Review: Drake Hall: The Secrets of Ormdale, Book 2

Drake Hall: The Secrets of Ormdale, Book 2 by Christina Baehr
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is like its main character, Edith: Intelligent, well-educated, calm, poised, pragmatic, occasionally wise, and kind and warmhearted in an understated way.

Now that we've established (in Book 1) that dragons exist in England at the end of the 19th century, and Edith is established as one of their protectors, with the power to heal people bitten by them, we get encounters with some more dragons, an attempt to steal dragon eggs, and a mysterious letter inviting Edith to a dragon-related ceremony in Wales.

There's less tension in it than in the previous book, partly because there's not really a main antagonist, and what antagonism there is tends to gets quickly resolved by Edith's sensible level-headedness. There is a bit more of a romance plot, though it's definitely slow-burn, and Edith isn't even sure that she feels attracted to the gentleman in question; there's also a potential love triangle, though it's only hinted at subtly. The main story question appears to be: Will the possible main love interest stand up for himself against his mother? And, of course, Edith, who is the narrator, can't do more than attempt to influence the outcome of that question, since she doesn't want to substitute herself for his mother as the man's manager, so she can't exactly pursue it as a goal.

All of this combines to make it, for me, less compelling than the first book, so I took a while to finish it (in part also because I had the audiobook, and I don't often have opportunities to listen to an audiobook). It feels like a middle book, moving people into position for a more interesting plot to come.

Still, there were moments that moved me, and it has more depth and just more grasp of its craft and the historical period than I usually see, so it makes it (just) to the Gold tier of my annual recommendations list, despite being short on tension or strong narrative momentum. I suspect it's also well edited, though since I only listened to the audiobook all I can say for sure is that I didn't spot any vocabulary being used incorrectly (which is a near-universal problem with books set before World War I).

I look forward to Book 3.

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Review: Adventure in Asteroid City: A Kat & Jerry Mystery

Adventure in Asteroid City: A Kat & Jerry Mystery by J. M. Holmes
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Unfortunately, I don't like Kat and Jerry. They're extremely quick to adopt ultraviolent solutions to their problems, which the author describes with lots of gory details, or to damage a valuable artwork just to provide a distraction, while never suffering any real consequences. Presumably in an attempt to make them less antiheroic, the author (view spoiler)[has a sniper kill the named antagonist for them, though they happily, almost gleefully, slaughter lots of nameless mooks. (hide spoiler)]

I think their "banter" is supposed to be both funny and endearing, but I didn't find it either one of those things; I thought it was weak. Their personalities are thin, too, and what there is of them didn't appeal to me. Jerry was born in the 20th century, and is still alive at the age of 250, for reasons that are not fully explained in this book (there are earlier, shorter stories that presumably explain it). Some sort of revival tech that he could afford because he was rich, apparently. This mainly means that he can make pop culture references that we, the readers, recognize. Kat... is some kind of action woman with magic glasses.

The setting is mostly generic 1950s or 1960s-style space opera, complete with sexism that would be less jarring in that time than it is in our own, except, of course, for the computer bits. These are mostly handwaved with some meaningless technobabble, or the word "quantum" used to mean "basically magic, can do anything the plot needs it to." The mining colony explicitly doesn't have a government, and yet in most respects feels like a small town that has a government to put up the decorative street lights and planter boxes, run the Archives and other central amenities, make strict quarantine laws, and provide a police force that is, admittedly, deeply inadequate (drawn from the various mining companies' security staff, supposedly). All of this is happening in orbit around a planet which, at one and the same time, is all the way out at the edge of the galaxy and also one of the first habitable exoplanets to be discovered from Earth, which seems contradictory.

This future of 200 years away is less futuristic than parts of the present, too. There's a lot of physical cash (called, because this is generic mid-20th-century-style space opera, "credits") and paper documents. At one point, a vehicle is left "idling," which is something internal combustion vehicles do and electric vehicles don't. So has some idiot decided it's OK to have internal combustion in a closed atmosphere, or is it just an error by the author?

I hung on to the end only because I do love a heist, and I was promised a heist. It was fairly clever, as heists go, though it did rely on something going exactly right that didn't completely convince me that it would necessarily do that.

