Although best-known for her lightly humorous fantasies and for her collaborations with Anne McCaffrey on the Petaybee and Acorna series, Elizabeth Anne Scarborough has also written Healer’s War, a classic novel of the Vietnam War, enriched with a magical, mystical twist. It won the 1989 Nebula Award for Best Novel of 1988. The Minneapolis Star Tribune called it “A brutal and beautiful book.”

Scarborough herself was a nurse in Vietnam during the war and she draws on her own personal experiences to create the central character, Lt. Kitty McCulley. McCulley, a young and inexperienced nurse tossed into a stressful and chaotic situation, is having a difficult time reconciling her duty to help and heal with the indifference and overt racism of some of her colleagues and with the horrendously damaged soldiers and Vietnamese civilians whom she encounters during her service at the China Beach medical facilities.

She is unexpectedly helped by the mysterious and inexplicable properties of an amulet, given to her by one of her patients, an elderly, dying Vietnamese holy man, which allows her to see other people’s auras and understand more about. This eventually leads to a strange, almost surrealistic journey through the jungle, accompanied by a one-legged boy and a battle-seasoned but crazed soldier. By the end of the journey, McCulley has found herself and a way to survive through the madness and destruction.

Elizabeth Ann Scarborough’s Song of Sorcery is another light-hearted contemporary fantasy adventure that will please the author’s many fans. Colin Songsmith sings a song to an old witch who takes an unlikely revenge. The witch’s granddaughter rescues him from the dire threat of being eaten alive by the cat. She hears the song, which happens to concern her recently married sister and a gypsy. Convinced that she has to save her sister, she takes the minstrel, the cat and her magical resources to Rowan Castle. The story is rich with descriptive details of setting and encounters with magical and fantastic creatures such as a talking cat, a lovesick dragon, and a bear prince. The characters speak in contemporary slang which plays nicely against the traditional fantastic settings.

Elizabeth Ann Scarborough was born March 23, 1947, and lives in the Puget Sound area of Washington. She won a Nebula Award in 1989 for her novel The Healer’s War, and has written more than a dozen other novels. She has collaborated with Anne McCaffrey, best-known for creating the Dragonriders of Pern, to produce the Petaybee Series and the Acorna Series.

Elizabeth Ann Scarborough has written more than a dozen novels, one of which, The Healer’s War, won a Nebula Award in 1989. She has collaborated with Dragonriders of Pern author Anne McCaffrey to produce the Petaybee Series and the Acorna Series.

Like The Godmother, Song of Sorcery is a light-hearted contemporary fantasy adventure. Colin Songsmith sings a song to an old witch who takes an unlikely revenge. The witch’s granddaughter rescues him from the dire threat of being eaten alive by a cat. It gets wilder and wilder from there including encounters with a lovesick dragon.

And don’t miss Scarborough’s aptly named collection, Scarborough Fair and Other Stories.

RC

Elizabeth Ann Scarborough has written more than a dozen novels, one of which, The Healer’s War, won a Nebula Award in 1989. She has collaborated with Dragonriders of Pern author Anne McCaffrey to produce the Petaybee Series and the Acorna Series.

The Godmother puts a new twist in contemporary fantasy with the story of a fairy godmother who works in in a social-services agency in Seattle and has to handle contemporary renditions of such Grimm tales as Hansel and Gretel, Snow White and Cinderella. Scarborough’s fully realized settings and humor make The Godmother a thoroughly entertaining modern fantasy story.

Other Scarborough works available on E-Reads are the novel Song of Sorcery and a collection, Scarborough Fair and Other Stories.

RC