I wrote a Claire ficlet for the prompt from ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
anaraine, “As a result of Castiel using her as a vessel, Claire knows things (events in history? adult subjects? encyclopedic knowledge of angels?) that she doesn't remember learning.”
Nick O’Donohue, The Magic and the Healing: Vet school students go to the Crossroads, where they treat unicorns and other magical creatures (and get caught up in an invasion of the place by the murderous Morgan). While the Morgan plot was truncated and awkward, and the magical healing worked a little too neatly for my tastes, I ended up liking this fantasy because the students quickly became recognizable people rather than collections of traits; not unrelatedly, the women outnumbered the men and spent a lot of time dealing with each other.
Percival Everett, Damned if I Do: Short story collection featuring African-American, Latino, and Native American protagonists. A little magical realism (the opening story is about a guy who can fix anything, where “anything” keeps getting a wider definition), but mostly just slices of life. As usual, venturing beyond f/sf left me cold, though I was interested in “The Appropriation of Cultures,” featuring an African-American man who starts playing “Dixie” without irony and showing the Confederate flag and telling everyone he’s doing it to promote black power, with great success.
Mary E. Pearson, The Adoration of Jenna Fox: I think if I had read this YA novel at 12-15, I would have loved it. Jenna Fox is recovering from an accident that her parents won’t tell her much about, and they’ve moved across the country and isolated her from everyone else. Her grandmother hates her, which is even worse because Jenna’s few memories (and the endless recordings of young Jenna she watches) say that her grandmother adored her. Given the stuff we’re told about biotech in the near-future setting, it’s not too hard to figure out the big secret; the “big social issue” behind the plot conflates medical rationing (you can get X amount of care in your life) with biotech experimentation, which combined with the unexamined privilege of Jenna’s life made it hard for me to get really into/horrified by Jenna’s plight.
Ted Naifeh, Polly and the Pirates: Polly is a proper young lady, being educated at boarding school while her diplomat father takes care of important business. Except that everything she thought she knew about her mother is a lie, or at least seriously misleading; her mother was the pirate queen, which she discovers when her mother’s former crew comes to her for help finding lost treasure. There’s a pirate king’s son, betrayals, and adventure both in the boarding school and outside. Despite not quite being sure whether Polly was supposed to have feet or not, I enjoyed it a lot … and then found out that there doesn’t seem to be a volume 2, which seems to be a thing with Naifeh, though some sources suggest that volume 2 may be forthcoming (… four years after volume 1). Oh sequential art, how you tease me.
anaraine, “As a result of Castiel using her as a vessel, Claire knows things (events in history? adult subjects? encyclopedic knowledge of angels?) that she doesn't remember learning.” Nick O’Donohue, The Magic and the Healing: Vet school students go to the Crossroads, where they treat unicorns and other magical creatures (and get caught up in an invasion of the place by the murderous Morgan). While the Morgan plot was truncated and awkward, and the magical healing worked a little too neatly for my tastes, I ended up liking this fantasy because the students quickly became recognizable people rather than collections of traits; not unrelatedly, the women outnumbered the men and spent a lot of time dealing with each other.
Percival Everett, Damned if I Do: Short story collection featuring African-American, Latino, and Native American protagonists. A little magical realism (the opening story is about a guy who can fix anything, where “anything” keeps getting a wider definition), but mostly just slices of life. As usual, venturing beyond f/sf left me cold, though I was interested in “The Appropriation of Cultures,” featuring an African-American man who starts playing “Dixie” without irony and showing the Confederate flag and telling everyone he’s doing it to promote black power, with great success.
Mary E. Pearson, The Adoration of Jenna Fox: I think if I had read this YA novel at 12-15, I would have loved it. Jenna Fox is recovering from an accident that her parents won’t tell her much about, and they’ve moved across the country and isolated her from everyone else. Her grandmother hates her, which is even worse because Jenna’s few memories (and the endless recordings of young Jenna she watches) say that her grandmother adored her. Given the stuff we’re told about biotech in the near-future setting, it’s not too hard to figure out the big secret; the “big social issue” behind the plot conflates medical rationing (you can get X amount of care in your life) with biotech experimentation, which combined with the unexamined privilege of Jenna’s life made it hard for me to get really into/horrified by Jenna’s plight.
Ted Naifeh, Polly and the Pirates: Polly is a proper young lady, being educated at boarding school while her diplomat father takes care of important business. Except that everything she thought she knew about her mother is a lie, or at least seriously misleading; her mother was the pirate queen, which she discovers when her mother’s former crew comes to her for help finding lost treasure. There’s a pirate king’s son, betrayals, and adventure both in the boarding school and outside. Despite not quite being sure whether Polly was supposed to have feet or not, I enjoyed it a lot … and then found out that there doesn’t seem to be a volume 2, which seems to be a thing with Naifeh, though some sources suggest that volume 2 may be forthcoming (… four years after volume 1). Oh sequential art, how you tease me.
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