Miss Ellicott's School for the Magically Minded by Sage Blackwood

Miss Ellicott’s School for the Magically Minded is alright, I guess. It’s not exactly bad and not exactly good. It has a certain atmosphere that I enjoyed, but the story just wasn’t awesome.

Miss Ellicott’s is told from the point of view of a 13 year old who basically knows nothing about the society she lives in or anything about the history of the place. It shows. It’s in-built into the plot that this is eventually reversed, through stumbling through the bureaucracy and onto a hidden/lost library. Honestly, Chantel does a lot of stumbling around and not a lot of reasoning, which is what bugged me, I think. She also doesn’t have much of an inner voice, either, so I think it was hard to get into her as a character.

I liked the whole concept of Lightning. A snake familiar who can turn into a dragon if you let it grow with you so you end up influencing each other, essentially. I did find it weird that there weren’t any other familiars present or mentioned… probably another thing that bothered me. This magic system is just very airy and full of “wha huh?” The magic system is not the point but also not explained very well at all.

Miss Ellicott’s was kinda cute and engaging enough for me to get through it. I might have enjoyed it when I was younger, but… yeah. It’s very solidly in the “okay” column.

Blood Bound by Patricia Briggs

A Spoiler Free Reread Review

Blood Bound was pretty good. I’m not nearly as high on it as I was on first read, but it’s still really good. I had a hard time putting it down at points. I feel like the Mercy Thompson world is very lived-in. It feels very real. Lots of moving pieces that don’t just stop moving because Mercy isn’t “on screen.”

I’m not super into this love quadrangle Mercy seems to have found herself in, through no real fault of her own. I don’t think we needed to add Stefan to the mix, having Samuel around already was enough. That said, Mercy isn’t as confused or even questioning like most female protagonists in these things, so that’s a welcome change.

Here we get a distinction between what Mercy is and the Skinwalkers of Native folklore/religion. I’m glad there is a clear distinction because Mercy is definitely not a Skinwalker. To that point, I feel like Mercy needs to sit down with Stefan and make him tell her what he knows about her abilities. He keeps saying things to her about her abilities that she doesn’t even know.

I really appreciate that Mercy’s fairly practical. Vampire Sorcerer who would definitely kill me? No thanks, think I’ll stay home and let other people deal with it. Well, until she basically get baited into going after Littleton via Marsilia. I’m glad it took Mercy a little while to figure out her ghost thing, since she’s so not used to actually using it actively. I’m even glad it took her a while to figure out the mystery of where Littleton was and all that. She’s a mechanic, not a detective and it shows in a good way.

I thinking bringing up the issue of young, untrained, attacked werewolves, especially female ones, was an interesting addition to the book and lore. Blood Bound has a lot of trauma in it. Mercy’s trauma with the sorcerer, Samuel’s trauma with his girlfriend in Texas and the car crash that made him remember it… I also think Mercy was the best person Tom Black could have come to about his daughter. I feel like she was most likely to tell it how it actually is, rather than lying or upselling anything. That he was more integral to the plot was a little bit of a surprise, but done pretty well.

I like that we get a bit more about the Fae. Mainly about how they’re not actually as powerful as Mercy thinks but also that they’re a lot closer to extinction than anyone would have guessed.

So, I’ve read a lot of vampire books over the years and in every universe, vampires are different. Even our own mythological vampires are very different depending on which you’re looking at. I find Mercy’s mantra of “Vampires are evil” a little bit hilarious because of this. Overall, the reason vampires are “evil” is because they’re pretty much just people with a few extras tacked on. It’s not usually the bloodlust that makes vampires “evil,” it’s the people-y-ness. People are capable of a lot of bad and when you essentially take away the governance that keeps us in check, we get worse. That’s vampires. Vampires are “evil” because people are “evil.” On a slightly separate note: these are the slowest reproducing vampires ever. I’m glad we basically got an info dump from Stefan’s menagerie. Good to have as much info about the people we’re dealing with as possible.

