Review: Spoil of War

OK. I realize I am REALLY behind in life, pretty much in general, but specifically with book reviews. I try to keep the blog balanced between writing-related stuff and reading-related stuff, but lately I've just not been feeling either of them, although I've read some fabulous books as of late. So, I'm going to try to play catch up a little bit here, starting with Phoenix Sullivan's Spoil of War.

And yes, this does tie into the interview from Tuesday. If you haven't read it, you should, ESPECIALLY if you're contemplating self-publishing. Phoenix has a lot of great insights into the process, marketing, etc. She's quite smart and a lot of fun to talk to.

Onward with the review!

I'll preface this by saying that I'm in love with all things Knights of the Round Table. I took a Middle Ages literature course, voluntarily, for Pete's sake. So when I found out Phoenix's book was a take on Arthurian legend, I was all over it. And thankfully, I was already informed of the culture because parts of this book tend to be brutal.

Here's the blurb from Amazon:

Elsbeth of Olmsbury desires nothing beyond helping her father run his dukedom - until the duke's forces are overwhelmed, his castle torched and Elsbeth seized for the invading king's personal spoil. Expecting the same abuse as the other surviving women of her house, Elsbeth instead finds the king, Leodegrance, treating her with a civility that belies his flagrant desire for her. A desire that will have her his consort in Cameliard once he can convince her rank and duty alone forced his hand against her father.

But Elsbeth is not so easily won. There is the matter of Leodegrance gifting his steward with an unwilling young handmaid from Elsbeth's household. Of his marriage of convenience to his Byzantine queen. And of his plans to subjugate more of Britain's citadels and unite the wild isle under Roman rule.

If Elsbeth can't find her tangled way to forgiveness with the king - or escape the dark designs and perverse desires of Uther Pendragon, enemy to them both - then a legend of Camelot may never be conceived, never be born, and never change history forever ...

Please note: This novel takes place in a harsh era when spoils were often treated as commodities. While the violence toward women and children is period-appropriate and for mature adults only, it is never gratuitous. The story focuses on adaptation, survival and, ultimately, love in the Dark Ages before Arthur was made king.

I'm trying not to make this review purely "I LOVED THIS BOOK" even though I did. I felt for Elsbeth, as she watches her entire life go up in flames. Her beauty proves to her downfall (which reminds me of Robin McKinley's Deerskin) when Leo chooses her to be his personal captive, if you know what I mean. Leo's treatment of Elsbeth begins as one would generally expect. She's property, pure and simple. It's the way of war, really, and even though Elsbeth had steeled herself for a day like this, she wasn't prepared for the total devastation surrounding her, and she basically goes numb, at least in my opinion. She spends a large part of the book this way as well, trying to rationalize the carnage and trying to keep hope alive that she may be to escape, or that Leo will just let her go.

As the book progresses, we start to see a change in Leo. Keep in mind, Leo is NOT--I repeat: NOT--a conventional romance hero. NOT. Nor is he meant to be. He is a king, Elsbeth is little better than cows at this point. However, Leo begins treating Elsbeth a little more humanely. She's already prized by Leo, thus earning her a place in the castle itself rather than the bailey where the rest of the captive women have been forced to live basically in squalor. And Elsbeth begins to feel the faintest hint of something like affection for her captor. He keeps her safe from his men, feeds her, ensures she's clothed. She doesn't have to worry so much, but she's become like a caged bird. She misses her freedom, and she has no qualms about letting Leo know exactly how badly she wants her freedom.

Elsbeth also develops a kinship with Leo's wife, who was barely more than spoil herself. She was given to Leo as part of an agreement with her father. Not uncommon, especially if you've seen Braveheart. So the ladies can sit and discuss the various ways their lives have changed since Leo entered their lives. Lynette is a true romantic at heart, a woman so in love with mythology that she hopes to someday find a love as strong as that in the stories she treasures. She hasn't found it with Leo, though. Leo isn't a monster, but he is a hard man, battle-hardened and full of the arrogance that comes with being a new ruler. His expectations of Lynette, most notably bearing him a son, turn her cold to him, but she feels some relief with Elsbeth's presence. Now Leo has someone else to cast his attentions on, and Lynette can be left alone.

