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megwritesIn case anyone has wondered what's up with the reviews and why the new format, I'm trying out a new way of reviewing books. I read over some of my old reviews and realized that they were very sloppy and probably not helpful to those who wanted to read criticism or reviews about a certain book.
I also made a list of some of the books I really enjoyed from the past year and decided that I'd finally get around to that massive review dump I've been swearing to do. After all, I probably read more this year than I have since college, and I felt it would be a good thing if I not only blogged about what I've been reading (especially genre wise), but also if I did so in a way that was more organized and easier to read.
& 
Title:Ink & Steel/Hell & Earth (The Stratford Man)
Author: Elizabeth Bear (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
matociquala, http://www.elizabethbear.com)
Genre: Fantasy
Page Count: 448/432
Publisher: ROC
What is the basic plot? A prequel of sorts to Blood & Iron and Whiskey & Water. These two novels are a continuation of the Promethean Age universe, set in Elizabethan England after the murder of Christopher Marlowe (Kit Marley), a playwright who's words created magic that strengthed and protected Elizabeth I. After his death, his friend and roommate, William Shakespeare, is enlisted to become a Queen's Man and serve as Marley did. Meanwhile, Marlowe, now bound to Faerie must serve a new queen, while trying to protect his old, and help his friends and former co-conspirators against those who want to see both Elizabeth and Faerie destroyed.
What is good about the book(s)? I'm reviewing these two books together, because they are - for all intents and purposes - one single volume that got split up because having a nearly 900 page book is just a bit too unwieldy for anyone. Collectively, the novels are called "The Stratford Man", and very literally, Hell & Earth begins exactly where Ink & Steel left off, to the point where you might as well have started H&E on page 449 (ala Hodgman, who began numbering his book More Information than You Require exactly where The Areas of My Expertise left off).
I list this under the postives, because where H&E ends does not feel chopped off. Instead, it's a very natural stopping point where the story line naturally drops into a lull between Very Exciting Plot Events and there is a span of time in which nothing much is happening anyway.
These two books are very stylistically representative of Ms. Bear's work, so if you enjoyed the previous Promethan Age books, you won't be disappointed in these.
However, those who didn't enjoy the previous books might still like these two books, because there is one big advantage in them that the two predecessor novels didn't have: accessibility.
I have decided that I have the perfect metaphor to describe Explaning Things In Novels, and it's this: A writer is like a bus driver. The novel is, obviously, the book. Explaning things is like driving along in that bus and coming up on a bus stop and seeing a group of people all running like the dickens to make it to the bus stop and catch the bus.
The bus driver, seeing this, can slow the bus down so that it gives the people running to the bus stop time to catch the bus. This would seem like the nice thing to do, but, the people who are already on the bus are going to get very upset and they might well get off the bus and find another mode of transportation.
Still, if you zoom right past, you'll go all the way down the line and you won't have a lot of people on the bus - and what's the point of driving a bus if you're not going to let people on?
Bear is one of those authors who, seeing the people running, says, "So sorry, you should've gotten up a little earlier this morning. Catch the next one, kids" and keeps hustling right along. Which is very satisfying to those people on the bus, but frustrating to those who were trying to catch up.
Thus, Bear's books can often leave a reader feeling excluded - as though nobody is ever going to let them in on the joke so they can enjoy the book, too.
Which is why these books are better. They start with a subject matter that is more familiar to a wider audience. Shakespeare and Elizabethan England have been the subjects of movies, TV shows, and pop culture for a long time. Even Doctor Who took a trip down to the Globe! Just about everyone who went to a public high school in America studied Shakespeare and Elizabeth I, even if it was just to read Romeo and Juliet and hear something about some Reformation and some queen and a guy with a lotta wives and blah blah blah.
So, in these two books, there's a shortcut for us less sophisticated, less learned types who had to run so hard to catch the bus in the earlier two novels because Faerie and Celtic/Welsh mythology are rather obscure topics. Yet it won't affect anyone who did understand what was happening the first time around.
Not to mention that having a much better structure of POV characters, and having the pattern of one chapter of Kit, one chapter of Will, makes for infinitely less confusing reading than some of muddled point-of-view switches in the two previous books.
On top of this, Kit Marley and William Shakespeare are perhaps the two most compelling, perfectly imperfect characters I've read this year.
