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Book Review (SERIES): The Boar King’s Honor

Erin Penn Leave a comment

A wonderful historic fantasy romance series, following a cursed family line through time, skip-stone hopping from the early modern period of the 1700s, touching on the Regency period, and finally landing in the 1940s. Written by the very talented Nancy Northcott.

The Boar King’s Honor by Nancy Northcott

  1. The Herald of Day
  2. The Steel Rose
  3. The King’s Champion

Amazon Cover

BOOK BLURB ON AMAZON for THE HERALD OF DAY

A wizard’s fatal mistake
A king wrongly blamed for murder
A bloodline cursed until they clear the king’s name

In 17th-century England, witchcraft is a hanging offense. Tavern maid Miranda Willoughby hides her magical gifts until terrifying visions compel her to seek the aid of a stranger, Richard Mainwaring, to interpret them. A powerful wizard, he sees her summons as a chance for redemption. He bears a curse because an ancestor unwittingly helped murder the two royal children known as the Princes in the Tower, and her message uses symbols related to those murders.

Miranda’s visions reveal that someone has altered history, spreading famine, plague, and tyranny across the land. The quest to restore the timeline takes her and Richard from the glittering court of Charles II to a shadowy realm between life and death, where they must battle the most powerful wizard in generations with the fate of all England at stake.

MY REVIEW for THE HERALD OF DAY

Paranormal romance. Historical Urban Fantasy. Illuminati level behind the scenes magic. Political intrigue. Class discussion. Courtly love. Ghosts. Curses. Illusions.

Nancy Northcott has created a magical world in England about a cursed noble family summoned by a scullery maid to defeat a time-traveling wizard who hides in the death world on one hand and the class-divide overcome-by-love slow-burn between the head of the noble house and the magic-wielding servant on the other.

Come for the magic, stay for the love. Come for the historical romance, stay for the vivid wizard duel in the ghost realm. The Herald of Day is the best of both worlds. (Fully – I got chocolate with my peanut butter, and maybe a bit of hazelnut too – type of vibe.)

 

Amazon Cover

BOOK BLURB ON AMAZON for THE STEEL ROSE

A wizard’s misplaced trust
A king wrongly blamed for murder
A bloodline cursed until they clear the king’s name

Amelia Mainwaring, a magically Gifted seer, is desperate to rescue the souls of her dead father and brother, who are trapped in a shadowy, wraith-filled land between life and death as the latest victims of their family curse. Lifting the curse requires clearing the name of King Richard III, who was wrongly accused of his nephews’ murder because of a mistake made by Amelia’s ancestor.

MY REVIEW for THE STEEL ROSE

I’m merrily reading historical magical fantasy, with Seers and Dragons (so far illusions in the Boar’s King Honor series) and Villains and Elves (different series – the Wolf and the Nun by Emily Leverett), against the backdrop of real history -and then hit this gem. Yes, it is historical fantasy, but it is also a full-blown Regency Romance too!

A second-chance romance where Amelia (a Seer) and Julian (the leader of the Merlin Club) don’t trust love after losing their first spouses to disease and infidelity. A political thriller when Napoleon’s return from exile brings another war to loom over Britain. A magical mystery investigating an ancient blood curse. All in the goodness of a Regency setting.

Each book of the series works as a stand-alone, but they also build in time-order as one expects of history. On to book 3!

Amazon Cover

BOOK BLURB ON AMAZON for THE KING’S CHAMPION

American reporter Kate Shaw and English Major Sebastian Mainwaring clash from the moment they meet on the beach at Dover. Kate has just escaped the hellscape of Dunkirk with a troop of English soldiers when Sebastian turns up, seizes her camera, and refuses to give it back. Kate needs the photos inside to prove to her boss back home that England’s fight against Hitler is a story worth covering and that she, woman or not, is the reporter to write it. Sebastian sympathizes, but controlling information about the war is his job.

Then Sebastian discovers that he and this infuriating American have a deeper connection and a mutual strength that could turn the tide of the war. Like Sebastian, Kate is a descendant of the Mainwaring line of powerful English wizards. Adopted at birth, she is Sebastian’s distant cousin. But unlike Sebastian, she has never known her miraculous flashes of “intuition” are something much more. She’s a practical farm girl who thinks magic is a fairy tale. Somehow Sebastian has to convince her to acknowledge and develop her gifts so together they can save the world.

The King’s Champion concludes Nancy’s Northcott’s exciting Boar King Trilogy.