The author (or the editor, possibly) has a bad habit of hyphenating a verb and its associated preposition when they are not acting as a compound adjective modifying a noun. In fact, very few of the places a hyphen is used are places that should have a hyphen. Also, when a single sentence is split with a dialog tag, the sentence resumes after the tag with a capital letter, which is incorrect; it's still part of the same sentence, and should be punctuated as such. Since I read a pre-publication version from Netgalley, it is possible that these problems will be fixed before publication, along with some missing or added quotation marks and a few other minor glitches.

Overall, it fell short in execution, and didn't match my taste well either, but it kept me interested enough to finish despite that. For me, that's a three-star book.

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Review: An Unbreakable World

An Unbreakable World by Ren Hutchings
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I dropped this author's first book, Under Fortunate Stars , two whole tiers in my annual recommendation list because of its truly massive overuse of fortunate coincidence to drive the entire plot. But everything else about it was decent to excellent, and (unlike one of the characters in this book) I believe in second chances, so I picked this one up when I saw it on Netgalley.

I'm mostly glad I did.

True, the main characters still don't have a whole lot of agency; events act on them more than vice versa, and their decisions often don't end up mattering, or are "decisions" to go along with the situation because there doesn't seem to be much other option. But I did come to care about their wellbeing, and almost everything else - the copy editing, the characterization, the plot, the twists - is at a high standard.

The worldbuilding, though, is mostly off-the-shelf space opera, including a threat from implacable alien Others who can't be communicated with and are almost impossible to fight (and yet haven't destroyed humanity, and clearly are possible to fight or the alien ship hulls that form an important plot point wouldn't be available). I don't have much time for this trope, not only because it's a piece of xenophobia originating in the Cold War, but because I've read Murray Leinster's story "The Aliens" from 1959 - more than 65 years ago - which points out how much more likely it is that advanced civilizations would want to trade with us rather than make war. (You can read it on Project Gutenberg, if you're curious.) But anyway, here the trope is, mostly providing a background existential threat to provoke reflection, but also a couple of important plot points.

The most original part in the worldbuilding is that there's an isolationist planet that claims, and teaches its people to believe, that it was the original home of humankind, despite the presence of clear marks of "seedships" having colonized it ("they're natural formations," according to the propagandists). One of the several narrative threads follows the niece of the leader of this planet, a cynical politician with a direct approach to silencing dissent and a lot of hypocrisy to hide. We follow the niece as she grows up, interleaved with the story of the tribulations of a young woman with no memory of who she is, thanks to having been cryo-revived, who is caught up in a proposed heist. That story is told both from her perspective and the perspective of another participant in the heist who semi-befriends her. There's also a fourth viewpoint, that of an anonymous (until the end) "storyteller" participating in what turns out to be an oral history project, who fills in bits of backstory that are important to the main plot and that the other viewpoint characters don't have access to.

Like the author's previous book, it's well enough written and has enough depth that it would normally get to the Gold tier of my annual recommendation list. However, also like that book, I'm going to demote it, though not by as much. As well as the implacable-aliens trope, which I personally think needs more thought put into it, and the shortage of protagonism among the main characters, there are also spoilerific reasons: (view spoiler)[the story of the niece is a bait-and-switch; we're clearly meant to think the niece is the amnesiac, right up to when it's revealed that she's not, just before the end. But that means that the niece's entire viewpoint has very little bearing on the main plot, making this two novels that are interweaved and have a tenuous point of connection through one character who doesn't remember any of the events in the other part of the story - some of which she isn't even present for - rather than one novel in two timelines. Also, we're implicitly promised a heist, and then there is no heist; that, too, was misdirection. And I do love a heist, and was looking forward to it, so I ended up feeling let down. (hide spoiler)]

The quality of the writing is far above average, but the author makes some decisions that turn this into a book that doesn't map well onto my personal preferences, so it only gets to Silver tier on my annual recommendation list. Other people, I'm sure, will like it more than I did, and even I liked it OK.

