Quote:
Originally Posted by Stitchawl
There are little bitty bugs that live their entire lives on our eyelashes. So small that they can move right under the skin where the lash emerges and go back inside again. And we never even know they are there! Everyone has 'em, and they do absolutely no harm at all.
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For people who really do wish to know more in this vein, I highly recommend biology professor
Roger M. Knutson's
Furtive Fauna: A Field Guide to the Creatures Who Live On You, which has apparently made it to an
e-book edition (I have it in paperback, along with Knutson's
guide on identifying common North American animals by the shapes they leave as roadkill, which is also excellent).
As for me, I've been mostly reading books in order to find out if I want to get more books while they were still on sale.
Tia Nevitt's
The Sevenfold Spell was part of her Accidental Enchantments series of fairy tale retellings out from Carina Press, and was a freebie a couple of times over the past few years, this one in particular based on the classic Sleeping Beauty tale.
This turned out to be considerably less romantic than I would have thought, and contained a fairly nifty plot underpinning addressing what would actually have happened if all the spindles (in this case, spinning wheels) in the kingdom were destroyed to protect the cursèd princess. As it turns out: a vast increase in the price of cloth which would need to be made using expensive imported thread, as well as substantial unemployment for a large number of womens' livelihoods, who would then have to consider turning to such things as sex-for-barter, in our heroine's case, at least until she can foment an alternate underground manufacturing plan.
It's nice to know that even in fairy tale kingdoms, the Marxist lesson about the importance of controlling the means of production leaks through into the multiverse.
Anyway, this contained some very funny moments and nicely-portrayed character growth of the non-traditional entrepreneurial heroine, and went in a mildly unexpected direction for me, as the usual cliché things I was expecting to happen (meets a handsome stranger who turns out to be true love, heroine immediately becomes a success and wins the admiration of all, etc.) didn't, and the usual tropes of fairy tales and romances were kind of turned over in a tongue-in-cheek way that fit well with the plot (though there was a happily ever after, eventually).
Recommended, if you happen to like humourous convention-defying fairy tale retellings which contain mildly erotic sex romps (non-explicit, but multiple partners until True Love is revealed) and an unexpected look at the socioeconomic reality of centring your public policy around fairy-laid curses (no seriously, they couldn't have just locked the single affected princess up in a tower and strip-searched with extreme prejudice any potential spindle-smuggling curse-fulfillers instead of wrecking a big chunk of their kingdom-wide peasant manufacturing base?!
)
As a direct result of reading this freebie, I went on to purchase the 2nd in series,
The Magic Mirror and the Seventh Dwarf, which was on sale as one of Carina Press' New Releases for $2.69 deals available on their website and price-matched elsewhere.
This turned out to be a far romantic rendition of the Snow White tale, with the twist of the dwarf being female, which was an interesting change.
Mild recommend. This was considerably more conventionally-told and thus had somewhat less appeal for me personally, though I still enjoyed reading it for the interesting look at the difficulties of "little people" finding suitable mates in an unhelpful narrative environment with certain deeply-ingrained physical expectations, and people who want more romantic focus might like it even more than the 1st. (It also contains less portrayed sex, for those who also prefer that.)
Myself, I just wanted to see more Why It's Not A Good Idea To Let Your GDP Be Dependent On Evil Fairy Christening Pronouncements™. (Really, you can always make more princesses fairly easily. Retooling your entire domestic cloth industry, not so much.)