MY REVIEW for THE KING’S CHAMPION

Each book of the series became progressively harder to read, not because of the Fantasy (wonderful magic world-building) or Romance (each of the couples are wonderful combinations of duty and devotion), but because the History keeps moving forward to our present times and mirrors today’s problems and battles closer and closer.

Early modern history in the 1700s – lovely. Regency romance dealing with the Napoleonic wars, with a charismatic despot gathering a following, much harder. And finishing book three on April 15, 2025, a story set in World War Two, rising against Hitler, the fall of France, watching rationing cutting into day-to-day life, and London being bombed – well, that was devastating. How are we letting the trains run again? History tells us where all this leads.

This wonderful historic fantasy romance didn’t provide an escape from reality for me, though it might for some. And, hopefully, it will easily provide enjoyment in the future. Well researched, a good ending for the series and also works as a stand-alone. Published in 2023 (and likely written in 2022), the author did a wonderful job for the time she was living in.

The strong female character, Kate, is an American war correspondent, or trying to be. Her bosses are extremely worried about a “girl” in the war zone. The male lead served in the military but has become disabled from a war injury. Together they must solve overcome pain and family expectations, support Britain in a time of war, resolve an ancient family curse, and, maybe, fall in love.

Flash: Career Day Options

Erin Penn Leave a comment

ID 224354623 © David Wood | Dreamstime.com

“Stuart, time for school,” Mom shouts up the stairs.

Checking to make sure all the books I need for today are in the clear backpack, I notice the red binder for permission slips is still on my desk. “Shit, I forgot today is career day.” I grab the folder and shrug the pack onto my back, racing down the steps, passing by my sister taking down the laundry.

She graduated last year when she turned thirteen. Lucky her. Guys have to stay in city-school until sixteen. Girls switch to support-school, which was only a half day. Like I said, lucky.

Waving the red folder at Mom as I approach, she grabs a pen from the table where everyone dumps things when they come in. “Long night?” I comment; I really shouldn’t but the bags under her eyes had bags. The baby we got assigned as part of Angela’s support-training had colic so the woman-folk of the house spent the night walking the tyke around to keep it quiet while me and Mom’s latest deployment husband got the needed rest to do our jobs right.

Hey, school is a job! Especially, once they had peeled off the girls to support-school. I hope Angie gets extra credit for Red Face so she doesn’t end up like Mom, forced to marry an Army Unit and provide comfort whenever one of them was between deployments. A permanent match was so much better.

She was smart. And a really good cook. It could happen, even for a girl from the Northside.

Well, we would find out next month when she hits fourteen and goes up for matching.

Speaking of matches, “Thanks for the sign-off,” I grab back the folder from Mom. “I really hope the recruiters like me. I did well on all the tests.”

Her sad smile as she clicks the pen close twists my gut. “I hope you get what you want too.”

Today is the day everything will be decided for me. I give her a hug before running out the door.

I know, what am I doing hugging her at fifteen? I’m nearly a man. Well, I don’t hug her much anymore, but today it just felt right, okay?

I join the men-folk and other school-age kids at the bus stop. All the kids have clear-packs like mine, as required by the Department of Education and Patriotism Instruction. Donald and Bobby have the back of theirs lined in some bulletproof fabric, but the Millers always put on airs. The dingy, smoggy pre-dawn hour carries the diesel fumes from the extra generators needed at the nearby datacenter where their dad, they only had one, lucky dogs, works as a manager. Mom started with one, but after he died and the Every Man Every Woman Act passed in ’31, she got paired with 19th Battalion.

The bus is only ten minutes late, which means I got to the school forty-five minutes early for morning cardio. But better than taking the seven o’clock red-line and arriving thirty minutes late, if it even had room for the kids which most days it did not. Working men get first shot at the seats.

Anyway, I had time to drop my stuff off in the locker and hang with the boys. Our half-year class of ’42 would be graduating come December, the early class of ’42 long dispersed into their assignments.

“What are you going to try for, Donny?” I drop beside him on the bleachers waiting for the coaches to show up.

Donny is different from Donald Miller, who was different from Vance-Donald, etc. Some days it seems like half my class is named Donald, but it is actually only nine of them. Donny and I team up and go door-to-door getting cyber-coins for moving stuff and fixing things. For the last week, he had been bouncing a lot of ideas around, but today is the day.

“Oh, I’m hoping I can qualify for votech.” He rubs his jeans. “I think I could do good working in mechanics. The last set of aptitude tests say machinist would be a good fit.”

“What we talking ‘bout?” Mike falls on the metal seat to Donny’s other side. Then he responds to himself as he twirls the pencil he always carries with him. His brain hears things a couple seconds behind everyone else. “Machinist. Nah. They ain’t matching Northside fodder with glitter unless your dad already gots the job. You’re Army, like the rest of us.”

