Fury Rising by Yasmine Galenorn...a review

Fury Rising by Yasmine Galenorn

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Kaeleen Donovan—her friends call her Kae—is a Theosian, a minor goddess created when her pregnant mother wandered into a patch of wild magic that altered her DNA. Bound to the goddess Hecate, and able to roam the Crossroads where all worlds meet, Kae has a mission to retrieve a stolen artifact that in the wrong hands, could mean TEOTWAWKI. That’s the setup for author Yasmine Galenorn’s latest book and it’s a romp through a Seattle altered by a cataclysmic magic storm unleashed by Gaia before the story opens.
The Portland of GRIMM has nothing on Galenorn’s Seattle, which is inhabited by creatures of both shadow and light, beings who can shift into hawks and work magic, spirit guides, and all manner of creatures that have come from the World Tree and through the various portals ripped in the fabric of space time.
Kae is a typical kickass urban fantasy heroine with her sword and dagger and whip, but though she walks “in flame and ash on a field of bones,” she is also recognizably human and profoundly grateful that she wasn’t bound to one of the death gods of Santeria instead of Hecate, Goddess of the crossroads and of dark magic. And her world includes a day-job (running a cleaning company), which grounds the fantastical in the mundane.
The author has done a lot of world building, which is a treat and as a special gift to her readers, she’s also added the playlist she used for the book, which includes everything from Android Lust to Tingstad & Rumbel. This is the first in a series, and it’ll be fun to see what’s next for Kae, who is known as “Fury” when she’s on the nightshift.




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Line of Duty, my new addiction

In general I don't watch a lot of television. And when I do, it tends to be in big, season-long chunks on dvd or streamed on Netflix when I'm recuperating from a hard day at the eye clinic and can't see well enough to read. It's not that I'm a culture snob--one of the shows I DO watch is Drop Dead Diva and another is Grimm--but I still haven't figured out how to balance out a freelance career, a pretty demanding writing-on-the-side career, a personal life and the odd night's sleep.  Something had to give and it was television. 
I did check out the BBC's Sherlock and liked it well enough, although honestly, I thought Sherlock's behavior in the second season ws a little ... smug.  I honestly didn't believe he'd go to Buckingham Palace wrapped in a sheet. But Freeman and Cumberbatch are lightning in a bottle together.
I'm still on the fence about Copper. I know a lot about the era. I once spent about six months researching a script called Dead Rabbit, which was basically Gangs of New York but with two brothers at the center. I thought the first episode was dark and dreary and predictable and on the nose. I liked the second episode better.
But then I stumbled across Line of Duty.It's currently streaming on Hulu (although I suspect it's eventually going to be part of their Hulu Plus package) and it's a slice of grit pie.  Martin Compston, playing the lead, a young detective sergeant who refused to take part in a cover-up after a raid leaves an innocent man dead, looks distractingly like a young Mark Dacascos in his Crying Freeman period,  but he's extremely good as the button-down cop. Lennie James, the other lead, is a black cop with a complicated love life and a taste for corruption. He's great too.
Sexism. Racism. Budget cuts. It's all there. Two episodes in, we really don't know that much about Kate Fleming, one of the detectives on James' squad, and I'm hoping that will change.
If you liked Dirty Pretty Things, I think you'll like Line of Duty.

Getting Lucky with Google Alerts

I love Google Alerts.  I love having digests of news stories on topics of interest delivered to my email in box every day.  Sometimes the alerts are short-term, reminders so I won't forget an upcoming event (a book publication date) or  way of researching a specific project. What I love about Google Alerts is that even if you're careful about defining and refining your search terms, you can get some bizarro results.

Right now I have a Google Alert on Grimm, the upcoming NBC television series.  I don't watch a lot of television and I'm always missing shows that sound interesting because I forgot they were on. And if they're not on Hulu or CastTv, I'm cooked. And don't tell me to DV-R them.  To do that, you have to know when they're on in the first place.  Hence the Google Alert.

So I get my Grimm Google Alert today and it includes this news story roundup from August 9, 1911, an account of various goings on at the time, including a speech by a suffragette named Miss Harriet Grimm.  She stopped speaking when a dog fight erupted up the street, realizing that no one was listening to her.  (She had a sense of humor about it.)  I hope Miss Grimm lived to cast her first ballot.