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Review: Slayers of Old

Slayers of Old by Jim C. Hines
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Jim Hines is a better and more original writer than some who have won more honours, in my opinion, and this book is an example of that. It's an urban fantasy that's pitched as "Buffy meets Golden Girls," and with some justification. Of the three viewpoint characters (I approve of urban fantasy with multiple first-person viewpoints and an ensemble cast), all of them are, to different degrees, old, ranging from sixties-but-looks-younger-because-supernatural-ancestry to almost a hundred. One was a very Buffy-like child soldier for a group called the Guardians Council, who raise young girls as slayers; she got out because they finally went too far in what they called upon her to do, but not before she'd got her friend group, the Slay Team, in way too deep and messed up all of their lives. One is a half-succubus; she's the Blanche of the group, if you like. The third character is male, a wizard from a long line of wizards, who has a symbiotic relationship with their house, his ancestral home.

They're trying just to run a shop selling books and tourist tat in Salem, Massachusetts, in addition to which the ex-slayer is, presumably as atonement, dedicated to helping and healing members of the local supernatural community. But, of course, they get pulled back in. With the help of a young man from a long line of monster-hunters who takes himself far too seriously, and whose late mother haunts his van, they have to take on a supernatural threat that is recruiting young people to your standard Great Old One cult and causing them to break out in eyes.

Everyone's backstory and every relationship ends up mattering. Everyone gets an arc of development and realization. Everyone, including the villain, believes they're doing what is right, but how you can tell that the protagonists are actually the ones doing what's right is that they don't hurt anyone if they can avoid it (and also they're not seeking power over others at the risk of causing a world-ending disaster).

It's a strong recommendation from me, and I hope it becomes a series.

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Review: The Lone Wolf A Melodrama

The Lone Wolf A Melodrama by Louis Joseph Vance
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a difficult one to rate.

Does it do the main job of a thriller, to keep the action moving and the reader engaged? It does, or did for me, despite the sometimes dire melodrama of the prose:

But as minutes sped it became apparent that there was to be no renewed attempt upon his life for the time being. The pursuers could afford to wait. They could afford to ape the patience of Death itself.

And it came then to Lanyard that he drove no more alone: Death was his passenger.

Is the main character relatable, despite being a criminal? He is; we're first introduced to him as a confused five-year-old being brought to France, apparently from England, by a mysterious man who places him with an uncaring foster-family who run a restaurant and lodging-house. They give him a new name, and he forgets his old one, which we don't learn (in this book, at least; his origin is not yet revealed), and exploit his labour once he's old enough to work. He largely educates himself, and as a teenager talks a criminal who stays at the lodging-house into taking him along as a kind of apprentice. This is highly successful, and by the time his criminal mentor dies (of natural causes), he is an expert housebreaker.

But he doesn't stay a criminal. Most of the book is taken up by his adventures after he decides to reform. Like Arsene Lupin (who is name-checked) and the less-known Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces, he does so because he falls in love with a woman he happens to encounter. (After all, what other motivation could a criminal have for reforming? Let's not bring religion into this; that would be completely at odds with the spirit of the times.)

"Happens to encounter" is a phrase that could be used at least five times of events in this book, which relies heavily on coincidental meetings to advance its plot. This is one of its several weaknesses, alongside melodramatic and overwrought prose, a weak romance plot (the Lone Wolf falls for the woman almost as soon as they meet and without actually knowing anything about her, and they don't spend much time together before she reciprocates; there's no real development of the relationship before or after their declarations to each other), and occasional casual racism against both black people and Jews. (view spoiler)[The female lead, who turns out eventually to be an undercover police agent, is not a particularly good one, since she makes her escape without remembering to bring any money, and in general doesn't show a lot of competence or spine or, really, personality. (hide spoiler)]

Overall, for me, the weaknesses outweighed the strengths, and it's not a recommendation, even though it did keep me engaged to the end. Apparently afterwards the hero becomes some kind of operative, like the later character The Saint, but I'm not interested enough to follow his further adventures.

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Review: Blood and Flame

Blood and Flame by Brendan Corbett
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A decently done sword-and-sorcery fantasy in many ways, marred by serious mechanical issues, but with a more original world than some I've seen. However, it's also not completely to my taste, being more dystopian and darker than I personally prefer.

The author has a bad dangling-modifier habit, sometimes leaves the past perfect tense out of sentences that really need it, occasionally chooses a word that doesn't quite have the right connotation for the context (or just sounds similar to the word he means) or uses the wrong preposition in an idiom, and makes several other common errors, like hyphenating an adjective and its noun. As always with books I get for review via Netgalley, I must note that I haven't seen the final published version, and there may yet be more editing to come, though there's a lot to work on.

