Cygnet by Patricia McKillip

[meganbmoore]

Cygnet is actually a reprint of two McKillip books, The Sorceress and the Cygnet and The Cygnet and the Firebird. The duology focuses on Nyx Ro, an eccentric sorceress who lives in the bog instead of her mother's vast holding by choice, and her relative, Meguet Vervaine, a swordswoman who serves Holder Ro.  

In the first book, a Wayfarer (gypsy equivalent) named Corleu, who has distinctive white hair and a love for stories, is separated from his people, and then his True Love.  His quest to find her leads him to the bog where Nyx lives, and she decides to aid him, despite Meguet's entreaties that she return to Ro Holding.  In the second, the kinswomen get caught up in the affairs of a mage from another world, a search for dragons, and a young prince who is trpped in the form of a firebird.

My McKillip experiences seem to range from "very enjoyable, but I didn't retain much" (The Book of Atrix Wolfe, Harrowing the Dragon)  to near mad love for (Ombria in Shadow, In the Forests of Serre, Od Magic) with the few others Ive read ranging in between, with Cygnet falling somewhere in the middle.  I really liked Meguet and Nyx, and meguet's relationship with the Gatekeeper, and I liked how the enigmatic, charismatic rule was a woman who indulged her oddball, sorceress daughter, and how the pensive, committed, stoic warrior was a woman.  It was also  interesting to see elements that show up in other McKillip books all combined into one place:  the bog witch, the important animals, the vengeful mother seeking a lost child, the prince trapped in another form, the other worlds, the time travel, etc.  Despite the fairy tale set-up of most (all?) of her worlds, a lot of these elements seem to usually be kept distinct.

Comments

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

I think a lot of that is why I've been gravitating towards histical fantasies lately, and the magic-lite ones.

McKillip seems to take fairy tale tropes and build worlds around them to create new fairy tales. You might try In the Forests of Serre, which has a very Russian (esp. Baba Yaga) feel, or Winter Rose, which is a Tam Lin story.

Have you read Catherynne Valente's Orphan's Tales duology or Meredith Ann Pierce's Dankangel trilogy? Despite the way the 3rd Darkangel book falls apart (you're kinda better off stopping 40 or so pages from the end of that one) they both create huge fantasy tapestries without relying on the typical Tolkein/european formula.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Nope to both -- really for the most part, if it's fantasy published in the last twenty years, and you haven't seen me talking about it here or with Red and/or Cho, the answer to "have you read --- ?" is almost guaranteed to be "no". I burned out really, really hard and it's only in the last few years that I've even tentatively started dipping my toes in again, and that's been helped a lot by you three and a couple of other friends having generally compatible enough tastes that I can tell from your recs if something's likely to work for me. (In prior decades, too many of the folks who tried to rec me stuff had VERY incompatible tastes, so their recs were...hit and mess, shall we say. As in, some of the SF recs worked quite well for me, but an awful lot of their fantasy faves made me want to hurl things and start bonfires...)

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

The McKillip's I can't speak for regarding others, but the Pierce and Valente seem to be pretty well liked by others who are burned on the medieval-lite stuff.

I think there's still a lot of Tolkein-based medieval-lite coming out, but there's also some pretty good medieval-lite stuff mixed in that's based on the medieval idea, and traditional tales and paths, both epic and fairy tales, as opposed to Tolkein's medieval-lite mythology. Some of the stuff (Sherwood Smith's Crown Duel comes to mind) came out while the genre was drowning in Tolkein knockoffs and just got mixed in, but there seems to be more of a concentrated effort to not use his rules and setups as much.