Review: The Complete Guild of the Eternal Flame Box Set

The Complete Guild of the Eternal Flame Box Set by Talia Beckett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Sometimes, a decent D&D-based sword-and-sorcery yarn with a bit of character depth is exactly what I'm in the mood for. This is one.

While it's clearly based on D&D (it's obvious, even if the author didn't outright say so), it makes the excellent choice to go the opposite of the obtrusive LitRPG route; rather than sticking all of the game mechanics into the story, the author has carefully kept them out entirely - no mention of spell slots, characters with non-strength-based and non-intelligence-based classes haven't obviously dumped strength or intelligence (the half-elf rogue is described as "burly"), and combat flows like novel combat rather than game combat. Armour reduces the damage done by a blow at one point, rather than D&D's binary hit/doesn't hit. It's not so much like a D&D game as it is a novel set in a D&D-like world, if the game aspects were ignored and it was treated just as a fantasy setting. Nor does it follow D&D all the time, though the characters' classes and even most of their subclasses are pretty clear; the ranger has no spells, for example, and magic sometimes works a bit differently, though I don't know what edition the author plays.

In terms of the plot and characters, I did expect the characters to start trusting each other with their backstories sooner than they did. The fourth book ends with the first of them confiding in one of the others, and it's only at the end of the fifth book that they all fully confide in each other - which does make a nice ending point, so I can see why the author timed it that way. We only got hints at the backstories prior to that point, which did provide intrigue, but we had to take it on faith that because of unspecified Bad Things that had happened in the past, these five adventurers had all individually decided to help others in order to atone for their previous bad decisions or actions that had hurt other people (and all happened to meet in a tavern in a town with a problem they could solve, but that's a genre trope, and I give it a pass). The characters are, in other words, noblebright, good-hearted people who will do what they can to help others, even risking their lives to do so.

The editing was rough in places, though I've seen much worse lately; there were a surprising number of missing closing quotation marks (and the occasional missing opening quotation mark), a few simple typos, and some homonym or vocabulary errors (refuting/disputing, too/two, knell/knoll, censor/censure, diffuse/defuse, horde/hoard, peaked/peeked, discrete/discreet, even sales/sails). In the first book, characters sometimes "reply" when there isn't a preceding line of dialog to reply to. Pronouns for the ranger's wolf companion and several other creatures, including human enemies, go back and forth between "it" and "he" rather than picking one and sticking with it. In a few places, a sentence degenerates into garble or changes grammatical direction in the middle, or an idiom gets mangled. It oddly uses metric measurements in a fantasy world, and then mixes them with traditional units, and then gets the conversion wrong. The west gate becomes the east gate at one point, and a period between one and two years has, a few pages later, shifted to between one and two months. Confusingly, the same pronoun is sometimes used for two different characters in the same sentence or adjacent ones, leading to a mental stutter and having to go back and parse the sentence again, and some modifiers dangle. It's below average; I generally see at least a couple of dozen errors in the average published book, from trad-pubs as well as indies (though indies sometimes make different mistakes), and this is almost twice that. But the author can write in the past tense, which isn't as widespread a skill as you'd expect, and nearly all the apostrophes and most of the commas are in the right places. It's scruffy, but wouldn't be hard to fix. Some readers won't notice, or care.

I think I know why there are so many issues: the author has a lot of books out, so is going for the reproductive strategy of a lot of offspring with small investment in each one, and probably doesn't spend much time on revision. I know that's economically preferable for some authors, but it does short-change the readers a bit. And it doesn't need to be a straight-up choice between quality and quantity, either; Lindsay Buroker and, even more so, Melissa McShane manage to produce a lot of books and still maintain high quality. (If you like this book, McShane's Company of Strangers series is similar, but with a more original world and much better editing.)

The story would normally place this in the Silver tier of my 2024 Best of the Year list, with the other solid, enjoyable books, but because the editing is distinctly below average I can only put it in Bronze, and I'd hesitate before picking up another book from the same author.

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Review: The Timekeepers

The Timekeepers by Jill Archie
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Unusually for a steampunk/clockpunk novel, this one has very few vocabulary errors. The rule of thumb seems to be that you can have an airship in your book, or you can use vocabulary correctly, but not both. Perhaps the reason this one is comparatively clean in this regard is that the voice reflects the sheltered 16-year-old protagonist, and the author doesn't try to use any fancy vocabulary.