This novel does what a lot of others that fictionalize William Shakespeare can't manage, which is to really treat Shakespeare as though he's just a guy named Will who writes some plays to get some money. It becomes easy to think of him as "Will", as just a man, as a character who is not unlike people you might know, or people you might be.
By the same token, Marley is both flamboyant and oddly quiet in his way. Somehow he is both the paragon of sin and sainthood. He hates and loves and wins and loses and fights and flees in a way that made me feel deeply invested in his narrative. Marley is broken, and he is perfect the way he is.
Kit is also a very useful character, because his descent into Faerie and then Hell gives the reader a clearer, better exposited look at Faerie and explained quite a few things that I couldn't figure out from the first two books.
The love, friendship, and eventual passion between Kit and Will is organic, heartbreaking, and pitch perfect in it's unflinching bittersweetness. It may be one of the most perfect romances I have ever read, and I think a very good literary argument could be made that I&S/H&E are actually very complex, very intellectual romances.
I can't help but admitting to glee at the canon slash aspect of it. Yes canon slash. Get over it.
Furthermore and on a deeper level, these novels do not deconstruct their own premise the way I believe that the first two did. The thesis that all the Promethean Age novels has put forward is "all stories are true". In the first two novels, the idea that all stories were true and that Faerie was built on stories was belied by the fact that there were, in fact, a whole lot of very widely told stories that the author never even acknowledge.
For instance, most of your average people (at least, I think, in the Western hemisphere) have a knowledge of fairies informed by Disney movies. Thus, the word "fairy"/"faerie" pretty much evokes images of Godmothers and Tinkerbells. It might one day get explained or even explored in other novels, but it bothered me that there was not even a nod to the fact that Faerie went from being the subject of Edmund Spencer's "The Faerie Queen" to the Disneyfied, softened, cartoon version of faeries we have now.
Nor was I satisfied that having entire generations of people tell that story over and over would result in the kind of Faerie shown in the first two Promethean Age novels. The "all stories are true" theory rang false, because it seemed like it came with the parenthetical afterthought: "so long as they were told in Europe before the Enlightenment".
This time around, with these latest two books, the theory holds up - because not only does it make sense that the world Kit and Will live in (and help create) would create the Faerie we see, but the theory also cuts both ways for them. The fact that all stories are true means that the songs, plays, poems, and tales told by the Prometheans can hurt them, or that not getting to tell their own stories can also harm them.
In these two novels, we see a visible affect on the Medb when the mythology she wraps herself and her court around takes a hit with Queen Elizabeth's death and the changing of politics in our world, with the arrival of a new king and a new age in England with an entirely new story to be told. We see how changes in the mortal realm affect changes in the Faerie world, how they are so intimately tied and why it is that they push and pull against each other.
The first two novels did not do such a good job of showing just how bound Faerie and the mortal realm are.
Another small advantage is that the names in this novel are at least 40% less unpronounceable. Well, at least to the English-speaking ear. I didn't long for a pronounciation key the entire way through the way I did with the previous two books.
The cast of supporting characters, as well, from Lucifer to Murchaud to Shakespeare's wife, Anne, are as well drawn and lovely to read as the two main protagonists. Lucifer in particular is vivid and dangerous, while being, oddly enough, one of the nicer people in the novel at some points.
The view of Faerie, it's queen and it's denizens is better portrayed and a lot more interesting than in the previous two novels, not to mention easier to get a grasp on as a reader. For those who were confused by the previous two books, it might be worth one's while to re-read them after having gone through I&S/H&E.
The plot, as with Bear's other books, moves at a fantastic pace, slowing and speeding up in the way a very wonderful song goes between lulls and peaks. There aren't really plot twists with these novels, however, because from the get go, the audience is kept in a perpetual state of not knowing what to expect.
From the micro to the macro in this novel, there is irreverence and just plain blindsiding. One memorable conversation involved Will commenting on a poem about a dildo a friend of his had written.
Historically, the book is not the most accurate by a longshot, but all of it's inaccuracies are deliberate and intelligently chosen, rather than being accidental or sloppy. Bear does play around with the chronology, the people and some of the settings - but always to the benefit of the story.
What Might Trip You Up? Like I said before, Bear does not write particularly accessible novels. Even when the more commonly known subject matter, a lot of people will probably not be able to get into this novel, even when they try very hard to. So if you are struggling with reading any of these books, don't feel bad or stupid. They're really hard novels.
