Top Books for 2019

This is my sixth annual roundup of the books I read in a year. Earlier instalments are here: my top 19 books for 2018, my top 17 books for 2017,  my top 16 books for 2016 (actually only 15), my top 15 books for 2015, and my top 14 books for 2014. Note that these are books I read in those years, not books published in those years - though these days I am reading a lot from Netgalley, which are often advance copies of books that haven't yet been published, so a higher proportion of my reading is books published in the year I read them.

Last year, I abandoned the attempt to make the number of top books equal the last two digits of the year, which was an arbitrary limitation, and just put as many books on the list as I thought belonged there. Following the same practice again, there are 20 books on this year's list, which means I have now featured 100 books across the six years I've been doing this. Five-star books automatically go on the Best-Of list, and it also includes a selection of four-star books that I think are worthy of mention.

For the second time, I'm awarding a Most Disappointing Book of the Year anti-prize, for a book by an author who, based on their previous history, should have written a much better book. This anti-award went to Andy Weir's Artemis in 2017, and in 2019 it goes to William Gibson's Agency (links are to my reviews). Apart from the massive plot hole right at the end, Artemis might have been an OK book 30 years earlier, when most male authors had no idea of how to write a female viewpoint character; Agency, though, would be tedious in any decade, chooses the viewpoint characters poorly, and gives them, ironically, no agency.

Overall Statistics

I only read 65 books in total in 2019, which is a big drop from previous years, and I'm not sure why that is. I didn't listen to many audiobooks this year, spending my commuting time listening to podcasts instead, which probably contributed. I also started and abandoned a number of books that aren't reflected in the total, but that's nothing new. Maybe I'm just not reading as long at night.

Here are my figures in a table:

	5 star	4 star	3 star	2 star	Total
2019	11	36	17	1	65
2018	5	72	15	2	94
2017	10	56	19	0	85
2016	11	53	12	1	77
2015	11	68	19	2	101
2014	9	70	23	2	104

Despite the lower overall number, I read as many 5-star books this year as in any of the previous five years. Either I'm becoming more generous (probably true) or I'm getting better at choosing books (also probably true). I only got suckered into one two-star book this year, but there were about the usual number of three-star books, 17 (versus 15 last year). A three-star book, for me, is one that I didn't hate, but it had definite flaws. Essentially, I start out at a nominal four stars, and boost it up one if the book is especially good or drop it down one if there's something that hindered my enjoyment. Two stars indicates that, while not lacking any redeeming qualities at all, for me the book was a failure.

Discovery

Where did I get these books? This year, 34 came from Netgalley: six of the 11 five-star books, 15 of the 36 four-star books (including two that made it to the Best Of), and 13 of the 17 three-star books - so a higher proportion of three-star books than other methods of discovery. Ten came from BookBub: one five-star, five four-star including one Best Of, three three-stars and the sole two-star. Four of the BookBub titles went on my Needs Editing shelf, one on my Seriously Needs Editing shelf, and two on my Well-Edited shelf.

One book (a Best Of) came directly from the author, because I'd reviewed the previous book in the series last year. Three came from the library, and the remainder were either found browsing Amazon, came from Amazon's recommendations, or were continuations of series I'd read previously.

Top-Rated Books

So, here is my list, ranked in ascending order. Your taste may well vary, and on a different day, my rankings might vary too.

Links are, as usual, to my Goodreads reviews.

Before I start the list proper, I will mention one that missed the list, even though all the previous books in the series made it on there. Sands of Memory (Company of Strangers, book 5) by Melissa McShane felt a bit by-the-numbers, though it was still good. Melissa McShane is a fixture on my best-of lists, with one book on the list in each of 2016, 2017 (when she also got an honorable mention), and 2018; this year, she has an impressive five books out of the 20, including three five-star entries.

Here are the books that didn't quite make it to five stars, but were strong four-star books:

20. Tess of the Road, Rachel Hartman. I listened to the audiobook while driving, which made it easier to leave it running than stop it; if I'd been reading the text, I might have found the slow pace harder to cope with. Still, some thoughtful moments, and a gradual but powerful build to a revelation that puts the rest of the book into a different perspective.

