Unfurling

[dolorosa_12]

This week has been hard, and I feel like I'm only just slowly coming back to myself. And then the sun came out, and it was warm, and bright, and the first of my tomato fruit are starting to come through, and I drank iced coffee in the garden, and went walking with Matthias out to Grantchester in the cool of the morning, and chatted to my dad about lambs he and my stepmother have currently living indoors in their house, and basically felt as if I were one of my plants, unfurling in the sun.

And above all things, I just sank into a book and didn't emerge until I'd read the whole thing. I didn't realise how much I wanted to lose myself in really satisfying fiction until it had happened, and I'm so glad I did. The book in question is the third in S.A. Chakraborty's Daevabad trilogy, Empire of Gold, and it was just such a perfect conclusion to a really enjoyable series (and I don't just say that because the love triangle resolved in the way that I wanted).

I wrote a longer review over on my reviews blog, and as always am very happy to discuss the book either here or at the review post.

And I'm not done with this series. I immediately went over to Ao3, but it's slim pickings there, particularly for the characters and pairing I want to read about. However, S.A. Chakraborty, in an act of great generosity, has uploaded nearly 200 pages of missing scenes from the trilogy over at her website, so I'm now reading my way through those. If I can't get what I want from fan-authored fanfic, at least I can read fanfic written by the series' original author!

Comments

[ambyr]

Ooh, thank you for the extra scenes tip!

Also: your card made it here! Thank you!

[dolorosa_12]

The extra scenes are really great — we get some from the perspective of characters beyond the regular three point-of-view characters, which I've been enjoying immensely.

I'm glad the card arrived. International mail is a bit hit and miss at the moment, so I'm always relieved to hear that things have reached their destinations!

[ambyr]

International mail is a bit hit and miss at the moment, so I'm always relieved to hear that things have reached their destinations!

Oh, yes, it is--coincidentally your card arrived on the same day as a letter from a friend in New Zealand, which was sent on May 19. So that took a bit! But I am glad for evidence of the continued existence of multiple other continents. Sometimes I start to wonder a bit.

[trepkos]

Lambs! So cute! How can anyone eat them?

[dolorosa_12]

They are really cute, aren't they? I have rather pointedly avoided asking my dad what happens to them later. My father, stepmother and their daughters live in a rural area of Australia, and although they are not farmers themselves, they evidently have a lot of farmers for friends and neighbours. One such neighbour has a number of sheep, and each year at least some of those sheep give birth to multiple babies. Sheep apparently cannot handle looking after and feeding more than one lamb at a time, and the mothers abandon the other lambs. The farmers on this farm then apparently distribute the abandoned lambs among their friends and neighbours to raise indoors until they're old enough to survive on their own. Hence my father and stepmother having four lambs in nappies living in their house.

[arthur_of_the_britons]

I have rather pointedly avoided asking my dad what happens to them later.

Probably wise ... SO CUTE!

[trepkos]

I am also "Arthur of the Britons" BTW!

[dolorosa_12]

Ah, the perils of having multiple accounts!

[merit]

It feels so long since a fantasy book series had a proper fandom with hundreds upon hundreds of fics. I have yet to finish the trilogy, but it'll be interesting to see how it all develops in the proposed live action!

[dolorosa_12]

The only ones I can think of are Leigh Bardugo's Grishaverse books, and Maggie Stiefvater's Raven Cycle series. Neither of those are getting huge amounts of fic at the moment, but in their heyday those fandoms were very active. Obviously you always get a trickle of fic for Yuletide and other multifandom exchanges/fests, but it's never written at the volume you see for megafandoms in film, TV shows and so on.

I'm really looking forward to the live action, because the storytelling is conventional enough that it's not going to get butchered in the translation to screen, and there's great potential for gorgeous sets and costuming — and an entirely non-white cast.