The politics and philosophies are extremely complex, and many times both a character's background and motivations go unexplained or badly explained. Other times, the explanations make very little sense, and there is some amount of philosophizing that you really have to crane your neck around to make sense of, especially when it comes to Kit and Lucifer's theories on God.
This is to say nothing of the fact that readers might get lost right about the time when the Gunpowder Plot on November 5th (yes, Guy Fawkes) - especially if they're only familiar with Guy Fawkes and the nutty plan to blow Parliament and the King to smithereens with a buttload of gunpowder. Those who have no idea who Robert Catesby is will find themselves confused by towards the second book. Fortunately, I think a quick trip to Wikipedia land to get an overview of the Gunpowder Plot and the history of it should suffice. Most of the events in the novel dealing with the Gunpowder Plot are invented ones.
There is also one very annoying device in the novel, which is the author's habit of inserting quotes from Shakespeare's or Marlowe's works directly into the narration in the middle of the chapters she writes. Some readers might not be as bothered by this as I was (or might even enjoy it), but I was also quite perturbed by the insertion of the bits of ballads into Blood & Iron. I wasn't quite able to articulate it then, but now I can say that both the quotes and ballads annoyed me because they disrupted the all important narrative flow.
Narrative flow, in a novel, is like a heartbeat. You stop it at your own peril, and if you don't restart it very quickly, your novel gets declared D.O.A.
I'm not sure the quotes did anything for me, or would for any reader who didn't have an intimate and encyclopedic knowledge of Shakespeare and Marlowe's works. I'm not sure why they were even there in the middle of things to begin with. I did get the feeling that the author was trying to say, "ooh, look here, it's a very important thinky spot! Go digging around for the meta I sprinkled all through this scene", which is nice, *but* didn't encourage me to do any extra thinking at all. It just encouraged me not to pay attention to the quotes so that I could get back to reading the story because it's hard enough to really get into one of Bear's novels and keep pace with it so that you don't have to re-read every page twice. The last thing I needed was speedbumps.
Worse even, some of these quotes come in the second book right in the middle of a rather important and climactic sword battle with the Devil. One quote, in particular, really made me roll my eyes:
" 'Come not between the dragon and his wrath'
- William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act I, scene i
Kit moves like a serpent, Will thought, and not a man. No. Not a serpent.
A dragon."
I'm not sure that trying to point out that Kit is pissed (which would be beyond obvious to anyone who actually made it to that point in Hell & Earth) and is kind of moving like a dragon is worth taking time out of your Epic Climactic Swordfighting Scene to do with a quote like that.
Another potential minus for readers is not just the man on man love, but the depictions of rape and torture in the book. I warn readers of this not because it is badly done, or even wrong for the author to have shown, but I do recognize that for a lot of readers, any depiction of rape and torture is too much. If the kind of brutality that is shown in this book is hard for you to handle, give it a pass, because you can't skip over it. You do have to face the torture as part of the plot.
Actually, if you have a hard time with rape/torture, maybe just give the Promethean Age a pass. In fact, maybe you should find another author. Elizabeth Bear may not be the one for you.
Overall assessment/grade? I give the books the full A grade, without a minus, because I think they will exclude less readers and encourage more to get into the Promethean Age.
In fact, I suggest that any new readers who haven't read any of these novels start with Ink & Steel and Hell & Earth, then read Blood & Iron and Whiskey & Water, because the internal chronological order reads that way and a lot of the events of B&I and W&W make more sense that way. Not to mention it makes the Faerie War more interesting to have that history already in your mind.
While this is still a very difficult book to read, it is also intensely rewarding. The payoff for the work a reader puts in is in the relationships, the characters and the conflicts. Kit and Will are both sympathetic and fascinating in their traumas, their failures, and their attempts to love despite both.
If you're looking for a read that has enough meat to sink your teeth on, and maybe more than you can chew, this book is for you. Again, it's not an airplane/beach read kind of novel.
I remember the quote on the cover of Blood and Iron, in which Sarah Monette (truepenny) said that the book, "Takes everything you think you know about Faerie and twists it until it bleeds." I always wondered, "What if you don't know anything about Faerie?" - but Ink & Steel and Hell & Earth take everything you thought you knew about Shakespeare, about one of the most fundamental writers in the English language, and twists it until it not only bleeds, but sings. And since a lot of people know at least a little something about Shakespeare, that means a lot more.
