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Six Degrees: Sleepy Hollow & Other Deadly Secrets

It’s time for #6degrees. Start at the same place as other wonderful readers, add six books, and see where you end up. Inspired by the Six Degrees of Separation Meme hosted every month at Books are my Favorite and Best.

Last month, I chose Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820) as the last book in my #SixDegrees chain.

Sleepy Hollow

Ichabod Crane, a schoolteacher, came to Tarry Town in the glen of Sleepy Hollow to ply his trade in educating young minds. He was a gullible and excitable fellow, often so terrified by locals’ stories of ghosts that he would hurry through the woods on his way home, singing to keep from hysterics. Until late one night, he finds that maybe they’re not just stories. What is that dark, menacing figure riding behind him on a horse? And what does it have in its hands? And why wasn’t schoolteacher Crane ever seen in Sleepy Hollow again?

Sleepy Hollow reminds me of all things slumberous, hidden, forgotten and deathly. Not surprising, since the Halloween Full Moon just turned the corner, eh?

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Books Recommendations

The Folk Keeper by Franny Billingsley: Underrated Gem

Folk Keeper

The Folk Keeper by Franny Billingsley is set in a world where humans co-exist with the Folk and the Other Folk. It’s not a peaceful co-existence though. The Folk, who are perennially famished, require a tithe from the humans to let their cattle and crops alone. And the indigenous Other Folk, with their magical abilities, create havoc of their own from time to time.

The Folk Keeper’s job is to help keep the status quo by overseeing the tithe. Corinna Stonewall, disguised as a boy at the beginning of our tale, is one such Folk Keeper. She has lived a hard life, and is angry, so angry, at the world. It is no wonder then that she is so prickly, always on edge, and wants so desperately to be special, to have some power over those that have hurt her.

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Books Recommendations

Plenilune by Jennifer Freitag: Heroic, Medieval Portal Fantasy – Book Review

Plenilune

Margaret Coventry is having a small bout of rebellion against her match-making family, when she is kidnapped and taken by force into the alternate universe of Plenilune. You see, Rupert de la Mare, soon-to-be Plenilune’s overlord, has been challenged whether he can take a human wife, and the nefarious Rupert doesn’t let challenges slide.

This is only a small part of the plot (the blurb would make you think otherwise). Margaret is a fish out of water as she begins to learn – and love – the magical landscape and history of Plenilune and its people. Along the way, Margaret breaks a curse with the help of a dragon, hunts down a wild boar (not intentionally), and rescues a kingdom. Oh, and she meets Dammerung, the War-wolf.

Book Blurb:
The fate of Plenilune hangs on the election of the Overlord, for which Rupert de la Mare and his brother are the only contenders, but when Rupert’s unwilling bride-to-be uncovers his plot to murder his brother, the conflict explodes into civil war. To assure the minds of the lord-electors of Plenilune that he has some capacity for humanity, Rupert de la Mare has been asked to woo and win a lady before he can become the Overlord, and he will do it—even if he has to kidnap her.

(The blurb really doesn’t do the book any justice, but I suppose the book cover art more than makes up for it. Book cover art is by Carlos Quevedo, his amazing work HERE.)

Plenilune. King John hunting, unknown painter.
The wicked King John goes hunting (14th Cent.)
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Six Degrees: Turn of the Screw & Other Spooky Things

It’s time for #6degrees. Start at the same place as other wonderful readers, add six books, and see where you end up. Inspired by the Six Degrees of Separation Meme hosted every month at Books are my Favorite and Best.

October 2020’s book is The Turn of the Screw by Henry James.

A very young woman’s first job: governess for two weirdly beautiful, strangely distant, oddly silent children, Miles and Flora, at a forlorn estate…An estate haunted by a beckoning evil. Half-seen figures who glare from dark towers and dusty windows- silent, foul phantoms who, day by day, night by night, come closer, ever closer. With growing horror, the helpless governess realizes the fiendish creatures want the children, seeking to corrupt their bodies, possess their minds, own their souls… But worse-much worse- the governess discovers that Miles and Flora have no terror of the lurking evil. For they want the walking dead as badly as the dead want them.

What better book than Turn of the Screw for this Halloween month? Incidentally, since I am also participating in the 2020 Readers Imbibing Peril (R.I.P.) XV challenge this month, here are six spooky reads, all following up from Turn of the Screw.

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Books Memes Recommendations

The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe: Book Review

Mysteries of Udolpho Cover

The first time I heard of The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe was in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. (I think that’s the case for most people.) In Northanger, Catherine Morland’s fondness for Gothic novels and active imagination results in a disastrous misinterpretation, and Mysteries of Udolpho is one of those novels. Clearly, not very high praise when it comes to practical real life.

