Promote your favorite Sutcliff book(s)!

[isis]

We're going to post the Sutcliff Swap rules and schedule, and open for sign-ups, Real Soon Now! But while you're waiting, why not squee about your favorite Sutcliff book in the comments here? This is your chance to remind others of that book they'd almost forgotten they'd loved, and inspire them to request or offer fanfiction or fanart for it. And if a book you haven't read sounds good to you, you can read it this summer and enjoy the fanworks created for it - and maybe you'll want to request it for Yuletide or Yuletart, or for next year's Sutcliff Swap. (Because this is going to be so much fun we will want to do it again!)

We're doing this on Dreamwidth only, so that we can use comment subject lines to identify the books we're talking about. If you don't have a Dreamwidth login, you can use OpenID or comment anonymously. ETA: anonymous commenting is now enabled! OpenID works too, which will email you comment replies. Please join in and promote your favorite Sutcliff books (this post has a list of all the books), and start thinking about what you might want to request and offer for the Sutcliff Swap!

Also, if you are intrigued by the descriptions of books you haven't read yet, you should be sure to join, not just watch, the community (at either site) so you can see locked posts. *cough*

Comments

Sword Song

[carmarthen]

Sword Song was Sutcliff's last published book, published posthumously (she was about halfway through editing it). It is a little rougher, but it's also fairly strongly influenced by Norse sagas and rather different in tone, IMO, from her other books.

The protagonist, Bjarni, is a young Norseman outcast from his settlement for a crime...so of course he has to go a-Viking. Along the way he acquires a dog and learns to respect women (there is a segment which struck me as...really problematic re: women, but I may be the only one) and has crushes on his ship-carls and all the usual for Sutcliff heroes.

I'm actually not the biggest fan of the book itself, but I desperately want fic for it. Bjarni's eventual love interest intrigues me (especially because of how they met, which I don't want to spoil), and Bjarni's lack of affect does as well. Fic about Bjarni learning to have ~feeeeeelings~? And yes, there's slash potential, too.

Geez, it is hard to try to convince people that books are awesome and ficcable without spoilers.