These books, also, of all the Elizabethan Fantasy novels that came out this year are the most intelligent, complex, and well researched. If you truly are itching for a truly authentic Elizabethan flavor to your reads, go no further.
I also made a list of some of the books I really enjoyed from the past year and decided that I'd finally get around to that massive review dump I've been swearing to do. After all, I probably read more this year than I have since college, and I felt it would be a good thing if I not only blogged about what I've been reading (especially genre wise), but also if I did so in a way that was more organized and easier to read.
& Title:Ink & Steel/Hell & Earth (The Stratford Man)
Author: Elizabeth Bear (
matociquala, http://www.elizabethbear.com)Genre: Fantasy
Page Count: 448/432
Publisher: ROC
What is the basic plot? A prequel of sorts to Blood & Iron and Whiskey & Water. These two novels are a continuation of the Promethean Age universe, set in Elizabethan England after the murder of Christopher Marlowe (Kit Marley), a playwright who's words created magic that strengthed and protected Elizabeth I. After his death, his friend and roommate, William Shakespeare, is enlisted to become a Queen's Man and serve as Marley did. Meanwhile, Marlowe, now bound to Faerie must serve a new queen, while trying to protect his old, and help his friends and former co-conspirators against those who want to see both Elizabeth and Faerie destroyed.
What is good about the book(s)? I'm reviewing these two books together, because they are - for all intents and purposes - one single volume that got split up because having a nearly 900 page book is just a bit too unwieldy for anyone. Collectively, the novels are called "The Stratford Man", and very literally, Hell & Earth begins exactly where Ink & Steel left off, to the point where you might as well have started H&E on page 449 (ala Hodgman, who began numbering his book More Information than You Require exactly where The Areas of My Expertise left off).
I list this under the postives, because where H&E ends does not feel chopped off. Instead, it's a very natural stopping point where the story line naturally drops into a lull between Very Exciting Plot Events and there is a span of time in which nothing much is happening anyway.
These two books are very stylistically representative of Ms. Bear's work, so if you enjoyed the previous Promethan Age books, you won't be disappointed in these.
However, those who didn't enjoy the previous books might still like these two books, because there is one big advantage in them that the two predecessor novels didn't have: accessibility.
I have decided that I have the perfect metaphor to describe Explaning Things In Novels, and it's this: A writer is like a bus driver. The novel is, obviously, the book. Explaning things is like driving along in that bus and coming up on a bus stop and seeing a group of people all running like the dickens to make it to the bus stop and catch the bus.
The bus driver, seeing this, can slow the bus down so that it gives the people running to the bus stop time to catch the bus. This would seem like the nice thing to do, but, the people who are already on the bus are going to get very upset and they might well get off the bus and find another mode of transportation.
Still, if you zoom right past, you'll go all the way down the line and you won't have a lot of people on the bus - and what's the point of driving a bus if you're not going to let people on?
Bear is one of those authors who, seeing the people running, says, "So sorry, you should've gotten up a little earlier this morning. Catch the next one, kids" and keeps hustling right along. Which is very satisfying to those people on the bus, but frustrating to those who were trying to catch up.
Thus, Bear's books can often leave a reader feeling excluded - as though nobody is ever going to let them in on the joke so they can enjoy the book, too.
Which is why these books are better. They start with a subject matter that is more familiar to a wider audience. Shakespeare and Elizabethan England have been the subjects of movies, TV shows, and pop culture for a long time. Even Doctor Who took a trip down to the Globe! Just about everyone who went to a public high school in America studied Shakespeare and Elizabeth I, even if it was just to read Romeo and Juliet and hear something about some Reformation and some queen and a guy with a lotta wives and blah blah blah.
So, in these two books, there's a shortcut for us less sophisticated, less learned types who had to run so hard to catch the bus in the earlier two novels because Faerie and Celtic/Welsh mythology are rather obscure topics. Yet it won't affect anyone who did understand what was happening the first time around.
Not to mention that having a much better structure of POV characters, and having the pattern of one chapter of Kit, one chapter of Will, makes for infinitely less confusing reading than some of muddled point-of-view switches in the two previous books.
On top of this, Kit Marley and William Shakespeare are perhaps the two most compelling, perfectly imperfect characters I've read this year.
This novel does what a lot of others that fictionalize William Shakespeare can't manage, which is to really treat Shakespeare as though he's just a guy named Will who writes some plays to get some money. It becomes easy to think of him as "Will", as just a man, as a character who is not unlike people you might know, or people you might be.
