I meant to remark on this a while ago, but didn’t get round to it until now: Mary Robinette Kowal has posted an excerpt of her first book, Shades of Milk And Honey. It’s great and you should read it.
One of a number of things I very much like about it is the opening paragraph:
The Ellsworths of Long Parkmead had the regard of their neighbours in every respect. The Honourable Charles Ellsworth, though a second son, through the generosity of his father had been entrusted with an estate in the neighbourhood of Dorchester. It was well appointed and used only enough glamour to enhance its natural grace, without overlaying so much illusion as to be tasteless. His only regret, for the estate was a fine one, was that it was entailed, and as he had only two daughters, his elder brother’s son stood next in line to inherit it. Knowing that, he took pains to set aside some of his income each annum for the provision of his daughters.
Openings are important and difficult and this is very nicely done indeed - I’m thinking particularly of the way glamour in the third sentence and entail in the fourth play off each other. Both words catch your attention in the same sort of way. You probably have a vague idea of what they might mean, but you don’t know any of the details of how they work or what they do.* Glamour is made up and entailment is real but they’re sort of equally familiar and unfamiliar here - entailment gets a touch of the exotic and otherworldly and glamour gets an overlay of real-world plausibility. Both seem like they’re important to the world on about the same level: a certain amount of low-key fantastic, and the ins-and-outs of inheritance and property law and money. One already gets the sense of interesting friction between the two to come. This is a very elegant way of conveying what the book’s about and what the world’s like in just the first few sentences.**
One of the other things I like about it is that Mary, an American, has been forced to spell “neighbour” with a “u”. This balances the karmic scales for the fact that I have had to Americanize all spellings in The Half-Made World. Such is the great circle of life.
* Unless you are a fairly well-informed historian, or went to law school and paid more attention in Property classes than was really, let’s face it, worth your time.
** Unless I’m wrong and from Chapter Two onwards it turns out to be about a gore-soaked Predator invasion or something. I don’t know, I don’t have a copy.
