Belatedly found time to get back here and saw above – have been falling about with glee and giggles. Did you ever finish the book? and what happend to the review or did I miss it somewhere in here later?

BW and ta for that encouragement!

SK

Sue Lange sent me the URL for this – I was really chuffed that you liked Alight so much, I can tell you. And that other people are also big on pouty pleasure slave boys, snicker.
Esp. pleased you liked the big battle scenes, “based on” as they say in the movies, some of the literally epic battles and sieges in Hannibal’s war with Rome – I had a lot of fun with those in a backhanded way, so it’s a kick that a reader liked them too.

In pedantic academic style, though, I shd. just pick up one point: the Houses don’t actually “cut” – quarry – qherrique while the cutter is menstruating. Rather, it’s done at the dark of the moon, by someone who herself is in her “moon-dark” – ie. in the two or three days prior her period, the paramenstruum.
As for hurt/comfort alert, yeah, I was considerably startled when I did read Russ on slash-fic, after I was fully into the SF part of my PhD, a coupla years after I wrote the draft of this novel. At the time of this one I had only been thinking about/ noticing the “damaged hero” syndrome in what was then called Female Gothic – daughters of *Jane Eyre*, basically – from the first half of the PhD.

When Lois (Bujold) read Alight – somewhere round ’02 – she also commented on the echoes of fanfic, which at the time rather startled me, since I’d read Russ by then, but still hadn’t read any fanfic for myself. Supports the theoretical arguments about straight women and the hurt/comfort syndrome very nicely, heh.

Hope you will also like *Riversend*, the sequel, due out in November, which Paula Guran at Juno reckons will “spook” everyone. No more pouty slaveboys, alas, but lots of angst, all the same…
Best wishes and thanks again

SK