Recently I received a review copy of My Sisters the Saints, a “spiritual memoir” by Colleen Carroll Campbell, and I confess I stayed up late to finish it.

In this book Campbell shares her life with us, both the good and the bad, and along the way she tells about particular saints who helped her get through. The names are familiar: St. Teresa of Avila; St. Therese of Lisieux; St. Faustina, St. Edith Stein, Mother Teresa, and St. Mary, Mother of God. She tells us of their lives and writings, and just what there was about them that spoke to her and helped her to cope with the trials of her life. I was familiar with most of the saints in question, but nevertheless I learned a thing or two about them.

The compelling part of the book, though, is Campbell’s own story, and her efforts to get over herself, and to learn to serve and love God. Running through much of the book is the story of her father’s struggles with Alzheimer’s Disease. These passages resonated especially strongly with me, because my own father was afflicted with Alzheimer’s in his last years.

My father was a brilliant man, and a born problem-solver, and it was horrifying and distressing to watch his capabilities fade. More than that, nothing made Dad angrier than a problem he could nothing about (politics, consequently, always made him furious), and as time went on there were more and more of these. Once he got terribly angry with my wife Jane, because “People aren’t keeping me informed about what’s going on!” Jane, with perfect grace, said, “Yes, Dad, you’re right.” And he was—not for lack of trying on our part, but he was right.

Every since then, I’ve determined that if I get Alzheimer’s in my turn, as seems likely (all of his siblings who lived long enough have shown the signs), that I want to be jolly rather than grumpy. And to be jolly then, I figure I need to stop being grumpy now. It’s a hard thing to do.

But Campbell’s father has shown me a better way. Campbell came to befriend the saints while learning to cope with her father’s illness; but her father had spent the better part of his life learning to know God and his saints. And in the year or so after the onset of Alzheimer’s, when he could still talk and make some amount of sense, everyone who met him was struck by his joy and his faith. Here was a man who was offering up his trials to God, and spreading God’s love and peace to his family and to the others in the nursing home where he lived.

Eventually Campbell’s father deteriorated to the point where he couldn’t even talk anymore, far past where my father was when my father died; and he suffered horribly. But he held on to the joy as long as he could.

So that’s my new goal. I don’t just want to be jolly when I’m old and infirm; I want to be joyful, and a blessing to those around me. May it be so.

Soul of Fire is the second novel in Sarah Hoyt’s “Magical British Empire” trilogy, and it’s rather better than Heart of Light, its predecessor—though not devoid of problems.

I am most unusually going to indulge in spoilers in this review; be warned.

It seems that there are two magic rubies, the Heart of Light and the Soul of Fire. The latter was stolen in the days of Charlemagne, and he used it to gather up all of the magic in Europe to himself and his descendants, thus establishing what one might call the magical right of kings. By the Victorian era, of course, the blood of Charlemagne has diffused throughout Europe; magical ability, once the mark of nobility, is now popping up in the oddest places.

Once used, the Soul of Fire was apparently used up, and was lost. And now everybody and his brother are trying to find the Heart of Light, in order to use it as Charlemagne used the Soul of Fire. This search drove the action in the previous book, Heart of Light, at the end of which we discover that the purpose of the two gems is to stabilize the world, and if the Heart of Light is found and used as everybody intends, the world as we know it will come to an end. (Bom-bom-BOM, as my second son would say.) Therefore, Soul of Fire begins with Peter Farewell, one of the principles of the previous book, searching for the Soul of Fire in order to rescue it from the bad guys and save the world. As the book begins he has traced it to India; and he immediately has a sort of cute-meet with Sofie, a young Englishwoman, which is to say he saves her from falling to her death from a balcony as she’s fleeing her home in order to avoid an unwelcome marriage to an ugly British raja. Interesting how he does it; for our Peter is a were-dragon, and he saves her by changing shape and catching her. This was extremely dangerous for him, because were-creatures of all sorts are subject to immediate execution by the English crown, and he had previously managed to keep his affliction secret.

Peter’s relationship with “the dragon” is interesting. He has trouble controlling the change, especially in confined, crowded spaces; and he has trouble controlling “the dragon”; and of course this is a romance, and of course, being an English gentleman (his father’s an earl) Peter has scruples about marrying any one, even though narrative causality dictates that he’s going to marry the young lady he rescued. She, of course, is the latest descendant of the family to whom Charlemagne gave the Soul of Fire for safe-keeping, a charge the family has been faithful to through the centuries.

