I am most certainly sick: a cruise-born illness, and some anxiety dreams.

Well, denial only works for so long because I am most certainly sick. It's pretty mild, insofar as I'm cognizant and actually have a the drive to get out and do things, if only to distract myself from the annoyance of my symptoms, but my constant throat tickle has morphed into congestion from stuffy nose to sore throat, my hearing and taste are a little dull and I'm a bit achy especially in my joints (which is almost redundant atop my back pain—seriously, body, where has your originality gone?). It's annoying, and it makes me alternately desperate for distraction and allover grumpypants, but it's not really all that bad.

Mostly I'm bitter. I feel like I'm being punished for going on the damn cruise. Rational? Well, yes, that's probably where I picked up this bug. An unrealistic personification of the random whims of nature? That too. But damn if it don't make me bitter. I was good! I traveled and attended and saw people and did things, and I made sure never to touch anything in public bathrooms with my bare hands, and now I'm being struck down by the annoying cold of doom.

Sleeping is the worst time, because it gives everything a chance to settle and go from stuffy to helpIcan'tbreathe. If that weren't bad enough itself (because I'd love nothing more than to sleep all day and hurry this cold away), last night I dreamt of returning to college and the night before I dreamt of a neverending cruise. The first is my standard anxiety dream: some people end up naked in public places; I've gone back to college a hundred times. This time, I went to a school where the dorms looked like hotels and I had failed to sign up for classes—intentionally so, because classes are half the part of college that my brain is convinced that I Cannot Do. After my first day of wandering around without a schedule, fellow students took me out to lunch in this mega city where you had to wait in line for half an hour before even coming into sight of the fast food restaurants.

The endless cruise was more or less a normal cruise, except that each time we flew home something would go wrong. One time we were at luggage claim and our bags were missing, so we turned around and climbed right back on a plane to fly back for another cruise so we could find our luggage somewhere on the journey. One time we had made the entire drive home before remembering that we had to turn around and do the whole thing all over again. It was all of it, no annoyance skipped, the car ride and security and plane ride and week-long cruise and return trip and then the whole thing over again and again until I woke up.

If cruising becomes the new anxiety dream, I will not be pleased.

So yes. I am sick and bitter and grumpy about it, even if I shouldn't be surprised. Now I'm going to go read while I wait for Devon to wake up and play distracting video games and maybe feed me alphabet soup.

Book Review: Enchantress from the Stars, Sylvia Engdahl

Title: Enchantress of the Stars
Author: Sylvia Engdahl
Published: New York: Firebird, 2001 (1970)
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 286
Total Page Count: 96,207
Text Number: 276
Read Because: personal enjoyment, picked up at Holland American Line MS Eurodam's book exchange
Review: Elana is a member of an advanced interstellar civilization that studies and protects unadvanced "Youngling" civilizations. When space-faring Younglings called Imperials invade a medieval Youngling planet called Andrecia, Elana becomes involved in an attempt to rescue Andrecia—without endangering either culture, or revealing her own. Enchantress of the Stars is an ambitious book, but not always a successful one. There are three civiliazations, three points of view, two narrative styles, a wide-ranging plot and setting all couched within a framing narration, and with so much going on no one aspect is fully realized. Take for example the characters: Elana and her love interest Georgyn are admirable, realistically faulted, promising characters, but Elana's narration deadens her own character development by burdening it with excessive explanation; the interaction between these characters is satisfyingly complex—except for the crucial romantic element, which develops too easily and early, and shoulders too many plot points. These aspects are well-intended and the groundwork for their success is laid out in elements such as Elana's naivety and intelligence, Georyn's keen emotional insight, and the unique POVs which accompany each character, but they never quite come to life. This failure makes for an emotionally stunted novel—which is particularly regrettable in young adult literature.

The plot has similar lofty goals and rocky execution. Its ambition and scope is what I loved best in the book, and it makes for a young adult novel that, rather than talking down to its audience, challenges them with difficult concepts of societal and personal maturation. The carefully constructed triple narrative also makes for some strong parallelism and clever plot developments, the sort of which would be unlikely in a traditionally narrated book. But the triple narrative also makes for unfortunate repetition, the plot's tension is destroyed by the framing narration, and in between the lovely parallels and plot points are some pinprick plot holes. Why, for example, do the Imperials consider colonized natives effectively nonhuman if they study—of all things!—their psychology, which is virtually identical to the Imperials's own? Because it makes for a convenient plot point later on, of course—but while such plot holes don't render things entirely improbable, they are enough to make the plot feel more like machination than natural progression, weakening its erstwhile strengths. I nitpick, of course, but that's just my point: I went through Enchantress from the Stars constantly distracted by nitpicking; I was never absorbed by characters or motivated by plot enough to overlook the various weaknesses. It's a laudably ambitious book, intriguing for its premise alone, and at times comes rewardingly close to its goals, but more often than not it made me wish, instead, that I were reading the book that it could have been. I recommend it only moderately, mostly on the basis of what it tries to be.

Review posted here on Amazon.com.