Dragonjek's Recommendations #2 · 3:15pm Sep 25th, 2015
Hiya.
Recommending a novel this time. A real novel, not a novel-length fanfiction.
Written in Red, by Anne Bishop
This is the story of a girl blessed/cursed (very heavily leaning towards the second) with the rare ability to tell the future when she bleeds. Of course, this is ridiculously valuable, and people like her are basically enslaved into compounds where they are bred and bled to produce prophecy for anyone filthy rich enough to by the future.
The story starts with this girl--who decides to call herself Meg Corbyn--escaping from this facility. Knowing the resources available to the organization hunting her, she flees to the only safe place she can think of, one that no sane human would normally consider "safe": the local Courtyard of the Others.
For, you see, this is set in an alternative Earth, where humanity is not the only sentient species; the Others, which I can only describe as the Fae brought to more frightening levels, have dominated most of the planet. The history of humankind has been one of conflict against the Others, one that usually ends with humans being eaten. But eventually, humanity began to offer benefits to the Others that opened up possibilities of trade, eventually resulting in the establishment of Courtyards, Other enclaves set in human cities to help them understand (and keep close watch over) humans.
Not having the typical mindset of a human due to her horrific upraising, she manages to find a little niche for herself in the Courtyard. But she is very, very valuable, and the organization that owns her doesn't like losing its property--or anyone outside their clientele knowing they exist at all.
The sections written in the perspective of Other characters are amazing--Bishop manages to capture what perceptions and thoughts a genuinely inhuman being might have. No matter how sympathetic the characters become, you always know that they aren't just people with a few special powers, or even just cultural differences--they are Other.
I'll avoid going deeper than this (it may look like a lot of information, but pretty much all of this comes from the back of the book and the first chapter), but it's an incredible story that I can't recommend enough.
