The Golden Wolf Cover reveal! (And some end-of-year news)

I have turned in The Golden Wolf for copy editing, and I can also now reveal the US cover, by Patrick Arrasmith. It is coming out in hardcover, digital, and audiobook, on August 13, 2019.

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Sequels don’t often make year-end best-of lists, which makes me extra happy to see The Sea Queen appear on Book and Film Globe’s.

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I’ve been continuing to blog at Amazing Stories, and recently wrote a recommendation for Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett.

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The Italian cover for The Sea Queen really gives Svanhild her due:

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I’m not going anywhere for Christmas/New Years this year, and I’ve just finished a huge writing project, so I’m diving into some other projects for these few weeks, including making Momofuku ramen. Yesterday I made Taré, which is a favoring agent for the ramen broth. I am currently curing a pork shoulder for meat to go in it. Tomorrow I will embark on the 7+ hour broth-making process. I did purchase the noodles at least from a local Asian grocery. Saturday will be the day to actually eat the ramen, and I will likely update on Twitter about how it tastes.

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Coming soon to a book club near you, and other updates

The Half-Drowned King was chosen for the Winter 2018-2019 Reading Groups List, in Historical Fiction! 

“Fierce storytelling honors the 13th-century Icelandic saga Heimskringla, which is retold here through the adventures of brother and sister Ragnvald and Swanhild. This novel is a real swashbuckler: true historical fiction in the tradition of James Michener and the ancient sagas themselves. A new favorite.” —Maeve Noonan, Northshire Bookstore, Saratoga Springs, NY

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I talked with Ed Pizzarello of the Miles To Go Podcast. You can listen here and win a free signed copy of The Sea Queen.

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I’ve been doing some volunteering for the NH Dems. Also knitting, and now I’m putting those things together:

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I started blogging at the venerable Amazing Stories Magazine, about What’s New In Fantasy! My most recent post covered some new and ongoing fantasy comics.

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I wrote about my top 5 fictional arranged marriages at FreshFiction.com.

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I’ve done fewer appearances for The Sea Queen than I did for The Half-Drowned King, but I did an event at Politics and Prose at the Wharf in Washington, DC, a signing at Friendly Neighborhood Comics in Bellingham, MA, and just this week, a reading at the library in my new home town.

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My podcast, That Book was BONKERS, continues to be a ton of fun to research and record. Just recently we covered The Pillow Book by Sei Shonagon, and soon we will be doing a Halloween-themed episode.

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I am deep in edits on The Golden Wolf, enjoying a New England fall, and cooking a lot. And that’s all the news these days!

 

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Hello from New Hampshire

The Sea Queen is coming out in the US in less than a week (August 14)! Do you have your copy pre-ordered yet?

It’s also been getting some good advance reviews:

Advance review from Booklist:

The “sea queen” is Svanhild Eysteinsdotter, a strong-willed woman with a difficult path ahead. In ninth century Norway, six years after the events in The Half-Drowned King (2017), Svanhild, married to the raider Solvi, loves her seafaring life but knows her intellectual son’s needs must come first. This leads to rising marital strife, while Solvi pursues revenge against Harald, Norway’s king. He’s not alone. Throughout the country and elsewhere, disaffected exiles and noblemen resentful of Harald’s taxes rise up against him. Svanhild’s brother, Ragnvald, king of Sogn, is loyal to Harald, and as rebel groups join forces, helping Harald achieve a united Norway becomes increasingly dangerous. Although less action- oriented than the first in the Golden Wolf Saga, the second captures the era’s violent atmosphere, where blood feuds last generations, and an early incident of stark brutality long haunts Ragnvald. Through her multifaceted characters, Hartsuyker adeptly evokes female alliances, the complications of love and passion, and vengeance both terrible and triumphant as she effectively juggles many subplots and settings, from Norway’s harsh, picturesque coast to sulfurous Iceland and Dublin’s muddy harbor.  —Sarah Johnson

I’m doing a launch party on August 20 at Politics and Prose at The Wharf in Washington, DC. If you can make it here is the FB invite. But no tour for this one–moving was enough!

