Where's Marissa?

Just so you know, I’m not really here.

Okay, that’s rather a cryptic statement. But as you’re reading this, I am happily traipsing around England with my family. We’re doing a whirlwind tour of southern England, starting in London and progressing through Oxford, Bath, Dartmoor, then along the south coast from Lyme Regis to the Isle of Wight and Brighton, then back to London and home. Believe me, you’ll hear all about it here on NineteenTeen in the coming weeks--I can’t wait to get back to Bath...and go fossil hunting in Lyme Regis...and I’m dying to see the Royal Pavilion (that's it above)! As you might guess, there's just a bit of a Regency slant to the places we're visiting.

Something else I’ve been anticipating for a long time is also happening right now. One of my favorite books (definitely in my all-time top five), Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, has been made into a television mini-series by the BBC.

Now, ordinarily, I would cringe—I don’t watch any TV apart from an occasional movie on DVD (hey, watching TV wastes valuable writing time!) But it actually looks like they managed to nail this 800-page glorious behemoth of a novel. It’s about an alternate Regency-era England in which magic exists, though fallen from use...until a pair of magicians arise and try to resurrect English Magic...and nearly destroy each other in the process. It’s full of a delightfully dry humor (like when Jonathan Strange temporarily moves Brussels across the Atlantic on the eve of the Battle of Waterloo to keep it safe from Napoleon), features marvelous world-building and the occasional 3-page footnote, and is just a giant confection of a book for lovers of historical fantasy. And it’s airing in Britain right now (coming to the US in July) so I’ll have a chance to catch the first two episodes while I’m here! In the meanwhile, check out the trailer:



See you soon!