Faris Nallaneen is young, gawky, not particularly well dressed, and the Duchess of Galazon, a small country somewhere in the vicinity of Ruritania. Her wicked uncle, her guardian until she comes of age, is running Galazon into the ground, and has shipped her to Greenlaw College to keep her out of the way.

Greenlaw is something of a finishing school for young women; but it is also one of the two premiere colleges of magic in Europe, for those who show they have the talent to learn it. Faris has the opportunity, and a really bad attitude, and her heart is back home in Galazon rather than on her studies.

Then there’s that strange man who follows her about when she leaves the college grounds, and her fellow student who has a penchant for getting other people into trouble in truly nasty ways.

I read A College of Magics, by Caroline Stevermer, on the trip home from Dallas last week, and enjoyed it considerably. I picked it up because I had enjoyed the Regency era fantasy novels Stevermer co-wrote with Patricia Wrede (notably Sorcery and Cecily, or the Enchanted Chocolate Pot) and wanted to see what she could do on her own; and I was not disappointed.

I’d particularly like to point out that Greenlaw is not in any way like Hogwarts; I’ve nothing against Harry Potter, but one Harry Potter series is enough. Clones are unnecessary.

Anyway, give it a try.

Rachel Neumeier’s latest book is House of Shadows. I pre-ordered it at Amazon when I saw that it was forthcoming, as Rachel’s books have been consistently entertaining.

It’s a fantasy novel, of course, and it concerns two sisters, two sisters of seven, in fact. As the book begins, their father, a successful stone merchant, has just died, joining their mother in death. None of the sisters, being female, can legally own the business. War is on the horizon, credit is scarce, and former business partners are liable to be wary. If the eldest can marry her betrothed, all will be well; he can own the business, and the third sister understands it well enough to run it. But her betrothed’s family won’t let him marry into a business going into ruin; they need money for a dowry.

And so we come back to the two sisters of our story. The older of the pair, Karah, is beautiful and loving; the younger, Nemienne, has, in Terry Pratchett’s terms, “first sight and second thoughts”. To save the family, some of the sisters must be sold into service, and these are the two who make the most sense, Karah for her beauty and Nemienne because the family can get on quite well without her, as she is the first to point out.

Karah is sold to Cloisonné House, there to learn to be a keiso: more or less a geisha, but with even higher social standing. Keiso are entertainers and conversationalists; if a patron wants more than that, he must wed the keiso as his “flower wife”. The children of his flower wife are called his “left-hand children”, and must be acknowledged and cared for.

Nemienne is not attractive enough to be a keiso, but the Mother of Cloisonné house sees something in her eyes, and sends her to the door of Ankennes the mage, who is looking for an apprentice.

Meanwhile, a young man named Taudde, a citizen of neighboring Kalches, has gotten himself in trouble. He is a Kalchesene bardic mage, and is in Lirionne incognito, in defiance of the ban. (It is Kalches that Lirionne is likely to be at war with in the near future.) Two powerful men, one of them Ankennes, have determined what he is, and are determined to use him in some scheme of their own.

Will there be war? Will Taudde end in prison? Will Nemienne make a mage? Will Karah make a keiso, and become the flower wife of a powerful noble of Lirionne? I think you can guess the answers to all of those questions, but therein hangs the tale.

Me, I enjoyed it. I read it at the airport and on the plane to Dallas this last week, and it kept me quite thoroughly occupied. I liked the characters, and how they grew; I liked the descriptions; and the magical elements were sufficiently original. Good fun.

I’ve recently discovered the web comic Girl Genius, by Phil and Kaja Foglio. Most of the web comics I read are more like daily comic strips; Girl Genius is more like a comic that’s released a page a time, three pages a week. And it’s both beautifully drawn and hysterical.

It takes place in a steampunk world where a small fraction of the population are “sparks”: people with the gift of mad science. They can build incredible devices, to do amazing, destructive things…and in consequence Europe’s in a bit of shambles. We’re dropped right into the middle of it on Agatha Clay’s last day as a student at Transylvania Polygnostic University. Agatha’s never been all that good at mad science…but all that’s going to change.

If you have any interest in steampunk, or simply in glorious foolishness, you should check it out.

The Iron Wyrm Affair, by the improbably named Lilith Saintcrow, is the first in a projected series of novels involving Prime Sorceress Emma Bannon and Mentath Archibald Clare. The setting is a kind of mash-up of steampunk and urban fantasy in an alternative England where Queen Victrix has just married her consort, Prince Alberich.

Bannon is a powerful sorceress in the service of the Queen, and in the service of Britannia, the guiding spirit of the Realm, of whom Victrix is the current vessel. (Note: this is not a metaphor.) She is tough, smart, determined, and because of her unsavory brand of magic, nearly friendless. As the book begins, she is accompanied only by her Shield, Mikal; and not only is it rare for a Prime Sorceress to have but one Shield, Mikal is known to have killed his previous master.