The author is also one of those people who likes to use other words as alternatives to "said," and chooses some odd ones, including "drolled" (probably by mistake for "drawled"), "cut" (not "cut in," just "cut") and "spewed". He repeatedly says "at the aft" when he just means "aft" or "at the stern." A quirk I've seen elsewhere, but never so much, is that he misses the "-ed" ending off some short verbs that end in "t" when putting them in the past tense. I've often seen "spit" used as the past tense instead of "spat" and "grit" instead of "gritted" (as in teeth), and have put it down to a dialectal variation, but I don't believe I've seen "flit" or "jut" or "rest" used this way before.

Add this to the frequent lack of past perfect tense when referring to something that happened before the narrative moment, and the author's habit of using the phrasing "X did A when Y did B" when it should be "X was doing A" or "X had done A," and it becomes challenging at times to parse how the action is taking place in time in order to envisage the action. Point of view also tends to wander sometimes between the two main characters within the same scene.

These issues aren't on every page, by any means, but when they do appear, they distract from what is a decent story about engaging characters. Certainly, there's nothing here that is completely unexpected, though the worldbuilding shows some originality. Monsters, even if they have familiar names like "Jackals" and "Sirens" (all species names, including "Humans," are capitalized for some reason), aren't what you're expecting from those names, and aren't just an existing monster under a new label, either. The humans (or Humans, if you insist) are vegan, while the Fae aren't, which is a low-level conflict between people of those two origins; although there is a leather gauntlet early on, I think that's just a slip, since it's described as "cloth" a couple of sentences later.

The church is dystopian, because of course it is, though unlike most real corrupted religious organizations it doesn't seem to go in for large-scale sexual abuse, thankfully. Or if it does, the characters we follow don't encounter it. It mostly just lies about history and commits ethnic cleansing. (view spoiler)[A somewhat cartoonish antagonist, a church official, virtually foams at the mouth when he sees the main characters wearing leather boots, but a few hours later is plotting genocide, which involves rationalizing a false-flag operation which will lead to the death of innocents from his own village. I know real people do have this level of hypocrisy sometimes, but it challenged my suspension of disbelief slightly because of the juxtaposition of "fanatically vegan, but also plotting mass murder of intelligent beings". (hide spoiler)] I don't like dystopian, so that took my overall enjoyment down a little, along with the gory tragic battles.

On balance, while it showed potential and some originality, it wasn't quite the kind of story I love, and the many language issues were a big distraction for me. Those factors combine to take it down to a three-star rating, and keep it off my recommendation list for 2025. It was good enough that I finished it, but not so good that I'd read another.

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Review: Mr Mulliner Speaking

Mr Mulliner Speaking by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Mr Mulliner is always an entertaining storyteller, recounting some unlikely adventure of one of his vast crowd of relations, and here that includes Roberta "Bobbie" Wickham, that red-headed young menace, who leads her many admirers such a dance that they quickly cease to be admirers; that's the case with three stories in this collection. She's a classic 1920s girl, with shingled hair, who's described here as looking like an unusually good-looking schoolboy who's dressed up in his sister's clothes. She also comes into one of the later Jeeves and Wooster books, where Bertie is foolish enough to fall in love with her but, like her other flames, comes to regret it, and emerges from the experience a sadder and a wiser man. Her problem is that she can't resist a practical joke, and has no respect whatsoever for the truth, and will put a young man through hell without a second thought if she thinks it will be amusing or even just convenient for her. She is, in fact, a pot of poison. However, she is the slightly indirect cause of the wonderful line uttered by her mother's butler when presenting a snake to her current wooer on a salver: "Your serpent, sir."

There are other stories here too, though, often, as Mr Mulliner stories tend to be, about worms turning, or men who have been trying to impress a woman by doing exactly the wrong thing finally finding out that she wanted them to do something else, which came more naturally to them. There's an apparent contradiction in that one of these women is described here as living with an aunt, her parents being implied to be dead, while in Young Men in Spats the same woman's parents are very much alive and central to the story. Do we care? We do not. The ups and downs of these lunatics in pursuit of often inadvisable love are hilarious in the way only Wodehouse can be hilarious.

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