19. Royal Rescue, A. Alex Logan. Provides insight into the experience of being asexual, with mostly authentic-feeling characters who are determined to do the right thing.

18. The Dragon's Banker, Scott Warren. Pulls off the difficult feat of making merchant banking interesting, and again features a protagonist who wants to do what's right.

17. Company of Strangers, Melissa McShane. The first of an excellent D&D-ish series, not as tense as some of the later ones, but very sound writing. The almost flawless editing definitely helps to boost this author's rankings for me.

16. Stone Unturned: A Legend of Ethshar, Lawrence Watt-Evans. Wizards, a protagonist who wants to do the right thing, mystery, twue wuv - I was always going to like this one.

15. The Masked City, Genevieve Cogman. A strong continuation to the Invisible Library series, with plenty of action and a level-headed, capable protagonist.

14. The Immortal Conquistador, Carrie Vaughn. Another protagonist determined to do the right thing even though, in this case, he's a vampire (turned against his will). Makes me want to return to the main series of which it's a self-contained side story.

13. Sidekicks, Arthur Mayor. Supers done right, with a strong conflict between doing the right thing and doing the sensible thing that looks for a long time like it could go either way.

12. Mortal Rites (Company of Strangers, Book 3), Melissa McShane. The undead done well, a group of protagonists with a strong bond and a good ability to work together, and the usual sound writing.

Now, the five-star books:

11. The Philosopher's War, Tom Miller. Sequel to my #1 book of 2017; its lower ranking mainly reflects my lack of enthusiasm for reading a book set in World War I. Protagonist sacrifices in order to do the right thing.

10. Magic for Liars, Sarah Gailey. Urban fantasy noir, richly psychological, and with a compelling mystery; magic school will never be quite the same after this.

9. Chasing Solace, Karl Drinkwater. Sequel to the #16 book on the 2018 list; the trappings of horror, but it still worked for me, a resolute non-horror reader.

8. This is How You Lose the Time War, Amar El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. The characters are not admirable, but their relationship is beautifully and skillfully depicted, with great imagination.

7. The Raven Tower, Ann Leckie. Hamlet, but very much not as we know it, with a twist that seriously messed with my head.

6. The View from Castle Always, Melissa McShane. I love a magical-castle (or magical-house) story, and this is a good one, with a fine romance woven through the mystery.

5. Spinning Silver, Naomi Novik. Determined, capable protagonists set out to bring about good outcomes for everyone in what seems like an impossible situation, and their courage and creativity are up to the challenge.

4. Shifting Loyalties (Company of Strangers, Book 4), Melissa McShane. Raises the tension, piling on complications for the characters, which produces a cracking story.

3. Gods of Jade and Shadow, Silvia Moreno-Garcia. This author made #11 in 2017 with The Beautiful Ones, and this book pulls off the same difficult feat of a truly glorious ending.

2. The Smoke-Scented Girl, Melissa McShane. If every romance/adventure was like this, I'd read little else. Wonderful protagonist, excellently characterized.

1. Turning Darkness Into Light, Marie Brennan. A lovely piece of writing, integrating scholarship, political maneuverings, and the best handling I've ever seen of the complicated feelings left over after a failed relationship.

Author Gender Breakdown

I started compiling figures last year for author gender (based on what's stated on their Goodreads profiles) for my top list. Without operating a quota system of any kind, I've tended to find myself reading about 50/50 male and female authors overall, though I think that's slowly changing; by my count, I read 41 female authors across 65 books in 2019 (two of whom had male co-authors). The numbers in my top lists skew female most years, though, including this one.

I believe A. Alex Logan is nonbinary, so I've added a column this year. One book had a male and a female author, so the total is 21 for the 20 books; I've counted Melissa McShane each of the five times that she appears on the list.

	M	F	N	Total
2019	6	14	1	21
2018	7	12		19
2017	8	9		17
2016	6	9		15
2015	10	5		15
2014	4	10		14
Total	42	59	1	102

Protagonist gender is even more skewed towards female, which is a conscious choice (I just find women more interesting protagonists). There are 15 female protagonists (Spinning Silver has three and This is How You Lose the Time War has two), and seven male protagonists; for spoilerific reasons, I'm not counting the (trans male) main character of The Raven Tower as a protagonist, and the viewpoint character in that book is non-gendered. Most of the books with male protagonists also have prominent female characters with arcs and importance to the plot; The Immortal Conquistador is the book of which this is least true, and it's a side-story to a series with a female main character. 