And since everything seems to be hunky-dory, we have to throw in a wrench in the form of a hunky errant knight named Patrise, while Leo is away campaigning against the Pendragon (yes, THAT Pendragon). Oh Patrise. He's like Iago in a way. Sly, calculating, and bending people to his will. He tries to bed Elsbeth (against her will, poor thing), and when they get caught red-handed by the Queen, he tells Lynette that Elsbeth forced herself on him. Of course, a knight of such valor and blah blah blah that Lynette TOTALLY has a thing for would NEVER lie. So Lynette has no choice but to believe him over Elsbeth. Enraged? I was. Had it not been my computer at stake, I would have thrown the book. Not because this didn't feel natural but because sisterly kinship is almost always broken because of a man. But I also pitied Lynette because, as the reader, we KNOW she's going to get screwed over somehow. Patrise is just too slimy.

It doesn't take long for Patrise to ruin EVERYTHING.

Oh, readers, this is when it gets JUICY. I don't want to spoil *LOL* the rest of the book for you. Really, this is one you need to pick up for yourselves because it gets gloriously crazy toward the end.

However, I will address one of the issues I know is floating around the interwebs. As I was writing this I took a gander at Amazon to get the blurb and read a few of the reviews there. They seem to fall at either 4-5 stars or 1 star with NONE in between. This book has been described as "polarizing" and I guess it is. There are accounts of brutal rape. There is an 11-year-old who becomes the spoil of one of Leo's knights and closest friends, and she does get treated AS spoil. It's not easy. It's not easy for Elsbeth to bear, either. Regardless of the implications that rape is treated as "romance," it is not. There is nothing romantic about rape, and rape is not treated as a romantic device. This was the reality for captive women . Hell, where war's involved, it still IS the reality for captive women, and that's one of the things you as a reader need to be aware of when reading this novel. It's a historical fantasy with romantic elements, and it does give us a HEA, but it is NOT romance.

Spoil of War is more a story of survival and overcoming brutality. There is affection and what constituted love in the time period, but Elsbeth is adapting to her new life as best she can. And sometimes, that means making your bed with those you consider your enemies.

Overall, I give "Spoil" a five out of five. This book's just too damn good. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

If you're interested in purchasing the book (and you should be, darnit!), then click here!

Interview: Phoenix Sullivan

Some of you may remember Phoenix from when I was writing my query (read: whining incessantly about having to write one). She helped me a great deal with formulating the one I'm using now for Duality. Also I've been vocal about how much she's helped me and I know I've recommended her blog on more than one occasion.

Believe it or not, Phoenix is also an incredibly talented writer. In celebration of her newest release, a near-future medical mystery/ecothriller, Sector C, I've asked Phoenix to join me for a little Q&A.

Here we go, Phoenix! I'm excited about having you on the blog :)

Thanks for inviting me over. I looove what you've done with the place.

1. So far you have two books--Spoil of War, an Arthurian saga, and SECTOR C, a near-future medical mystery/ecothriller--available on Amazon, as well as the Extinct anthology you edited. First of all, congrats on the release of SECTOR C ! Why don't you tell us a little bit about your experiences writing it?

Well, SECTOR C was a bit of departure for me since I don't generally write contemporary anything. Although maybe I get a bit of a pass on that because it's actually near-future -- set a dozen years out. The following is a bit spoilery, but I can't talk about the process without somewhat spoiling the mystery half of the book.

The idea for SECTOR C was implanted a few years ago during a conversation with my brother and sister-in-law about whether using in vitro fertilization and surrogate mothers to repopulate endangered animals was a good idea or not. Was there a way to make money with the technology without exploiting the animals? After that marinated for awhile and designer animals such as lygers and tigrons starting popping up more frequently, I began wondering about theories for rewilding extinct animals. The mammoth genome has been mapped, genetic material taken from mice frozen for 12 years has been successfully cloned, and Japanese researchers now say an embryo cloned from frozen mammoth DNA is no more than five years away. Exciting stuff! But cool ideas need a plot wrapped around them.

Thinking about why mammoths and other Ice Age beasties became extinct in the first place, I latched onto the idea of disease, which hasn't been ruled out as a possible cause. But most diseases are either caused by external factors, like viruses and bacteria, or are host-specific, like cancer and diabetes - things that aren't transmissible. I needed something that's not only a genetic disease, but one which is transmissible across species and capable of causing a pandemic. Luckily (well, luckily for the story anyway!), I found a candidate.

