The raven was told to find the young woman with honey skin, dark hair, and purply-blue eyes who spoke the Old Language. He found half-elf, half-Native American Indigo, and gave her a message: the Green Lady of Faerie needed her help. Indigo admired the Green Lady and wanted to help but had been told never to return there and was terrified of imprisonment underground again. How could she help the faerie-folk and gain the love of Griffin, another half-elf, without encountering the Dark Faeries of her nightmares? And what do the ravens have to do with it anyway?
She’ll never abandon the land Chronically low cattle prices and her father’s skyrocketing medical bills may have forced Jessie Weaver to sell the ranch that’s been in her family since the mid-1800s, but no way will she let developers wreak havoc with her glorious Montana mountains. So she writes conservation restrictions into the deed of sale—even though that means taking a huge loss in land value. Even though Guthrie Sloane, her boyfriend, thinks she’s dead wrong and it will mean the end of them as a couple. He’ll never abandon her Hotheaded and old-fashioned, Guthrie may have disagreed with Jessie’s dreams for her land and stormed off to Alaska in protest, but no way can he quit her.
Adoption allows families to modify, either overtly or covertly, what is considered to be the natural order. Cures for Chance explores how early modern English theatre questioned the inevitability of the biological family and proposed new models of familial structure, financial inheritance, and gendered familial authority. Because the practice of adoption circumvents sexual reproduction, its portrayal obliges audiences to reconsider ideas of nature and kinship. This study elucidates the ways in which adoptive familial relations were defined, described, and envisioned on stage, particularly in the works of Shakespeare and Middleton. In the plays in question, families and individual characters create, alter, and manage familial relations. Throughout Cures for Chance, adoption is considered in the broader socioeconomic and political climate of the period. Literary works and a wide range of other early modern texts – including treatises on horticulture and natural history and household and conduct manuals – are analysed in their historical and cultural contexts. Erin Ellerbeck argues that dramatic representations of adoption test conventional notions of family by rendering the family unit a social construction rather than a biological certainty, and that in doing so, they evoke the alteration of nature by human hands that was already pervasive at the time.
