Weird experience today…reading the kind of book I never read. Seriously — never.
I am very much a sci-fi, urban fantasy reader. I like it gritty. The grittier the better. I like it science-y. I like weapons and explosions and fighting. Neal Asher, Iain M. Banks, absolutely! Jack McDevitt, yep! Richard K. Morgan, yes please! Rob Thurman, Jim Butcher, Richard Kadrey…keep it comin’! But today I went with Pride and Prejudice meets Faerie Magic. I’m talking about Mary Robinette Kowal’s Shades of Milk and Honey.
Confession time…this all started with porn. Okay, not really porn, but erotica. I started following Ms. Kowal on Twitter when she supplied John Scalzi with a dress to wear for a picture (yep, you read that right). She recently posted a link to some erotica she had written involving her characters from SoMaH. So, of course, I clicked on it. Oh shut up! Don’t judge me… I’m human!
Let me just say that her erotic vignette was quite well written –it was a scene from a wedding night. It was so well written with such engaging characters that I wanted to read more, so I called my local indie bookstore and ordered a copy of SoMaH. Me, the girl who avoids squishy, love-story crap like the plague I think it is.
I picked it up this afternoon…and I just finished it a few minutes ago. Yeah, she got me. It had enough fantasy and magic in it to keep it from being a mundane story and there was even a moment where I got to say “Hey, guns! Cool!” The book is a lot like Pride and Prejudice, but the world it’s set in has glamour and magic alongside country dances and proper English society in the Napoleonic era. Weird…but good! And save any tsk tsks you’re tempted to send my way because there is no erotica of any kind in the actual book…so it wasn’t a sex thing. It was the characters. I liked them. I cared what happened to them.
Hmmm, where have I heard that before? Oh right, that’s the way to make people want to read what I write! Yeah, okay, not that I didn’t know this before…but it’s somewhat astonishing to find it to be so true that it can pry me out of my sci-fi/fantasy corner and make me read something entirely different. Maybe this means I can add an actual female writer to my list of Unwitting Author Mentors.
But the question now is…will the clerk at my bookstore laugh at me tomorrow when I call to order the next book in the series?
mckkenzie 