I really, really appreciate that killing vampires doesn’t come super naturally to Mercy. I feel like that initial period of killing vamps gets completely skipped over in most, if not all, cases of vampire hunters. Either that, or the hunters are already super cool with just taking out vamps left and right. Not so with Mercy, and I’m glad of it.

I don’t really have a conclusion to this thing. Blood Bound was a good sequel and I’m on to the next one.

Favorite Lines

"Never thank a fae or you'll be washing his socks and paying his rent before you can say effluvia ten times." - Uncle Mike

"Look. The wooden stake thing works, but it's better if it's oak, ash, or yew. And if you kill them that way, you have to cut off their heads or burn the body to make sure they stay dead. Remember, a dead vampire is ashes. If there's body, it'll come back -- and it'll come back angry with you. Cutting off their heads is pretty good, but difficult. They're not likely to stand around and wait for the chainsaw. Sunlight's good, too. But the stake and sunlight, they're like kicking a guy in the balls, you know?" - Rachel

"Dracula, he isn't, but where there's werewolves, there certainly ought to be vampires." - Gabriel Sandoval

The Vampire Post

I was making a paragraph-long note for Blood Bound by Patricia Briggs while I was reading today (7-27-23) about vampires. The note kind of got stuck in my head and so this post was born. This is part rant, part character study, part blather, part me gushing. There will probably be spoilers for a lot of things... I'll go ahead and list them before the next paragraph after I actually finish writing this thing.

Spoilers For: Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, Supernatural, The Vampire Diaries (TV Show)

I've read a lot of books that are about or include vampires. My favorite media properties also include vampires. Basically, if there are vampires, I'm at least going to check it out. Vampires are my favorite mythical creature outside of unicorns, which I collect. Vampires are just so darn interesting and come in all sorts of flavors. Every book series or media property has their own take and possibly even multiple takes on vampires. Everything from monstrous, barely human revenants to the ones you wouldn't even know were vampires at all if you weren't told and everything in between. And yes, even the sparkly ones count.

What really sent me down this rabbit hole this time was that Mercy Thompson, the main character of Blood Bound and where the series gets its name, keeps saying that vampires are evil. Over and over again. My note for that review was basically that vampires are evil because they're humans with a bit extra. No matter what form they're found in, vampires always start as humans... well... Bunnicula is a rabbit, but I haven't touched those books in so long I'm not even sure what was going on there. Anyway, humans, as we all know and deal with every day, are the absolute worst. It follows, then, that vampires would be even worse than that due to the fact they're basically us without society holding them back. They have powers and live outside human society and without human rules, a good chunk of them don't even have a soul.

My take on vampires is probably really unique among vampire fans, or at least ones I've come across on the internet. I've got this weird thing where I can compartmentalize according to what I'm consuming. That means my brain-space can have room for both Selene from Underworld and Edward from Twilight and they're not constantly locked in a death-match where Edward won't ever win... probably. I frankly think the mind-reading bit would give Edward an edge, but that's a discussion I'm not seriously having so... yeah. Basically, the multi-verse has room for all the different iterations of vampires and Edward really needs to watch some Buffy, The Vampire Diaries, and Supernatural in order to properly understand that he does have a soul.

Souls are actually an interesting component of vampire lore... and a fairly recent one, from what I can tell. The vampires of Buffy don't have souls unless they're cursed or go get them back. The demon that "infects" the vampires basically lets the meat-suit's soul go and takes up residence. The Vampire Diaries (TV show, I couldn't stand the books enough to get past a chapter or two) has vampires "turning off their humanity" which is basically letting the "soul" or conscience take a nap while the baser instincts take over. Supernatural... vampires kind of have souls, but they go to Purgatory instead of Heaven when the vampire is killed. There are more instances of humans not having souls than there is even discussion of vampires souls in Supernatural. Then there's The Hollows series by Kim Harrison where vampires are alive until they die and upon death lose their souls. That's just the four I can think of off the top of my head. Basically the lack of soul gives the vampire free reign to be as terrible as their little hearts desire without feeling any guilt over their actions... or much of anything, really, if Supernatural and The Hollows are to be believed. Again, this all comes back to humans without morals.

