A peak into The Seventh Bride and The Quiet World

For this week's Book Beginnings on Friday, hosted by Rose City Reader here is the start of the novella The Seventh Bride by T. Kingfisher (aka Ursula Vernon)

Her name was Rhea. 

Her father said that she had been named after a great and powerful goddess of the old days, the queen of all the gods, but in that country at that time, there weren't many books about gods. There were too many problems with wizards and fairies and odd things popping up in the corners of the potato field for anyone to want to invite more supernatural intervention.


Just FYI: Rhea was the Titan goddess of fertility and motherhood, described as "the supreme goddess" and "mother of all gods and men." She was the daughter of Uranus and Gaea and was married to her brother Cronus - the one who kept swallowing all his children until Rhea managed to hide her last child Zeus and give Cronus a rock, wrapped in a blanket, to swallow instead.

For non-fiction, since there is a couple of feet of snow out there, here is the start to The Quiet World: Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom 1879-1960 by Douglas Brinkley ...

Young Theodore Roosevelt could barely believe his good fortune. Taking a long break from studying for his Harvard University entrance exams in Manhattan, he headed to Long Island for an outdoor ramble in the calming woods. A dedicated birder, the seventeen year-old Roosevelt was hoping to add a couple of new species to his growing North American list. Suddenly, Roosevelt heard a faint barking hoot and looked up.

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For The Friday 56 hosted at Freda's Voice something from the 56% mark of The Seventh Bride ...

She shoved her hands in her pockets. The hedgehog prickled against her fingers. 

"Do you want me to put you down?" she asked. "I'm about to do something very stupid." 

The hedgehog turned a bright eye up towards her and shrugged, as if to indicate that perhaps it was the time for very stupid acts. 

{anything more would be a spoiler.}

And from The Quiet World page 56:

The Chugach National Forest – a subpolar rain forest – was perhaps Roosevelt's most ambitious move with regard to conservation. Throughout the Chugach Mountains, which provided Anchorage with an ideal natural backdrop, rivers and creeks interlaced with snowfields, salmon wove their way the Gulf of Alaska, wolverines (Gulo gulo) and bears were on the prowl, and explorers could easily get lost in whipping mists and rain squalls. Geographic features were named after animals: for example, Ptarmigan Lake and Caribou Creek. (All around the Kenai Peninsula, there were natural features eventually named after former U.S. presidents, such as Harding Icefield and Grant Lake.) Overnight the Chugach became the northernmost addition to the portfolio of the U.S. Forest Service; there were many gurgling creeks and milky blue-green rivers that nobody had yet named. All along Resurrection Creek, however, could be found the scars of mining. Heaped-up cobble and gravel marred the riverbeds.

Happy Friday!