What Makes These Books the Best?

As I read through my list, I was struck by how strongly I'm gravitating at the moment towards admirable protagonists who struggle against the odds to do the right thing for the benefit of others (otherwise known as "noblebright"). At least 16 of the 20 can be described this way. They're not, generally, the blacksmith's apprentice who is secretly the prince, either; most of them are ordinary people (possibly with extraordinary talents) who have to step up to meet a challenge. The most prominent exceptions to this type of admirable protagonist are the pair in This is How You Lose the Time War, which managed to win me over despite, rather than because of, what kind of people they were.

It's been a good year for books, and even though I've read less, I seem to have read just as many really good books (and just as many just-OK books, unfortunately). Join me again next year.

Review: Agency

Agency by William Gibson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I never thought I would use the phrase "tedious William Gibson novel," but apparently this is the version of the world we now live in.

This tedious William Gibson novel is clearly a William Gibson novel: it has the effortless prose, the vivid (if occasionally inaccurate) imagery, the geek-culture namedrops, the characters who are outsiders to power and the mainstream. What it doesn't have much of is a plot, and what the characters don't have much of, by irony that may or may not be unconscious, is agency. They do almost nothing that has any impact on anything. In fact, they do almost nothing, and it's narrated at great length.

The author establishes a strict alternation between two viewpoint characters: Verity, in a version of 2017 California where the US election of 2016 and the Brexit vote went the other way, and Netherton, in a post-apocalyptic future descended, quite possibly, from our version of the timeline. This strict alternation regardless of what's going on and who has the most at stake at the time, and this choice of viewpoint characters, soon begin to work against the success of the book.

Both viewpoint characters are essentially passive. Verity spends most of the book as a passenger, being moved around to escape from a corrupt corporation who hired her at the start of the novel. It's never really clear to me why anyone involves Netherton in events, rather than just going direct; he's a go-between and a middleman and an observer, and the one effective thing he does (fighting off a random encounter that has no lead-up and no follow-through) is entirely by accident. Many of the chapters, particularly the Netherton ones, consist of someone, usually Netherton, repeating something we have just been shown in the previous chapter to someone else who wasn't observing at the time. (Not very far into the book, the two viewpoints connect, by a technological means of communication that's never explained in any depth, but looks to the users like VR.)

The beginning is promising. Verity is hired by that dodgy corporation because of her reputation as an "app whisperer" to do vague things with a new alpha build, an advanced AI called Eunice. Eunice is templated on a feisty, fiercely intelligent and capable African-American woman, and is by far the most interesting character in the book; after (view spoiler)[she disappears (hide spoiler)] (relatively early on), the novel immediately bogs down in exposition, pipe-laying, long descriptions of logistics (she sat here, she put her bag there, she looked at this), and people explaining things to other people that we've just been shown in the previous chapter. Once (view spoiler)[Eunice unexpectedly returns through no action of the other characters (hide spoiler)], the book wraps up rapidly, but without much involvement of the carefully-gathered group of people who are supposedly the protagonists; they have spend all their time while the world was threatened with nuclear disaster doing mostly mundane or evil-corporation-avoidance-related things, rather than working on anything to do with the threat, and (view spoiler)[the unnamed president, clearly Hillary Clinton, sorts it all out anyway with hardly any help even from Eunice - revealing that the normally pessimistic Gibson has a more optimistic view than I do about at least one thing: HRC's potential to be a great and wonderful president, rather than simply a much more competent and all-around less bad one than Trump (hide spoiler)].