Then I needed a way for a private enterprise to make money off the animals it produced. I figured that out too.

There were a few things I swore early on I wasn't going to do. I really wanted to create as accurate and believable a scenario as I could. But you know what? Stuffed-shirt science is pretty yawn-inducing when it comes to storytelling. I said no romance. Before I knew it the main characters - Mike, a CDC analyst, and Donna, a veterinarian - were falling for each other. Not in the "hot dude/hotter gal, gotta get into his/her pants NOW" kind of way, but in a "two ordinary people get thrown together into extraordinary circumstances and have only themselves to rely on" kind of way.

I also assured myself the beasties safe in their compound certainly weren't going to escape. A lot of money goes into building enclosures meant to, you know, contain animals. But really, where's the fun in that?

One thing I didn't back down from and that was to take a very balanced look at some tough ethical questions around animals as property and science as the fallguy. I have some pretty strong opinions around hunting (anti), exploitation (anti) and science (pro), but I worked hard to present the opposing view in a positive light too. So hard that I think I almost convinced myself to rethink my own positions around some of the questions ;o).

2. How did you research the different topics? Are you a Googler or do you use books and articles to inform your books?

Count me a Googler and a Google Mapster. I relied heavily on satellite images of the area in North Dakota where most of the action takes place as well as pictures of ranchland for sale in the area. I researched the native flora and fauna. I have a short scene where one of my MCs doesn't want to hike through some tall grass because of chiggers. One of my beta readers asked if North Dakota even has chiggers and I was proud that I could immediately point to the research that shows it does. I confess I have never actually been to North Dakota but I pored over maps and images and data to be sure I got it as right as possible.

While documenting all the bits and pieces about size of dairy herds in the Great Plains, methods the CDC uses to collect patient data, and all the other pesky topics that I didn't know off the top of my head was time-intensive, researching the mechanics of the disease was the most brain-intensive. After all, I was positing something that doesn't exist today but that could plausibly have existed 10,000 years ago, be cloned in a collateral damage kind of way, and be transmitted across almost any species. I was determined to get the science right. And getting the science right also meant no easy answers and no vaccine-in-the-nick-of-time ending.

Luckily, I have a head for biology and physiology so making the connections and understanding the lingo wasn't as difficult as it could have been. Some of that research winds up on the page because, well, the first half of the book is a medical mystery. There are enough details, I hope, to satisfy the geeks and not so many that non-geek eyes glaze over. It's always a delicate balance -- one that even the likes of Michael Crichton, Robin Cook and Daniel Calla struggle with to varying degrees of success.

3. You decided to take the "non-traditional" route of self-publishing. What factors influenced your decision to do that? As an author, do you foresee a greater amount of writing self-pubbing in the future now that there's not such a stigma?

The decision wasn't entirely in my hands. Both Spoil of War and SECTOR C made the agent and (some) publisher rounds to a lot of positive feedback. Both garnered over a dozen requests for the full as well as revision letters. Spoil made it to the acquisition table twice. I had agents apologize (and not in that fake, form-letter "it's a subjective business and some other agent may feel differently" way but in that gut-wrenchingly personal way that makes you want to rip your heart out) for not taking SECTOR C on as they were sure it would get picked up. That reinforced the idea that I had good books. I'm lucky enough that ebooks had started taking off and the process to publish was pretty easy and streamlined. The real decision I was faced with was to put these books in the closet or up on Amazon. Had I not received as much positive feedback from industry professionals, I would likely have closeted them.

There are still a lot of quality issues that need to shake out in the self-publishing arena. I do believe there are too many people wholly unready either from a skill level or a business sense to be out competing just yet. We'll see more poor-quality books before we see a strong rise in quality ones, I think. The ease of self-publishing and the lack of consequences for doing it poorly promises that. What some folk don't get, though, is that the distributors enabling the self-publishers -- Amazon, BN, Apple, Kobo, etc -- are still tweaking their models. They aren't done yet. And when they are, the landscape and rules will likely be much different than they are today and will certainly favor the needs of the reader far more than the needs of the author.