Unfortunately, at least in the pre-publication version I had via Netgalley, it does have not only most of the other errors that 70-80% of authors typically commit, including sometimes punctuating dialog tags as separate sentences (and numerous dangling modifiers, and commas and apostrophes in the wrong places, and frequently missing past perfect tense), but also some issues I see less often: the wrong form of the word used sometimes when it is in the past perfect, and in general a number of sentences that aren't quite grammatical, or don't mean quite what they're obviously intended to mean, or aren't as clear as they should be about who is doing what. An editor is credited; the fact that she didn't fix all of these doesn't mean that she's not a good editor, necessarily, just that there may have been too many issues to deal with in the time allotted.

Not every reader cares about this kind of thing, but if you do, be advised that there is a lot of it, and that even if you don't notice the specific issues, you may find you're confused occasionally.

For example, quite often there's a sentence of the pattern "Onyx did X when Y happened," which sounds like it means that she did X triggered by Y and the effect is being described before the cause, but actually makes more sense if you include the past perfect and say "Onyx had done X when Y happened," and the sentence becomes about two separate, independent events that happened in sequence. Another example where a sentence isn't as clear as it could be: "She used a fresh handkerchief to wipe away the small streak of blood from her shoulder." In this sentence, "she" is one female character and "her shoulder" belongs to a different female character, so that even though the plain meaning of the sentence is that character 1 is wiping her own shoulder, the reader has to infer from context that character 1 is actually wiping character 2's shoulder.

The plot is a simple one, quite predictable, and relies heavily on the main character making bad choices. At one point, for example, her father is kidnapped and the kidnapper sends a ransom demand: Send me the McGuffin by return of post! The heroine then proposes that she and her two companions instead go to where her father is being held (which they can discover from the means the villain used to send the message), unarmed, and take the McGuffin with them. The companions, both of whom are older and more experienced, praise this as a great idea and see no issues with it whatsoever. She then recruits someone she knows is a slightly unhinged radical to help them, by promising something she knows she can't deliver. Exactly the problems you would expect ensure.

The worldbuilding involves a world that is spread across the main gears of an enormous clock, of which the main character's father is the Timekeeper. It's consistent in its aesthetic - lots of gears and springs and brass - but not especially realistic; I don't think it's meant to be. It's there to create a vibe, not to be a serious science-fictional speculation. If that's the case, it does its job, and at least it's original. Still, even giving physics a holiday, there are parts of the setting or the events that didn't make sense to me. I never did get straight in my mind what the scale of the tower that holds the clock hands was, for example, and I couldn't figure out how a mirror at the top of a staircase could possibly make it look as if the stairs continued up. There were a number of other minor examples where my suspension of disbelief stuttered, not because of the steampunk aspects, but just because of something incidental which looked like it had been invented on the fly to make the plot work, despite not being particularly credible. For example, the obviously misanthropic airship inventor conveniently has two spare bedrooms in his airship - the exact number needed by the characters to, among other things, have a series of interactions that forward the plot - even though the author flat-out says that he didn't seem the type to entertain guests (and even though, in what is intended to be the fastest airship in existence, you would probably want to save as much weight as you could, but that's a physics thing, and I did say I was going to give the physics a pass).

Overall, for me it fell short of being a book I'd recommend. This is primarily because, at the sentence level, the prose frequently doesn't do its basic job of accurately and clearly conveying the author's intent. But also, a plot based largely on the incompetence of the main character (who's still supposed to be some sort of special chosen person), who must be opposed by incompetent villains in order for her to succeed, doesn't work for me, and I constantly struggled to maintain my suspension of disbelief about secondary details.

There's some light philosophy about living in the moment and not fearing death. It doesn't have enough depth to raise the rating.

It engaged me enough to finish, but I was constantly distracted by the many issues, so it gets three stars.

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Review: A Drop of Corruption

A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The second book of a series of which I very much enjoyed the first, despite the grimness of the setting. I eagerly picked this one up when I saw it on Netgalley, and it didn't disappoint.

The detective duo are kind of Holmes and Watson turned up to 11. Ana is brilliant, erratic and eccentric, and a drug user; she also swears constantly. The rather stolid Kol sees, but he does not observe - or rather, he records his sensory impressions with great accuracy (thanks to his particular neurobiological alteration, something that's quite common in the setting), but only occasionally comes to a conclusion about this evidence. That's mostly left to Ana. Watson, unlike Holmes, had romantic relationships; Kol is popular with both women and men, and uses casual sex to try to deal with his loneliness. He's also not just Watson to Ana's Holmes, but Archie Goodwin to her Nero Wolfe, since she finds sensory stimulation so overwhelming that she mostly stays indoors if she can manage it and sends Kol out to do the legwork.