There is much villainy afoot …

… This led to the question, whether the spirit, after it has quitted the body, is ever permitted to revisit the earth; and if it is, whether it was possible for spirits to become visible to the sense … 

In Mysteries of Udolpho, Emily St. Aubere’s father similarly admonishes her to not give in to impractical sentimentality. But then he dies and leaves her orphaned in the hands of his rather shallow sister, Madame Cheron. Madame Cheron and Emily do not get along, to put it mildly. 

Emily and Madame Cheron threatened by Montoni. Copyright: Trustees of British Museum

That situation worsens when Madame Cheron ends up marrying Signor Montoni, a stylish Italian whom everyone seems to admire but no one seems to like. Montoni is the quintessential Gothic villain who, gambles, drinks, cheats, broods and schemes. (I expect he had a mustache too, which he twirled a lot as he brooded.)

Poor Emily has a terrible time of it all. She learns her father was hiding a terrible secret from his salad days. Her engagement with young Valancourt is broken off and her hand promised to another without her consent. Her home and father’s impoverished estates in France are rented away, and Montoni packs them off (eventually) to the desolate castle of Udolpho. 

Nestled in the Apennine mountains of Italy, Udolpho’s grandeur has faded with time and neglect. It once belonged to Montoni’s relative, Signora Laurentini, who died in mysterious circumstances. There are rumors that Montoni killed her off out of jealousy and to grab her estates. Certainly, nothing can be put past Montoni, who it turns out is now leading a band of mercenaries, the Condottieri.

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Books Recommendations

Shadow Spinner by Susan Fletcher: Book Review

  • Shadow Spinner by Susan Fletcher

To fully appreciate the wisdom of Shadow Spinner by Susan Fletcher, we need to first begin with the history of The Thousand and One Nights.

We know that the stories of The Thousand and One Nights are set in the Middle Ages of the Persian Empire. But these were actually compiled over several centuries, in multiple countries and languages. When the Arab Traders of 8th Century travelled worldwide, they carried these tales with them – thus, also called The Arabian Nights.

Essentially, we are talking about stories that are more than 1300 old! And all of them told over a span of 1001 nights by the wily Shahrazad to pacify the Sultan. Here is a woman who with her spine of steel and love for the written word managed to change the course of (fictional) history.

But what was Shahrazad really like? How did she survive so long, married to a mad man, desperate and afraid every day whether she would live to see the next day, and the next, for almost 3 years? We get to know this side of Shahrazad, in Shadow Spinner.

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Books Memes

Six Degrees of Separation: Curtis Sittenfeld’s Rodham

It’s time for #6degrees. Start at the same place as other wonderful readers, add six books, and see where you end up. Inspired by the 6 Degrees of Separation Meme hosted every month at Books are my Favorite and Best.

September 2020’s book is Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld. Blurb below:

“He proposed. She said no. And it changed her life forever.

In 1971, Hillary Rodham is a young woman full of promise: Life magazine has covered her Wellesley commencement speech, she’s attending Yale Law School, and she’s on the forefront of student activism and the women’s rights movement. And then she meets Bill Clinton. A handsome, charismatic southerner and fellow law student, Bill is already planning his political career. In each other, the two find a profound intellectual, emotional, and physical connection that neither has previously experienced.

In the real world, Hillary followed Bill back to Arkansas, and he proposed several times; although she said no more than once, as we all know, she eventually accepted and became Hillary Clinton.

But in Curtis Sittenfeld’s powerfully imagined tour-de-force of fiction, Hillary takes a different road. Feeling doubt about the prospective marriage, she endures their devastating breakup and leaves Arkansas. Over the next four decades, she blazes her own trail—one that unfolds in public as well as in private, that involves crossing paths again (and again) with Bill Clinton, that raises questions about the tradeoffs all of us must make in building a life.

Brilliantly weaving a riveting fictional tale into actual historical events, Curtis Sittenfeld delivers an uncannily astute and witty story for our times. In exploring the loneliness, moral ambivalence, and iron determination that characterize the quest for political power, as well as both the exhilaration and painful compromises demanded of female ambition in a world still run mostly by men, Rodham is a singular and unforgettable novel. “

Read more about those 6 books “Six Degrees of Separation: Curtis Sittenfeld’s Rodham”
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Favorite SFF Books: A Highly Opinionated List

Making lists is my favorite thing to do, esp. rec lists. Here is a list of my favorite science-fiction and fantasy books / stories, and I hope to keep updating it from time to time.

I can’t claim I’ve read all the stalwart works of speculative fiction, but here are my personal top SFF recommendations, in no particular order. When next you’re on the lookout for something new to read, remember this list!

Last Update: May 14, 2021

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