Promote your favorite Sutcliff book(s)!

[isis]

Signups for this year's Swap begin on April 6th. This means you have three weeks to Read More Sutcliff before things get started!

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 before sign-ups, and maybe you'll be inspired to request or offer for it.

We're doing this on Dreamwidth only to consolidate discussion. Feel free to start a thread about your favorite book or three; please put the name of the book in the subject line. If you don't have a Dreamwidth login, you can use OpenID or comment anonymously. Please join in, tell us about your favorite Sutcliff books, and start thinking about what you might want to request and offer for the Sutcliff Swap!

A list of all of Rosemary Sutcliff's books
2013 source promotion post
2012 source promotion post
Sutcliff Wiki

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

Outcast

[riventhorn]

I love h/c, and Outcast is basically what would happen if Rosemary Sutcliff had ever written a h/c fanfic. A lot of really sad and horrible things happen to the protagonist, Beric. Your heart just keeps breaking that little bit more every chapter.

And then Justinius comes along.

Justinius is my favorite Sutcliff character out of all the books of hers that I have read. He's a centurion and an engineer, overseeing the draining of a marsh in Britain. He finds Beric and shows him the love and affection and trust that Beric needs so much. Although you could ship Justinius/Beric, personally I do not. I prefer them in more of a father and son relationship. All those little cracks in your heart start mending once Justinius is there.

Justinius's backstory really intrigues me too, and I think he'd be a wonderful character to explore.

There are also not one but two faithful hounds.

Re: Outcast

[isis]

Outcast is basically what would happen if Rosemary Sutcliff had ever written a h/c fanfic.

Haha, no kidding. All Beric whump, all the time.

Re: Outcast

[riventhorn]

LOL, yes. I feel like she really wanted to do this in a lot of her novels, and then in Outcast she just threw self control out the window and went all out.

The Shining Company

[isis]

I love this book, and the banner I chose for this post is fanart for it by motetus - Conn, Prosper, and Luned.

Many of Sutcliff's works are based on history/myth; The Shining Company is set within the Welsh elegiac poem Y Gododdin, about the Battle of Catraeth in about 600 CE. Spoiler alert: in the poem, pretty much everyone dies. Fortunately, the main characters in the novel are not warriors: Prosper, who becomes shieldbearer to Prince Gorthyn; Conn, his Irish bondservant, who becomes a smith; and Luned, Prosper's kinswoman, and astonishingly enough, for a Sutcliff novel, they are all alive at the end. (Although unsurprisingly, for a Sutcliff novel, Luned is only present in the first half of the book.)

There is a whole lot of fic potential in this book, and a whole lot of art potential as well! Prosper/Conn/Luned (as in the artwork above) is a delightful OT3, as well as Conn/Luned, Prosper/Conn, and gen set in the first part of the book when they are all at Nant Ffrancon, in Wales. Prosper eventually develops a friendship with the warrior Cynan MacClydno, and there's fic potential there as well, both slash and gen, set either in the second half of the book or post-canon.

But the pairing of my heart for this novel is Prosper/Faelinn. Faelinn is shieldbearer to Peledur of Rheged, and during a training exercise in the ruins of Castellum (which name you may recognize from Frontier Wolf!) he and Prosper fight, and for some time after that they maintain a wary enmity. But later in the book they become friends, and the way that happens would make an amazing bit of artwork! They end up fighting shoulder-to-shoulder in the Battle of Catraeth, and damn, that is just about my favorite trope ever, and if anyone wants fic for their growing friendship-with-benefits, or their night before battle, or post-canon (la la la) I AM THERE. Or write me fic!