Normally, a foul-mouthed drug user and someone who uses casual sex as maladaptive coping, working on graphic murders in a bureaucratic and sometimes corrupt empire threatened by horrifying kaiju, wouldn't be my cup of tea at all, let alone a five-star book. But Robert Jackson Bennett does it so well that I can set aside the dark, dingy, dank and dirty setting and characters and enjoy the clever detective story and the over-the-top high-concept worldbuilding - and the dedication of the central characters to justice. It has the same general feel as his Founders Trilogy, which I loved: a dark, strange world in which morally complex people stubbornly pursue what's right.

I mean, this series takes the idea of monstrous kaiju who produce biochemicals which cause drastic modifications in living beings, and makes that the technological basis of the empire that fights the kaiju by, among many other things, deliberately turning some of their people neurodivergent, and then works out rigorously what that would look like. And it looks very strange. It's the kind of thick worldbuilding that I love in, say, Brandon Sanderson, where the world is very different and that means the author can tell a story that could only happen in that world; the setting is inextricably enmeshed with the characters and the plot, rather than serving as scenery flats (that we've seen a dozen times before) behind The Usual Drama. And yet, all of the characters have believable motivations, and ultimately it's a story about humanity, and what's always the same about it even when so much else changes. It's also about the sometimes blurry line between being exploited by a system and sacrificially serving something greater than yourself for the good of all. The villains are on one side of that line, as both victims and perpetrators; the heroes work hard to stay on the other side, and to enable as many people as possible to join them there.

The author thinks this is a fantasy novel, and the level of mechanical technology supports that, but to me it feels science-fictional as well; the technology is just biochemical, and well beyond anything we are capable of, to the point that it's sufficiently advanced to read as magic.

The books I get from Netgalley are not necessarily in their final form, and may get more editing after I see them. This one doesn't need a lot; the occasional missing or added word or missing quotation mark, the excess coordinate commas that nearly everyone puts in, occasionally a singular/plural issue where the phrase is confusing and it might be either one. It's smooth enough that I was able to stay in the story most of the time without being distracted by poor execution.

Even though it doesn't look, at first glance, anything like my normal preferred read (which is cosy fantasy), I'm putting this in the Platinum tier of my 2024 Best of the Year list, because it is ultimately noblebright, the worldbuilding is brilliant and original, and the story it tells has depth and weight and a lot of thought behind it.

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Review: Fundamental Magics: Leander's Machine

Fundamental Magics: Leander's Machine by Alex Evans
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

From the author's blog, it emerges that this book was translated (by the author) from French, and it badly needs an editor to get it into smooth English. Not only do we get a full collection of all the usual editing issues, but the verb tenses are frequently off, and there are a great many mangled idioms (with missing or substituted prepositions, missing words, and singular and plural sometimes swapped round). I'm used to seeing books where the author uses simple past instead of past perfect tense; I seldom see one where it's also the other way round, as here. There's also a whole passage of three or four paragraphs copied and pasted into the wrong place at one point, which is nothing to do with being translated or the author (probably) not having English as a first language; it's just careless proofreading.

Usual disclaimer: I had a pre-publication version from Netgalley, and there's some chance that there will be more editing before publication. However, given that there's so much work to do, I'm confident that it still won't be in good shape when published. I mention these things in my reviews because they bother me, and if they bother you, you probably want to know that they're present; I know they don't bother everyone.

The start of the story is slowed by too many initially unconnected subplots with no clear overall plot question to resolve. We get the MC's flashbacks to her difficult childhood; a visiting scholar from a distant place that most local people distrust; an incubus (who, at one point, refers to himself as a succubus) who's dropped through a rift; disappearing academics; the MC's hiding of her status as a shaman. Switching back and forth between these means that none of them progress very fast, and there's not much sense of forward momentum until at least halfway through the book, when the supposedly intelligent main character chooses to go with a man who has more red flags than a May Day parade, without telling anyone where she's going or with whom. This despite the fact that two people with similar knowledge to her have already disappeared in unexplained circumstances.

And then she goes with another dodgy guy, and accepts a drink from him. I don't appreciate stupid female characters, especially when they're supposed to be intelligent.

On the upside, this is a magic-as-technology book, which I enjoy; that's why I picked it up. The worldbuilding isn't in great depth, but it's adequate. There is a bit of "Aerith and Bob" (where made-up fantasy names are mixed with familiar names from our world), but there are several different ethnicities in the city and, giving the benefit of the doubt, maybe that's the reason and the author has worked it all out carefully. The magical terminology is suitably arcane, and sounds like real technical jargon.

