Chocolate Box

[cyphomandra]

I had a fabulous Chocolate Box! I received three gifts, all great:

I don’t seem to have written much about them on here, but Antonia Forest’s Marlows series (10 books about the same family, published over 34 years but covering a little over two years in book time, with each book roughly contemporary with its publication date) are hugely important to me as a reader and as a person; they are stunningly well-written, brilliant on character and, unfortunately, difficult and expensive to find. I re-read them frequently and always find something worthwhile (I’m reading Lucy Mangan’s memoir Bookworm at the moment, and it’s great to see her similar enthusiasm).

The fic I got is totally in keeping with canon, a post-series talk between Nicola (mostly the series protagonist, although she’s largely absent in The Thuggery Affair) and her adored older brother Giles, who is now fallen from grace. It’s great on character and on casting a new light back at events of the series, and at showing that Nicola is growing up, and the balance between her and Giles is starting to tip. Also, bonus naval details.

Suffer a Sea-Change (1910 words) by AJHall
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Marlows - Antonia Forest
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: Nicola Marlow, Giles Marlow, Miranda West, Ginty Marlow
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, The Royal Navy
Summary:

"That long line of naval officers, all with their happy ships..."

The name "Marlow" has been a powerful talisman in the Royal Navy for generations. What would it take for that name to change from a blessing to a curse?

On the eve of Nicola Marlow's departure for Britannia Royal Naval College, she and her brother Giles talk.

I nominated a few original prompts and got two amazing stories:

the battle is coming, I’ve been waiting so long is a great piece of hidden identities and arranged marriages, with a fantastic title, and some lovely world-building details.

the battle is coming, i've been waiting so long (1110 words) by sorori
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Original Work
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Queen Who Fought in the War/Princess of Enemy Country She's Marrying to Seal the Peace Treaty
Additional Tags: Storyteller narrator, Final Battle, Fights, Weddings, War, Battle, Identity Reveal
Summary:

“Where is your general?” Shikang asked, panting. “He is a coward if he does not come out to fight me.”

“Here,” came the answering shout, and she was far from a coward.

and Blades has a would-be fighter and an older world-weary mentor, both female and both tropes I am very fond of, as well as lots of extremely tasty-sounding baking, which, ditto. Very nice.

Blades (1215 words) by kalirush
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Original Work
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Older Woman from Proud Alien Warrior Culture & Half-Human Teenage Girl Who Wants To Learn To Fight
Additional Tags: Baking, a lot of butter
Summary:

Ulli goes looking for a mentor: the legendary Aellaria Sunkiller.

I’m still working through the archive, but there’s a lot of great fiction and art there, and I hope to come back with some more recs.

For my own assignment I matched with thisbluespirit on Sid Halley and his father-in-law Charles Roland from Dick Francis, which I’d seen in the tagset and been very much taken with. I re-read Odds Against and Whip Hand for inspiration (I have these in a double edition that inexplicably published them in the wrong order, so the first time I read them I was quite confused) and read Come to Grief for the first time and thought it was fantastic. However, all the ideas I was getting were a) novel-length and b) required quite a bit of horse-research. So I went back to thisbluespirit’s prompts, and saw that she’d also nominated Sapphire and Steel, a canon I love dearly but have never written for, and found this important footnote - “I never not want random fantastical stuff in my mundane canons and having sensible people deal with the ridiculous in whatever way works for them.” So I had my concept. I rewatched some Sapphire and Steel and thought about time, and places and objects, and ended up with ships and bells.

I had my usual problems getting the start right - I had quite a bit of Sid riding in (and losing) a race based on the Carlisle Bell, the oldest British horse race (tweaked to make it jump rather than flat), and then a few chunks of Charles unconscious in hospital while Sid went back to Aynsford and encountered strange individuals, and then the deadline loomed over me like an iceberg and I finally found my way in. Many, many thanks to my betas, especially sovay who had less than 24 hours to look at it.

