More Sutcliff ebooks!
sineala pointed out that Blood and Sand is currently free on US Amazon (not...what I would have chosen as a Sutcliff teaser, but okay, it's also not the Sutcliff I would have chosen to adapt into Takarazuka Revue, either). The review up has an interesting side comment that I'm curious about:
Sutcliff freely acknowledges Scottish historian and educationist Michael Starforth as having given her the story of Thomas Keith. Herein, I discovered, lies the answer to the curiously dissonant feel of "Blood and Sand". Starforth didn't just give her an inspiration - he actually wrote this story first. Starforth's specialty was Middle Eastern affairs and he had spent a good deal of time working on a novel based on Thomas Keith's extraordinary adventures called "A Broadsword for Islam", but couldn't find a publisher for it. He gave the draft to Sutcliff who adapted it and subsequently published it, with Starforth's blessing, under her own name as "Blood and Sand". This is a graft that hasn't quite taken, a tale of two very different styles in uneasy co-existence - imagine an austerely masculine living room decorated with a profusion of colourful silken curtains and embroidered cushions and you'll get the idea.
Which sounds about right to me, tbh, as do the reviewer's comments about the female characters. It's still an interesting book, though!
Anyway, there are also a bunch of other Sutcliff ebooks available that weren't previously--it looks like probably the same editions that went up on Amazon UK several months ago, although not all the same books (still no The Shining Company for US buyers, grrr). Past experience suggests it's wise to grab ebooks while you can...
Sutcliff freely acknowledges Scottish historian and educationist Michael Starforth as having given her the story of Thomas Keith. Herein, I discovered, lies the answer to the curiously dissonant feel of "Blood and Sand". Starforth didn't just give her an inspiration - he actually wrote this story first. Starforth's specialty was Middle Eastern affairs and he had spent a good deal of time working on a novel based on Thomas Keith's extraordinary adventures called "A Broadsword for Islam", but couldn't find a publisher for it. He gave the draft to Sutcliff who adapted it and subsequently published it, with Starforth's blessing, under her own name as "Blood and Sand". This is a graft that hasn't quite taken, a tale of two very different styles in uneasy co-existence - imagine an austerely masculine living room decorated with a profusion of colourful silken curtains and embroidered cushions and you'll get the idea.
Which sounds about right to me, tbh, as do the reviewer's comments about the female characters. It's still an interesting book, though!
Anyway, there are also a bunch of other Sutcliff ebooks available that weren't previously--it looks like probably the same editions that went up on Amazon UK several months ago, although not all the same books (still no The Shining Company for US buyers, grrr). Past experience suggests it's wise to grab ebooks while you can...