale! Daughter of Mystery, The Mystic Marriage, and Floodtide. Any of these books I would highly recommend! Mystic Marriage is my favorite (I'm a big fan of Jeanne and Antuniet, both together and separately), but Daughter of Mystery is the first book. While Floodtide is more of a side novel--could probably be read on its own with only a little "wait, who are all these noble lesbians in the background" confusion.

Alone by E.J. Noyes is half thriller half romance, a novel about a woman partaking in an experiment on the effects of isolation on the psyche, and the woman who disrupts the experiment three years in, putting our MC's possible magnificent earnings in jeopardy (not to mention, she's suspicious as hell and also might be a hallucination. there's a lot going on). I read this in covid days and thought it was a bit eerie that it came out in 2019. It's a good read.

I Left My Heart by Jaye Maiman is a solid murder mystery with a side plot of lesbian romance (also, the character murdered is the MC's ex. Not a spoiler. You learn this very early on. It's pretty sad). Probably other Jaye Maiman books are also good if on sale but this is the only one I've read.

Don't know how long this sale will last (I'm making this post on August 4) but while it does, I'd just like to recommend these books and the publisher in general to anyone who loves f/f fiction :)

[queereads-bracket]

Queer Adult SFF Books Bracket: Preliminary Round

Choose a book:

Slow River by Nicola Griffith

Alpennia series by Heather Rose Jones

Voting ended onNov 23, 2024

Book summaries and submitted endorsements below:

Slow River by Nicola Griffith

She awoke in an alley to the splash of rain. She was naked, a foot-long gash in her back was still bleeding, and her identity implant was gone. Lore Van Oesterling had been the daughter of one of the world’s most powerful families…and now she was nobody, and she had to hide.

Then out of the rain walked Spanner, predator and thief, who took her in, cared for her wound, and taught her how to reinvent herself again and again. No one could find Lore now: not the police, not her family, and not the kidnappers who had left her in that alley to die. She had escaped…but the cost of her newfound freedom was crime and deception, and she paid it over and over again, until she had become someone she loathed.

Lore had a choice: She could stay in the shadows, stay with Spanner…and risk losing herself forever. Or she could leave Spanner and find herself again by becoming someone else: stealing the identity implant of a dead woman, taking over her life, and creating a new future.

But to start again, Lore required Spanner’s talents–Spanner, who needed her and hated her, and who always had a price. And even as Lore agreed to play Spanner’s game one final time, she found that there was still the price of being a Van Oesterling to be paid. Only by confronting her family, her past, and her own demons could Lore meld together who she had once been, who she had become, and the person she intended to be…

Science fiction, cyberpunk, speculative fiction, mystery, queernorm, adult

Alpennia series (Daughter of Mystery, The Mystic Marriage, Mother of Souls, Floodtide) by Heather Rose Jones

Endorsement from submitter: "Historical fantasy series set in a fictional country squished between Italy and Austria with a belieavable religious based magic system. Each book in the series follows a different sapphic couple, but there's an overarching political plot uniting them"

Margerit Sovitre did not expect to inherit the Baron Saveze’s fortunes—and even less his bodyguard. The formidable Barbara, of unknown parentage and tied to the barony for secretive reasons, is a feared duelist, capable of defending her charges with efficient, deadly force.

Equally perplexing is that while she is now a highly eligible heiress, Margerit did not also inherit the Saveze title, and the new baron eyes the fortunes he lost with open envy. Barbara, bitter that her servitude is to continue, may be the only force that stands between Margerit and the new Baron’s greed—and the ever deeper layers of intrigue that surround the ill-health of Alpennia’s prince and the divine power from rituals known only as The Mysteries of the Saints.

At first Margerit protests the need for Barbara’s services, but soon she cannot imagine sending Barbara away—for reasons of state and reasons of the heart.

Fantasy, historical fiction, politics, alternate history, Regency/Napoleonic/early 1800s, pastiche, series, adult

[with-my-murder-flute]

One of the things I really like about Alpennia's ~magic system is that it's historically coherent with Western history, where the Catholic church held total supremacy over much of Europe for over a milennium, BUT, you can definitely see the cracks that mean an alternate interpretation would totally blow the whole system wide open.

One of the things about being an ex-Catholic history nerd is, it's hard for me to really invest in "our world, except magic" AUs where magic is this totally separate branch of institutional power in Western society, where there is the monarchy/government, there is the Church, and then there is The World of Magic—because the Church, being the largest branch, has always tried to eat its lesser kin; there has been so much warfare about whether the Roman Catholic Church holds precedence over secular governments, or whether secular governments can tell the Church where to GTFO. So it is very fundamentally implausible that, if magic truly exists, the Church has not annexed it and claimed to be its only true source.

Daughter of Mystery is about the "mysteries" of the saints, where "mystery" means both "a secret ritual" (like the Elusinian mysteries) and "an act of religious ministry" (like medieval "mystery" plays). It's an adaptation of things that exist in our world, where Catholic veneration of the saints has always included asking different saints for different things, and honouring them with specific actions, prayers, pilgrimages, and items. That means everything from walking hundreds of miles with bare feet to worship at a shrine, to sighing and chanting, "Anthony, Anthony, turn around, something's lost that must be found" while spinning in a circle, before continuing to look for your car keys.

