coffeeandink's excellent post about it told me a sad thing, that an author I enjoyed who helped shape some of my work passed away May 6. Patricia A. McKillip wrote with a lush, often dreamy style that managed to avoid turning purple and gave me some amazing visuals. I loved a lot of her books but reread The Sorceress and the Cygnet and Fool's Run the most ( Read more... )

Phelan is looking to get out of the bardic school he's only in because his father wanted him there, his often drunk father is looking for something no one knows, and Princess Beatrice is looking into the buried mysteries of the past. When a strange bard with a mysterious power shows up and upsets everything, he brings danger, old secrets, old ( Read more... )

There's not much of a feeling of peril or huge things at stake and the final battle is something of an anticlimax in Patricia A. McKillip's The Bell at Sealey Head, but the book was a pleasant, atmospheric read in often poetic language populated by characters I was interested in. Like most of her books, The Bell at Sealey Head uses magic, finding ( Read more... )

Somebody suggested LibraryThing to me to keep track of my books. I hit the 200-book limit for free accounts almost immediately. I'm counting books I vaguely remember but don't own anymore, so my count may be in the thousands. I'm not paying $10 annually to have a full list of my books! Unless somebody searched and entered my books for me, which... ( Read more... )

People who follow this journal know that I'm a fan of Patricia A. McKillip's novels. Hey, my pseud of seven years and my default user icon of nearly five years come from a Patricia A. McKillip novel. Even the ones I don't like so much I find at least something interesting and thought-provoking in. Thus, I figured that I would enjoy her short ( Read more... )

I finished Patricia A. McKillip's Od Magic pretty quickly, in two sittings, since she retains her gift for creating interesting characters and lush word pictures. I also appreciate her taste for depicting strange magic. I found the wrap-up to be too quick and easy, though. Interesting to have a writer coming out against words in this novel, since ( Read more... )

Yesterday I finished one of the few older Patricia A. McKillip novels I haven't read, The Changeling Sea, and enjoyed it very much. It's short, but I appreciate that she told her story and finished it instead of padding. It features her usual poetic descriptions and characters that seem to be living in a bizarre fairy tale. Yet these are fairy ( Read more... )

A while back I asked folks to tell me what they thought of this icon


( Read more... )

These are the books I've kept through the years, because I love them entirely, or I love pieces, or I'm a nostalgic fool. Some of these series I don’t have as the complete series because the other books weren’t worth keeping, in my opinion.

( My bookshelf )

And I just finished Patricia A. McKillip's In the Forests of Serre in a few hours in the emergency room. It caught me faster than Alphabet of Thorn, since I found the characters more immediately intriguing ( Read more... )