She calls upon Archibald Clare, an Unregistered Mentath; which is to say, a man trained to perform and to desire observation, logic, and deduction to such a degree that boredom can quite literally be a recipe for madness. When we meet him he has been unemployed for some weeks and is clearly paddling in the deep end. (Picture Sherlock Holmes on one of his very bad days.) Their partnership is somewhat unlikely; Mentaths have difficulty with the illogic of sorcery, and Bannon has difficulty with almost everyone.

Together, the two uncover two (or is it three) dastardly and fiendish plots against the realm and the person of Queen Victrix, and (not terribly surprisingly) discover that they make a good team.

I had a lot of fun with this book, and intend to buy the sequel when it’s available on Kindle; however, I was never able to take it completely seriously. It struck me as possibly a little more over the top than the author intended it to be.

And then, the thing that especially struck me is the way that Saintcrow manages to conjure up an air of decadence and sin, especially regarding the relationship between Bannon and her Shield, Mikal—it’s a master/slave relationship, of sorts, and a sexual relationship as well, and I kept expecting the leather and spike heels to come out. But they didn’t. In fact, what little sex there is, is entirely off stage, and (except for the fact that they aren’t married) there’s not actually anything perverse going on. It was really quite odd. I’m used to authors putting forth all manner of sexual goings on as though there was nothing shocking about any of it; and here Saintcrow is creating an atmosphere of great wickedness that completely fails to materialize. Weird. Somewhat refreshing, but weird.

A couple of weeks ago I read Charles Stross’ latest, The Apocalypse Codex, and I’ve kind of been sitting on it every since. It’s the next book in the Bob Howard/Laundry Files series that began with The Atrocity Archive, a series that is an delightful mash-up of Lovecraftian horror, computer science geekery, and classic espionage. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the previous books in the series, but this one put me off a bit.

Peter Sean Bradley at Lex Communis gives it a 5-star review, which you can go look at if you like; and he puts his finger on what bugs me about it. The villain is

The action takes place in a land that the British mind finds incomprehensible, and which it instinctively feels might be filled with death cults that worship the Elder Gods, i.e., the scary strange land of Middle America.

Bob, Persephone and Johnny follow a typically American televangelist – as imagined by a post-modern, post-Christian Brit.

What we have here is a televangelist who is literally working to revive a Lovecraftian horror from beyond time and space. He claims to his followers that he reviving the Son of God from his crypt, but the reality is far otherwise. And it’s Stross’ hamfisted handling of the American religious scene that puts me off.

It is dangerous to infer an author’s point of view from his fiction; but I get the sense that Stross finds commited Evangelical Christians as scary in real life as his protagonist finds the horror from beyond time and space in the book. That’s the first thing that bugs me.

The second is that he seems to be throwing vaguely Christian window-dressing around without really understanding whether or not it fits together. There are a number of instances of this, but the one that really bugs me is when the televangelist, a Calvinist, Quiver-full, Prosperity Gospel Evangelical (with decidely heterodox enhancements) holds a mockery of a communion service using vestments and language I remember from my days as an Anglican. Do pastors who are serious about Reformed Theology (Calvinism) go in for the Prosperity Gospel? I wouldn’t have thought so. Do non-denominational Evangelicals go in for vestments? I wouldn’t have expected that either.

I don’t know what Stross’ religious background is, but I’d guess he’s drawing on an Anglican childhood and on the mainstream media view of American Evangelicalism. It’s not a marriage made in Heaven.

So. I recommend the previous books in the series; Peter Sean Bradley recommends this one, too. Me, I liked bits of it, but Stross’ apparent animus towards Christianity weakens it in my view, not simply because it put me off, but because I think it prevented Stross from seeing the work quite clearly. Again, take anything I say about Stross with a grain of salt; I might be misreading him completely.

Whatever you do, don’t start with this one. Part of the pleasure of the series is Bob Howard discovering slowly, over time, what’s really going on, and you’ll spoil the earlier books if you read them out of order. If you like the earlier books, I’d recommend you read this one even if you need to hold your nose occasionally, as there are important plot points in the series’s on-going story arc.

Seven or eight years ago, my doctor told me I need to lose a whole lot of weight. She put me on a low carb diet, and I lost 70 pounds. I kept it off for a while, but eventually I got tired of dieting, and over the last three years I’d put 40 of those pounds back on. Starting late last year, I made a concerted effort to get them off again, and only succeeded in keep my weight stable…until, a month or so ago, I read Gary Taubes’ book Why We Get Fat: And What To Do About It. Since then, I’ve dropped approximately 8 pounds with no real effort.