In this world, the mysteries work. Not all the time, not for everybody, but just often enough to be miraculous. And the Church traditionally holds that God and the Saints are just very choosy about when they bestow those miracles, and it's the job of ordinary people to pray humbly and dutifully and bow their heads when the blessings fall down.

But slowly over the centuries, theologians, philosophers, and eventually, thaumaturgists, have been observing that there is a pattern to when and how the mysteries generate miracles. There are some people who are especially sensitive to seeing or hearing the working of miracles, who can say whether a prayer was answered or a mystery was successful; and there are some people who, much more reliably than others, have their prayers answered. If they work together, they can use trial and error to create far more effective mysteries that produce more reliable results.

This has led to the creation of "mystery guilds", because the guild was the medieval framework for a closed group of people who meet to work together for a specific cause; in this case they were not tradesmen regulating a profession or philanthropists raising money for a cause, but people working to celebrate mysteries in hopes of creating a desired miracle. (I don't know if it comes up in later books, but I imagine the Freemasons in this world are buck wild.)

The Church officially condemns what is called "the mechanistic heresy", which says that miracles don't come from God, but are the sum of the people involved and the thoughts and words and actions they perform. Thaumaturgists have to step very carefully around this issue, because it is actually pretty clear that either case is equally possible, but they want to not die at the hands of the Inquisition. So there's this very real tension where thaumaturgy that was scandalous and near-heretical in its day (which I'm guessing to be the 12th century?) is now essential to understanding modern philosophy, so a nun who disapproves of the field as a whole nonetheless has to teach parts of it if she wants her student to understand why Christian thought and worship of the early 1800s is the way it is—but she won't give that student access to the entire book, just carefully chosen excerpts. And even if that book can be obtained from other libraries, other books of thaumaturgy are so at risk of being deemed heretical that reputable printers won't print it, and reputable booksellers won't sell it.

It reminds me a lot of the practice of human dissection in European history. During the Early Middle Ages, the Church discouraged the practice, which had been more common in Ancient Rome; it held that human bodies were sacrosanct, and could not be in any way damaged or altered after death, because when humans will be given our "new flesh" on the day of the Resurrection, it will be our actual physical bodies that will be revived—so your body had better be in a revivable state, and not cremated or taken apart or anything else.

But slowly, in the 11th and 12th centuries, it became clearer and clearer (thanks in part to physicians from Jewish and Islamic traditions) that dissection was a necessary part of medical science, because doctors and surgeons will just be fundamentally worse at their jobs if they don't have the kind of detailed knowledge of anatomy that only human dissection can provide. So in fits and starts, various regions and bishops and popes made the procedure more legal, even as they limited who could be dissected to those least likely to be deemed fit for the eternal hereafter.

Which, like... it is completely off the chain for us to live in a world where autopsies are performed on everyone, good citizen and hardened criminal alike, in the case of suspicious death; where it is routine to take the vital organs of a dead person out of their body and transplant them into a new one. We couldn't imagine law enforcement without forensic pathology, and we're comfortable with medical science experimenting with the human body in a way that treats nothing as sacrosanct, except knowledge and truth.

So Alpennia is at the jumping-off place for this brave new world. They've been a solidly Catholic country, wedged between France and Switzerland, only slightly touched by the wilder excesses of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution; Napoleon's wars ravaged them somewhat, but a new generation that barely remembers them is coming of age, with the knowledge that all the old truths can be thrown down—if you throw hard enough.

These books are so deeply nerdy. So very much. I love them so.

[star-anise]

Today in gay historical romance novels I am reading:

Heather Rose Jones’ Daughter of Mystery is totally not what I expected. It’s a Ruritanian romance, which means it’s set in a fantastical invented country somewhere in Central or Eastern Europe. Those are traditionally swashbuckling romps with lots of swordfights up castle stairways. And it’s not that this book (which I haven’t finished yet) isn’t going to provide that. One of its main leads, Barbara, is every inch a Ruritanian hero--raised by an eccentric nobleman to follow the masculine trade of a professional duellist, she’s cool, sophisticated, and with a suitably tragic and mysterious past.

But Daughter of Mystery is something much rarer, the kind of thing modern historical fiction rarely achieves: It’s set in a historical society. The gowns and balls and propriety and convention aren’t just window dressing; the grand houses aren’t emptied-out ruins occupied only by protagonists. Alpennia comes richly populated with housemaids who want to climb the servants’ hierarchy and maiden aunts who go visiting friends when they clash with their sister’s husband, fencing-masters and court musicians, serious scholars and University dilettantes. The characters occupy physical space; they share rooms, are crowded in the upper floors of houses, stretch out in a luxurious manor, stay inside because the villain is lurking in a nearby park. 

They go to church. So many of the books I’ve read lately imagine premodern characters in a thoroughly modern state of isolation, floating through months and years without contact with the rest of their village, without acknowledging the social forces that would inevitably pull them together, from Mass to legal proceedings to village fetes--even when a character would be isolated, that isolation ought to stand in comparison to the tight social network binding the rest of their community together.  Daughter of Mystery acknowledges the social forces that limited women to very specific norms of class, gender, and sexuality, without automatically demonizing them.

I’m enjoying it, though it’s harder to read when I’m not trapped in a car for hours on end and there are so many other distractions to call me away. And I look forward to it. But I felt like expressing this: it’s so much closer to history than most historical fiction I’ve read lately.

[aspeccharactersoftheday]

Antuniet Chazillen from Alpennia is demisexual!