Which part of 'completely terrified' did you translate as 'show us your knives'?

[dolorosa_12]

So! I got a copy of The Demon's Covenant yesterday. Stupid Waterstones took a week to get it in, even though it was published on 27th May. I had to avoid all the fantastic release-day celebrations at marmalade_fish, including the live chat with sarahtales and all the spoilerific posts, which made me quite sad. But! Now I have a copy, and I've read it (twice, actually), and although I'm not at the stage of a coherent, Wordpress-worthy review, I'd like to flail about a little bit.

Spoilers abound, of course.


1. Alan is an insane and terrifying puppet master. I don't know why I didn't assume differently. All those references to chess should've made me suspicious, even if Nick's comment that 'Since I can't lie, Alan told me not to tell secrets' went right over my head.

2. sarahtales is queen of the plot twist. I didn't get the twist in Lexicon (although I had worked out that Nick was Black Arthur's son, which he isn't, but by some definitions is), and I didn't see the twist coming in Covenant either. I should pay more attention to the books' titles. The whole 'Nick has trouble with language and this book is called The Demon's Lexicon, hey, maybe Nick is the demon' thing went over my head, and with Covenant I missed the whole 'Alan is an insane chessmaster/pokerfaced liar/machiavellian schemer who probably could make unbreakable pacts with demons, y/y?' thing too.

3. You can tell sarahtales used to be a fic-writer. She's so hyper-aware of the shipping potentials for every single pairing, and she manages to ship-tease with just about all of them. I saw Alan/Mae, Seb/Jamie, Gerald/Jamie, Sin/Mae, Nick/Sin, Nick/Mae, Nick/Liannan, Nick/Jamie, and possibly others.

4. That being said, YAY FOR THE NICK/MAE!!!!! This is one of the few things where I rabidly ship one pairing (it ties in with the whole 'reducing me to a 13-year-old fangirl' thing) and I was so happy that the series seems to be agreeing with me in terms of shipping preferences. Although sarahtales is a devious person and likes to ship-tease, so maybe there'll be no Nick/Mae in book 3.

5. Anyone else notice that Jamie sounds a lot like sarahtales? At least the way she writes on her blog, that is. I don't think Jamie's her author-avatar or anything, I just think he has similar speech patterns, either consciously or unconsciously.

6. All the characters, however, seem to have attended the Joss Whedon Academy For Defensively Sarcastic Use of Language. I approve.


I might read it a third time now...

Comments

[dolorosa-12.livejournal.com]

Oh dear. I didn't mean to inadvertently start any drama...

I adored Covenant, so...thank you for writing it! I really liked seeing things from Mae's perspective. It gives you such a different opinion of things you've seen from Nick's in Lexicon - in particular how devious and not particularly nice Alan can be. There was an interesting discussion at some point in the book about the differences between 'good' and 'nice'. In Lexicon, you see (for most of the book), Alan as a nice, but not necessarily good person, and then in Covenant things are reversed. At least that was my impression...

This post is incredibly flailly and shrieky, but I am going to post something approaching a serious review at some point. Maybe after I've read Covenant for the fourth time...

[sarahtales.livejournal.com]

You haven't! Though I did feel I had to stand up for my beloved original characters for a moment, I also wanted to say thanks and I am deeply pleased you enjoyed, especially as changing POVs is a weird thing for a writer to do and a tricky thing for some readers to accept.

[dolorosa-12.livejournal.com]

changing POVs is a weird thing for a writer to do and a tricky thing for some readers to accept.

Only if you don't give the readers a reason to like the new POV. Since I liked Mae already in Lexicon, I wasn't going to complain if Covenant was told from her POV.