If the vampires do have souls -- which I'm going to assume most other iterations do -- they often have some form of society that's just outside our own. The Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter novels by Laurel K. Hamilton have a ruling class of vampires based on the amount of magical power they can wield over those weaker than them. Not just a ruling class, either, but just stronger and weaker vampires in a hierarchy inside of all that. The vampires of the Mercy Thompson series have a "seethe" to answer to, which also runs on who has more power... I'm pretty sure anyway. The Mercy series mostly deals with werewolves and it's been a while since I've read the entire series. Heck, even The Twilight Saga has the Volturi as their "vampire police." This sort of thing basically takes money (though the ruling vamps are often rich as well) and replaces it with magical power of some kind. Usually, if you have more power, your ego is also through the roof, whether you're human or vampire, it seems, and that leads to all sorts of fun (if terrifying) shenanigans within the power structures. The more power you have, often the more unhinged you become, even if you didn't start out that way and especially if you don't have a plucky human or two keeping you on the sane side... and most don't.

In addition to having societies of their own, vampires will also come in different flavors either from series to series or within a series. Got your bog-standard faster, stronger, compel you with their eyes like a snake vampires. Got your not-even-human anymore vampires, often called revenants and usually bad news for anyone if they're loose. Got your able-to-rot-but-not-die vampires. Got your illusion-creating vampires that only look human because that's what they want you to see. Got your immune to sunlight vampires, sparkly vampires, vampires that house demons, and vampires that are barely more than human. Vampires that are human aside from occasional blood-lust and slight speed and strength buffs until they die and lose their souls. That's not even touching on the powers vampires can possess.

Aside from strength and speed, these can include but are definitely not limited to:

• Telepathy
• Foresight
• Illusionists
• Elemental Manipulation
• Taser-like Electricity Powers
• Shapeshifting - animals or mist
• Lust Bringers/Feeders
• Lover Bringers/Feeders
• Anger Bringers/Feeders
• Teleportation
• Control over animals/therianthropes (basically were-animals)
  

The one thing most, if not all, vampires share is the blood-lust. Where there are vampires, there is their main food source: us. As we all know, the most dangerous game is Man so vampires have to be even more dangerous than that. Human blood does it for most vampires, usually because animal blood just lacks... something in the metaphysical/preternatural realm no one ever quite puts their finger on. Some vampires can feed off animals, but apparently humans just taste better in those universes so... yeah. Human blood or bust. Often there's a metaphysical/preternatural life-force thing that's conveyed through the blood, but I largely think a human chowing down on another human is better left to the zombies. Blood's just cleaner and technically renewable. Some universes even have synthetic blood: Underworld and The Southern Vampire Mysteries, to name a couple, but real human blood remains king.

Vampires are just plain neat. I feel like a discussion on what they allow us to explore about ourselves is a little outside of my wheelhouse and has been done to death elsewhere. I like them, I know a lot about them, and I can discuss them at length. I've also honestly only hit on a few of the series I've consumed in this write-up, and clearly a lot of what I've mentioned here are the Big Names in Vampire Media. I have also read Dracula, just so no one recommends I read it. That Netflix three-part mini-series from 2020 was mostly excellent, by the way. I've got a lot more on my TBR list and am looking forward to consuming much more vampire media.

This entire post has been written off the top of my head, with the exception of having to look up what the Sookie Stackhouse novels are actually titled... have not read those and the accents in the TV show just shut off my brain so... yeah. Hope you enjoyed this nonsense.

Reviews Batch 9

I had a lovely bit of trouble while putting this post together. Apparently GoodReads had a weird fart where it wouldn't recognize a logged in account on individual book pages... which is where you have to go to follow a small path of links to get to the HTML copy of the reviews, which is what I re-post here. There really needs to be a better way to get to your own review not in edit mode. Anyway, enjoy these very short, old reviews of mine.

Battle Magic by Tamora Pierce

Originally Posted to GoodReads: July 28, 2014

For some reason I was expecting Battle Magic to focus as much on Evvy as it did.

I thought the new characters and lands introduced were quite interesting. I kind of wish there could be some more books set in them rather than back in Emelan.

