"Liberté", Gita Trelease

I have very mixed feelings about this book. The premise in itself intrigued me (a parallel-universe French Revolution where magic is real and it is magicians being blamed for crop failures and strung up from lamp-posts), and the idea of a magic system based on *sorrow* is very original; it both leads to magic being associated with suffering for the user, thus making its use less inviting, and, humans being what they are, gives rise to the temptation to develop techniques for mining the suffering of other people to fuel your own power, thus giving magicians in general a bad name.( Read more... )

My main gripe with it is that the book turned out to be very clearly flavoured as a 'Young Adult' novel. If you want to write Strong Independent Female Leads, the French Revolution is a pretty good place to do it, and I've read a couple of seriously good historical novels by women writers that do just that: Hilary Mantel's "A Place of Greater Safety" and Madge Pierce's "City of Darkness, City of Light". But this book simply doesn't convince on that level. ( Read more... )

Camera card

I wiped the new SD card on my camera for the first time today (it took a worryingly long time for the camera to complete the process of deleting 700-odd pictures -- I should probably have just gone for the 'reformat' option!) So a 512Mb card lasts me for eight months' worth of photography -- I did delete a few unusable out-of-focus photos along the way but left all my other multiple attempts untouched.

---

The Gypsophila elegans is in full flower.

So is one rather tatty rudbeckia -- the others have yet to open fully, though they have been on the brink for a week or more. The surviving pink poppies (thinned down to only half a dozen or so in a still inadequate pot) are in bloom also -- four months from sowing, although the self-sown ones that took root in other pots are far larger and flowered much earlier! Ironically the pink poppy pot has been rather crowded out by a self-sown mesembryanthemum, which I allowed to stay and which is now far more vigorous than any of the poppies...