By the same token, Marley is both flamboyant and oddly quiet in his way. Somehow he is both the paragon of sin and sainthood. He hates and loves and wins and loses and fights and flees in a way that made me feel deeply invested in his narrative. Marley is broken, and he is perfect the way he is.
Kit is also a very useful character, because his descent into Faerie and then Hell gives the reader a clearer, better exposited look at Faerie and explained quite a few things that I couldn't figure out from the first two books.
The love, friendship, and eventual passion between Kit and Will is organic, heartbreaking, and pitch perfect in it's unflinching bittersweetness. It may be one of the most perfect romances I have ever read, and I think a very good literary argument could be made that I&S/H&E are actually very complex, very intellectual romances.
I can't help but admitting to glee at the canon slash aspect of it. Yes canon slash. Get over it.
Furthermore and on a deeper level, these novels do not deconstruct their own premise the way I believe that the first two did. The thesis that all the Promethean Age novels has put forward is "all stories are true". In the first two novels, the idea that all stories were true and that Faerie was built on stories was belied by the fact that there were, in fact, a whole lot of very widely told stories that the author never even acknowledge.
For instance, most of your average people (at least, I think, in the Western hemisphere) have a knowledge of fairies informed by Disney movies. Thus, the word "fairy"/"faerie" pretty much evokes images of Godmothers and Tinkerbells. It might one day get explained or even explored in other novels, but it bothered me that there was not even a nod to the fact that Faerie went from being the subject of Edmund Spencer's "The Faerie Queen" to the Disneyfied, softened, cartoon version of faeries we have now.
Nor was I satisfied that having entire generations of people tell that story over and over would result in the kind of Faerie shown in the first two Promethean Age novels. The "all stories are true" theory rang false, because it seemed like it came with the parenthetical afterthought: "so long as they were told in Europe before the Enlightenment".
This time around, with these latest two books, the theory holds up - because not only does it make sense that the world Kit and Will live in (and help create) would create the Faerie we see, but the theory also cuts both ways for them. The fact that all stories are true means that the songs, plays, poems, and tales told by the Prometheans can hurt them, or that not getting to tell their own stories can also harm them.
In these two novels, we see a visible affect on the Medb when the mythology she wraps herself and her court around takes a hit with Queen Elizabeth's death and the changing of politics in our world, with the arrival of a new king and a new age in England with an entirely new story to be told. We see how changes in the mortal realm affect changes in the Faerie world, how they are so intimately tied and why it is that they push and pull against each other.
The first two novels did not do such a good job of showing just how bound Faerie and the mortal realm are.
Another small advantage is that the names in this novel are at least 40% less unpronounceable. Well, at least to the English-speaking ear. I didn't long for a pronounciation key the entire way through the way I did with the previous two books.
The cast of supporting characters, as well, from Lucifer to Murchaud to Shakespeare's wife, Anne, are as well drawn and lovely to read as the two main protagonists. Lucifer in particular is vivid and dangerous, while being, oddly enough, one of the nicer people in the novel at some points.
The view of Faerie, it's queen and it's denizens is better portrayed and a lot more interesting than in the previous two novels, not to mention easier to get a grasp on as a reader. For those who were confused by the previous two books, it might be worth one's while to re-read them after having gone through I&S/H&E.
The plot, as with Bear's other books, moves at a fantastic pace, slowing and speeding up in the way a very wonderful song goes between lulls and peaks. There aren't really plot twists with these novels, however, because from the get go, the audience is kept in a perpetual state of not knowing what to expect.
From the micro to the macro in this novel, there is irreverence and just plain blindsiding. One memorable conversation involved Will commenting on a poem about a dildo a friend of his had written.
Historically, the book is not the most accurate by a longshot, but all of it's inaccuracies are deliberate and intelligently chosen, rather than being accidental or sloppy. Bear does play around with the chronology, the people and some of the settings - but always to the benefit of the story.
What Might Trip You Up? Like I said before, Bear does not write particularly accessible novels. Even when the more commonly known subject matter, a lot of people will probably not be able to get into this novel, even when they try very hard to. So if you are struggling with reading any of these books, don't feel bad or stupid. They're really hard novels.
The politics and philosophies are extremely complex, and many times both a character's background and motivations go unexplained or badly explained. Other times, the explanations make very little sense, and there is some amount of philosophizing that you really have to crane your neck around to make sense of, especially when it comes to Kit and Lucifer's theories on God.