“I’m planning Navy.” I declared.

Both of them laughed. “You? You hate getting caught in the rain. Being surrounded by water? Bah-ha-ha.”

“Alright fodder chumps.” The two uniformed coaches show up exactly at seven-fifty-five. “Down for twenty, then we run stairs.”

And like that, we in the dirt doing pushups.

When the girls were around, we only had to do the run. And, we only had to run on the track. I miss those days.

***

At the door to the library, I turned over the sheet my mom signed emancipating me so I could sign up for a career to start the day after I turn sixteen in February. I inhale deep and step into the carpeted area. This is it. The rest of my life.

The tables normally set around the library had been lined up in front of the bookcases. The recruiters were sitting behind the tables, and my classmates stand in front of them hustling for the best options they could get. Army has the north wall and most of the boys are there, including Donny. I glance around and don’t see any options other than military. Marines, ICE, National Guard, Internal Enforcement Patrol. And the one table I care about which combines Space Force, Air Force, and Navy in all their flavors.

I frown as I walk over to their little corner of the world. The summer crowd got the Federal Teamsters from the Department of Interstate Transport as well as City Services recruiters. Did our tests not qualify for government work to meet our ten years of civil service, or are they beefing up the ranks to invade Canada or Mexico again?

I hope it is Canada. Whenever they do Mexico, the stores stop getting fresh produce for a while.

I stop at the Navy table where the two men sit chatting to each other. After a moment, when they don’t stop talking about one of them qualifying for Comfort Matching, I wave at them and say, “Hey, guys.”

The one beside the computer sighs and says, “Name.”

“Um, okay. It’s Robert Kennedy Hamilton.”

He types my name in. “Birthday February 9th?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t qualify. Go over to Army.” The computer guy turns back to the other guy and starts talking again. “Get the youngest one you can for your cyber. Train her up right.”

I interrupt, trying not to think about my sister ending up with someone like them. “Hey, now. I’ve seen my aptitude tests, I qualify for Navy, especially the Seabees.”

“They upped the standards kid, you don’t qualify.”

“But—”

“You don’t qualify. Go join the foot soldiers.”

“Could you at least tell me how close I am to qualification?” I don’t like the whine in my voice. It sets my voice cracking, but I have to know.  “I got a month left, maybe I can raise something.”

The other guy, the one with wings on his shoulders shook his head. “No can-do my guy. Just go over there. Everyone here is going into the same barracks come December 26th. Just roll with it.”

I blink and start walking over to the Army table.

I don’t get a choice.

I watch as my classmates get turned away from all the other tables but Army.

None of us are getting a choice.

(words 1,299, published 6/15/2025)

Editing Rant: Everything at its Time

Erin Penn Leave a comment

Photo by Emil Widlund on Unsplash

One of the constant “micro” edits I need to do while copyediting or developmental editing is making sure the story is always moving forward, even on the paragraph and sentence level. No stutter steps back and forth. The story should push forward like a train running down the tracks in genre fiction.

What do you mean by that, Erin? you ask. Isn’t there backstory and flashbacks and information sharing happening all the time. The time order of a story is a web going back, forth, and all around, more a ball of yarn after kittens play with it than a linear if-then series without any side quests.

Absolutely past lore and character history are shared once the story starts, but the backstory is released when the information is needed in the next scene. Flashbacks happen when a pause in the rollercoaster emotion is needed to climb to the next drop, the flashbacks adding to the hill, pulling the train up the tracks.

Writing, drafting, and editing creates the track to keep the story pushing forward.

Particular to the micro-edits and the order of things, ensure when describing action to always have the activity in the order it happened. Don’t make your reader stop and reedit the scene’s action in their head.

Three examples (pulled from recent edits, adjusted to make generic):

  1. “Do you mind if I light a fire?” He asked once the shutters were latched.
  2. He started to get out of bed, and the woman did as well, offering her hand to him to help him stand, even though she was much shorter and lighter. The previous battle had left him bruised.
  3. MC woke from a nightmare of fear and forked lightning. Flashes and flying fiends sent them diving and dodging, ducking behind spindly spider statues. The dreamscape consumed them as they ran to friends and family always out of reach.

Each of these cases has a problem with the action sequence being out of order.

In the first case, the character is asking a question of the people in the room, but after the dialog, the reader needs to back up to the character closing the windows. This particular example is the classic stutter-step within a sentence, one forward then one back.