I was engaged enough to finish the book, without ever wanting to put it down and read something else, so that's something. And despite her narrow life, poor choices and determination not to get involved in the plot until it intersected with her academic interests, I did like Adrienne and want her to emerge as a winner, even if it wasn't clear exactly what that would look like. But she is always reactive more than proactive, and ends up having to be rescued from several situations she should have been smart enough not to get into in the first place, and between that and the non-idiomatic English, I won't be picking up the sequel or adding it to my recommendation list.

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Review: Lilith, a romance

Lilith, a romance by George MacDonald
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A good many years ago now - I forget exactly how many - I went through a period of reading the books that C.S. Lewis mentioned as influences on his writing. It took me to strange and wonderful places, this being one of them. This review is from my 2024 reread.

There's a strong line of fantastic fiction that runs through the canon of English literature from Beowulf to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo , The Faerie Queene , Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest, The Pilgrim's Progress , Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained , Gulliver’s Travels , William Blake, William Morris, our present author George Macdonald, Lewis Carroll, G.K. Chesterton, E. R. Eddison, A Voyage to Arcturus , and on to the Inklings (C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and others) and beyond; I count Susan Cooper as being in the tradition, and I'm sure there are others I'm not aware of. Many, though certainly not all, of these authors and works include a good deal of Christian theology and/or allegory in their fantastic fiction, and George MacDonald is definitely one. He was a clergyman, unorthodox but devout, and this and several of his other works feature both Christian and fantastic elements side by side and entangled with one another. He also wrote realistic fiction, which is less well known.

It's a portal fantasy, with a mirror (often associated with Lilith, who would possess women by entering them through mirrors) as the door, or one of the doors; there's also a cupboard in a library, disguised with fake books, and a fountain. The British portal fantasy tradition, in my opinion at least, probably originates from Celtic legends of trips into the Otherworld through ancient burial mounds or "fairy forts," but Macdonald has a key role in bringing it into the English-language fantastical tradition, especially through his influence on C.S. Lewis, who regarded him as his "Master". He wasn't the first to use a mirror as a portal, though; Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass was published more than two decades earlier. MacDonald was a mentor to Carroll, and encouraged him to publish Alice in Wonderland, which MacDonald's children enjoyed.

Nearly 40 years before Lilith, MacDonald had published Phantastes, which I consider in part a dry-run for Lilith; it also features a young man pulled into a dream-like world and a quest involving a woman. It took inspiration from the German author Novalis, just as the character of Lilith, mentioned in Goethe's Faust, was imported via Goethe into English romanticism and the school of the Pre-Raphaelites; German and Scandinavian folklore is a strong influence on the British fantastical tradition too.

Lilith, in Jewish and Mesopotamian legend, was the first wife of Adam, and is regarded as a demon. She is, among other things, a symbol of a particular kind of feared femininity: seductive, lacking in submission, hating children, obsessed with her appearance. Lewis mentions her as an ancestor of Jadis, the White Witch, in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe . In MacDonald's version, she is offered a chance at redemption. MacDonald's main unorthodox belief, which hindered his career as a minister, was that everyone could be redeemed by a universally loving God.

Before we even meet Lilith, though, we meet a series of other allegorical and instructive characters in a series of weird landscapes which the narrator, Mr Vane, travels through. There's Mr Raven, the sexton (sometimes a talking bird, sometimes a man dressed in black), who tells him about how the people under his care are dying so that they may live, and sleeping so that they may wake. There are the Lovers: happy, generous, wise, tiny children, a kind of noble savage, who, if they mature too much and give way to greed, become dull and ill-tempered giants who forget their origins and cease to even notice the existence of the remaining Lovers. Unfortunately, some of the younger children speak the overly cutesy baby-talk dialect that makes Carroll's Sylvie and Bruno such hard going, though at least there isn't much of it. There are the inhabitants of a run-down city where everyone is rich (or thinks they are) and strangers are despised; the inhabitants also think they are free, even though they live in terror of their ruler Lilith, who destroys their children if she can. On the same page we're told that they do no work apart from digging up gems out of their cellars, but buy everything they need from other cities, and also that they've inherited their wealth and never spend it. A lot of things in this book are supposed to not make sense, but there are some things that don't make sense that I suspect the author didn't intend to not make sense, as well. There are two female leopards which are sometimes shapeshifted women and sometimes have an existence independent of those women.

Mr Vane, the narrator, is given to making bad decisions through not listening to his wise guides. As Mr Raven warns him, though, doing so means that he brings about evil which turns out for good, and he does eventually manage to do something positive, if not much. He's at a very low stage of spiritual development and has a lot of work to do, which probably makes him exactly the right audience proxy for most of us.

