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To Absent Friends by Celeritas	5 Review(s)
Antane	Reviewed Chapter: 1 on 1/29/2010
Greetings, my dear! I miss our conversations. So, I have finally got to this and enjoyed. How Frodo is like me, on the whole being happy solitary and also his advice to Merry about having an excuse to be wacky with Pippin. I love being an aunt as much as he loves being an elder cousin and future uncle. Love the last line to Sam about his heart. Namarie, God bless, Antane :) Author Reply: Thanks so much, Antane! I'm glad you enjoyed the fic--and also Frodo's inherent singleness.

Virtuella	Reviewed Chapter: 1 on 1/12/2010
Oh, Celeritas, what an utterly delightful read this is! You describe it all so vividly, and it flows so well. An enchanting story. The spices and the baking - how wonderful, and one can just about smell them. I loved the way you described the smoke coming from the chimney. It's little details like the decorations on the box, that make your writing so pleasurable. Ghost stories and indoor snowball fights, wassailing and a lonely posthobbit suddenly finding himself in a warm welcoming place - all these things are drawn with such loving skill. I like how your characters - Frodo in particular -are so believable, and not necessarily following the fanon standards. Frodo's dream was a great passage, and well done for giving him that speech about the /joys/ of being single. I wouldn't want to be anything other than married, but I resent the way some people press the Noah's Ark principle on everybody. It's a marvellous story, superb in its own right, but even better with the little bits of foreshadowing and the light it throws on teh relationships between the characters later on during the quest. Well done! Author Reply: Gosh, thank you so much for the lovely review! Spices are such a huge part of Christmas baking that it was really fun trying to adapt them to the Shire where they'd be a lot harder to get. Not so hard when you have an adventurous and wealthy uncle, though! And thanks for your words on Frodo. He's one of my favorite characters in the books, but the fanons that have cropped up are so prevalent, even if they're valid interpretations, that I really do feel the need to get other canonical interpretations out there. And I sincerely hope that my ideas are closer to Tolkien's than the current fare, because that means that they're good in their own right and not just as an antidote to fandom. I hope that Frodo was single because he preferred it that way--both because that's far more merciful to him than giving him Ring-induced heartache (not to mention that the Ring does not appear to be all-powerful) and because it validates the many people out there who lead perfectly normal, contended lives without ever being romantically attached to anyone (which is entirely consonant with Tolkien's Catholicism). The pressure to marry, I fear, would be far, far stronger in the Shire than it is in our society, but if Frodo wanted otherwise I can't imagine him being anything less than articulate and firm in defending himself.

Larner	Reviewed Chapter: Epilogue on 1/10/2010
And again, thanks for the recipes! Author Reply: Yes--for the record, the recipe that the "wassail" is adapted from said you could use cider as well; however, 1). it wasn't something I could see Bilbo or Frodo using for this fic, and 2). I didn't want to get into convoluted explanations of hard cider vs. sweet cider, etc. Plus hard cider is a lot less common in the States.

Larner	Reviewed Chapter: 1 on 1/10/2010
Again, a beautiful story, from the spice box to the visit with Vaire (her brother WILL send dreamers her way from time to time, after all) to the snowball fight to the festooning of Bag End and the honoring of the Post Hobbit and talk of accents.... Definitely a good response to her desires! Author Reply: Thank you so much! For the record, I don't know whether that Vaire visit was deliberate, or whether Frodo's tendency to wander farther than he intended applied to the Path of Dreams as well! (I'm not used to having Valar wander into my fanfics unexpected, but I know better than to pry into their affairs too deeply.) Anyway, I'm glad you liked it and found it fitting! Thank you!

Larner	Reviewed Chapter: Prologue on 1/10/2010
Ah--to read it again! Heh! Author Reply: Great! The exchange challenges are always really funky, because everyone reads the tales before they want to review them (lest they limit options as to which fics they wrote). Not that that was a problem for your reviewing this story as I definitely contradicted some of your ideas--but I still didn't want to respond to what you said before the week was up! Anyway, thanks for looking through this a second time.

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