Anthology: Lace and Blade
This is a fantasy anthology that combines swords and sorcery with things like swashbuckling and highwaymen. It is, obviously, something I was meant to have.
My favorite stories-Madeleine Robins’s “Virtue and the Archangel” and Sherwood Smith’s “The Rule of Engagement”-are the first and last stories respectively. Robins’s story is very reminiscent of her Miss Tolerance books, in which a somewhat silly Lady loses a valuable jewel during a tryst, and asks a woman she went to school with to find it for her, while Smith’s is a take on the “abducted bride” trope that ends in a far from conventional way. I’m also exceptionally fond of Mary Rosenblum’s “Night Wind,”where a young man with a cursed family adds a highwayman to his troubles, and “Lace-Maker, Blade-Taker, Grave-Breaker, Priest,” in which two men who want to kill each other are shipwrecked on an island, but can’t get to the killing thanks to the other survivors. It’s notable, though, that they contain the same twist.
I liked most of the rest of the stories, save for Diana L. Paxson (European man finds himself in the self-actualization sense in ever-so-exotic Peru!), Catherine Asaro (thought it was basically as rather silly romance), and Chaz Bentley’s (relied on my already being attached to the characters from the books, and already understanding their relationship) stories.
I’m thinking I should probably check out more of Norilana’s anthologies.
My favorite stories-Madeleine Robins’s “Virtue and the Archangel” and Sherwood Smith’s “The Rule of Engagement”-are the first and last stories respectively. Robins’s story is very reminiscent of her Miss Tolerance books, in which a somewhat silly Lady loses a valuable jewel during a tryst, and asks a woman she went to school with to find it for her, while Smith’s is a take on the “abducted bride” trope that ends in a far from conventional way. I’m also exceptionally fond of Mary Rosenblum’s “Night Wind,”where a young man with a cursed family adds a highwayman to his troubles, and “Lace-Maker, Blade-Taker, Grave-Breaker, Priest,” in which two men who want to kill each other are shipwrecked on an island, but can’t get to the killing thanks to the other survivors. It’s notable, though, that they contain the same twist.
I liked most of the rest of the stories, save for Diana L. Paxson (European man finds himself in the self-actualization sense in ever-so-exotic Peru!), Catherine Asaro (thought it was basically as rather silly romance), and Chaz Bentley’s (relied on my already being attached to the characters from the books, and already understanding their relationship) stories.
I’m thinking I should probably check out more of Norilana’s anthologies.