Masques
Patricia Briggs
Patricia Briggs’s first novel
The first thing you need to know about Patricia Briggs‘s Masques is how it came to be. which she describes in her Introduction
One day, in the middle of my senior year of college, I decided to write a book. I’d written a few things before. Nothing so complex as an actual short story (aside from a few five-hundred-word shorts for various high-school assignments and one memorably bad story I’d written in German in lieu of a report), but scenes and scraps of dialogue. I’d never met an author, never gone to an SF convention, when I set out to write this book. And for the next few years I wrote, and rewrote, the first ten pages of my novel.
Not a promising start.
Then she moved away from her sparsely populated home state of Montana to spend a year in Chicago, and suddenly her novel became a much-needed escape from the seven and a half million people of Chicago. They returned to Montana after a year. To her surprise, she had finished the novel. To her further surprise, it sold. Well, what she really means it that it got published. Sales were poor. That was 1993.
But she kept writing, and she got better, and she continued to get published. And then along came Mercy Thompson, and she was a success. (A well-deserved success, in my judgment -- Mercy Thompson is still my all-time favorite urban fantasy series.) So, in 2010, she had the chance to publish a revised edition of Masques. And that is what we have here. The first thing she cut was those many-times-rewritten first ten pages.
It’s not great, but it’s not half bad. The characters, principally Aralorn and the wizard she calls Wolf (because that was the form in which she first knew him) are well-drawn and intriguing. World-building is sketchy.
I enjoyed reading this, but not as much as I’ve enjoyed Briggs‘s other work. I was mostly interested in it because I’m interested in where Briggs came from. I don’t think I’ll read the second book.