I should note, I’m not anything like a diet book junkie. The only other diet book I’ve read is The No-S Diet, which was responsible for me putting the first 20 of those 40 pounds back on. I’ll also note that Why We Get Fat is not your typical diet book. It’s not about eating less and exercising more and lots of rah-rah stuff to inspire you to try harder.

Instead, it’s a book about what makes your body take on and burn fat.

I had always thought that putting on weight worked like this:

• You eat food.
• Your body digests the foot, and all of the nutrients and calories enter your blood stream.
• Your body burns some of those nutrients and calories for fuel.
• Whatever is left over—the nutrients that are getting past their sell-by date, as it were—eventually get packed away in the form of fat.

Hence, in order to lose weight you need to exercise more, so that you don’t have any nutrients left to turn into fat.

It turns out that this is not the case. The first part is true: the food you eat turns into nutrients that enter your bloodstream to feed your tissues. But the second part isn’t. Your blood flows by both your muscle cells and your fat cells like a buffet on a conveyor belt, and both kinds of cells consume as much as they like. If your fat cells are set to pull lots of nutrients out of your blood and sock it away, you’re going to get fat.

Taubes describes a study, done in the last ten years, in which two groups of white rats had their ovaries removed. The goal of the study was to determine the effect of having no estrogen. One group of rats was allowed to eat as much as they liked; the other group was fed the same diet as they would usually get.

Both groups of rats became obese. The difference between the two was that the rats that could eat as much as they liked were normally active, well the rats on the constrained diet moved as little as they could manage. You see, fat uptake is determined by hormones, and without estrogen the fat cells got turned up to eleven, and in effect stole energy from the rest of the rats’ bodies.

There are a number of hormones that control fat uptake; and the main one that’s affected by diet is insulin. The more insulin in your blood, the more fat your fat cells squirrel away. And the more carbohydrates you eat, the more insulin in your blood.

It’s a fascinating book; Taubes is a skilled writer, and he makes a compelling case. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating, so to speak, and in the month or six weeks since I read it, I’ve lost about 8 pounds. What did I do?

I cut out sugars and starches almost completely. This is not that different than what I was trying to do before.

Of the things that were left in my diet, I looked at their glycemic indices. That’s a measure of how quickly the food gets converted into glucose. And I cut out foods that have a significant glycemic index. For example, I’d always thought of beans as a protein food. But most beans also have a lot of starch, and a glycemic index of about 15. Carrots, by comparison, have a certain amount of sugar but a much lower glycemic index. So I eat carrots sparingly, and I’ve mostly cut beans out of my diet.

Third, Taubes suggests that if you listen to your body, you’ll eat what you need. Previously I’d been trying to eat only at mealtimes, and enough that I didn’t get hungry between meals. The upshot of that was that I never really got hungry. What I’m doing now is trying to adjust my meal sizes such that I get hungry maybe half-an-hour before the next meal. That means I’m consciously eating less at meals. But the promise is, I don’t need to be hungry. If I get hungry at some other time, I’m allowed to eat as much as I’d like—until I get full, and only from the approved list.

And it’s working. I’m eating less at breakfast and lunch, and much less at dinner, than I used to. Sometimes I have a snack in the afternoon, or after dinner, but not always, and only if I’m actually hungry. And here’s the weird thing: in the old days, when I was eating foods with more carbs in them, I never really got hungry…but I always wanted more to eat. When I think about some of the “snacks” I used to have in the afternoon, it boggles my mind.

Be clear: I’m not saying, “Gosh, I just gathered my will-power and cut down my food intake, and I’m losing weight.” What I’m saying is that by cutting certain things out of my diet, I’m not only eating less, I’m wanting less. And the weight is coming off. My weight is generally more stable from day to day, with a slight downward trend; my digestion is better; the only annoying part is eating away from home, where it’s sometimes hard to get the right things.

Put it like this: we had three birthdays during the last week at our house. I lost weight. ‘Nuff said.

Over the last week I read the family Patricia C. Wrede’s latest, The Far West, which is the third (and, apparently, final) volume in the series that began with The Thirteenth Child and Across the Great Barrier; and we all enjoyed it thoroughly. I read the last fifth of book on Saturday evening, and my voice was beginning to go as we got to the final pages.

So the main point you should take away from this is, this is a darn good series and you should go read it. It’s probably the best set of new fantasy novels I’ve read in ages: both smart and funny, but with a serious core, and with a deep understanding of how people and families work.

