Folklore and rock and roll

[dolorosa_12]

Other than Eurovision, this weekend has been very much about reading — both original fiction, and fanfic. I've finished three books:

The Heroines (Laura Shepperson), a retelling of the Phaedra story which I would say does a reasonably good job, and doesn't fall into the trap of completely softening the edges of a story about women's power and powerlessness, which sometimes happens in female-character-centric retellings of Greek myths

The Cloisters (Katy Hays), a dark academia story taking place in the eponymous Cloisters gallery in New York, interweaving tarot iconography, toxic relationships, and issues of money and class, and proving my theory that every current dark academia book seems to have been influenced by either Possession or The Secret History — in this case the latter. The book suffers from the fact that it thinks it's being incredibly clever and subtle, but it's not really either of these things (for example there's a death at the heart of it, and the murderer is immediately obvious to the reader, but it takes the protagonist nearly the whole book to figure it out)

The Stolen Heir (Holly Black), the latest in Black's YA books set in fairyland. As with all her fairy books, bargaining, trickery, and the slipperiness of words play a huge role, and her two central characters are a bantering pair of antagonists-to-reluctant allies-to-lovers. You know what you're getting into with a Holly Black book, and if it's something you like, you'll like this one

once_upon_fic opened this weekend, and it's been an absolutely fantastic exchange so far. I haven't read through the whole collection yet, but my own fic (authors are still unrevealed) has been really well received, and the gift I got has utterly blown me away. I'm always really impressed when authors go well beyond the minimum wordcount requirement (that's not to say that I haven't received great fic in the past that was close to the minimum wordcount), and this one is 15,000 words in an exchange where the requirement is only 1000. And what an incredible story is packed into those 15,000 words — the author managed to incorporate a huge number of my requests, and give me a fic that really sees what I see in the original fairytale while also drawing out several things that caused me to see the fairytale in new ways. I'll share it again as part of a recs post once authors are revealed, but for now, I'll post it below:

Deals In The Dark (15412 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Rumpelstilzchen | Rumpelstiltskin (Fairy Tale)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Müllers Tochter | Miller's Daughter/Rumpelstilzchen | Rumpelstiltskin
Additional Tags: Once Upon a Fic Exchange 2023, Light Angst, Motherhood, Arranged Marriage, the romance stuff is really downplayed
Summary:

A bargain was made for her life. Now she has no choice but to arrange her own escape.

I hope you're all having lovely weekends!