Stalk On (6074 words) by Cyphomandra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Sid Halley - Dick Francis, FRANCIS Dick - Works, Sapphire and Steel
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Sid Halley & Charles Roland | Charles Rowland, Sapphire/Silver/Steel (S&S), Sapphire & Silver & Steel (S&S)
Characters: Sid Halley, Charles Roland | Charles Rowland (Dick Francis), Sapphire (S&S), Silver (S&S), Steel (S&S)
Additional Tags: Crossover, Case Fic, Timeline Shenanigans, The Royal Navy
Summary:

Far up in the stretches of night; night splits and the dawn breaks loose;
I, through the terrible novelty of light, stalk on, stalk on;
Those great sea-horses bare their teeth and laugh at the dawn.

W.B. Yeats, High Talk

Sid spends another pleasant evening at Aynsford.

Comments

[sovay]

I don’t seem to have written much about them on here, but Antonia Forest’s Marlows series (10 books about the same family, published over 34 years but covering a little over two years in book time, with each book roughly contemporary with its publication date) are hugely important to me as a reader and as a person; they are stunningly well-written, brilliant on character and, unfortunately, difficult and expensive to find.

I know it can be difficult to write about very important books, but I've never even heard of this series and its handling of time sounds fascinating. Can I ask you to say more?

[cyphomandra]

I know it can be difficult to write about very important books, but I've never even heard of this series and its handling of time sounds fascinating. Can I ask you to say more?

In the dim past (sadly before I got into the habit of emailing all my stuff to myself as backup) I wrote a 10K word essay on this, so I certainly *could* - but in the interests of time, I think Forest was - possibly unusually for a children's author - not interested in nostalgia. She did write two historical Marlows books, about an ancestor who runs away from home and joins Shakespeare's company, but with her contemporary books she wasn't interested in recreating an increasingly distant past and went instead for keeping the characters consistent but their setting updated with each book. So the first few are very much post-WWII (one character keeps bringing up her shell-shock from being trapped in a house in London during the Blitz) but then those explicit references fade away, although that character still - as she did with the Blitz experience - dwells on trauma and makes it far more of a thing than her siblings do). Then The Thuggery Affair came out in 1965 and has extremely detailed period slang that I think she mostly invented ("Belshazzar it, herbert!" is how one character instructs another to look at a wall), wrapped around a half-term adventure involving drug-smuggling via pigeon by a gang of Teds; Run Away Home, the last book, came out in 1982, and we have punks instead. Four of the books are set at Kingscote, a girls' school (the Marlows as a family comprise two boys and six girls), and the rest in the holidays.

Most centre around Nicola, one of the youngest and an identical twin, and identity keeps coming up again through the series - probably my favourite, Peter's Room, has the characters pretending to be people inspired by the Brontës' Gondal, in a snowy winter, and deals with the fallout from the slippage that takes place between their real and pretend selves, and how each character gets very different things from their alternate self. Even in the other books, though, there's a lot of focus on character. What she was interested in was what sort of person you were, not what time you came from.

Antonia Forest was a pen name for Patricia Rubinstein - parents were Russian Jewish and Irish, although she converted to Catholicism. The books also deal with religion - there's an excruciating but funny argument between Lawrie (Nicola's twin, obsessed with acting and not good with anything outside that) and Miranda (not related, Jewish) about whether Jesus was Jewish, and why Miranda is excluded from the school (Anglican) Christmas play that has a lot more depth than most children's books of that time. And then there's a lot of death (the body-count is surprisingly high when you tot it up), and literary references, and theatre...

And although a recent publisher (Girls Gone By) did reprints they seem to have been opposed to ebooks, as otherwise I'd send you some. However, one of the early books - Marlows and the Traitor - is on archive.org here

[thisbluespirit]

I am now inevitably intrigued by the stories I didn't get! But I very much loved the one I did, so that's all right. I read the Sid Halley books out of order, too, but then, as I said, over on AO3, I actually started with fic and the TV series.

“I never not want random fantastical stuff in my mundane canons and having sensible people deal with the ridiculous in whatever way works for them.”

I am always so delighted when people take me at my word on this. (I think the main other time in exchanges was when somebody once wrote me Mary-Lou from the Chalet School encountering a ghost for Yuletide.)

I'm very glad you got something excellent as a gift too!