30 Dec, 2016
A Year of Tanith Lee
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2013’s Cruel Pink was not Tanith Lee’s last novel (I believe last week’s Zircons May Be Mistaken was her final book) but it is the last Tanith Lee novel I will review in the series A Year of Tanith Lee. I hope the series has been an enjoyable diversion in what has been otherwise a festering bubo of a year.
Five people. One house in old London.
23 Dec, 2016
A Year of Tanith Lee
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[Due to a technical issue, this is unedited]
2014’s short novel Ghosteria II: Zircons May Be Mistaken is the second and final volume in Tanith Lee’s Ghosteria duology.
The decaying stately home has stood for centuries. No living person has entered it in years, not since the Terror of 2020 dragged civilization down into the dark. Living people may never walk the corridors again. Indeed, it is not at all clear humans survived the Terror.
The absence of living people does not mean the mansion is unoccupied. There are still the ghosts.
16 Dec, 2016
A Year of Tanith Lee
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2014’s Ghosteria Volume 1: The Stories is the first of two ghost-story collections by Tanith Lee. I wish I’d read this in time for Halloween.
9 Dec, 2016
A Year of Tanith Lee
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2007’s Piratica III: The Family Sea is the third and final volume in Tanith Lee’s Piratica series.
Former pirate turned privateer turned national hero Art Blastside has it all: fame, wealth, and family. If only she could be happy on land. If only she could stop doubting her husband Felix. If only Art could understand why it is she doesn’t love her daughter Africa.
2 Dec, 2016
A Year of Tanith Lee
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Tanith Lee’s 2006 Piratica II: Return to Parrot Island is the middle volume of her Piratica trilogy.
Rescued from the gallows by the adoring mob, reformed pirate Art Blastside has everything society assures her she should want: wealth, position, and her one true love, Felix Phoenix. If there’s one thing of which stories assure us, it is that happy endings and true love are forever.
If only Felix were Art’s only love.
25 Nov, 2016
A Year of Tanith Lee
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2010’s Disturbed By Her Song is the second of Tanith Lee’s Garber collections (the third work including the novel 34.). Unlike Fatal Women, in which Lee adopted the persona of Jewish lesbian Esther Garber, in this Lee plays at being both Esther and Esther’s half-brother, the half-Arab, half Jew, entirely gay Judas.
18 Nov, 2016
A Year of Tanith Lee
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2004’s Fatal Women is one of three works Tanith Lee wrote under the pen name Esther Gerber. 2004 also saw the publication of the Gerber novel 34, while Disturbed by Her Song came out in 2010.
11 Nov, 2016
A Year of Tanith Lee
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2006’s Piratica: Being a Daring Tale of a Singular Girl’s Adventure Upon the High Seas is the first volume in Tanith Lee’s Piratica trilogy.
An exploding cannon cost Artemesia “Art” Fitz-Willoughby Weatherhouse her mother and her memory. At age sixteen, Artemesia regains her lost memories. They explain why she has never fit in at the Angels Academy for Young Maidens: Art is the daughter of Molly Faith, better known as the infamous pirate queen Piratica.
Escaping from the academy is trivial. So is trading her dress for trousers, her hated surname for the far more satisfactory “Blastside.” An encounter with a hapless highwayman provides her with a pistol and a very snappy hat. Luck leads her to stumble across the remnants of Piratica’s old crew. All she needs is a seaworthy boat and Art Blastside can pick up where her mother left off.
O Sing of the valour o’ a pirate so bold
Who robbed the seas over, and took all the gold
Of captains and traders, from Carrib to Inde,
And slipped by the nets of the Law like the wind
There is just one small complication.
4 Nov, 2016
A Year of Tanith Lee
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Tanith Lee’s 1989 Forests of the Night is a single-author collection.
Unlike previous Lee collections, this one includes epigrammatic introductions by Lee herself, introductions that are often more allusive than informative. Forests of the Night overlaps with other collections I have reviewed — but only slightly.
It includes what may be the single most Tanith-Lee-like short work I have ever read.
28 Oct, 2016
A Year of Tanith Lee
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Tanith Lee’s 2003 novel Mortal Suns is a standalone secondary world fantasy.
Born deformed, Cemira is consigned by her mother, Queen Hesta of Akhemony, to Death’s Temple to live or die as the god Thon decrees. Cemira apparently attracts Thon’s favour, for she survives the wilful neglect and the abuse that follow.
Cemira is spared a long life of onerous labour in Thon’s temple by the Sun Consort Urdombis. Urdombis, the senior wife, has her co-wife’s child brought back to the royal compound as soon as she learns the child exists. Renamed Callistra, Cemira will be, if not a treasured member of the family, at least acknowledged.
Thon is not done with the girl. Death will transform Akhemony and the lands surrounding it.