Catching up on reading: Ysabeau Wilce
Flora's Dare by Ysabeau Wilce
Just finished the lavishly titled Flora’s Dare: How a Girl of Spirit Gambles All to Expand Her Vocabulary, Confront a Bouncing Boy Terror, and Try to Save Califa from a Shaky Doom (Despite Being Confined to Her Room), which is itself the sequel to the similarly sesquipedalian Flora Segunda: Being the Magickal Mishaps of a Girl of Spirit, Her Glass-Gazing Sidekick, Two Ominous Butlers (One Blue), a House with Eleven Thousand Rooms, and a Red Dog.
Picture (if you can) an alternate San Francisco named Califa, where magic is spoken in sigils called Gramatica, where there lives an adventurous fourteen year old girl named Flora, descended from a noble house (all the noble houses have what appear to be semi-Scandinavian names, despite the liberal use of Aztec and other Mexican verbiage).
Flora desperately wants to be a Ranger, like her paperback (sorry, “yellowback”) idol Nini Mo. She seems to be well on her way, as long as she doesn’t get killed what with the entanglements with the tentacles in the trendy club’s potty, the fact that her maybe-boyfriend has gone Goth with the Warlord’s daughter, her maybe-psycho father is forcing her to take lots of lessons over her school break, and oh, let’s not forget the city may crumble because of earthquakes and it’s possible that the precarious political situation of Califa may crumble, what with the anarchists and all.
If Harry Potter had been written by China Mieville, maybe it would read like this. It’s worth your time. Besides, the Official Web Site of Ysabeau Wilce gets across enough of the flavor that you should be able to decide that Califa (and Flora!) are worth visiting. After all, it’s not like you were going to read Twilight, right? You have better taste than that. Plus, the author’s name is Ysabeau. Come on, you can’t possibly resist.
Am also midway thru Elantris, and so far it deserves its acclaim…
7 Responses to “Catching up on reading: Ysabeau Wilce”
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Am also midway thru Elantris, and so far it deserves its acclaim…
Really? I read Mistborn and Well of Ascension, and I felt they were… good enough, but not superb. Good enough to read Hero of Ages, though I’m waiting for the paperback to show up at my local bookstore before I grab it. I reviewed the first book here, and didn’t write about the second one.
Haven’t heard of Wilce’s stuff; I’ll check that out. Might be enough to tide me over until Stirling’s Scourge of God appears in paperback at my bookstore. 😛
Thanks for the recommendation on those Flora books, they both look like something I’d love. I’ve added both of them to my Amazon wish list. Once I finish the other books I am reading….
Bah! I remember writing crazy tongue-twisting stories as a kid. My teachers would give me poor grades because my stories were convoluted and inaccessible…
Your stories challenged people to think, which competes with the teacher’s functions :9.
Don’t get him started.
Heck, don’t get me started. 😛
In elementary school, my parents were called in by the principal (that means my teachers complained to their boss!) because I was more engrossed in fiction than I was in playing with the other kids (i.e., socializing.)
In junior high, I wrote a “story” that received the highest marks ever in the history of that school (made possible by four “experts” who were unsure that their A grades were correct.) What was the story? How to say “Hello, World!” in BASIC…
In high school Honors English, I received Bs and Cs for my stories. They were criticized because I was “too much of a poet and not so much of a writer.”
Is it any wonder that I only read nonfiction now?
The problem with fiction is that everyone has their own interpretation and none of them are correct. I’m with William Forrester on this. 😉
(I tried to read Gordon Dickson’s “The Dragon, The Earl, and The Troll” last night. I finished the book several years ago. But this time, he lost me at “had had”.)
If you liked Elantris, you should like Mistborn and Well of Ascension. Mistborn in particular is a better read than Elantris, though I really like Elantris as well.
FWIW, Brandon Sanderson was picked by Robert Jordan’s editor/wife as the author to finish last book of the Wheel of Time.