Which isn't at all meant to imply that there isn't plenty of quality out there right now. As venues for traditionally published books keep downsizing, more new authors who would have been picked up in the past will be turned away. More midlist authors will be getting their rights reverted and putting up their backlists. And more established authors who perform only marginally well by industry standards -- though not by their own personal standards! -- will be let go. These are the folk we're already seeing good things from on the self-pubbing front.

Like with the decentralized music industry, it'll be harder for the artists to get noticed but the consumers will benefit by having plenty of quality books to choose from.

4. How do you approach marketing and promoting your books?

Mainly with a lot of trepidation. I actually have a marketing and advertising background (*insert ironic laugh here*). I'm still trying to get the hang of social media in a way I'm comfortable with using it. Haven't quite found that way yet. I still wind up falling back on the old broadcasting approaches -- here's my book; come buy it! -- and I feel like slime when I do it.

Specifically for SECTOR C, I'm starting its promo run by tying it in to the "Contagion" movie releasing this week. They both are standard pandemic stories at their core. Where I think SECTOR C is unique is in the transmission route and in involving animals in the outbreak. Not only do you have a lot of people dying in the story but a lot of pets and other animals too. And since one of the MCs is a veterinarian, I'm tapping into the audience who likes animals (oh, I so cried when I had to kill two animals in particular). Next out, I'll be approaching mystery/thriller/science fiction review sites open to reviewing ebooks. And hey, bloggers, I'm available ;o)

I pitch Spoil of War as being in the tradition of Mists of Avalon. In fact, Marion Zimmer Bradley, who wrote Mists, was my first editor many (ahem,many) years ago. Since Spoil is a bit gritty and has some unpleasant violent bits as well as political manipulation, I advertised it for awhile as being the withdrawal cure for HBO's Game of Thrones and Starz' Camelot.

5. What topics are you looking forward to tackling in the future?

This question actually relates somewhat to the previous one. I have several WIPs in various stages of completion, but the project I'm most excited about now is a planned series of ebooks that fondly -- and sometimes not so fondly! -- recall the years I spent as a veterinary technician. Rather than try to imitate the fabulous James Herriot and his series that started with All Creatures Great and Small (because NO ONE can come close to matching those books and I'll take on anyone who says they can!), mine will be a series of bite-sized essay-stories (Tales), each less than 2000 words long. These tales will ultimately tie together to tell not just a series of funny and heartwarming anecdotes about the various animals I worked with but about the vets and my coworkers, and will reveal some of the hard truths and tough decisions that sometimes surface even when you think you're in your dream job.

I'm actually posting the Vet Tech Tales series to my newish blog, Confessions of an Animal Junkie, with a new Tale out each Friday. Since I also have stories and pictures about my farm on Mondays and invite others to share their own stories on Wednesdays, it gives me a chance to connect with other animal lovers now before I have anything to actually peddle.

Speaking of, I can ALWAYS use guest posts! If you'd like to spotlight your best friend in story and pictures, email me at phoenixsullivan @ yahoo.com.

6. What have you learned from writing SECTOR C ?

That I'm at heart a plotter. I've pantster'd a few stories in the past, but SECTOR C has several small side stories and a lot of cutting between characters and scenes to keep it pace-y. I really had to keep very detailed notes about who was where and doing what at any given time. The great thing about that was that I felt I was always in control of the story even when I had to figure out how to weave a romance into it or figure out a plausible way for the beasties to do their escaping. In fact, I think having the story thoroughly laid out help drive me to the best decisions for my plot and characters.

Thanks for having me by, Cate! Everyone's welcome to stop by my Animal Junkie blog or my main blog where I talk about writing and publishing and where there's an archive of line-edited queries and synopses you can pore through. I'd love it if you'd "like" my new SECTOR C Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Sector-C-Medical-Mystery/150265391728555?sk=wall#!. And I'm @PhoenixSullivan on Twitter. (Forgive me in advance for sucking at social media.)

Thanks again for stopping by, Phoenix!!! Peeps, check out A Spoil of War here and SECTOR C here. And please stop over at Phoenix's blogs! The Animal Junkie blog just makes me happy and is full of beautiful, wonderful stories about the little four legged things that make our worlds go 'round. And like I've said NUMEROUS times, Phoenix's writing blog has helped me tremendously. Stop in and peruse her awesomeness.