My new favorite author

I've been enjoying the Heralds of Valdemar series by Mercedes Lackey for several years now. I've been picking them up at used book stores, the library, and online. I own about half the series now, and have read all but 3 of the books. I am completely enthralled with them. This may be the first time I've ever (well, since Harry Potter came out anyway) read through a series and then just started over again. And again. The Valdemar universe books are generally written as trilogies and occur at different times in their history. Chronologically, the first trilogy set in this universe takes place several thousand years before the rest of them begin, which I find very interesting. Not many authors take the time to go back and tell you the history of "where all this really began" and make it just as great as the rest of the series.

The title of this post though is that Lackey is becoming one of my all-time favorite authors, and that's because I've recently discovered how many other things she's written. I knew about the 500 Kingdoms series, but just yesterday saw a list of how many books she's written and realized that I have a lot of reading to do. Over the last 20 years, she's published over a hundred books. I would have a hard time publishing 1 book a year. I can't imagine writing 5 - much less have them turn out to be any good, and hers are amazing! I'm very impressed by that.

Okay, so about the 500 Kingdoms. These books are based on fairy tales, and are hilariously fun to read. The first book, "The Fairy Godmother" is a Cinderella story - only the prince in this kingdom is only 11 years old, so what's a girl to do? Well, clearly the only choice is to become the fairy godmother! "One Good Knight" is your classic rescue-the-princess-from-the-dragon story - but what if the knight turns out to be a girl? I will add a caution that there was one scene in "The Fairy Godmother" that I thought was unnecessary (though it wasn't explicit, and I've never read anything in Lackey's books that has been), but overall these are great books.

The other series I've just begun reading is "The Elemental Masters" which are also loosely based on fairy tales, though you may have to look hard to find them. I've only read one so far, "The Serpent's Shadow", and thoroughly enjoyed it. It was set in London in the early 1900's and weaved together several things that I appreciated. The heroine is half-Indian, her father having married an Indian while in the military, and is a doctor in a time when women were just beginning the suffrage movement - which also plays a role in the book. Obviously, it's fiction, but I enjoyed the way Lackey used those plot points to make the book seem that much more realistic.

So it's been awhile...

A long, long while. In December 2009 we found out we were expecting our second child, but I miscarried in January so I went on hiatus from blogging and somehow never made it back. However, I have been reading - though not from the library shelves so much. (Due to a miscommunication with my husband, the books I had checked out at the time didn't get back for...oh...several months and incurred a rather hefty fine. I've been a little embarrassed to go back, though we have helped them purchase several new books now.) A friend of mine introduced me to the library's online lending and I've become obsessed. The teen fiction category has almost 5500 books - quite a few more than our library can boast. I'll let you know how my progress through that monstrous stack of books goes, and in the meantime try to catch you up on what I've been reading over the last year.