Well put ;-)

Have a lovely day! :-)

LOL indeed! As a card-carrying fan of Conor Oberst, I love this!

Hee hee hee! I really did laugh out loud.

Oh, Fire Logic. Such a wonderful book. And oh, how I hated the sequel.

Briefly: I loved how the first one played with fantasy cliches in a new format. It is, not to put too fine a point on it, an excellent take on applying liberal politics to fantasy standards. I loved the gay stuff, I loved the use of drug addiction, and I loved the fundamental message that destroying the enemy wasn't the answer -- understanding the enemy, and moving forward instead of fighting for some distant memory of the past, was the answer. Loved all that.

In the sequel, the primary love story, which had obstacles in the first book, is running smoothly... so the author comes up with a convoluted way to slap an obstacle in place. I'm fine with that, but the obstacle boils down to "Uh, because we have to." And that's with me giving it the benefit of the doubt. They read some runes, and the runes say that one of the protags has to leave, and she does, and everyone is sad. For no reason. It was a handwave of enormous and awkward proportions.

Then another hero realizes that the best way to overcome the evil invaders isn't to destroy them (which is a good message)... but to write a book. He writes a book that talks about how the evil invaders are people too, and they like flowers, and then all the invaded peasants start giving flowers to the invaders so that they won't be lonely. It was transparently and painfully an "author decides to make writing a damn book the solution to everything" deal, and wow, was it embarrassing to read.

Finally, in the end, all the potential tension was defused by another hero having a huge deus ex machina power that completely cut the philosophy off at the knees. If your message is "Learn to understand, forgive, accept, and compromise," and then, as soon as the invaders raise their guns, your heroine can use magic to make their guns fall apart... well, your message has just become "Learn to understand, forgive, accept, and compromise, and also have an ace in the hole that lets you completely wipe out the enemy army in one fell swoop, at which point you will magnanimously declare peace."

Not the world's worst book ever, but it read like a neocon doing a parody of what liberal fiction would be like, and that was incredibly disappointing after how much I enjoyed the first book.

I only vaguely remember the rune card use in the first book, but it didn't bother me hugely. In the second book... I'm glossing, on the off chance that someone here wants to avoid spoilers, but what they do as a result of this rune reading made me physically angry, and not in a good "Oho, tension!" way. And then, the unexpected twist... is painful. So painful. And bad. And painful. And deeply indicative of a writer hitting that second-book place and trying to recreate the success of the first book by destroying all the progress of the characters in the dumbest and clumsiest way possible.

re: the cover art: Pat Murphy was my writing teacher back in college. She told a story about having an anthology of short stories and getting an advance look at the cover, only to see that the cover art included people walking through a forest while some kind of tiny, leaf-clad forest nymph watched them from a tree. Pat's anthology did not include any leaf-clad forest nymphs, and was, frankly, not even a leaf-clad forest-nymph-appropriate sort of anthology. It would be a bit like seeing a unicorn made of rainbows on the cover of Neuromancer.

Pat called her agent and politely asked what the hell was up with that. The agent said, "I got them to take the wings off." At which point my mentor thoughtfully thanked her and gave up on trying to control her cover art.

Given that the woman on the cover isn't in a chainmail bikini, I'd chalk it up as progress.

Oof. Also true. I'd just been thinking about inaccuracy. I didn't click on it specifically as whitewashing. Then again, I don't remember clicking on the heroine's tribe as being what Yoon Ha Lee would call chromatic. That could be my sketchy memory, my sloppy reading making me assume that they just meant that people were tanned from outdoor living, or me looking at the cover and missing the writer's cues because of the whitewashing.

I've got a fantasy novel with a PoC as the heroine. It's sitting on an editor's desk. It honestly never occurred to me that if it ever got published, I might have to have what I think of as the "DC Comics Vixen is Suddenly White" argument over the cover. I feel very white and male and naive right now.

Aw... the valkyrie is sad... :(

Also, shouldn't the Librarian just say "Ook"?