I’ve been living in the Seacoast area of New Hampshire for a little more than three weeks now. In that time, I unpacked all my boxes, shopped for the zillion things a house needs and an apartment does not, and oh yeah, finished a draft of The Golden Wolf. I’m letting it sit for a week before I go back to it, and do one more draft before sending it to my editors.

In some ways, three weeks seems like a long time, but of course, it’s almost no time. I thought I would do a long post about what it’s been like moving here and settling in here, but so much of it is very prosaic. It has been very hot. Also, New Hampshire gets some very violent thunderstorms, including some hail one day. Luckily no tornadoes, though there was a warning one day.

I’m very happy we moved here, and I’ve been finding ways to get more involved in the community, through volunteering and making other connections. I feel like I want to do everything right away, but I also know how easy it is to take on too much.

I’ve been re-reading the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder since I got here. They were extremely formative books for me, and I wanted to be a pioneer girl in the 1860s when I was in elementary school But I think I’m enjoying them now because those books are all about moving and making a home, and that’s what I’m thinking a lot about these days. And as much work as taking care of a house is, compared with an apartment, it’s less work than building a new house from scratch on the prairie every few years. That’s always good to remember.

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Podcast News, Book News, Life News

It’s hard to know what news to talk about first, but please be sure to scroll down to the end, since I may be burying the lead by waiting until then to tell you I am leaving the state where I have spent my entirely life until now.

Podcast News:

I’m still recording That Book was BONKERS, with a bunch of awesome women. So far we have covered:

  1. A Study In Scarlet by A. Conan Doyle
  2. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
  3. The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux

With new episodes coming out on the 15th (the IDES) of each month. We will definitely be doing something Julius Caesar-themed in March.

We are also planning on doing guest episodes, with just one or two of the hosts, between the monthly releases, so if you’re interested, please get in touch at thatbonkersbook at gmail dot com.

Book News:

The paperback of The Half-Drowned King came out on June 26, 2018 in the US. It’s going to be in some Hudson Booksellers in airports, which is very exciting for me. If you see it in the wild, I’d love to see a picture of you with it!

It will also be in Barnes and Nobles all over the country, and in many independent bookstores, like Boswell Book Company in Milwaukee, WI, which looks like a huge and wonderful bookstore, and I can’t wait to visit.

Life News:

My parents moved me to Ithaca, NY when I was less than two years old. I grew up there, and then went to Cornell University for college. I did a few out of state internships, but then moved to New York City after college, and stayed there….UNTIL NOW.

Yes, that’s right. Just yesterday my husband and I closed on a lovely house in New Hampshire, and we are moving in just a few weeks. I can’t wait to get back to country living, and to try living in a whole new state. I’ll be closer to Boston than New York, but will still visit both frequently to get my city fix.

For now, though, I’m dreaming of gardening and hiking and even shoveling snow.

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Bright Futures Still Have Shadows: The Recent Novels of Kim Stanley Robinson

It’s been hard for me to figure out what to read since the 2016 election. While some people have doubled down on post-apocalyptic horror–witness the popularity of The Handmaid’s Tale TV show–I have been looking for books that keep my hopes up, without denying reality. I found what I was looking for in the more recent works of Kim Stanley Robinson. I have liked his books in the past, but New York 2140, 2312, and Aurora entranced me and lifted me up in exactly the way I wanted. These books all imagine plausible or semi-plausible futures, based on where we are right now.

New York 2140

The New York of New York 2140 is flooded by global warming, a new “Supervenice”, while outside New York many species’ futures hang in the balance–only assisted migration to the South Pole can save polar bears from extinction.

At the same time, a cooperative ethos has sprung up in New York City, and crowded apartment buildings operate as commune-coops, sharing and growing some of their own food, while their residents look after one another. The book has a slow build, following several different characters, some enthusiastic revolutionaries, and some more reluctant, as a new financial crisis looms, and just maybe, this time, the governments and the people can get it right.

