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From GalleyCat:
Indie romance novelist Sylvain Reynard has landed a “substantial seven-figure deal” with Penguin Group’s Berkley imprint for Gabriel’s Inferno and Gabriel’s Rapture, a series that began as Twilight fan fiction.
Srsly, click through for the story. Because it's long and bananas and... yeah. Bananas.
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In Princess of the Midnight Ball, soldier Galen has to put his knitting skills to work to save the twelve dancing princesses, while in After the Snow, Willo's sewing skills help him survive a brutal winter in an even-more brutal town.
Know of any others?
ETA: Lots of suggestions in the comments, including a mention of this round-up of Textile Fantasies at Charlotte's Library.
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...in The Privilege of the Sword audiobook.
Fabulous choices, both.
(If you haven't read it, by the way, it's a fantastic book. Swashbuckling galore!)
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Titles I've written about:
Riding Out the Storm (2012):
Even though the majority of the book takes place outside of Maine, it begins there (here!), and there are some great details that prove Sis Deans has Maine Cred. (Like the brief list of local tv channels—the specific numbers, not the call signs—and Derek's love for Amato's. People are freaking passionate about that chain here.) The details about the feel of the bus, the interactions between passengers as the ride progresses, and especially the descriptions of other passengers prove that she's got Greyhound Cred as well.
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Fifteen-year-old Willo goes up into the hills to collect firewood, and when he returns, his family is gone. He can tell by the tracks and the smell that they've been taken by the government—only the government has trucks strong enough to come into the mountains during the winter—but he doesn't know why they've been taken, or where.
So he loads his sled up with as many supplies as he can, and he sets out to find them.
After the Snow is set in the near future—near enough that the adults remember the world as we know it now—in (judging by the place names) Wales. A new Ice Age has settled in, and as Willo understands it, people are divided into three major categories: those who live in settlements, beholden to and controlled by the government; stealers, those who live by theft, murder, and cannibalization; and stragglers like Willo's family, who work towards self-sufficiency and think of themselves as 'beacons of hope'. (Willo's not particularly interested in the 'beacon of hope' part—he's borderline feral, and more focused on observing animal behavior and learning from it—but it's something his father talks about from time to time.)
If you dislike books written in dialect, you're not likely to enjoy Willo's voice. But for those of you who don't mind—or even like!—reading dialect, you're likely to see the beauty in passages like this:
The snow blast at me in great sweeping drafts—it sting in my eyes and get down my coat and the whole thing get to be a proper fight. I shout pretty hard at the wind and the snow and myself too for not making that tent good and strong. If you don't get angry sometimes you're gonna get trodden on or swallowed up or just plain washed over.
Although there are a couple of pretty amazing coincidences near the end of the story—the kind of coincidence that abruptly allows for the end of a story by neatly tying up major loose ends—and I don't know how believable I found Willo's decision to [SPOILER], for the most part, the book really works. The pacing is good, the description strong, the characters believable, and the violence, while upsetting and gut-wrenching, isn't gratuitous. It's a vision of a post-apocalyptic future that touches on a lot of our current concerns—global warming, alternate energy, the oil crisis—while also taking a (pessimistic) stab at imagining what the global political landscape could look like in a few short decades.
Recommended to: Fans of How I Live Now, because it's a survival story set in the UK about a teenager disinterested in and shaky in his grasp of the politics that directly affect his life. Fans of Blood Red Road, because it's a survival story narrated by a teenager who speaks in dialect setting out in search of his lost family. Those who enjoyed Graceling for Katsa's trek through the mountains sequence more than her romance with Po.
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Booklists/pairings: Fiber arts save the day, Star Wars references in a post-apocalyptic future, Post-apocalyptic stories written in dialect.
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Book source: ILLed through my library.
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SO. EXCITING.
*faints*
Here, feel free to peruse this sampler of their upcoming offerings while I recover.
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Warner Bros considers The Shining prequel:
The Shining prequel is being written by Shutter Island's Laeta Kalogridis, suggesting that the studio is taking the prospect of a new film seriously enough to employ a screenwriter of some pedigree.
Go away, please.
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From her tumblr:
It doesn’t matter if any of Magnus’ background is white. Casting him white would erase that part of his background that is Asian. And important. There are plenty of roles out there for white actors. Most roles are for white actors. This is not one of them. There is very little I have control over as regards casting. I cannot pick an actor for Magnus. I don’t have that ability. But I can say, and say strongly, that I want them to cast an Asian or half-Asian actor, and I did. It is pretty much the one ironclad demand as regards casting that I have made, i.e. : if you don’t cast an Asian actor, I’ll never talk about this movie again, nor will I see it.
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Titles I've written about:
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mademoiselle Odile (2012):
The story has a lot going for it. It stars a capable girl who's got a few big secrets and a couple of potential love interests. It features cool science (or is it magic?) and a rarely-covered historical event. In addition to the attractiveness of the premise, much of this book is technically well done: it's clear that the author did quite a lot of research, and the historical details are both interesting and integrated well into the narrative.
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