The Seventh Bride by T. Kingfisher 📚

Having read Nettle and Bone recently and enjoyed it greatly, I decided to pick up some other works by the same author. This one turns out to have been one of her earlier titles, and it bears more than little resemblance in the plot, prose, and setting to the later work.

The young protagonist is a miller’s daughter rather than a princess, and is herself threatened with marriage to a mysterious nobleman, but this is a fairy-tale world and not a Jane Austen novel and the nobleman’s intentions are quickly revealed to have more to do with magic and theft than happy-ever-after. Rhea must look for allies in unlikely places, perform terrible tasks set by her self-declared intended, and find a path to escape what seems likely to be a tragic ending.

The story is well told, the adventures scary and magical, and one can clearly see the inventive imagination of the author at work, but it does have a bit of early novel about it, the characters are a bit less vivid and the plot much more linear in how it unfolds. Still I banged though the book in short order (it’s not all that long) and enjoyed doing so.

Recommended.

Book cover for The Seventh Bride by T. Kingfisher, a person in a red dress, viewed from the back, standing in front of a large clock on a collapsing tiled floor.

Signed back up for Netflix so that I can watch The Sandman. What else did I miss the last few months that is worth watching?

A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik 📚

I greatly enjoyed the author’s Temeraire series of Napoleonic adventures (with dragons), and her more recent fairy tale retellings Uprooted and Spinning Silver; and now I have finally finished reading this novel, first in a series, set in an entirely new and horrifying world.

Although there are certain elements in this story which echo those in that series of books about a magical school, the two could not be more different in scope and intention. The present volume is entirely first person, narrated by El, who is not the hero of her own story; indeed she is desperately trying to avoid becoming the villain. The cast of characters is varied but not large, and the world itself is positively claustrophobic, as almost all of the story, save for a few flashbacks, takes place in the self-contained magical “Scholomance,” a wizardly building constructed outside the bounds of the world, populated exclusively by student adepts. The horrifying part is that the purpose of the school is to protect the developing wizards from roaming malicious magical creatures straight out of the D&D monster sourcebook, all intent on consuming the magical essence of the young magicians; and over many years the system has broken down and the school itself has become infested. Survival rates are marginally better than trying to survive on your own in the outside world, but that’s not saying much.

El herself is a bit of an enigma, unaffiliated with the powerful enclaves which shelter the elite of the magical population in the outside world, she starts her junior year without friends, but it quickly becomes clear that despite her magical aptitude for spells of mass destruction what she really wants is to find a few friends, upend the social order, and (if possible) not die horribly. At one point I had to put down the book for a while because I was so concerned that El was going to be disappointed in her choice of friends, but on coming back and starting again from the beginning I was able to keep going to the end of the term, learning (along with El) a little more about who she is and who her friends really are. But don’t worry, there are more volumes on the way, and senior year awaits!

The writing throughout is excellent, El is a snarky delight, and the monsters are horrible, but the biggest monster is the Scholomance itself, which is at once dorm, classroom, and faculty, imposing daunting lesson plans on the captive students according to some obscure magical rubric which is never really explained, rooted in a complex and convoluted system of magic where powerful spells come with powerful costs.

As before I will reserve judgement until I have finished at least one more in the series…

Book cover for A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik, a diagram with a book below and a rayed eye encircled by moon phase images above, with a dark background sprinkles with stars.

Updating the Synology, which requires making sure that none of the computers is trying to back up at the moment.