2312

In 2312, humanity has spread out across the solar system, finding ways to live on worlds as disparate as Mercury and Saturn’s moons, as well as terraria built within the thousands of asteroids in between. Through genetic engineering, the solar-system dwellers have changed themselves into post-humans, while only Earth has been left behind.

2312 tells another compelling tale of non-violent revolution, but my very favorite parts were when Robinson describes the technologies that have enabled habitation of various planets and moons. Mercury’s city on rails, which stays on its dark, habitable side, while the sun heats the rails and the expansion pushes it forward, so it remains just before dawn, is an imaginative vision I will never forget.

Aurora

Aurora, set in the 25th century, has been described as less optimistic than Robinson’s other works, and it is, in a way, but it is a fitting cap for this loose trilogy that continues to imagine how humanity and its structures evolve and change into the future. The setting for most of the novel is a generation ship that is attempting to colonize a far-off earth-like planet. The settlers reach the planet as the effects of many generations within a small ecosystem are becoming more and more threatening, and then have to face a devastating choice: whether to stay or return.

Still, I found even this somewhat bleak portrait of interstellar travel optimistic for the ways it portrays different types of humanity, the way humans fight and reconcile, and finally the simple joys that we can find here on earth. If the first two books were about the exuberant possibilities of tomorrow, Aurora seems to be about the things that may not change, and the things that cannot change, but that we can and should embrace anyway.

I recommend these books to anyone who likes science fiction and is feeling bleak about the future. Robinson’s wonder at technology and love of humans, their foibles and their ingenuity, shines through in every sentence. It is hard to read these books without feeling both uplifted and determined at the end of the experience.

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New Cover, Blurbs, Reviews

Lots of news from your friendly neighborhood Viking novelist.

ONE. I Started A Podcast!
Four literary friends discuss books and the history surrounding them. The first episode is about A Study In Scarlet by A. Conan Doyle, the first Sherlock Holmes novel. With Surprise!Mormons! Available wherever you get your podcasts.

On iTunes here.

TWO. Library Journal blurbs The Sea Queen

Following a successful trading season, Svanhild, sister to Ragnvald, the hero of Hartsuyker’s The Half-Drowned King, and husband Solvi return to their home in Iceland. Svanhild’s young son hasn’t taken well to travel on the open seas, and she hopes that by staying on land for a time, he might grow stronger and regain his health. Sadly, being land-bound is not where Solvi’s heart lies, and he demands that his wife and son accompany him on his next voyage. When Svanhild’s weakened son dies at sea, she abandons Solvi and sets off for Norway and her brother’s household. Meanwhile, Ragnvald, weary of war, returns to his own land to find his holdings have been claimed by Atli, who insists that King Harald promised them to him in Ragnvald’s absence. Deprived of home and hearth and knowing that his sister is no longer tied to his enemy, Ragnvald joins Harald to resume war against the raider. VERDICT Hartsuyker is a wonderfully descriptive writer equally adept at penning truly horrifying battle scenes as depicting life in ninth-century Norway. Fans of History Channel’s Vikings should find this novel (and its prequel) equally compelling.

—Jane Henriksen Baird, formerly at Anchorage P.L., AK

THREE. The Half-Drowned King makes another great list:

The Half-Drowned King as one of their top ten historical novels of the last year. Read more here!

FOUR. The UK Cover of The Sea Queen has been unveiled! 

Click to see a bigger version.

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Tucson Festival of Books

The first thing I learned at Tucson Festival of Books is that I’ve been spelling “Tucson” wrong all my life. Why would you put the “C” first? What is with that?

Tucson Festival of Books is a huge, free book festival held on the University of Arizona campus. This year it drew 130,000 people and had about 1600 volunteers helping run it. There is a big science component, and also lots of events geared toward kids.

I saw authors like R. L. Stine wandering around, and I got to fangirl Janet Fitch, one of my favorite writers.

