Earthcast, by Lydia West

[hebethen]

Since it came up when I was thinking up in_a_peartree recs over the holiday, I'd like to take a moment this #fffriday to more broadly rec a lesser-known favorite of mine, Lydia West's web serial Earthcast. It's a dark fantasy saga that digs into history, folklore, and horror -- not to mention the intersection of all three -- as its deuteragonists plumb the depths of the forest and strive against strictures both literal and metaphorical. Dry humor and wry ripostes abound, but it definitely makes our heroines, a contemplative golem and a sharp, trauma-hardened strigoi, Earn Their Happy Ending.

“That heart is broken,” said the Treewitch, succinctly. “My apologies. I should have looked for a fresher one.”

You might like Earthcast if you:

• like explorations of identity and personhood
• enjoyed Uprooted but wished it were queer
• are looking for a hefty doorstopper to wind your way through, getting deeper and deeper and more lost by the hour

My original thoughts-post can be found here.

Three Friday freebies

[el_staplador]

Actually, two and a half. Nitpicky reviews follow:

Outlaw was a free download from Niamh Murphy's site (which currently isn't loading for me). It's a retelling of the Robin Hood legend with a female Robin. Or, this case, Robyn. I could just about buy the idea of 'Robyn of Loxley' being an example of the Tiffany Problem, medieval spelling and all that, but I think I'd have preferred 'Roberta' or something. However, this was only one of a number of details that felt off - others included inappropriate use and conjugation of the second person singular, along with some questionable accent/dialect choices, and the statement that Robyn had fasted on saints' days - all of which threw me out of the action from time to time.

The action establishes the outlaw set-up and introduces Robyn, Marian, and Little John. It's very much the first in a series, and the f/f content is very slight - no doubt there'll be more in later books.


The Midnight Couch by Jae was another free download. This was a pretty straightforward contemporary story, in which the protagonist is a radio technician with a crush on the station's resident agony aunt. Fairly predictable, but none the less sweet.


DNF The Girl With Two Hearts (T. T. Thomas), which I think was going to be a historical fantasy. I find that the author did do the research as far as royal use of Gosport went, but the dialogue was very clunky and unconvincing, there was only the haziest idea of even fin-de-siècle mores (I can believe the heroine wears make-up by way of a disguise - I can't believe her sister approves of it and then introduces her to their brother as a 'theatre friend'!), and I gave up when the Victorian motorcycle gang showed up.