Snowflake Challenge - Day 2
Jan. 3rd, 2023 08:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
flo_neljaIn your own space, write a promo, manifesto or primer for your fave character, ship or fandom.
I regularly rec things on French comms, but now it's time to rec things in English, and therefore it's also time to rec things whose original version is in French. So it's time for:
La Passe-Miroir / The Mirror Visitor
It's a series of four books (finished, and IIRC the official English translation is finished too).
It's set far in the future. Most of Earth is no longer habitable. What's left of humanity has been saved by strange gods, the family spirits, who took them on flying islands names Arks. The gods also had kids with humans, and most of the people living in the island are their descendants on some degree, and share a tiny part of their power.
Ophélie is from the Anima Ark, populated with people with powers over inanimate objects. Hers manifests in two ways: psychometry, that lets her have an idea of the feelings of people who touched an object in the past, and the ability to jump from a mirror to another (over short-ish distances, she can't jump from and Ark to another). Thanks to her first power, she manages the local museum. For now, she has rejected every marriage proposal.
She also has an adorable living scarf.
One day, the oldest women that administrate her Ark talk to her about this, and she gets forced into an arranged marriage with a man she doesn't know, from another Ark: the Pole, where people have power over the mind. She doesn't want this, and actually, he doesn't either. This is all part of a war between two factions, one trying to understand what happened exactly the day the world ended (even the family spirits have forgotten), one trying to bury this knowledge forever.
What I love in this series:
* The romance. Ophélie and Thorn have a classic arranged-marriage-to-love arc, but it's really well done, slowly advancing, credible, touching. I suspect they are both on the ace spectrum. ^^ It has moments of big drama and moments of quiet fluff. I really love how the way the describe each other technically doesn't change with time, neither of them is the super-hot kind, but the tone of the description does.
Also, Ophélie, while sympathetic, is a bit passive at the end, and Thorn is everything but passive but not very sympathetic, and the way they take on each other's good qualities? High romance.
* The worldbuilding and the way it mixes with some of the big plot reveals. Clearly the mystery about the Family Spirits and the destruction of the world was planned from the beginning, it's the kind of books where you reread and you're like "it was a hint! so early! OMG I thought it was a cliché, I've been played".
Of course, it's nice to have descriptions of the islands, their social systems and how it's impacted by the most common powers here (even if I would have liked to have all of them). But this is not the most original part, compared to what the Family Spirits themselves are.
(Spoiler: on the first 2 Arks we visit, the family spirit is white and the population mostly white. It's not the case everywhere)
* The writing style is good too! To be fair, the plot is slow sometimes, so it's nice to be able to enjoy the view when there's a stop :D
In general, it's one of the series that should be better known outside of French speaking countries!
I regularly rec things on French comms, but now it's time to rec things in English, and therefore it's also time to rec things whose original version is in French. So it's time for:
La Passe-Miroir / The Mirror Visitor
It's a series of four books (finished, and IIRC the official English translation is finished too).
It's set far in the future. Most of Earth is no longer habitable. What's left of humanity has been saved by strange gods, the family spirits, who took them on flying islands names Arks. The gods also had kids with humans, and most of the people living in the island are their descendants on some degree, and share a tiny part of their power.
Ophélie is from the Anima Ark, populated with people with powers over inanimate objects. Hers manifests in two ways: psychometry, that lets her have an idea of the feelings of people who touched an object in the past, and the ability to jump from a mirror to another (over short-ish distances, she can't jump from and Ark to another). Thanks to her first power, she manages the local museum. For now, she has rejected every marriage proposal.
She also has an adorable living scarf.
One day, the oldest women that administrate her Ark talk to her about this, and she gets forced into an arranged marriage with a man she doesn't know, from another Ark: the Pole, where people have power over the mind. She doesn't want this, and actually, he doesn't either. This is all part of a war between two factions, one trying to understand what happened exactly the day the world ended (even the family spirits have forgotten), one trying to bury this knowledge forever.
What I love in this series:
* The romance. Ophélie and Thorn have a classic arranged-marriage-to-love arc, but it's really well done, slowly advancing, credible, touching. I suspect they are both on the ace spectrum. ^^ It has moments of big drama and moments of quiet fluff. I really love how the way the describe each other technically doesn't change with time, neither of them is the super-hot kind, but the tone of the description does.
Also, Ophélie, while sympathetic, is a bit passive at the end, and Thorn is everything but passive but not very sympathetic, and the way they take on each other's good qualities? High romance.
* The worldbuilding and the way it mixes with some of the big plot reveals. Clearly the mystery about the Family Spirits and the destruction of the world was planned from the beginning, it's the kind of books where you reread and you're like "it was a hint! so early! OMG I thought it was a cliché, I've been played".
Of course, it's nice to have descriptions of the islands, their social systems and how it's impacted by the most common powers here (even if I would have liked to have all of them). But this is not the most original part, compared to what the Family Spirits themselves are.
(Spoiler: on the first 2 Arks we visit, the family spirit is white and the population mostly white. It's not the case everywhere)
* The writing style is good too! To be fair, the plot is slow sometimes, so it's nice to be able to enjoy the view when there's a stop :D
In general, it's one of the series that should be better known outside of French speaking countries!
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Date: 2023-01-03 08:50 pm (UTC)Oh, that's fascinating! Subtle writing is such a gift to experience. Thank you for sharing this!
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Date: 2023-01-04 09:10 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2023-01-04 03:38 pm (UTC)This sounds fascinating and I like that it's a complete series - so you know you're not heading into some 20+ book deal. I'm adding it to my library list.
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