Sarah Monette

One book I am really really looking forward to (to the point of regularly checking Sarah Monette's livejournal blog) is Corambis, the fourth and last book in the Melusine series. It's due out in 2009 (she's supposed to finish the revisions this month), and it can't come a moment too soon for me!

This series is a really interesting one for me (well, it's interesting full-stop, but there's a particular way it's interesting for me), because when I first started the first book I found it hard-going. Our hero was a thief from the gutters, and his language seemed to me almost impenetrable initially, with so many words Monette had invented. But it was well-enough written and sufficiently intriguing to make me persevere, and I got into it, I started to know what was going on, until by the second book I couldn't remember why I'd found it so difficult initially. And the characters grew on me, in that utterly compulsive, where's-the-next-book kind of way, and when I'd read the first two books and had to wait a while for the 3rd, I was impatient. And now, having to wait so much longer for the 4th, I'm even more so, because my enjoyment of the books has deepened rather than lessened with familiarity.

Monette's website is called Labyrinthine, and it's an apt name not simply because the series is officially called The Doctrine of Labyrinths. There is something very intricate and possibly tortuous about Monette's mind, I think, and it's that that makes these books so rich and enthralling. Probably not to everyone, though. She has a number of chapters available on her website, so you can see whether you are one of them.