I pretty much blew through this book and very much enjoyed the ride.

Wizard's Holiday by Diane Duane
Originally Posted to GoodReads: July 29, 2018

Fun and a hell of a lot more fast paced than the last one, or maybe the last one was just hard to get through... anyway... i enjoyed the look at wizards beyond humans and planets beyond Earth.

 

Doctor Who: The Legends of Ashildr by Justin Richards
Originally Posted to GoodReads: July 31, 2021

It was alright. The first story was kinda crap, not gonna lie. Didn’t like it or, essentially the framing device, i guess. The rest of the stories were better. The plague one would probably have been more heartbreaking without the addition of aliens, who i thought didn’t need to be there at all. But yeah, pretty alright.

 

In Other News

I've finished another OviPets Project! Introducing: Puyoyomon!

Puyoyomon took me just about 4 months even to complete.

The Color of Magic by Terry Pratchett

Originally Posted to GoodReads: July 25, 2016

I really and sincerely do not know what I just read... like, I know what happened. I know I read The Color of Magic. I know that a series of events took place in the book. I could tell you what that series of events was, probably even in order. I could not tell you what the point of it was. I could not tell you the motivation behind the events other than this: "Apparently Fate wants Rincewind and Twoflower dead... for some reason, which no one gets to know."

I feel like The Color of Magic tried too hard to be The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I enjoyed Hitchhiker's. I could follow Hitchhiker's. Hitchhiker's makes sense. The Color of Magic just doesn't hang together, in my opinion. I just... what? Why? Huh?

This thing happened. This other thing happened. There was some bit of world-building in each area. There was increasingly weird world-building elsewhere. There were asides with "gods" and semi-imaginary dragons, and then this alien water-troll thing. And the day is saved because sapient pearwood... except not, apparently. And then... the end of Divergent before that was even a thing... And I just can't.

Also, apparently octarine is yellow-green or something.

My original plan was to go ahead and read the entire Discworld series but... that's no longer on my to-do list. Re-gifting this travesty of a book to someone who will enjoy it definitely is, though.

A Note From Present Me

It has come to my attention that reading Discworld in order is a bad idea. Instead one ought to read certain storylines? I don't know, but I will eventually be reading the Death arc... at some point in the future.

Family Spies Series Overview

Family Spies by Mercedes Lackey

This Post Will Contain Spoilers For Family Spies, The Herald Spy, Collegium Cronicles, ETC, Through The Back Catalogue of Valdemar Books. Also A Slight Spoiler For Heralds of Valdemar.

You Have Been Warned.

Once Upon A Time, Herald Mage Vanyel took it upon himself to create a magical early warning system consisting of air spirits known as vrondi. The vrondi were to watch for any signs of magic within Valdemar and report back to the Herald Mages so the Herald Mages could take care of the Mage they saw. However, Herald Mage Vanyel did not forsee that he would be that last of the Herald Mages for nigh on 300-something years. The vrondi were left with no one to report back to and instead simply watch the Mages, if they cross into Valdemar. Somehow, Herald Mage Vanyel's clever spell also caused Mage Gifts to be suppressed within Valdemar until such time as Herald Mage Elspeth's Mage Gift manifested... I guess. The spell somehow also made it weirdly hard for anyone in Valdemar to talk or think about magic at all, unless it's Mind-Magic... apparently. Oh, and the vrondi know when and where Valdemar's borders are at all times, even after expansion. How is anyone's guess. The vrondi don't bother Mages outside of Valdemar, either. Also, Herald Mage Vanyel didn't tell anyone about his vrondi warning system. But the focus stone he used to set the vrondi spell and the Herald Web knows about it, but no one can remember the stone even exists... except Herald Mags... it's all very complicated. I've said it before and I'll say it again: this vrondi thing is stupid.