I got the feeling partway through that the excessive number of secondary characters with backstories that didn't seem relevant to the current story were left over from a previous novel, and indeed it seems this is a sequel to The Peripheral. I was surprised to discover, looking at the front of the book where they are listed, that I'd missed three novels by Gibson since the last one I read, so I don't know if the mediocre dullness of this one is a new development or part of a trend. Since I got a pre-release version from Netgalley, I also don't know if the couple of glitches (such as placing jungle-dwelling orangutans on the savanna) will be fixed before publication; they may be. What I don't think can be fixed is the overnarration of mundane logistics that stands where a plot would normally go, or the limp and ineffectual puppets that are the viewpoint characters.

Accordingly, I'm awarding this my non-prize for Most Disappointing Novel Read in 2019.

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Review: Sands of Memory

Sands of Memory by Melissa McShane
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

While not up to the previous book's level of tension, a decent, enjoyable adventure.

It's replete with Arabian Nights tropes, so not necessarily a super-original setting either.

The team accidentally unleash bad consequences on other people and escape without permanent damage themselves - in fact, in a better state than they start out in. So, also not my favourite from a moral-consequences standpoint.

In fact, it had enough flaws that I'm leaving it off my Best of the Year list, something I seldom do with a Melissa McShane book. That's not to say it was bad, just that I usually like her books a lot more than I liked this particular one. I don't regret buying it, but I hope the next one brings back the full level of tension (despite the team's now awesome power levels).

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Review: The Immortal Conquistador

The Immortal Conquistador by Carrie Vaughn
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'm a long-time fan of the Kitty Norville series, though I have lost touch with it a bit lately, so when this side-story came up on Netgalley I requested the chance to read and review it. Thanks to the publisher for granting the request.

Here we get the full backstory of Rick, the 500-year-old vampire and decent guy who's one of Kitty's allies. Turned against his will by an acquaintance who knew him back when they were both on Coronado's unsuccessful expedition to find the Cities of Gold in Mexico, Rick is determined to be bad at vampiring; he has friends, not victims, and only uses his powers to protect people.

Naturally, this doesn't come easily, but it helps that he spends the first hundred years in complete isolation from other vampires, so nobody tells him how he's supposed to do it. Even in the present day, there's a lot he doesn't know, and he's still determined to be a good man (and a devout Catholic) insofar as that's possible for someone like him.

Carrie Vaughn is an excellent storyteller - her short stories are highly skilled, even though she's probably primarily known as a novelist, and in part this book is what used to be called a "fixup," joining several short stories together into a longer, multi-part narrative. The frame story isn't just a frame, though, but expands into something more.

The very early part, when Rick is turned, is darker and more horrific than I usually prefer, but it sets up a contrast that the author uses well. The essential goodness of a character who fights against the evil imposed on him to remain, in important ways, himself shines through powerfully throughout.

Although I've read a number of the Kitty Norville books, you could read this book without having done so and be fully oriented; the events of those books are only referred to briefly, some of the many adventures that Rick has had over his long life, and Rick himself is at the heart of the story. He's an appealing protagonist, and I enjoyed reading this. Perhaps I'll go back and read some more of the main series.

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Review: Spinning Silver

Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Naomi Novik is doing some wonderful stuff lately. I was starting to feel that the flaws in her Temeraire series were outweighing the strengths, and then she started writing standalone fantasy novels like this, and like the excellent Uprooted.

It's a twist on the Rumpelstiltskin story, but it isn't at all closely constrained by its source material. There are at least three protagonists and several more viewpoint characters (one of whom was a bit of a surprise, and a signal, for me, that that particular character might have a shot at redemption, unlikely as that seemed); the main three are all capable young women who are treated, by their culture and by the men who surround them, as far less than they actually are. They decisively prove that underestimation to be wrong.

One is the daughter of a Jewish moneylender, and I'll admit that I set the book aside for a while and read other things because I was worried about which particular other shoes would drop for a Jewish family in an analog of Eastern Europe in what seems like the 18th or 19th century.

(view spoiler)[Happily, there is no pogrom, but there is plenty of tension and risk and high stakes nonetheless.

I wondered if a story like this, that is set up with so much potential for terrible tragedy all the way around, might have what I call the Glorious Ending, where someone makes a decision out of love and self-sacrifice that takes a story that seems destined for inevitable tragedy and turns it into a triumph. When I finished it, I didn't quite feel that it had hit the full Glorious Ending, but on reflection I'm going to grant it. It came so close that I felt the heat of it, at least.

