I had to look up T. Kingfisher’s ”Summer in Orcus” after reading melanier’s five-star review. It seemed to have all the elements to a great fairy tale: magical beings, adventure, overcoming your fears. Just the kind of book you read to escape for a while, just the kind of book that fills your heart with wonder. Summer is an 11-year old girl who lives with her overprotective, anxiety-ridden mother. She’s hardly allowed to leave the house for fear of bad things happening to her, let […]
Summer, Baba Yaga, and a were-house
I love portal fantasies. I’ve loved them for as long as I can remember, from Narnia to Oz to Wonderland to Amber and even for a brief moment Xanth, I have loved stories of someone from this mundane world transported to a world full of magic and wonder. Summer in Orcus is an offering in this category from T. Kingfisher, aka Ursula Vernon, and it is marvelous. The best I can describe it is a middlegrade fantasy for adults, and much like Catherynne Valente’s The […]
My other theme this month is Fairy Tales
Toad Words and Other Stories is a collection of fairy tale retellings by T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon) most of which were published previously on her blog, though there is at least one new story. I’ve read a couple of the stories when they were on her blog, but there were a number that were new to me. I really enjoy Kingfisher’s approach to fairy tales, where magic may exist but that’s no reason to throw logic out the window. For the most part this book […]
Anna Should Be So Lucky
The Raven and the Reindeer is Ursual Vernon’s (under her ‘grown-up book author’ pen-name of T. Kingfisher) retelling of The Snow Queen. It’s fantastic, bloody, and dark without loosing the magic that is fairy tales. Vernon has a kind of no-nonsense, logic based method to her storytelling that appeals strongly to me. She also manages to incorporate animals in a way that makes perfect sense for those animal types, her raven feels very raven-y and her reindeer are very reindeer-y, yet still makes them unique […]
A Practical Heroine in a Fairy Tale Wedding
Ursula Vernon writes extremely practical heroines, they simply don’t have time for nonsense when there is danger around. It makes for some extremely humorous situations, and very good story telling. Here, under the pen name T. Kingfisher, she creates a fairytale and gives us the very practical miller’s daughter Rhea as our protagonist. Rhea, is as I said a miller’s daughter, so when a lord asks for her hand in marriage there is very little she or her family can do to deny him. It […]
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