Will fierce beast win fair lady? Will the world be saved? These are the ostensible subjects of the tale…but things are not as they seem. The real subject of the book seems to be alienation: and specifically the alienation of the were-folk of Europe, who have been raised to loathe themselves. We see this in Peter, who regards his dragon-self as The Other, the Not To Be Trusted. And as the tale proceeds, and he is forced to rely more on “the dragon” in aid of his young lady, he grows less conflicted…and discovers that perhaps “the dragon” can be trusted after all, if only he embraces it and accepts it as part of himself.

Two other plot elements cast light on his personal growth. First, there are the were-folk of India. It develops that large portions of the Indian population, especially among the higher castes, are were-folk. We meet were-monkeys, were-elephants, and were-tigers. (The raja who was seeking to marry Sofie is in fact the King of the Tigers.) They have no problems with being were-folk; and the normal humans around them have no trouble with it either, though they walk carefully when were-tigers are in view. So coexistence, were-folk with normal humans, and were-folk with themselves, are both possible.

May I say I really like the prevalence of were-folk in India; it makes Hoyt’s India much more interesting than most.

The second plot element is a young British soldier, who has also been sent to India to find the Soul of Fire. He’s acquainted with young Sofie (indeed, his superiors tried to persuade him to marry her), but though he likes her, he’s not attracted to her. And why not? Because, overwhelmed by Peter Farewell’s dragonly glamour, he discovers (to his shock and dismay) that he’s attracted to men. His subsequent emotional turmoil and alienation is exactly parallel with Peter Farewell’s, and it takes him the rest of the book to find peace, living in the wilds of India with a sepoy who happens to be a were-elephant and who fell in love with him at first sight. The sepoy suffers alienation as well; his family rejects him, not because he loves men but because he loves an Englishman, who is outside the caste system.

Now, all of this is somewhat interesting. Alienation and marginalization of The Other are common themes in fantasy and science fiction, and I’ve sometimes wondered when reading books like Kathryn Kurtz’ Chronicles of the Deryni whether there was a homosexual subtext in the author’s mind. This is the first book I’ve read that makes the link quite so explicit. Now, I don’t object to Hoyt dealing with themes like this explicitly. It’s certainly true that having a false self-image is harmful, and that accepting yourself as you presently are is the beginning of maturity. (Though not the end of it; at any time, there are aspects of each of us that need to get cleaned up.) And it’s certainly been true that to be gay in America has been fraught with alienation.

No, what I object to is the hamfisted way in which Hoyt pulls in the relationship between the two young soldiers. Suddenly, in the dark of the jungle, the Englishman looks in the Hindu’s eyes, and smells his breath, and suddenly, pretty much out of a clear blue sky, passion erupts and the curtain descends (for which I am grateful; and I will note with equal gratitude that all of the sex in the book is either offstage or glossed over). It was clumsy, and it seemed out of place, and from my point of view, it didn’t aid the story; rather, it shouted, “Here’s the point, people! Here’s the point! Pay attention!” And this is almost never a good thing in a work of fiction, no matter who’s writing it or what the point is. Sigh.

After I reviewed Sarah Hoyt’s Heart of Light, a friend of mine sent me a copy of Hoyt’s first science fiction novel, Darkship Thieves, just to show me that she really does write good stuff. He was right.

Darkship Thieves is a consciously Heinleinesque tale set in a future Solar System. Our heroine, Athena Hera Sinistra, daughter of one of the oligarchs who run the Earth, wakes from sleep in her stateroom on her father’s ship in orbit around Earth to discover a man about to give her an injection. Athena is a piece of work: spoiled, temperamental, the terror of boarding schools all over the world, and extremely accustomed to getting her own way; she’s also strong, fast, skilled in hand-to-hand combat (for reasons that make sense, in context) and lickety-split she’s made it to one of the ship’s escape pods and used to, well, escape.

The pod is picked up by one of the so-called “darkship thieves”, a clandestine ship that harvests the power pods that grow in Earth orbit and takes them to a colony asteroid that’s not supposed to exist, and there begins a tale of mystery, villainy, derring do, and true love. Athena, as I said, is a piece of work…but an insistence on getting your own way is not always a bad thing, assuming you can adjust what you want a bit.

This is the kind of story where a good bit of the fun lies in learning (with the main characters) just how the world got to be the way it is, and in which the accepted public explanation and the truth are rather different. It’s good fun, and I’m looking forward to the sequel.

(Oh, and for those who know their Heinlein: this is the Heinlein of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress rather than the Heinlein of either Have Space Suit, Will Travel or Stranger in a Strange Land. Which is to say that Hoyt pushes against current social mores a bit, but doesn’t take it to absurdity. Also, I think Hoyt might be better at characterization.)