#a.j. lancaster

Let's start with the special editions!:

The Kickstarter for the special editions featuring art, beautiful reversible dust jackets, and more, is now only less than 600$ away from the goal with a little less than a month left to go! Donate if you can! We're so close to getting these beautiful editions! (If I had a job, I'd push the project over the edge myself! Unfortunately, I am seventeen and unemployed)

A vauge promise of an announcement:

In a recent email of her newsletter, Lancaster compares writing to gardening, how seeds spend so long in the soil, then sprout up and all of a sudden grow like crazy. In this she says she doesn't like to say much about her works in progress until they've "sprouted into the sunlight and grown a few leaves" and continues to say that her current project is "about an inch below soil level" below the "weeds of distraction" being the delightfully successful Kickstarter ("delightfully" being my words here, in part because this information came before the Kickstarter went live). Surely, this means we're getting news soon, should Lancaster's current project bloom in good time! Is it something in the world of Stariel, such as what has been alluded to on her website? Or perhaps the next installment of Fae & Firstborns? Maybe it's something entirely new! We just have to wait and see! (Sigh, waiting.) If you don't hear it from the newsletter directly, then you'll surely hear it from me!

(bonus parenthetical on the special editions: Kickstarter doesn't say when the project first went live, but I think it's only been up for like two days? either that or a week and that's still crazy! If we keep going at this rate, we'll certainly reach the stretch goals! Patterned edges, a bonus scene, and ribbon bookmarks? I'd kill for those!)

Stariel faces threats both magical and mundane. The house is in desperate need of repair, there's a blackmailer at large, the magical boundaries are weakening, just about everyone is keeping secrets, and oh yes, the ancient law keeping the legendary fae from bringing their generations-old wars to the mortal realm has been rescinded. And just when Stariel most needs a lord, something has gone terribly wrong with the Ceremony of Choosing. Family drama, magical battles, romance, faerie courts, stolen heirlooms: by all rights, this should be an overstuffed combination of competing sub-genres too top-heavy not to tumble. But it's precisely because The Lord of Stariel knows exactly what it wants to be and what it wants to do that this alchemy creates something so fun and thoroughly charming. The book has flaws. As a mystery, for example, The Lord of Stariel leaves much to be desired. The clues are minimal, the red herrings are rather half-hearted, and you never get that snap of a meticulously-constructed whodunnit coming together. But there's so much else going on that it's easy to accept the mystery plot as merely the scaffolding on which the rest of the story is built, and a most efficient way to get down to the enjoyable business of running around Stariel with Hetta and her allies, rivals, and relations. There is---and I say this with nothing but good will---not a moment of genuine suspense in The Lord of Stariel. At no point was I less than confident in the eventual arrival of a satisfying and cheerful conclusion, and so help me that is just the way I liked it. This book does not reach for psychological depth and many of the characters are mere sketches. But there's real elegance in much of the characterization, too. With the lightest of touches, the book creates a compelling sense of Hetta's profound ambivalence at returning to Stariel, and a marvelous portrait of Stariel's house and family. There are no ponderous explanations of Valstar history or internecine drama: in dialogue and a few quick asides, Lancaster conjures a large and quarrelsome extended clan with warmth and recognizable authenticity.  Especially evocative is the dynamic of the Grown Cousins, those in-between Valstars who have adult lives of their own, but who are never quite all the way grown up in the eyes of their elders, who can still cheerfully regress into childhood squabbles and capers. Hetta and her closest contemporaries swing between their roles of erstwhile playmates and allies against disapproving aunts or troublemaking younger siblings, and adult rivals in the inheritance drama and family politics of Stariel. I was both struck by the the sense of familiarity, and eager to learn more of the specifics. I would have liked to see more of the Valstar family, especially the women: intriguing figures like Hetta's grandmother, aunts, half-sisters and female cousins exist only as broad outlines. The significant supporting cast is small and entirely male. Fingers crossed for the rest of the series. So while I enjoyed this book immensely, I’m obviously still compelled to drone on about its shortcomings. But thinking about it, its strengths and flaws, I’m coming back again to the question of what the book is trying to accomplish, in mood and world and reader experience. It doesn't do everything perfectly, but it does was it most wants to do very well indeed.