Blog Tour: Sea Queen's Daughter by Ellis Drake

Today I'm excited to have a great up new author on my blog, Ellis Drake.  In the last year I've had the chance to read four other novellas by Ellis and really enjoyed the range of mysteries and stories that she's written.  In her newest, The Sea Queen's Daughter, she takes on a great adaptation of the fairytale of The Little Mermaid.

Here's a short summary of the tale:  On a barge anchored in the middle of the Adriatic, Marco Lorendan meets a mysterious and beautiful woman. His fascination for her is sealed when she saves him from drowning and then disappears into the sea. Is she dead, or simply lost? Marco is determined to find out.

Living beneath the waters of the lagoon, Serena can change into whatever form she chooses, but cannot change her fate: to die in an ancient ritual that goes back to the founding of Venice. Serena wants to live in the human world with Marco, but will she save herself if it means the destruction of Venice?




Here is my Q&A with Ellis today here at One Literature Nut:

I know that Venice is famous for its glass work.  Since you had Serena craft her mask into this masterful glass piece, first, did you do that on purpose?  Also, being the artist that you are, were you picturing anything in particular with it?

In the opening scene, I wanted everything about Serena to be strange and magical, so naturally the mask she wore had to be of a unique, fanciful material. Glass was an obvious choice because of its associations with Venice and because glass masks didn't exist—they would be too heavy to wear all the time. Most masks were made of paper and were very light, because you literally could not go out in public without a mask during Carnevale, which by the 18th century went on for six months out of the year. So the more common masks like the bauta had to be comfortable, relatively cheap, and disposable. Of course, Serena's supernatural so she doesn't have a problem with wearing an impractical glass mask.

As for what the mask looked like, I vaguely modeled it off an Ancient Mesopotamian statue that some scholars believe represents the Sumerian moon goddess, Inanna.

Is the legend behind this story an actual legend? I'm just curious where it came from.

The legend about the founding of Venice and the reason behind the Doge's annual Marriage of the Sea is something I made up so I could include the Ascension Day ceremony in the story. In actuality, the Marriage of the Sea started as a celebration of a military victory—or so they say.

Are you planning to set another story in Venice?

You never know! I'd love to write about Giacomo Casanova, one of the most fascinating people in history. Venice has such a rich culture and complex history that the possibilities for stories set there are endless.

Thank you so much to Ellis for dropping in today!  Please check out The Sea Queen's Daughter and drop by her site at http://ellisdrake.blogspot.com/ to learn about her other novellas and writing. 

Double Review: Two NetGalley Novellas

Quite awhile ago, I joined Netgalley, but then lost sight of what it was all about and let it go.  Sadly, I think that I found it too tricky with my Kindle to figure out how or if I could download books and what my responsibilities really were.  Now that I have my iPad, I have no problems accessing just about any ebook out there, so that issue has been resolved.  As for responsibility, so to say, I think I have that figured out as well and started off slow with a couple of novellas that I thought I'd try out while I was on vacation.  Really what can be better than a short novella to give you that escape factor in a short amount of time, so for me, this was a nice way to start out.

Both novellas that I chose were short romance reads, which it seems dominates this format.  Am I right?  Both were actually pretty different from one another, but both were easy to get into quickly and to finish in a short amount of time.

When Harriet Came Home by Coleen Kwan is essentially about Harriet Brown's return to her small hometown in Australia.  As a grown woman who overcame her shy, nerdy-girl teen years, Harriet just couldn't overcome the anxiety she felt around her high school crush Adam.  That wasn't all that had her stumped though, as she was also responsible for exposing that same crush's mayor father for his infidelities and corruption.  In essence, she blew apart Adam's life and now had to face all of that in returning to help her own ailing father.

This was a classic romance tale where said girl changes for the better and catches the eye of yesteryear's hottie.  There is a nice amount of tension, with a fast moving story, sometimes believable and sometimes not.  Either way, it was a fairly clean read with plenty of romantic tension to keep you turning pages.  Adam seemed like a character I couldn't quite figure out, but I liked that he was so into Harriet, regardless of their past.  In a lot of ways, he is that man that women hope exists, in that he's sexy and aloof, but completely able to commit and be vulnerable at the same time.  (Could we call that a true oxymoron in male terms?)

Three Days, Two Nights by M.J. Frederick was way more graphic where the first novella was subtle.  What I found to be shy or tense in the first novella was completely different in the second.  In this novella, Nathan is trying to reconnect with his ex-wife Tess.  With a long, complicated back story in the military that led Nathan to put his wife on the back burner as he dealt with difficulties of his career, Tess had moved on to become a powerful career woman in her own right.  Nathan found an opportunity to conveniently step in to pilot her jet to a work retreat, wherein he hoped to renew his love for Tess and to make up for past hurts.  Like the perfect storm that it was, the plane hit bad weather and ended up stranded in paradise.  During that time, if Nathan couldn't win Tess back, then he had much more to worry about than a plane that had gone down and food shortage.

First off, I have to say that this was a pretty steamy, graphic read.  The characters are guarded and unsettled enough to create an instant tension and chemistry that it doesn't take more than a chapter or two to get where the story is going.  Tess is pretty wounded though, so in this short amount of space, Nathan had to prove that he had not only changed, but that he wanted her back.  The mode of getting those points across were pretty physical, so I'm thinking that the healing was more of a sexual kind than an actual working through of the core issues.  The tension in the story was well established, and what little we knew about the back story between these two was frame worked, but I will admit to wishing we had more emotional details worked out between the two characters in this short amount of time and space.

Both novellas were an interesting dive into using Netgalley and super vacation friendly with their length in page numbers.  To their credit, I think that Netgalley's site is extremely easy to use and has a great variety of books to choose from.  For me, this was just a start and I hope to read a lot more from them in the future.