#book bartending

[unfavorableinstigation]

I do love your tags, however, I wanted to inform you that there are indeed Canadian fantasy authors to be discover & love out there! A very partial list includes

• Guy Gavriel Kay. Lucked into the dream job of every fantasy fan, going through Tolkien's unpublished papers right outta college. Has been writing historical-inspired fantasy ever since. One of G.R.R.M's favorite authors

• Elisabeth Vonarburg. Québec's answer to Margaret Atwood, weird and wonderful. Where Atwood is a cynic, she has a utopian bent and some love for anarchism, but she also avoids the mysticism of Le Guin.

• Charles de Lint. Pioneer of Urban Fantasy! Pals with John Crowley (perhaps the best American fantasy writer) and a sort of mysterious polymath. Wonderful prose writer.

• Amal El-Mohtar. Of bigolas dickolas fame. Not the most prolific of the writers on this list but the one I'm following most closely. She's fun and delightful and endlessly creative in a way that looks easy but really isn't.

• Charles Saunders. The lonely giant of Afrofantasy. I feel it would be insulting to say that he was decades ahead of his time, as he did shape a lot of afrofuturist & afrofantasy writer's tastes (along with Chip Delany ofc).

• Jo Walton. She's the queen of uchronia. Harry Turtledove be damned. The meanest thing anyone can say about her is that she probably only deserves 9/10ths of all the awards she has. 17/20ths if you're feeling especially uncharitable.

• Nalo Hopkinson. Serious and playful, a polymorph, a humanist, a lover of Victoriana's fascination with the magical and a deeply funny writer of big ambitious novels.

• And technically okay yeah she's french and only moved recently to Montreal and doesn't count as a real Canadian or whatever. But also Sabrina Calvo will knock your socks off. Melmoth Furieux is about Joan of Arc vs Disneyland. Toxoplasma is her most québécois novel though.

• Also Jeff Lemire is a pretty big deal I guess even though he can annoy me

Oooo, I hadn't heard of half these names, and had no clue Jo Walton was Canadian! I do feel like we're getting way more Canadian fantasy these days than we ever did, I'm hopeful this will keep going. I'm particularly interested in Calvo, actually - I always kind of despaired of finding novels in French that both met my interests and weren't translated from English. A thousand thanks!!!

[liprairian]

Obligatory everyone's-mad-about-Scooby-Doo-adaptation plug for Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero

It's not exclusively a pastiche on Scooby Doo - there are some other Kid Mystery Gangs mixed up in there - but it's a book about sort of the primordial ideal of your Gang of Meddling Kids, now young adults and deeply, diversely psychologically fucked up after their last job, which went wrong somehow.

The style is kind of internet-friendly/Terry Pratchettesque¹, with neat, creative, twisty analogies and use of screenplay formatting and dialogue to get points across differently.

The plot is fun, but not light - there's that adage that a really good parody is both a mockery and a good example of the thing it's parodying, and the thing Meddling Kids is parodying is horror². I'm a terrible source for content warnings, but seek them out if you're unsure.

¹Woman who's only read one author: "Wow, this sounds exactly like-" [the agent assigned to me slams the detonation button]

²And, I would posit, the full-length Scooby Doo movies a lot of us grew up on, where the putative monster threat just keeps escalating

[liprairian]

Everyone has to read the Greta Helsing books, she just made an Eddie Izzard reference and I'm deeply in love. They remind most of Ilona Andrews' Innkeeper Chronicles.

Premise: Greta Helsing is the latest in a long line of doctors secretly tending to the supernatural. Being just about the only one in the business means she gets wrapped up in some of the events causing the supernatural to require medical aid.

Tone: kind, humorous, very British-humourist tone. The found-family vein runs extremely strong through these books; their values as a whole are extremely Pratchett.

Plot: Thriller/mystery

Genre: Fantasy-horror. The horror is mainly aesthetic over ideological, but there's some body horror to be cautious of if you're sensitive to that in particular.

Final comfort-food rating: Full English breakfast. No unpleasant surprises besides using blood in places you might not expect it; really, it could be a trifle bland for some tastes. There's tons of variety and enough substance to keep you satisfied.

[unfavorableinstigation]

Dear two-weeks-later @nimblermortal:

Highfire is by the Artemis Fowl guy, Eoin Colfer, and has a lot of the Artemis series hallmarks (humour, curmudgeons) but with a few more adult characters. The title character is a cranky centuries-old dragon who drinks slightly too much and deeply cherishes his Riverdance T-shirts - strong bachelor uncle energy.

The action kicks off when Squib Moreau, a burnout 15-year-old, finds his hiding place in the middle of the swamp and has to help fend off a sociopathic cop to keep the whole thing under wraps.

The whole thing is a lot of fun, with my only complaint being some overreliance on character archetypes.

The audiobook is read by Johnny Heller, who takes his job as a one-man play actor extremely seriously. He's got a great sense of place in a way I very rarely get in an audiobook (the book is set in the Louisiana bayou) and does a fantastic job of characterization. He's won 4 Audies, though he wasn't nominated for Highfire that I can find.

[liprairian]

Does anyone know of any princess-actually-marries-goblin books other than The Hollow Kingdom? PLEASE send them my way, I just finished The Princess and the Goblin for the first time and I need to sort of cleanse my brain a bit from the toxic saccharinity. But also...

I knew what I was getting into in terms of the Little Princess-style icky-sticky didactic perfection, but not that there would be so much writing-back potential there that modern writing/publishing has seemingly left unexplored? Like, it's a reasonably influential book, it's in the public domain, there are some very interesting motifs there! T. Kingfisher/Ursula Vernon (please don't tag her, I know she's active here again and it's unfair to her) could do insane things with that skin-shoe-stone-shoe motif, I just know it. The sun/moon imagery, the nurse?? Not so much underutilized in the original text as so, so ripe for mining (heh) in a retelling. In an alternate universe Ursula Vernon's got a blog post from like 2005 talking about how you can establish a relatable goblin family in one chapter and then leave the entire race floating downriver in the floods at the end. There's C.S. Lewis levels of shit going on here, in a public domain book. I'm dying a slow and painful death here.

Please, some recs.

[unfavorableinstigation]

1) start reading His Majesty's Dragon

2) think about how great it would be, also, if the dragon character was Just Some Guy

3) realize I have already read Highfire and it was as good as my fleeting brainburp implied

[unfavorableinstigation]

Anyone have any Eva Ibbotson readalikes? I'm looking for stuff like her romances, kind of easy reading with a lot of faith in humanity behind it, but with her gentle satire as well. Basically, I want thoughtful easy reading.

... actually, now I think of it, who wants to sell me on their favourite Diana Wynne Jones book?

[unfavorableinstigation]

Does anyone know of any princess-actually-marries-goblin books other than The Hollow Kingdom? I have an Itch