The taste of dried-up hope in my mouth / and the landscape of merry and desperate drought

The other day, skygiants was posting fanmixes, and I thought, I used to love making fanmixes. Why don't I do that anymore?

Fortunately, one of the prompts that skygiants hadn't yet filled (suggested by vass) was Erin Bow's Prisoners of Peace duology, a wonderfully iconoclastic take on young adult dystopia that I recommend without reservation. Greta is a logical, courageous princess living in a post-apocalyptic monastery and waiting for her mother to go to war, at which point Greta will be killed, since she's a hostage for the cause of world peace. Keeping her and dozens of other royal children prisoner is the brilliant idea of Talis, immortal AI and amoral murder robot. But everything is more or less fine until a new hostage arrives... at which point Erin Bow scraps all the usual YA dystopia tropes and takes her story somewhere much more interesting. The sequel, which I can't even link to without Book 1 spoilers, is even weirder and better.

All that is to say, I made a playlist. Spotify playlisting is terrific, because there are so many songs to choose from. Somehow I still ended up with two Vienna Teng, two Indigo Girls and two Dar Williams songs on a fourteen-song playlist, though.

( The Scorpion Rules: I'm no ordinary princess / I was born in the Cold War )

( The Swan Riders: I hear the clockwork in your core / Time strips the gears till you forget what they were for )

I'll take other playlist requests, and try to come up with five songs for each.