It would be better worded:

Once the shutters were latched, he asked, “Do you mind if I light a fire?”

The second example is confusing, leaving a question of who got out of bed first, the man or the woman? Because, how is she offering her hand to help him stand if he got out of bed first? He was mentioned first, so the reader would assume he was first out of bed. At the end, backstory is doled out explaining why she is helping him stand. If everything was in Time Order the paragraph, it would read like:

The previous battle had left the man badly bruised. The woman in bed with him got out of bed first and offered her hand to help him stand, even though she was much shorter and lighter.

As you can see, some rewording was needed to make it work. But editing is not about making everything Time Order linear, but also polishing the storytelling so that Everything is at its Time. Why the man is having problem getting out of bed should be supplied AFTER we see the issue of getting out of bed.

The woman got out of bed, and when he started as well, she offered her hand to him to help him stand, even though she was much shorter and lighter. The previous battle had left him bruised.

In this case, the NOW action needed to flow in time order, and the backstory information dropped to fill in the hole to make the sequence more immersive. The reader sees the action, and then the details of the white-room and new-characters get painted in.

The final of the three examples starts with the character waking from a dream, then describing the dream as though the character was still in the process of dreaming it. Either the character is awake or the character is dreaming in most stories, even in most genre fiction stories. In this manuscript for storytelling purposes, having the MC remembering the dream instead of having it happen in story-NOW-time would be better. The verb tense needs to change to past perfect.

Adjusted the paragraph reads as follows:

MC woke from a nightmare of fear and forked lightning, the emotions and images lingering in the morning twilight. Flashes and flying fiends had sent them diving and dodging, ducking behind slimy spindly spider statues. The dreamscape had consumed them as they ran to friends and family always out of reach.

Most genre fiction is written in “simple past” which expresses past actions, usually in sequential order. “Past perfect” is “past of the past”, describing an action or event that took place before the action being described by the (simple) past tense. By changing the verb tense, the reader is clued in through grammar on the time order of the sequence of the events.

As you can see, each Time Order issue needed a different solution, from a simple reorder of the sentence to tapping into grammar structure so an English reader understands what has happened.

The three original examples would leave a reader confused, reordering things in their head. The edited changes keep the information in order, the NOW time-sequence moving forward, and gives storytelling a chance to expand the reader’s imagery as needed.

Everything at its Time, with the train rushing forward on the roller coaster of genre fiction telling.

Flash: Mouse Monopoly

Erin Penn Leave a comment

Photo by James Wainscoat on Unsplash

(This flash is based on last week’s Writing Exercise: Trope Writing Prompts (6/5/2025).)

“What are you watching?” Brune asked, jumping over the back of the couch to land in the cushion area on the other side from me. I heard what was left of the springs complain. He wasn’t the worst of the offenders, but he did contribute to the wrecked state of most of the flat’s furniture. Three-bedrooms and five guys, all CIS except for me which meant half the time the other renters weren’t in residence, going hunting or hanging out with their most recent capture-of-the-heart in less crowded conditions, and the other half the time they brought the chicks over, I think in a half-hearted attempt to get them to cook or clean.

I missed Dave. His OCD kept the place dusted.

Anyway, I clicked to the next channel on the cable rotation. “Haven’t decided yet.” I had been watching a cooking show, but admitting that would mean either I (1) would have to cook the dish or (2) get teased for being gay and into girl things. Not something I could handle today. Between the bio-lab from University and the stocking at the dead-end job, I operated in the negative fucks. My brain was leaking out my ears from everything I had stuffed into it at school this afternoon, after a mind-numbing morning of reorganizing the paper products for my big-box store employer so people would not be able to find their toilet paper immediately and spend more time in the store looking around and picking things they didn’t need up, like unicorn-themed napkins on the end-caps. Mice were showing on the screen in a lab setting; probably some sort of news story about cancer or a new medical finding.

I clicked the channel.  I had dealt with mice for three hours today, I’m not spending downtime with them. The next channel showed a carpet of mice pouring down a street. Looked like downtown. One of the Peachtrees. But, hey, we were Atlanta, the Hollywood of the south. Everyone filmed downtown. As much as I like horror, no mice for me today.

The next channel was Fox News. Ugh, the reporter had mice in the background screen. I guess that medical news is a big thing. *Click*

Another news channel. They were clustered in our cable in the 40s. There was a scroll across the bottom of “Breaking News” and talking heads. Something, something about a lab accident and infection. Oh, mice, never mind.

I was about to click again when Brune dived across the couch and grabbed the remote control.

“Dude, what the hell?” I complained.

(words 428; first published 6/11/2025)