I did wonder what was going to happen with the two unwanted and malevolent husbands. Were they just going to kill each other and leave the women in possession of the field? In the end, it was something more sophisticated than that, though I wasn't fully comfortable with the resolution; it plays a bit too close to the trope of "I believe my abuser can change if I stick with him," and that probably lost the book its potential fifth star. (hide spoiler)]

With those caveats, I found the story engaging, the characters powerful, the sense of tension and the stakes compelling, and the plot well-paced. It's not every author who can pull off a book with this many viewpoints and with three or four major plot threads closely intertwined, but Naomi Novik is definitely one who can.

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Review: The Elementalist: Rise of Hara

The Elementalist: Rise of Hara by T. M. White
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

DNF at 42%. Between muddled worldbuilding, an annoying protagonist, and constant promises of action and adventure that still hadn't been fulfilled, this just wasn't for me.

There are three layers to the worldbuildng. Layer one is a fantasy secondary world, complete with continent map. The western not-quite-half of the continent has cultures with analogies to France or possibly Italy, and (judging by the names) to Ireland, but they're called something else. The eastern more-than-half has unaccountably (given its huge coastline) been enforcing a policy of isolation for years, now thawing, and (again, judging by the names) appears to have analogs of China and the Middle East. I'm never a big fan of basing fantasy cultures on real cultures, but I understand why people do it. The geography and history are, of course, not those of our world or anything close to it.

Somehow (again), the western part has had the industrial revolution and is all the way up to dieselpunk. This is where the second layer comes in.

The second layer of worldbuilding, at odds with the first, is set dressing that comes straight out of the 1920s or 1930s US, complete with fedoras, trench coats, and jazz. Early on, I noted a car stopped at a red light as challenging my suspension of disbelief (since that's a very arbitrary signal); I didn't know the half of it yet. This secondary world with a completely different history is fully furnished in a job lot of scenery and props straight out of the Jazz Age. It's like you were filming a fantasy epic and just decided to use the sound stage left over from The Great Gatsby.

On top of that is the third layer, which is the speech and attitudes of the characters. These are from contemporary USA, with no visible attempt to go for the 1920s or 30s as anything more than furniture. A nurse is more like a modern nurse practitioner, the status of women seems approximately as it is today, there are college protests against hate crimes and racism towards immigrants, and numerous small attitudes and turns of speech put us firmly in the early 21st century.

I was going to ding the book half a star for muddled worldbuilding, but it wasn't chock full of the usual sloppy mechanical errors, and there kept being promises (in the situation, and in what the protagonist was being trained for) that it would be a thrilling adventure later on, so I kept reading.

Ah, the protagonist. My personal favourite kind of protagonist is one who is strongly motivated by a personal commitment to do the right thing, and will persevere through any challenge, displaying competence and sound judgement and winning allies to her cause (because I do prefer female protagonists). Preferably, she's someone who isn't the most talented or the most gifted (and definitely not fated or prophesied as the Chosen One); she's an underdog, making up with strength of character for being ill-equipped to meet the scale of challenge she's presented with.

Voi, the protagonist of this book, is pretty much the exact opposite of all of this, except that she is a young woman. She constantly huffs, pouts, broods and sulks; she resists her training; she resists being recruited to the cause (probably quite rightly, but it makes her an unpromising protagonist); she has no self-discipline to go with her awesome powers of awesomeness that are better than anyone else in the history of talent. When she does make a decision, it's almost always an ill-judged one. I disliked her as a person and found her constantly annoying as a protagonist. Finally, when she had dangerous sex with a complete stranger because her powers were (for some reason) making her horny, I was done. Even though the many promises of action and adventure were finally (nearly halfway into the book) looking like they might start to pay off, that was just one too many negatives for me.

This book is very likely to the taste of quite a number of people, but I am not a part of that number, I'm afraid.

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Review: Floodtide

Floodtide by Heather Rose Jones
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A very strong beginning and quite a strong ending were let down, for me, by a weak middle, and a viewpoint character who was neither the most interesting person nor the person with the most at stake. These craft missteps brought a well-edited and generally appealing book down to three stars.