The whole book is visionary, and frequently alludes to both the Bible and Dante, as well as medieval legend. The influence on Lewis's The Last Battle is particularly marked (there's even a version of the "further up and further in" phrase), though it also reminds me of some passages in Lewis's Space Trilogy and of pretty much all of Charles Williams. Like Williams' best work, it gripped my attention and occasionally moved me. The depth in it is in the ideas, rather than in the characters (who are mostly allegories or symbols of one kind or another) or the plot (which is episodic, and contends with a protagonist who won't do as he's told). It's very much a working out, in mystical and symbolic form, of the author's beliefs, so it will work less for you the less you share those beliefs, though I think it does stand on its own merits to a degree; the description is vivid, and the conflicts are powerfully conveyed.

It's a great enough work that I'm leaving it at my original rating of five stars, despite some minor caveats. There's more in it than I saw, for certain.

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Review: Who?

Who? by Elizabeth Kent
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Melodramatic. Everyone (but especially the women) is extremely emotional and makes bad decisions. It has what I would describe as a poor grasp of mental health: a woman who, it is emphasized by her doctor, is not insane, is nevertheless so mentally delicate that he declares that upsetting her emotionally could kill her. Someone has a stroke, and instead of making it difficult for her to walk or talk, it makes her childlike. The alcoholic, however, is believable: according to her, nothing is her fault, and every bad decision she ever made was fully justified and caused by someone else's actions.

Parts of it are predictable (I spotted who the young Frenchman was instantly), and it would be more so except that the characters behave erratically; there's a last-minute complete 180 that doesn't at all ring true to everything the character said and did in the immediately preceding chapters, for example, which shows unmistakable signs of only happening because the author needed it to work that way for the plot to come out right.

It also shows a poor grasp of writing mechanics for the time. These days, I often see people putting extra commas in lists of adjectives that don't belong there - particularly before a colour, which is this author's abiding fault - and before the main verb of a sentence, and leaving question marks out of sentences phrased as questions, but it was less common in books published a century ago, when editors mostly weeded out these issues even if the authors didn't (and the authors usually did).

I've given it my "thin-romance" tag as well, which I give to any story where a supposed great and abiding love arises instantly because someone is physically attractive, and without the characters subsequently spending much time together or having any real chance to get to know each other, becomes the basis for a lifelong commitment. It's borderline, in this case; her love for him, based on his actions in rescuing her, is more believable, though still a bit thin, but his love for her didn't seem to me to be well-founded at all, particularly since he spends much of the book not sure who the object of his affections actually is - hence the title.

At least the title does include the question mark.

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Review: Trent's Last Case

Trent's Last Case by E.C. Bentley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An unusual classic mystery from a close friend of G.K. Chesterton's, best known as the inventor as the clerihew (that's what the C in his name stands for). He and Chesterton collaborated on several books, in which Bentley wrote biographical verses about famous people and Chesterton illustrated them.

In this book, Trent, a painter who routinely quotes English poetry like Lord Peter Wimsey (though different poets, I think), starts the book with an established reputation as an amateur detective. This reputation was established in adventures which were not chronicled prior to this one; this is the first book of what eventually became two novels and a collection of short stories, though internally it reads as if it's the end of the series. He's called in by a newspaper he occasionally works for to investigate the death of a prominent American financier currently staying in England, where he maintains a house. By coincidence, Trent knows the uncle of the financier's wife, and they meet at the nearby hotel and discuss the case.

The odd features include that the dead man appears to have dressed in a hurry, but also in a way that a person wouldn't normally dress (which, to me, instantly pointed to someone else having dressed him, but that's not a conclusion that Trent gets to straight away). He also behaved oddly on the night of his death. Also, nobody heard the shot that killed him, and nothing is missing, apart from half a bottle of whiskey.

From this intriguing base we get what is, for much of the time, not a conventional mystery at all. Trent investigates, finds clues, comes to a theory... but he has fallen in love with the widow, and thinks she might be involved at least indirectly, so he chooses not to pursue his main suspect. There's then a long interval in which he tries, unsuccessfully, to forget about his love interest. When things shift in such a way that he talks to the suspect after all, he finds that things were not at all as they appeared, and the book finishes with a startling twist, leading Trent to declare that this is his last case.

It has the poetic observations and the slightly askew quality one might expect from a friend of Chesterton's. It's not a formulaic book, by any means, which makes it interesting to me, and I think its departure from the expected mystery formula works.

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