Daughter of Magic

I've got a new audio book just out!  It's called "Daughter of Magic," part of my Royal Wizard of Yurt series.

It's available on Audible as well as Amazon and iTunes.  You can get it for free with a trial membership in Audible, or buy it for $1.99 from Amazon if you also buy the ebook version.  And if you're an Audible listener, make it one of your choices this month!  It should soon have "Whispersync" turned on, where you can alternately read and listen, read and listen, and have your devices (Kindle and mp3 player) remember your place.

Here's the description (a ruined castle plays a prominent role):

She's the daughter of a witch and a wizard, with the talents of both - and the world had better watch out!

Daimbert the wizard just wants to spend some quality time with his daughter Antonia. He loves his peaceful kingdom of Yurt, but he and those around him are increasingly finding themselves hampered by their society's strictures and silent rules. The king doesn't want to marry any of the princesses offered to him, the duchess' twin daughters want to be respectively a knight and a priest, and Daimbert himself is forbidden by the norms of wizardry from a liaison with a witch - much less having a daughter.

And then the peaceful kingdom is suddenly not so peaceful, between the arrival of an exotic eastern princess and her elephant, a ravening wolf, an army of undead warriors, a bogus miracle worker, and an old enemy seeking vengeance.

Can Antonia save the day? She already knows how to turn someone into a frog. But she is after all only five years old. And the bogus miracle worker has a strange power over children....

An audio book (what we used to call "Books on Tape") is an interesting experience.  It gives you more of the feeling of stories-told-out-loud around the campfire than sitting and reading.  The narrator is called on to do different voices, to bring out the tension in the exciting parts, to make you want to know what happens next.  The story is told by Daimbert the wizard, and when I first heard my stories being narrated, it was an odd sensation, because in my own head of course Daimbert sounds like me.  The excellent narrator, Eric Vincent, brings out intensity I hadn't realized I'd put in.

If you've never read or listened to any of the Yurt series, you could plunge in here for a wild ride, but you might prefer to start at the beginning, with "A Bad Spell in Yurt."  Happy listening!

© C. Dale Brittain 2017

Mage Quest

The audio version of my novel "Mage Quest" has just been released, and I'm very excited.  But if you're here mostly interested in medieval history, you'll soon see some of that too.

The Royal Wizard of Yurt series, of which "Mage Quest" is part, is set in a slightly skewed version of the real Middle Ages.  In fact, I imagine that this is what medieval Europe would have become by the nineteenth century if there had been no New World to discover, no Protestant Reformation, no French Revolution, and no Industrial Revolution--plus of course working magic!

In this book, the characters are off on a quest to the fabled East.  Now, in fact, medieval Europeans knew very little about the real Middle East unless they went on Crusade or pilgrimage (and then they were shocked).  Nineteenth-century Europeans didn't know much more.  But they found the Middle East fascinating and exotic.  There was a big fad for "orientalism," anything involving harems, turbans, desert sands, mummies, palm trees, and the like.

This fascination led to the success of "Arabian Nights," especially in the Sir Richard Burton translation (no, not that Richard Burton).  In this book westerners learned about Aladdin and the lamp, Sinbad the Sailor, and many other exciting characters.

Now, in the twenty-first century, historians of the Middle East have of course gotten away from orientalism.  You can't start studying a society by assuming it's weird and exotic.  Everyone is normal to themselves, after all!

But in "Mage Quest," I have included a heavy dose of the way that the real nineteenth-century West imagined the East, as full of amazing wonders.  However, I have radically downplayed the West's negative views of Islam.  I'm not in the business of being insulting to anyone's religion.  I have also included a lot of material inspired by twelfth-century descriptions of the Holy Land and Byzantium.

Now if you're just interested in an exciting adventure story and don't want to hear about modern historians of the Middle East, you can ignore all this and just enjoy!

But if you're interested in how I shaped the backstory, the novel assumes that there was a Roman Empire equivalent long ago, but that it never actually took over the Jewish kingdoms in Palestine, and that Christians, Jews, and Muslims were able to work out their quite serious differences in subsequent centuries enough to coexist.

The audio version is narrated by Eric Vincent, who does a great job, especially with the Ifrit--a particularly large kind of djinn.  The production has music between chapters to set the mood and is just terrific.  It is available on iTunes, Audible.com, and Amazon--or, if you prefer to read it, it's available as an ebook on all major platforms as well as a physical paperback (out of print unfortunately, but used copies are available).  Let me know how you like it!

(By the way, I wrote the book over twenty years ago, long before modern on-line gaming.  Some modern video games include "mage's quest" as one of their aspects.  If you came to this page looking for gaming tips, sorry!  Maybe I should get a percentage of gaming revenues? I wish! as if that would ever happen.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2014