I was the author guest at an author dinner, where we had the world’s cutest desert:

I was on three panels, two about historical fiction, and one about being a debut author, and led a workshop ambitiously titled, “How to Turn an Idea into a Novel: Linking Theme, Plot, and Character”. Most of my events were full and turning people away.

I love being on panels, and these were very well-run, with interesting questions from the moderator. I think panels are more interesting for the audience than a single author doing a talk and a reading, and expose audience to more than one author at a time.

It’s also truly wonderful to meet other working authors. Many of my classmates are now published, and my teachers in my MFA program were all published authors, but I feel like I can never meet enough. It’s good to see other writers at different stages of their careers, having different struggles. The flight home was filled with authors and we were still talking about the festival and writing, even though we were tired and nearly talked out.

One of the great things about being on panels is hearing about other writers’ processes. Some of the historical fiction writers I met don’t do much research until after the first draft is done–which makes sense since they were writing about recent history and mostly need to spot check. Some writers outline, some don’t. Some, like me, do some outlining, some furious writing, and some more outlining. But most writers, especially writers of fiction, share an interest in other people, their stories, and a certain kind of thoughtfulness about the world and how it works.

My workshop was very well-attended, turning away nearly as many as people who made it in–and I wished it could have been twice as long. So many people who want to write novels! Some writers complain about meeting people who talk about their own writing ambitions, and I understand that since many new writers don’t yet appreciate how much work it is to finish a novel, but I also think that writers can come from anywhere.

I do also like to remind people that:

  • The Half-Drowned King had 14 drafts before it went to copy editing. The Sea Queen had 8. Writing a novel-length manuscript is only the very first step.
  • Don’t worry about finding an agent or a publisher until you have a manuscript that is as good as you can possibly make it.

It takes a combination of love of story, commitment, and talent, and different writers have different levels of each. Some people publish their first novel in their seventies. I’m happier to meet people of all ages with stories they want to tell than people who have suppressed those dreams. And writing is something people can take up at any age.

I’m still riding a high from this festival, and I hope to return next year. If you are in the area of Tucson (spelled it right this time!) or want to visit the southwest, you could do a lot worse than to time it around March and this wonderful event.

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How to get kids to read, maybe

Back when I was soliciting ideas for blog posts, Bill Morrissey asked me about how to get young people to read. I don’t have kids, so take all this with a grain of salt, but like many of you, I was a kid once, and I haven’t entirely forgotten what it was like.

I was a late reader. Some of my fellow students showed up to kindergarten already able to read, but I did not. And when I was seven I went through a pretty severe rebellion where I refused to do my homework. I showed up, not having it done, and cried when it became evident to the whole class that I had not done it, but I hadn’t, and the next day the whole thing repeated itself.

My 2nd grade class was full of kids reading at a 3rd or 4th grade level, and I was not, so my teacher put me in a group with the fast six-year-olds, until I caught up. I’m not sure why reading was a struggle for me. My parents read to me a lot. My house was filled with books. I loved stories. I was very verbal from a young age. It probably was some sort of rebellion, a way to assert myself. I’m not sure what changed except maybe me being allowed to progress at my own speed, and by the time I was eight years old, I was reading everything in sight. By the time I was eleven, I was reading adult books (SOME OF WHICH I SHOULDN’T HAVE, MOM). Now I average reading about 80 books a year.

I’m actually not sure young people, by which I mean people under 18, aren’t reading. They’re reading texts and blog posts and tweets and fan-fiction, and definitely books and comics as well. If my generation was known for talking on the phone for hours, this generation is known for being on their smart-phones, and a lot of what they’re doing is reading.

However, I think we’re talking about reading full-length books, and particularly fiction books. Why do we want young people to read fiction? Though it’s important to learn to be a careful reader and a clear writer in this era of written communications, fiction teaches us more than that: it teaches us to see things from others’ perspectives, to value metaphor and symbolism, to look for themes, to analyze characters and meaning, and hopefully understand others and ourselves better.

