Hah hah haha!!! You tried to read Celia Dart-Thornton! Hah haha hah!!! (I read about ten pages of The Ill Made Mute)

"About ten pages" seems to be as much of Dart-Thornton as anyone can take in one dose.

Fuck me. That's ... awful. That's unspeakable. That book needs to be burned at the stake for crimes against words. And for the record, Mary Gentle is excellent - she is very very very long but she's also very very very good. I particularly love Sundial in a Grave: cross-dressing, fencing, maths, time-travel, BDSM and Samuri. Can't go wrong.

Oooh, maths, time-travel, and Samurai? Are there ninjas? Please tell me there are ninjas...

"Cecilia, you're breaking my heart..."

Maybe the hero thought if he disoriented his family with synonyms they wouldn't realize he was telling them things that would have been obvious to all of them for years. Too bad it didn't work.

*amused* If only he'd prefaced it with "As you know..." because that *always* works in fantasy (cf. "As you know, your father the king...")

Being a horrendous pedant, I actually found the lumpiness, the wordiness, the staginess, the implausibility, and the posturing of that paragraph significantly less objectionable than the sentence, "Everyone wants to protect their loved ones". After all, it is just about conceivable that a teenager in a pseudo-medieval fantasy world might express himself in a lumpy, wordy, stagey, implausible, posturing way. But no one who says "gramercie" would ever use "they" as a singular pronoun.

No, no, I totally feel your pain. The moment that completely and totally soured me on the LotR's movies was the bit when Theoden buries his son with all due Anglo-Saxon ceremony and it's all very moving and authentic and they put him a burial mound and everything. And then, while weeping, the King declares: "No parent should have to bury their child." And that just makes me want to scream and throw things. I usually don't talk about it though because people look at me like I'm some manner of anal freak for hating it as passionately (and I do mean passionately) as I do.

But no one who says "gramercie" would ever use "they" as a singular pronoun.

Nor, for that matter, would they use the phrase "loved ones", which as far as I can tell dates back to 1948.

Yeah, the use of "gramarye" to mean "magic" also got me annoyed, because it's so incredibly pointless. Throwing the odd archaic word into a sentence is not a quick and easy way to make your characters speak in an archaic idiom only actually writing in an archaic idiom can actually do that. Such things are both difficult and arguably not quite as worthwhile as they seem; the reason I gave up reading William Morris's The Well At the World's End is that, while it was a competent imitation of Malory's writing style, it didn't really replicate Malory's worldview in the way that Morris was clearly aiming for, because at the end of the day it was written by a 19th Century wallpaper designer, not a medieval knight going out of his mind in the Tower of London. Especially when it comes to light escapism, there's absolutely nothing wrong with writing in a modern style to speak to your contemporaries, because you are, after all, writing for a 21st century audience, and cannot claim to be anything other than a 21st century writer. We can't, in this day and age, write a "new" Greek tragedy or Viking saga, because they're products of cultures and viewpoints which we can only, at best, approximate today. Then again, Cervantes would never have been able to write One Hundred Years of Solitude and no Icelandic bard could have come up with A Wizard of Earthsea.