Touch the wooden gate in the wall you never saw before.
Say “please” before you open the latch,
go through,
walk down the path.
(from “Instructions” ~Neil Gaiman)
Once Upon a Time (II) is about journeys…yours… mine…ours. I frequently find myself aware of the serendipitous occurrences, the coincidental connections, that unveil themselves when the seasons synch up with my reading. My awareness is heightened when we are traveling on these seasonal reading journeys together.
–published 1996
–318 pages, Tom Doherty Associates
–1997 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Novel of the Year
–5/5 stars
Maggie Black has always been a fan of Pulitzer Prize winning poet Davis Cooper. Her one great desire is to write a biography of the man whose work has been her inspiration and although they carry on a friendship through correspondence, Cooper never allows Black to visit him in his Tucson desert home nor gives permission for a biography. Thus when he dies a mysterious death–an apparent drowning in a dry riverbed–and leaves her his house, property, and all the house contains, she is both confused and intrigued. A trip to Tucson introduces Maggie to the intimate group of people whose orbit revolved around Cooper and her investigation into the work he left behind and the paintings of his lover Anna Naverra opens up Maggie to a connection with a world she never knew existed.
“Win as if you were used to it, lose as if you enjoyed it for a change.”
~Ralph Waldo Emerson
And so we begin. Our first giveaway for Once Upon a Time II required you to do something very simple that very well could produce something substantial and enduring: you signed up for a reading challenge. The deadline has passed (but only for this contest, I encourage those of you who haven’t to join us in the challenge) and the ultra-scientific prize drawing machine (i.e. slips of paper with numbers on them in a bowl) has worked its magic. We have a winner.
–published 2007
–256 pages, Night Shade Books
–4.5/5 stars
“The Sword-Edged Blonde has all the finesse and depth of a great hard-boiled mystery, but takes place in a fully realized heroic fantasy setting. From start to finish, it’s a treat for readers of either genre, and easily one of the better books I’ve had the pleasure of reading this year. Don’t miss this one!” ~Charles de Lint
With a quote like that from one of the world’s premiere fantasists, the book has to be good, right? In this case ‘right’ is an understatement. Mr. de Lint’s concise review is spot on and I could readily step away now and just tell you to go out and buy this book. But that would just be too easy.
Aren’t you so thankful that so many of the wonderful things in life do not have to be experienced just once? And at the same time we are able to experience once-in-a-lifetime moments….moments that may be quite similar to those experienced before, but not exactly the same.