So how should we get young people to read books? A better question might be to ask how we get young people to engage with narrative—and to remember that they already are, only that narrative might be on social media instead of in fiction.

(I taught a session of a high school creative writing class last year, and the teacher told me that it was amazing how many students had trouble telling stories that weren’t 99% autobiographical. I wonder if that is a consequence of this social media age where people are constantly creating their own public narrative. I’ve always found my own life to be pretty dull and would rather make up stories about people who are far more interesting than me.)

A good start to encourage any kind of new behavior is to meet someone where they are. I suspect a reason why many people end up hating literature after high school is that they are reading books that are too challenging for them, and even if not, their enjoyment of it may be crushed by having to prepare it for a test, rather than explore it. A way to meet young readers where they are is to find out what they are already reading and suggest similar things. The explosion of YA literature in the last fifteen years has made it easy to find books that young people can relate to in any genre.

And there’s nothing wrong with comic books or manga. It’s still reading, and there’s still a narrative to engage with. There is romance, and pulpy sci fi, and super heroes in the world of comic books, and among all of those, transcendent literature. There is also nothing wrong with fan-fiction. In fact, reading and writing fan-fiction can be one of the deepest ways to engage with a text. No one thinks more deeply about Harry Potter than the people writing novel-length fan-fiction for the pure joy of it.

It’s probably not a bad idea to limit screen time, TV, iPads, and smart-phones. I suspect one of the reasons I was such a big reader from age eight on is that we didn’t have a TV when I was growing up and my parents both worked more than full time. I spent a lot of time on my own, entertaining myself. I often had to wait for a long time for my parents to get off work and pick me up, and I always had a book with me.

And my parents reading to me and being big readers themselves helped. As did the transgressive elements of the things I read as a pre-teen and beyond. There are worse places to discover sex than in the pages of The Valley of Horses by Jean M. Auel. 

Not every young person is going to want to read, and they are also going to find ways to read and tell stories that are different than anything we could have imagined. But we can put the media and tools in their hands to get them started on their reading path.

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Breaking my rules

A lot of the work of a beginning writer is figuring out what works for you–reading lots of writing manuals, and taking classes, trying things. This is how writers end up with very specific writing places, times, and habits, and all of those can be very helpful. Some of my rules and habits:

  • I outline by listing chunks that will be chapters in the future and figure out what happens in each chapter, and how it serves plot, character, and theme
  • I rough draft in fast chunks while sitting cross-legged, on a couch or in bed, with my laptop on a pillow in my lap
  • I revise at a desk with my laptop and a separate monitor
  • I never write more than 2000 new words in a day, since more seems to dip into my store of words for the next day
  • I don’t go back and edit what I’ve already written until I get (near) to the end
  • If I lose flow when I’m rough drafting, I write long hand, asking myself questions and answering them
  • I write every day if possible

But I’m starting to feel like the ongoing work of a writer is figuring out new ways to write, how to break the rules when I need to, and find new things that work when old ones don’t. Many writers have said that when you write a novel you learn to write that novel. When you begin the next novel you have to learn how to write that one. With The Golden Wolf, the third and final book of my viking trilogy, I’ve done all kinds of things differently:

  • A lot more editing as I go. I was nearly finished writing a big set piece that took up about 30,000 words and then realized that it was boring and there was nothing I could do to make it unboring, and I moved most of the action that had to happen to different places
  • A lot more detailed plotting of big set-pieces as I go
  • Recently I tried writing 3000 new words a day for a few days–kept it up for a whole 4 days, but I really do feel like it may be too much
  • And for the third time, I am now stopping before the end to go back to the beginning and bring the reality of what I’ve written more in line with what I’m imagining

I’m taking a couple days right now to ask myself all the questions I have about what needs to happen in the book, from details about how a battle that involves at least five competing agendas will play out, and serve all of the characters’ arcs and the plot’s needs, to more general questions like going over various characters’ arcs, and to write out all of these answers longhand.

