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Yesterday, I heard an old (old) interview with one of my favorite fantasy authors, Jeffrey Overstreet.  I was going to simply post a link to it on FaceBook, but then realized that there are many other links that I’d want to include, and it would end up being something just shy of a blog post. So, er, I decided to actually write a blog post.

Now, to start you off, here’s a post that I wrote about my review of Auralia’s Colors by Jeffrey Overstreet.  The link to the actual review is in that post, but the post contains a bit of overspill that I couldn’t put directly into the actual review. This is one of the most creative and well written fantasy novels that I’ve ever read. Period.

Anyway, so, the interview that I heard is with my favorite irreverent Reverend (former reverend, actually) Steve Brown. He interviewed Jeffrey Overstreet for his (J.O.’s) first book, Through A Screen Darkly- which is a non-fic about movies. See, his day job is being a movie critic. Fiction is what he does in his off hours.

Anyway, they get into some pretty interesting discussions, and, to Steve Brown Etc’s producer’s incredible joy, brought up Empire Strikes Back. Seriously, the producer guy is a little disturbing in his devotion to Star Wars. Anyway, for those of you who enjoy talk radio, you might find the interview interesting, though my favorite parts are probably the “movie trailers” they interrupt the interview with. Such as “Nuns. With Guns.” and the touching story of a cross dressing lesbian trapped in a man’s body, and his struggle to understand why he prefers to wear men’s clothes and is attracted to women.

Now, I love that because of the interview with one of my favorite authors (it’s about 40 minutes long and about 30-35 minutes is the interview). However, Steve Brown had Jeffrey Overstreet back to discuss The Golden Compass back when the movie was still out and people actually gave a crap. Whether you care about the G.C. or not, if you’re into fantasy, it’s still pretty interesting to hear his take on it- being a fantasy novelist AND a movie critic. Really interesting combo for this type of topic. To be honest, this might have been the interview where they discussed Empire Strikes Back. It was yesterday that I listened to them, so it’s all getting a little jumbled now.

And, just because it’s easier to drop links here than to actually try to find mom’s email address and then convince her to actually read the email, I wanted mom to hear this interview with the author of What’s a Christian To Do With Harry Potter? and The Gospel According to Harry Potter. Since I’m an HP geek from way back and used to listen to MuggleNet’s weekly podcasts ALL THE TIME, I was totally into this interview and got shivers several times when Connie Neal made points that I’d totally missed in my own reading. I’d always focused on Harry as the savior figure rather than as the saved. Some of her insight totally blew me away, and made me just want to hook her up with the MuggleNet peeps just so I could hear it!

The Vanishing Sculptor is Donita K Paul’s newest novel. It’s set in the same world as her DragonKeeper Chronicles, but takes place during a much earlier time and in a country that is far removed from the Amara we got to know in her earlier books.

The Vanishing Sculptor is a story about Tipper, a young emerlindian girl (an interesting take on elves) who is forced to sell her father’s masterful works of art in order to pay the house bills for years after her father disappeared. Unfortunately for her, and the world, it turns out that 3 of the sculptures she’s sold were carved out of one of the foundation stones of the earth! She must now set out on a quest (those pesky things, awfully uncomfortable these quests are- according to Wizard Fenworth) to retrieve these statues to prevent the total disolution of the world… and her father.

Even though I really miss Sir Dar, who, in this book, has not even been born yet, I love that Wizard Fenworth is back. Yes! There is nothing better than a wizard who drops off to sleep in mid sentence and who grows bark and leaves during his snoozes, not to mention the bizarre logic he follows that would make a sidewinder jealous with all the zigs and zags it takes.

Donita K Paul writes YA fantasy, and does it very well. The quality of her writing has improved with each book, and, surprisingly, each plot is remarkably fresh. Not all stories are particularly gripping, some are naturally better than others. But they’re all unique.

Happily, she’s gotten over her habit of over-naming things. In the first book of the DragonKeeper Chronicles, EVERYTHING had a weird name. It made it extremely difficult to follow the story, or even a train of thought. Particularly when the things being named didn’t actually have anything to do with the story at all.

This began to taper off until the last few books in the series were a good standard of fantasy naming. No more than is necessary.

In The Vanishing Sculptor, Paul continues to only name what’s necessary. There are only two things that I can really find fault with (aside from the lack of Sir Dar, which was necessary), and that’s that sometimes the quest seems a little too normal. As in, they go here, and then this happens, and then they go here.  So, in my opinion, a couple of scenes could have been removed with a mention of “they continued on to such and such, obtained such and such, and then proceeded to reach the such and such”. That would have left more room for what I consider to be the good stuff to be fleshed out a bit more.

The other thing that I take issue with is that they eat daggarts in Chiril. Which, as we know, is a common treat in Amara a few centuries later. I’m willing to forgive this point by telling myself that Wizard Fenworth and Librettowit brought daggarts back to Amara from Chiril and that’s how they became popular in Amara. Remember, Chiril and Amara are across the world from each other, and so travel is prohibitive. The odds of the same cookie-type treat being popular across the world when people didn’t travel across the world is pretty slim. It’s a minor point, I know, but it irritated me while I was reading.

If you’re interested in ordering The Vanishing Sculptor, it can be ordered directly from Random House, or from your favorite large bookstore.

Addendum: Donita K Paul answered the question “If you could say one thing to aspiring novelists, what would you say?” on Christian author C.J. Darlington’s blog.

Also, I forgot to mention my other The Vanishing Sculptor review at TitleTrakk.com