Wyrd & Wonder Blog Tag, prompts 1-10

This is for the Wyrd & Wonder blog event. I will do prompts 10-20 next week.

list of prompts

1. TBR: I already wrote a post for this! I might change it, though.

2. Fantastic pirates: the Monstress series of graphic novels by Marjorie Liu has pirates in vols. 2 & 3. I can't think of anything else for this prompt. I liked them, but I didn't like volume 3 as much as the first two, unfortunately.



3. The best things come in threes: trilogies: This has to be the Broken Earth Trilogy by N.K. Jemisin. I do not consider The Lord of the Rings a trilogy so I am not using it for this entry. (I have the 3-volume edition listed on GoodReads just because that’s the copy I happen to own, but it was not written as a trilogy.)

The first book in the Broken Earth Trilogy is The Fifth Season. I liked the first one best, but the whole thing is worth reading. 



This is the way the world ends. Again.

Three terrible things happen in a single day. Essun, a woman living an ordinary life in a small town, comes home to find that her husband has brutally murdered their son and kidnapped their daughter. Meanwhile, mighty Sanze -- the world-spanning empire whose innovations have been civilization's bedrock for a thousand years -- collapses as most of its citizens are murdered to serve a madman's vengeance. And worst of all, across the heart of the vast continent known as the Stillness, a great red rift has been torn into the heart of the earth, spewing ash enough to darken the sky for years. Or centuries.

Now Essun must pursue the wreckage of her family through a deadly, dying land. Without sunlight, clean water, or arable land, and with limited stockpiles of supplies, there will be war all across the Stillness: a battle royale of nations not for power or territory, but simply for the basic resources necessary to get through the long dark night. Essun does not care if the world falls apart around her. She'll break it herself, if she must, to save her daughter.

4. Unexpected wizards - pass! skipping this one

5. Victory Against All Odds — The obvious choice has to be The Lord of the Rings, although The Silmarillion is a very close second (for the voyage of Earendil). I will definitely feature The Silmarillion later; it is the obvious choice for the epic deaths prompt later this month.



6. Celebrate A Sidekick — It's too hard to pick just one! But my picks are Sam Gamgee (The Lord of the Rings) and Matthew the Raven (The Sandman comics series). Both amazing friends t the main characters. I kind of want to add Childermass (Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell) but that's stretching the definition of the word, probably. 😏 Childermass has his own ideas if you know what I mean ...

The Sandman vol 9: The Kindly Ones

7. Book Rainbow:


Books: The Innkeeper's Song (library checkout), The Children of Hurin, Beren & Luthien, The Silmarillion, Guards! Guards!, One Hundred Years of Solitude (current read), Spindle's End - current library checkouts + some of my favorites
8. Can't Wait to Read — Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay -- I have a library hold on this one. This is on my list as part of a challenge in one of my GoodReads groups, the Science Fiction & Fantasy Book Club. This year I am trying to read 10 books that have been past group reads in the group. Synopsis from GoodReads:

Tigana is the magical story of a beleaguered country struggling to be free. It is the tale of a people so cursed by the dark sorceries of the tyrant king Brandin that even the very name of their once beautiful home cannot be spoken or remembered. But years after their homeland’s devastation, a handful of men and women set in motion a dangerous crusade—to overthrow their conquerors and bring back to the world the lost brightness of an obliterated name: Tigana.



9. Fairytale Retelling: Spindle's End by Robin McKinley is probably my favorite.



Synopsis from GoodReads:
All the creatures of the forest and field and riverbank knew the infant was special. She was the princess, spirited away from the evil fairy Pernicia on her name-day. But the curse was cast: Rosie was fated to prick her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel and fall into a poisoned sleep-a slumber from which no one would be able to rouse her.

The first paragraph is one of my favorites: The magic in that country was so thick and tenacious that it settled over the land like chalk-dust and over floors and shelves like slightly sticky plaster-dust. (Housecleaners in that country earned unusually good wages.) If you lived in that country, you had to de-scale your kettle of its encrustation of magic at least once a week, because if you didn’t, you might find yourself pouring hissing snakes or pond slime into your teapot instead of water. (It didn’t have to be anything scary or unpleasant, like snakes or slime, especially in a cheerful household—magic tended to reflect the atmosphere of the place in which it found itself—but if you want a cup of tea, a cup of lavender-and-gold pansies or ivory thimbles is unsatisfactory. And while the pansies—put dry in a vase—would probably last a day, looking like ordinary pansies, before they went greyish-dun and collapsed into magic dust, something like an ivory thimble would begin to smudge and crumble as soon as you picked it up.)

Honorable mentions: Deerskin, a retelling of Donkeyskin (also by McKinley) and the title story of The Bloody Chamber & Other Stories by Angela Carter (that one is a Bluebeard retelling).

10. Cool powers, dude (interesting magic systems) — Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie! I don't remember this as well as I should, but I loved it! I read it a few years ago. (Most of the books mentioned so far also fit the prompt! But I wanted to pick something else.)



Synopsis from GoodReads:
Saleem Sinai was born at midnight, the midnight of India's independence, and found himself mysteriously "handcuffed to history" by the coincidence. He is one of 1,001 children born at the midnight hour, each of them endowed with an extraordinary talent - and whose privilege and curse it is to be both master and victims of their times. Through Saleem's gifts - inner ear and wildly sensitive sense of smell - we are drawn into a fascinating family saga set against the vast, colorful background of the India of the 20th century.