I often find that as I revise, I add more drama, I combine characters, weave arcs and plot points together, and I give characters more agency. Now I have, again, gotten to the place where I need to make that happen. With all this rule-breaking though, I frequently wonder if I’m doing the right thing. I guess I’m just trying to do whatever keeps me moving forward, whatever keeps me making the novel better, more what it needs to be.

I’ve also raised the degree of difficulty on each of the novels I’ve written so far, at least with some aspects of craft. The Sea Queen definitely has a more complex plot than The Half-Drowned King, at least in terms of moving parts that have to line up, and it also has an additional POV character. The Golden Wolf raises the difficulty level again, with two new POV characters who have full arcs (rather than supporting arcs), more supporting characters, more complex politics, more settings, more battles, three different climaxes–at least. I shouldn’t be surprised that it feels like more of a challenge.

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News and Travel

I received my bound galleys of The Sea Queen this week. These are uncorrected, meaning while they are copy-edited, they don’t have the final 100+ changes I made to the galleys. They are sent to reviewers and book buyers. It’s always exciting to get my hands on a bound copy of one of my books, even though it’s not the official, beautiful hardcover version.

In other news, I was away in Thailand and Vietnam for ten days, and I’m only just starting to recover from jet lag. Thailand is 12 hours off from New York, which is the absolute hardest time change to make. Night is day, up is down. Not only is my sleep off, but I’m hungry at the wrong times of day, ravenous in the middle of the night, but not hungry for my dinner.

Still, it was a wonderful trip. I had some time on my own in Bangkok while my husband went to a conference. I got a lot of writing done, ate delicious food, Thai and otherwise, and visited the Jim Thompson house.

After the conference was over, we flew up to Chiang Mai to visit with some friends who live there. Chiang Mai is a wonderful laid back city. In weather, and in parts of the culture, it seems like a Thai Southern California with aspects of Brooklyn.

I think one of the reasons I had such a nice time on this trip is that I didn’t go in with any expectations. I wanted to see friends and get writing done. I saw some sights of Bangkok, but I didn’t have a checklist of things I needed to see. I had my trip, not a trip out of some guidebooks. A lot of what I like about travel is not about seeing particular sights, but just about being in a place. Because of that, it was fun just to go to a Bangkok food court, or listen to the conversation at a friend’s dinner party–to experience my time rather than rush on to the next thing.

I think I don’t do that enough in my life in NYC–my days are always about checklists of things to get done, and appointments to keep. I rarely sit in a coffee shop, or in a park and simply experience life. I listen to podcasts to drown out life, and when I don’t I get annoyed at my fellow NYers.

Part of this is the difference between vacation brain and work brain, but part of this is the location. I went to a fitness park in Chiang Mai to go for a run and get some other exercise in. Here in New York I am not a fast runner, but at that park, I was one of the fastest. Everyone else was just trotting along, talking with friends, keeping an easy pace. It made me feel silly about my constant pushing myself to be better, faster, stronger, more productive.

It was also nice to be 12 hours off from the US news. Even when I did go on Twitter, it was pretty quiet. Not many people update between 3am and 6am–my afternoon there.

For reasons too convoluted to go into, we had to leave from Hanoi, so first we had to get to Hanoi, which was somewhat challenging. My knitting needles were not allowed to go in my carry-on on leaving Chiang Mai (a first!) and then once we got to Hanoi, there was a long visa and immigration line. Then we only had the morning in Hanoi before an evening flight to begin our journey back to NYC.

Some scenes from around Hanoi.

A post shared by Linnea Hartsuyker ???? (@linneaharts) on


But even that was nice. The weather was chilly in Hanoi, making a bowl of Pho that much more attractive. We ate Pho and Bahn Mi and random fried street food. I had some amazing Vietnamese coffee (it’s incredibly thick, and then they put sweetened condensed milk in it–delicious). We went to a temple, and put our heads in random shops. By the time we had to leave, I definitely wished we had more time in Hanoi, but I also felt like I’d gotten a nice little taste of the city.

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