Meanwhile, Mercedes Lackey decided to write Family Spies; a series in which each of Herald Mags and Herald Amily's children go outside Valdemar and have one magical adventure each. Perry's adventure took place in the Pelagirs, which still has magic and is just very odd to begin with. Abi's took place in a bit of unincorporated land Valdemar was looking to annex at the request of its inhabitants. And Tory's was mostly in Karse and a couple of the lands surrounding it. Honestly, I found these stories much more fun and interesting than I did the entire The Herald Spy and Collegum Chronicles series. No court intrigue, no annoying characters I didn't care about, very little actual spying... not that the spy training didn't come in handy, mind you, it just wasn't super prevalent. I think Perry got the most use out of his spy training, going deep undercover like he did. But yeah, none of these adventures was even able to take place within Valdemar because of the overall magical nature of them. Not exactly a bad thing, but... ya know... really obvious.

I did very much enjoy getting a look at the other creatures that inhabit the lands surrounding Valdemar. The dyheli finally got more than a passing mention and their own magical refuge by the end of The Hills Have Spies. We got a kyree encounter in the form of the Scooby Doo dupe Ryu and Larral. They're alright, I guess. Oh, and that Scooby Doo thing is better explained in a short story "Moving Targets"... Herald Arville is basically Shaggy and that big ol' wagon Mags and Perry use was the Mystery Machine. It was a whole thing. The afrinn were a fun addition, though I would very much like to know what the big difference between afrinn and vrondi are... probably the amount of power or something. Also, afrinn reminded me a lot of djinn, but that might just be me. I didn't particularly enjoy the Karsite demons, but I'm glad we finally got a better description of them than just "demons." That's such a catchall term these days.

I think my favorite characters were Abi, Jicks, and Sira. Abi's definitely my favorite of the Mags/Amily Clan. She's sure of herself and fairly unruffled when it comes to most everything. Also nice to get that Ace representation. Jicks was a fun lesbian mercenary, though that's pretty much her whole personality so... not real deep, but fun. Sira's a badass with a heart of gold. I like how resourceful she is and how attached she got to her afrinn friends. Her parts of Spy, Spy Again were a welcome break in between Tory's narration of their travels.

I honestly don't have much to say about Family Spies as a whole. Each story was self-contained, sharing characters but not much else. I liked Abi the best, out of the three kids, though her story was honestly the weakest. Perry was alright and Tory was mostly just dragged along on Prince Kee's adventure. I definitely had more fun with Family Spies than The Herald Spy.

Spy, Spy Again by Mercedes Lackey

Spy, Spy Again was probably my favorite of the three Family Spies books. I liked the switching perspectives between Tory and Sira. Sira was a lot of fun and it was fun getting to know a more far-flung country of the Valdemar Universe. That said, most of Spy, Spy Again took place traveling to and from Karse and that was rather… monotonous. I’m very glad we got the bits with Sira and the afrinn interspersed throughout.

The Karstie priests are fucking idiots. Sexist idiots. Their entire reasoning for Sira not being a Sleepgiver was based on her gender. So, so dumb. Probably could have infiltrated the Karsite priesthood via female cooks or servants and just poisoned them all. Whatever ended up happening to the ones in the prison, they deserved it. I hope the priests at the end got buried when their strength ran out under those shields. Just… ugh.

I quite liked the afrinn. Elemental spirits are fun, when they're not vrondi being annoying. It was really convenient for the travel back to Valdemar for Eakkashet and the other to tag along. It was also super convenient to have Halina negotiate with the vrondi about the Mages. Still really bugs me that that’s even a thing… and I could have sworn Vanyel had them watching only when magic was used and not, like, all the time. More ughs in the direction of that. Good thing Kee was alright going back to Sleepgiver Mountain at the end.

Speaking of the end, it was wrapped up cleanly, if not satisfactorily. I won’t say more, because spoilers. But yeah Spy, Spy Again was pretty good. Definitely my favorite of the three. 

Favorite Line

"Any sane man knows that walls don't work. You can't guard every furlong, it would bankrupt you, and you still wouldn't have enough people to do it if you put everyone you could call a fighter in the country up on it with a spear. And what good's a wall with no one on it? Anyone can go over or under it. A wall's useless except around a city, and even then, it'll only defend you for about a month in a siege." - Tiron