u/MikeOfThePalace

I didn't have "being sad over the fact that in real life the independent Duchy of Brittany was subsumed into France 500 years ago" on my 2026 Bingo card, but here we are.

A problem I have with books grounded in real-world history, assuming the author has done their homework, is that progress is slow because I keep getting distracted reading about the actual history. Guy Gavriel Kay has long been the biggest offender here, but Katherine Arden is giving him a run for his money. Anne of Brittany, as I have learned, is a fascinating figure. The last ruler of an independent Duchy of Brittany, the only woman to have been Queen Consort of France twice. Her story features three marriages, questionable annulments, defiant assertions of independence, and even a cameo by Pope Alexander VI (because what kind of late medieval/early Renaissance intrigue could it even be if there wasn’t a Borgia in there somewhere). Anne’s story ended tragically, with a death in her mid-30s and Brittany a permanent part of France.

Arden built her story around “what if Anne’s story ended differently?”

To start with, Arden aged Anne up so she’s about 20 when she becomes Duchess, instead of 11. (I know that child marriage was hardly unheard of among European nobility, but I appreciate that I didn’t have to cope with that in the book.) Brittany is under threat from France; she’s being pressured to marry Charles VIII, which would mean the end of Brittany. Instead, Anne reaches out to the Holy Roman Empire Maximilian I of Austria for protection. She’ll still have to accept a husband she doesn’t know or want, and acknowledge his sovereignty, but Brittany will remain and hopefully her son will inherit. That’s all more-or-less true to history.

Where things diverge is when, keeping a French ambassador distracted, they go unicorn hunting, and Anne actually encounters one. Along with a man, a diviner from the French king’s court in Paris who has been lost among the fae for two centuries. He doesn’t remember much, but he does remember a message he was supposed to bring: that there is a third contender vying for the hand of the Duchess of Brittany - the king of the fae.

So far I’ve loved everything Katherine Arden has written, this very much included. This book is otherworldly and beautiful, and I’m looking forward to whatever she’s working on next.

Bingo categories: Unusual Transportation [Hard Mode]; Politics & Court Intrigue; Published in 2026

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The watch seems to be in good condition; there's a crack on the face, as can be seen in the first picture. The mechanism works smoothly and keeps good time. The lever to set the time is under the glass; to set it, you have to screw the glass off.

My grandfather was 99, and my mother was pretty sure this watch is older than he was, for whatever that's worth.

Anything you all can tell me would mean a lot.

RIP Pop, you were a real one.

Everyone should know Lois Lowry; The Giver and Number the Stars are both absolute classics. I was more than a little surprised to see this book coming out, as I didn’t think Lowry was still writing. But The Giver was so formative for me I leapt at it.

This is set in a dystopian future, after numerous climate change catastrophes, in a United States ruled by a man who is the only one allowed to run in the supposed elections still being held (his crassness, cycling through wives, and oddly colored dyed hair make the inspiration here… unsubtle). Peoples’ lives are tightly controlled, and many things are outlawed. Our protagonist, Tessa, learns about some of them when her elderly-but-spry neighbor is sent to mandatory retirement and slips her a collection of contraband - strange things called “books” that are full of oddly compelling untruths called “stories.” Tessa’s twin brother had vanished several months before the story, and there are clues that his disappearance was also connected to these illegal books.

If this sounds thematically familiar to The Giver, it’s because it is. And that’s what leads me to conclude I’m fundamentally incapable of giving this book a fair review.

The Giver was, as I said above, formative for me. I read it somewhere around age 10 and it completely blew my mind. So as I was reading this book, which addressed so many of the same themes and with a setting so reminiscent of the dystopia of The Giver, I expected to feel the same kind of thing. That didn’t happen, and I truthfully think it wasn’t fair of me to expect it to. The Giver doesn’t hold up that well as an adult; I revisited it a few years ago, and it was very definitely targeted at younger readers than me. I had the same kind of problems with Building 903 as I did then, having things in my head like, “oh come on, they managed to outlaw STORIES?”

And yet I didn’t have a problem with that sort of thing with The Giver. So I don’t know. I’ll have to throw this at some of my niblings and see how they feel about it.

Bingo categories: Unusual Transportation [Hard Mode]; Middle Grade; Published in 2026

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