Chyckfest

Thanks to hca for hosting a sleep-over party for grown-ups. We had high tea at the Edwardian Tea Room in Arlington. It's a wonderful place. Both the tea and the nibblies are delicious, and everything is so civilized and elegant without being stuffy or pretentious. hca, epilimnion, davidsmom1, jila, and I spent about two hours there enjoying tea and refinement. Then we went back to hca's place for the perfect accompaniment to high tea: 7 hours of Jane Austen in cinematic form. We watched the Emma Thompson/Ang Lee version of Sense and Sensibility. I didn't know Alan Rickman was in it - a most pleasant surprise. Then we settled in for the five hour BBC production of Pride and Prejudice, with a young Colin Firth as Darcy. I highly recommend it. Not only does it have Colin Firth, but Jennifer Ehle makes and absolutely perfect Elizabeth Bennett. And, best of all, the production is very thorough in its treatment of the book. Admittedly, it's been a rather long time since I've read it, but everything is there, nothing is oimitted, condensed, or glossed over. And it really is a very romantic story. But then again, anyone who know myself and my husband shouldn't be surprised that I like a story that features an intelligent, spirited heroine, and a hero who is brooding and a bit prickly but really good underneath it all.
In addition to the Jane Austen and tea, there was much good conversation and general female bonding.

Book Review

The Dragon of Despair, by Jane Lindskold
This book is the third in a series of fantasy novels. The books are connected, but the plots are self-contained (i.e., this is not one continuous story spread out over several books). Firekeeper, one of the two principal protagonists, is a feral child raised by wolves and recently reintroduced into human society. The other main character, Derian Carter, is Firekeeper's first and best friends in the human world. The plot is, at its root, fairly routine fantasy: a group of adventurous types must go on a mission into not-completely-friendly territory to prevent a terrible magical thing from happening. But I'm not going to describe the plot any farther than that here, because that's not what's interesting about these books and why I read past the first one.
The interesting thing about this book (and the previous two) is the mix of adventure and political intrigue. In a lot of ways, this book is kind of like a "beginner's" (referrring to the reader) political intrigue novel. Because of Firekeeper's background, she sort of acts as an interpreter for the reader. Since she was raised by pack animals, she actually has a surprisingly good grasp of social and political hierarchies and people's places within them. However, since she was not raised among humans, she also has an outsider's viewpoint and doesn't always understand the particulars of how human society and hierarchies work at first. This is in fact, the most clever aspect of the book.
Otherwise, The Dragon of Despair and its two predecessors (Through Wolf's Eyes and Wolf's Head, Wolf's Heart) are reasonably good, but not great. The plots and characters, while not completely hackneyed, are also not wildly original. If you've read a decent amount of fantasy, this will all be familiar ground. The writing itself is also good not great - it does its job well, but that's it. These books are reasonably good, diverting reads - nothing more, nothing less.