I always have trouble reviewing the later books in series, because I don’t want to spoil the earlier books; consequently, I’ll just say a few words about the Frontier Magic trilogy as a whole. It takes place in an alternate United States, circa 1850 or so, but this is a world in which technology is magically based. More than that, human beings never made it to the New World, here called North and South Columbia, until the first Avrupans (Europeans) came. At that time, the continents were still the home of a vast variety of wildlife, including mammoths and saber cars, and also stranger things: magical creatures like spectral bears, swarming weasels, and steam dragons. It made colonization rather difficult, until Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, working together, managed to cast the Great Barrier spell—a magical boundary that runs up the Mammoth River from New Orleans to the end of the St. Laurence Seaway, and thence to the Atlantic. Wild animals can’t cross the barrier, and once the more dangerous fauna were dealt with the eastern territories were safe to settle in.

But that leaves the Western Territories. When Eff Rothmer is five years old, her family moves to a new town just beside the Mammoth River, where her father will teach in a new college. Settlers are moving out into the western territories despite the danger, and the college is intended to train them before they go. Eff’s father teaches magic, which is essential for safety in the territories. Eff’s father is a seventh-son; and her twin brother, Lan, is the seventh son of a seventh son, and consequently gifted with great magical power. Eff, herself, is a “thirteenth child”—and what that means, for good or ill, is one of the things you’ll need to read the book to find out.

Wrede’s web site definitely refers to The Far West as “The final book of the Frontier Magic trilogy,” so the whole story is available now; go read ’em all. Me, I hope she gives in and writes another.

The second of Jack McDevitt’s series that I’ve read a few of is the Alex Benedict/Chase Kolpath series, which has a very different feel than the Academy series. It also concerns archaeology, but as it is set 9,000 years in our future, and other intelligent species are scarce, it pretty much all has to do with traces of past human societies.

Alex Benedict, the narrator of A Talent for War, is not, in fact, an archaeologist; rather, he’s an antiquities dealer, the sort of person that makes Indiana Jones scream, “That belongs in a museum!” However, he does spend a certain amount of time following leads and tracking down finds; the easiest way to make a lot of money in the antiquities business is to obtain your own supply of antiquities. He hires a pilot, the beautiful Chase Kolpath, to help him hunt down a mystery that his uncle had been chasing when he died, and that other people clearly want him to give up on.

In the subsequent books (I’ve read Polaris, Seeker, and The Devil’s Eye, but there are two more I’ve not gotten to yet), Chase is the narrator. She’s become Benedict’s assistant and sometime pilot, and makes a fine Watson, thank you very much. And that’s important, because every single one of the books is a mystery, and the fun is in watching Alex and Chase track down the clues while managing not to get killed by the bad guys. There are plenty of chases and narrow escapes—Alex and Chase have had to cope with sabotaged air cars on at least two occasions, and I might be forgetting one—but in general the entire series is much more human scale than the Academy books, and I find I like it better. Not that planetary catastrophes are unknown; but they are handled rather differently.

I’ve noted McDevitt’s even-handedness with respect to religion before; I’ll note that the first book, A Talent for War, opens in a Catholic monastery. Catholics don’t seem to be all that common, mind you, but it’s delightful to see the Church as a going concern 9,000 years down the road. (It’s what I’d expect to happen, of course…but one doesn’t expect science fiction authors to see it that way.)

Anyway, good stuff; and I expect that I’ll read the two remaining books in the series before too much time goes by.

Having thoroughly enjoyed Wilkie Collin’s The Moonstone, I went out and got a copy of the same author’s The Woman in White. Short answer: it’s even better. The Moonstone‘s climax is marred by a plot point that seems completely implausible today, although it would have seemed more more reasonable when it was written, whereas The Woman in White has no such problems.

The premise is straightforward. While out walking late at night, a young drawing master named Walter Hartwright encounters a strange young woman, dressed all in white, who calls upon him for help. He grants it, only to discover later that she is a madwoman escaped from a private asylum. Later he encounters another young woman who might be her double, and loses his heart. She, of course, is promised to another…and therein hangs the tale.

Like The Moonstone, the story is told by a number of voices, each supposedly first person; like The Moonstone, it’s a mystery, perhaps the first mystery novel in the English language; like The Moonstone, a romance is central to the tale. It’s long, a bit slow, but it kept me reading.

If it has a fault, it lies in two notions that were commonplace in novels of the day: that a good, cold wetting invariably leads to a horrible, life-threatening illness, and that the minds of women (and of men) are all too easily unhinged. Its strengths, as with The Moonstone, are its characters. I was especially taken with the larger than life Count Fosco. I wouldn’t want to know him, mind, but I enjoyed all of the scenes in which he appears.

One minor quibble: if young Walter had any sense, he’d have fallen in love with Marian rather than Laura. Marian’s worth the whole rest of the family.

Note: Lars Walker has also recently read and reviewed this book; go here for his take.