I’ve been working on revisions for my next fairy tale novel (and NaNo novel of 2014) and so thought I’d share another scene with all of you… This is very early in the book, just after a strange and decidedly unfriendly young woman has crashed into Forrest’s life. His mother insists they should be understanding and friendly, but he has doubts. This scene also explores one of the major magic systems of the book. Enjoy!
*********
Forrest went back to the kitchen. He could see Karina through the doorway before he entered the room, and he found himself stopping on the threshold to look at her. Alone in the room, she had let her shoulders slump. She clutched the clasp of her cloak with one hand and played with her spoon with the other, tracing patterns in the bottom of her emptied bowl of porridge. She was staring into the bowl, expression…sad? Forlorn? Some emotion he hadn’t seen on her face previously.
All right. Maybe she was lost and scared. Maybe.
He deliberately stepped audibly on the wooden floor as he came into the room. In an eyeblink her shoulders were straight again and her face had wiped smooth of any expression at all except faint disinterest.
“There’s more porridge in the pot if you want it,” he said, even though he was pretty sure that hadn’t been why she was staring into the empty bowl.
Her gaze flicked to the pot hanging over the fire. “I can see that.”
Maybe lost and scared, but still unfriendly. “Right,” he said, pulling out a chair at the opposite side of the table with possibly more force than was necessary. He sat down and unrolled the half-made scarf, concentrating his attention on untangling the loose end of the yarn and lining up the last row of stitches on the needle.
“So you don’t just tie bows,” Karina drawled, “you also knit?” Continue reading “Fiction Friday: Magical Knitting and General Hostilities”
I picked out The Door in the Wall by Marguerite de Angeli from the list of Newbery Medal winners because I wasn’t sure if I had read it before or not. It turns out the answer is no, as all I could remember of the book I thought it might be was that it involved canal boats—which don’t appear here at all. But now I have another one to check off my list!
I want to start this review by saying how much I respect Scott Westerfeld as an author, due to his Uglies quartet. That respect is why I kept reading his Afterworlds. I still respect him…but Afterworlds was very disappointing.
One of my reading goals for the year is to read more books involving parallel universes. I don’t mean books set entirely in an alternate Earth, but ones that actually deal in some way with multiple universes, or multiple paths someone’s life could take. I kicked off with one that explored exactly that second option: Pivot Point by Kasie West.
Tales of the Marvelous 