This is to say nothing of the fact that readers might get lost right about the time when the Gunpowder Plot on November 5th (yes, Guy Fawkes) - especially if they're only familiar with Guy Fawkes and the nutty plan to blow Parliament and the King to smithereens with a buttload of gunpowder. Those who have no idea who Robert Catesby is will find themselves confused by towards the second book. Fortunately, I think a quick trip to Wikipedia land to get an overview of the Gunpowder Plot and the history of it should suffice. Most of the events in the novel dealing with the Gunpowder Plot are invented ones.
There is also one very annoying device in the novel, which is the author's habit of inserting quotes from Shakespeare's or Marlowe's works directly into the narration in the middle of the chapters she writes. Some readers might not be as bothered by this as I was (or might even enjoy it), but I was also quite perturbed by the insertion of the bits of ballads into Blood & Iron. I wasn't quite able to articulate it then, but now I can say that both the quotes and ballads annoyed me because they disrupted the all important narrative flow.
Narrative flow, in a novel, is like a heartbeat. You stop it at your own peril, and if you don't restart it very quickly, your novel gets declared D.O.A.
I'm not sure the quotes did anything for me, or would for any reader who didn't have an intimate and encyclopedic knowledge of Shakespeare and Marlowe's works. I'm not sure why they were even there in the middle of things to begin with. I did get the feeling that the author was trying to say, "ooh, look here, it's a very important thinky spot! Go digging around for the meta I sprinkled all through this scene", which is nice, *but* didn't encourage me to do any extra thinking at all. It just encouraged me not to pay attention to the quotes so that I could get back to reading the story because it's hard enough to really get into one of Bear's novels and keep pace with it so that you don't have to re-read every page twice. The last thing I needed was speedbumps.
Worse even, some of these quotes come in the second book right in the middle of a rather important and climactic sword battle with the Devil. One quote, in particular, really made me roll my eyes:
" 'Come not between the dragon and his wrath'
- William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act I, scene i
Kit moves like a serpent, Will thought, and not a man. No. Not a serpent.
A dragon."
I'm not sure that trying to point out that Kit is pissed (which would be beyond obvious to anyone who actually made it to that point in Hell & Earth) and is kind of moving like a dragon is worth taking time out of your Epic Climactic Swordfighting Scene to do with a quote like that.
Another potential minus for readers is not just the man on man love, but the depictions of rape and torture in the book. I warn readers of this not because it is badly done, or even wrong for the author to have shown, but I do recognize that for a lot of readers, any depiction of rape and torture is too much. If the kind of brutality that is shown in this book is hard for you to handle, give it a pass, because you can't skip over it. You do have to face the torture as part of the plot.
Actually, if you have a hard time with rape/torture, maybe just give the Promethean Age a pass. In fact, maybe you should find another author. Elizabeth Bear may not be the one for you.
Overall assessment/grade? I give the books the full A grade, without a minus, because I think they will exclude less readers and encourage more to get into the Promethean Age.
In fact, I suggest that any new readers who haven't read any of these novels start with Ink & Steel and Hell & Earth, then read Blood & Iron and Whiskey & Water, because the internal chronological order reads that way and a lot of the events of B&I and W&W make more sense that way. Not to mention it makes the Faerie War more interesting to have that history already in your mind.
While this is still a very difficult book to read, it is also intensely rewarding. The payoff for the work a reader puts in is in the relationships, the characters and the conflicts. Kit and Will are both sympathetic and fascinating in their traumas, their failures, and their attempts to love despite both.
If you're looking for a read that has enough meat to sink your teeth on, and maybe more than you can chew, this book is for you. Again, it's not an airplane/beach read kind of novel.
I remember the quote on the cover of Blood and Iron, in which Sarah Monette (
truepenny) said that the book, "Takes everything you think you know about Faerie and twists it until it bleeds." I always wondered, "What if you don't know anything about Faerie?" - but Ink & Steel and Hell & Earth take everything you thought you knew about Shakespeare, about one of the most fundamental writers in the English language, and twists it until it not only bleeds, but sings. And since a lot of people know at least a little something about Shakespeare, that means a lot more. These books, also, of all the Elizabethan Fantasy novels that came out this year are the most intelligent, complex, and well researched. If you truly are itching for a truly authentic Elizabethan flavor to your reads, go no further.
