#rivermarked

I address every single  one of you I know irl.

I spent the day with Shay and Bre, who I need to hang out with more often.

We saw The Woman in Black. Which is actually scary as hell. And I don't say that lightly, as very little scares me in movies. But I actually covered my head with my arms four times, which I have only ever done twice in my life previously. It's surprisingly scary.

I spent far more than I should have. 140 bucks gone. And all I bought was

A Coldplay CD

A sweater just like my other one, but in a different color. 

Lana Del Rey's CD

A case of diet Pepsi

Bloodsucking Fiends, You Suck and Bite Me by Christopher Moore [the books I rec'd the other day]

toothpaste

And Shay, Bre and I also each bought a Wreck This Journal, which we are going to do one page a day, then compare at the end, which is kinda cool. We got started by throwing it at the wall outside of Chapters. 

Ooh, I guess I also bought a Tim's coffee, and some timbits and cookies too. Because what kind of a Canadian would I be?

Rivermarked, Mercy Thompson Book 6, by Patricia Briggs, released March 2011.

The Mercy Thompson novels have been one part fantasy, one part horror, one part mystery, and to a much lesser extent one part romance in that Briggs doesn't put a lot of emphasis on the romantic aspects as other female fantasy authors tend to do.  They're good books, have inspired a spinoff series in the Alpha and Omega novels, and offer a traditional yet pretty fresh take on the werewolf mythos as well as aspects of European and Native American mythology.  Rivermarked in particular plays a great deal on the themes and symbolism of Native spirituality, introducing us to Coyote, Raven, other famous animal spirits, and the concept of the Great Spirit.  The villain of the book is a Native monster called River Devil who through a series of visions and circumstances Mercy ends up having to stop.  But that seems about as par for the course as far as the life of our favorite coyote shape-changer goes.

The series in a nutshell follows the adventures of Mercedes Thompson--now Hauptman (yes, that's a spoiler but shouldn't be much of one...it says right in the book's summary that she was getting married), a VW mechanic by day, by night a shape-shifter who turns into a coyote.  Briggs and Mercedes herself both use the term "walker" to describe her, although to give Briggs credit she does point out in a couple of the novels that maybe that isn't the best term ("walker" referring mostly to "skin walker" which in Native lore is a bad thing), but Mercy feels that it's the best she's got.  She was raised by a pack of werewolves and as she grows up and moves away finds herself getting involved with another pack, specifically their Alpha, Adam Hauptman.  Eventually she falls in love with him and becomes his mate.  In this novel they get married and go on their honeymoon, which becomes interrupted by the whole giant monster going up and down the river eating people thing.

Along the way Mercy finds out some things about her heritage, meets Coyote who is in some ways her maker, and discovers some secrets about her past, namely her father who is the one she gets her Native ancestry from (her mother being Caucasion).  Turns out that somehow she and Adam got set up and now they've become responsible for taking the Devil down, which they do manage to accomplish with the help of Mercy's new animal spirit friends and her little fae artifact stalker which followers of the series already know about.  And I don't know about the rest of you, but the ending...while I know it was meant to be light, the idea of that fae artifact in the hands of a certain Native trickster animal spirit gives me just the slightest chill.