Luck in the Shadows by Lynn Flewelling
by Stella Atrium 2/12/13
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I love castle stories. What could be better than a 350-page fantasy novel that starts with three companions on horseback carrying swords and Radly bows crossing a frigid field to escape the bad guy or to rescue the princess?

I celebrate that there’s no end to these horse-and-castle stories, and I investigate whatever’s new. Some novels like A Quest for Heroes by Morgan Rice are calibrated for a juvenile audience and the heroine is too young for insights I would seek. Some stories follow the new trend of heaps of gore and lists of knightly heraldry like The Wilding by CS Freidman.  For some stories I don’t buy the second book in the series because not enough surprises held my attention during the first outing, like Blood of the Falcon by Court Ellyn.


I picked up Luck in the Shadows because I had enjoyed all three Bone Doll’s Twin stories, and especially the gender-bending twist.  The witch who lived in the forest and the young magician who she trained were diverting enough for use of magic.  Though the three stories lagged in places, a whimsical holy man arrived like a breath of fresh air to resolve some plot difficulties.  A 15-year-old girl in full armor and long sword at the head of an army to save the empire was a bit of a stretch, but at least she was a girl, and she had female relatives who had roles in the plot (more than decorative).

But…  I would call Flewelling’s Luck in the Shadows a lighter version of The Golden Fool by Robin Hobb.  Over the past two decades, Hobb wrote four series (series-es) around the enduring friendship between a fool with a mysterious background and an apprentice to a wizard.  There are same-sex undertones, but each becomes the beloved to the other through their many adventures.


Flewelling’s Book I of her Nightrunner series presents a watcher with a longer life than many, a wizard who commands spells for shape-shifting and message bubbles, and an orphan (why is it always an orphan?) who is a quick learner (why is he always more gifted at picking up dark skills?). Without a girl/boy love story to carry the reader through the MANY discussions of the heroics of former queens, and more discussions of the dead wizards who helped the dead queens, getting to the end was a struggle.

I don’t care about those old queens.  I have no context for those old queens. More living female characters who have roles in the plot -- other than decorative -- please.


Flewelling presents a bad guy (why do they always have no redeeming value?) who pursues our watcher and apprentice, but she drops this story line in the middle of the book in favor of describing the needed lessons in swordplay for the apprentice (why are long descriptions of training with swords required for fantasy writers?).

The struggle in the final act means the watcher and apprentice fight on the side of the current royal family for whom only three scenes were spared, and vanquish a long-simmering blood feud for which only two scenes were constructed.

Again, the reader doesn’t feel invested in solving the problem at hand, especially since the resolution was a matter of home invasion and a fire contained in a single room. A comparison to Hobb’s white queen in Fool’s Fate comes to mind, wherein the queen lost her captain, her familiar, her ice castle, and her hands before her suffering ended.

The bad guys in Flewelling’s story had not shown their faces again by the end of Book I, but the homoerotic undertones were coming to light. If there were more surprises, fewer long-winded stories about dead queens, less description, more jeopardy, more hetero romance – then I could overlook the disjointed plot.  I doubt that I pick up Book II.

The Lovely Bones: a Study in Writerly POV
by Stella Atrium
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The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold was published in 2002 and a Peter Jackson movie followed, so I’m not giving away secrets when I reveal that the narrator is a dead girl. This review includes specific plot details, though, so **spoiler alert**.

The story is about how family members work through grief, and a little about cosmic justice. If the reader recently lost a loved one, reading the novel may be heartrending.

Sebold managed multiple perspectives in each scene since the narrator spies from heaven and tells the story through the eyes of a suburban schoolgirl. The creative use of verb tense and simple sentence structure reinforces the deep but flat POV. Aspiring writers can take a lesson here about how to integrate “double voiced” sentences (see: Mikhail Bakhtin).

After she is murdered, Susie exists in “my own heaven” and frequently views family members, school chums, and the man who murdered her. For the first hundred pages, Sebold restricts the narration to the perspective of a 14-year-old girl who discovers secrets her parents hold dear and also how the world works. For example, she follows the rabbit that carries poison in the garden back to the burrow where the whole family dies.
Susie can spy on individual members of the family and school friends. Later she seems to view the whole town during a specific event (the escape of her murderer) for what each person is doing at that moment.

There are several stories (made into movies) about a return from heaven. http://www.moviecus.com/movie_search/heaven/relevance/1

Who can forget Warren Beatty in Heaven Can Wait? or A Pure Formality with Gérard Depardieu and Roman Polanski?

The Lovely Bones has a strong presence in this crowd, even though the Peter Jackson movie with Mark Wahlberg, Susan Sarandon, and Stanley Tucci did the novel no favors.
In her own heaven, Susie can call into existence comforting objects and the company of favorite dogs. She is guided to a tree where her heaven overlaps with the personal heavens of other murder victims, and later as spirits they ride along with the bad guy during his downward spiral.  I’m glad the dénouement didn’t offer a cliché ending, but rather a drawing away – like a boat receding from shore – so heaven is not restricted in scope.

Discovery by other characters for needed plot points is managed deftly. Susie is a passive observer, for example, when her sister Lindsey deduces by the presence of a red scarf that her mother slept with the detective assigned to Susie’s case.

As the months and years pass, Susie’s perspective matures and the insights grow world-weary. While she follows siblings and school chums into adulthood, her connections with them allow her to travel to areas she never knew in life, and see what they were and were to become in the same paragraph. This development feels rather like she has the help of the ghosts of Christmas past and future simultaneously. And much later she flies with her dead grandfather while they chase birds skimming treetops in several states.

Some of the events are sugar-sweet, and the double loss (sister and absent mother) experienced by an inarticulate younger brother is underdeveloped. The reanimation of Susie for sex with the high school sweetheart is silly. I had sex with my high school sweetheart when we were adults and it was not transformative, as she describes.

When the story ends, we have the same number of characters as in the beginning. Nobody commits to an outsider. Even when the sister and her fiancé want to refurbish a strange old house, the owner turns out to be the father of a school chum. Maybe that’s how life works in the suburbs. That feature, however, keeps the story in its own little world, tight and self-abusive.

Aspiring writers who struggle with managing a narrator’s voice or multiple views for the same scene can learn much craft from Alice Sebold.