2006 Author Reviews for
DrummerWench

DrummerWench writes excellent short stories and vignettes, and excels in extrapolating from Middle-earth\'s various cultures the kinds of fairy tales and folklore stories that might have been told. She adapts content and, perhaps to a lesser degree, tone to the people whose campfire stories she is telling and so convincingly is able to evoke the subcreative aspect of Middle-earth--its having a history proper to itself, despite being a fictional world. This also comes out in her gap-fillers, and her characters, canonical and original, are nicely drawn.

DW is a wonderfully talented author. I especially enjoy how she weaves JRRT\'s basics in new ways through typical, and more often atypical, tales - taking familiar stories and putting them in other and different, yet still familiar, formats.

I know when I get an alert from DrummerWench that I am in for a quality read--a unique blend of the otherworldly and the everyday. In \"Fairy Tales,\" the author keeps to a remarkably simple, clear language, and conveys such a wide variety of mood and feeling, from deeply sad (as in the King\'s son who mourned forever the loss of both his family and the Wood) to joyful, to scary (the Dwarf in Moria). Each is at once unique while clearly part of a whole--the sum of the whole is more than the parts. The prologue, setting the context of a book created by Sam to read to his children, works perfectly. \"The Green Flash\" evokes the sea in a way at once Elvish and reminiscent of sand castles. The tale of the Elf-maiden turned dolphin brings to mind John Sayles\' lovely movie \"The Secret of Roan Inish,\" about the Selkies of Irish legend. DrummerWench has at least one tale in the works that I know of, and it brings the same enchanting blend of magic and every day--to our century. Read Cirdan \"The Boatbuilder.\"