I always say that if you give me a motivated character in a dynamic situation, you'll have my attention for as long as you want it. At the beginning of the book, it looked like that was what I was going to get. Roz is dismissed, without references, pay, or anything more than the clothes she's wearing at the time, for "lewd conduct" with another female servant. Desperate, she wanders the streets, homeless, penniless, and hopeless.

However, she quickly falls on her feet and gets not one, but two good opportunities. The biggest point of tension for her is that she'll eventually have to decide between them, but that decision isn't imminent or urgent. There are some half-formed romantic longings, but they never become plot drivers either, and the middle devolves into a long series of mostly inconsequential events. Roz is not striving for anything specifically, or trying to resolve any story question in particular, so there's really no plot to speak of, and she isn't a true protagonist, just a main character.

Interesting things are happening just offstage and to people who aren't Roz, but she (and, therefore, the audience through her first-person viewpoint) gets to hear about them only indirectly and not in any depth. I got the impression that this is a side story to a series that may tell some of those stories; I very much wished that I was reading the books that told those stories, and not this one, at times. Roz's is an engaging viewpoint, despite or, at times, because of its naivite, and she's one of those characters I sometimes wish we saw more of: the reliable, hard-working person of low status who isn't a noble in disguise or a fated Chosen One. The Samwise Gamgee, if you like. But in the whole of the book, she only does one thing that affects events to any degree worth speaking of, apart from perhaps bringing together characters who do more - and then holding things for them and handing them things while they do the interesting stuff.

Because there is interesting stuff on stage again, there at the end, and the characters collectively save the day. I'm all for ensemble casts, and I have no issue with that whatsoever; I'm even quite happy that, at the end, Roz makes something of a sacrifice (that still leaves her in a good position) to enable someone else to fulfil their potential. Unfortunately, that doesn't make up for the aimless middle.

What kept me reading through the aimless middle was the promise offered by the beginning; Roz's voice; and the fact that, even in an ARC from Netgalley, the copy editing was to a high standard (only five minor errors, two vocabulary and three apostrophe-related). The world-building was also interesting, with ubiquitous magic enmeshed with both folk tradition and Catholicism. But that middle part did drag the book down to three stars for me.

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Review: Endurance: The Complete Series

Endurance: The Complete Series by A.C. Spahn
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

First, the praise. For me, this was a better-written and funnier space opera than the Hugo-winning Red Shirts by John Scalzi. The characters are more distinct and better developed, the plot makes more sense, and the description is far superior.

Now, the undermining of the praise. I thought Red Shirts was mediocre and not at all funny, and didn't think it remotely deserved its Hugo. The characters in that book were indistinguishable, not least because they (and their environment) are never described at all, and there was a huge, ridiculous plot hole. You could film it quite easily; just cut out a few identical, vaguely human shapes from thin cardboard, write random names on them, move them round a white room on obvious wires, and have Scalzi do the voice. (Not voices; there's only one, and it's Scalzi's.) That would give exactly my experience of reading Red Shirts, if you made a few careless editing errors and tried to be arty at the end, but failed.

So actually, Endurance didn't set my world on fire. It made it to four stars, barely, because the characters are likeable, and they develop some individuality and have arcs. They're not the most complex or fully rounded characters you'll ever meet, though; they each only have a couple of characteristics, even when we've been in their viewpoint for a while, and their backstory tends to be vaguely hinted at rather than developed.

The book is made up of multiple stories with the same characters and setting, but tending to focus on one or two characters per story, moving around the crew of the spaceship after which the book is named. There's an overall story arc, though, which makes it like a limited TV miniseries rather than a movie; each episode has its own complete story, but together they make a larger story.

That more or less worked for me. I'm not sure of the timespan over which the stories were written, but there are inconsistencies between them, from the spelling of the talky/talkie box to whether or not there is a substantial United Earth military apart from the law enforcement organization to which the central characters belong.

The setting is heavy on the tropes and light on actual science, which is kind of what I've come to expect from space opera. However, I found the balance a bit too much on the tropey side and away from the science side. Not only do we have a crew of misfits in an outdated ship (who turn out to be the greatest ever and save the day repeatedly), but we have several sets of planet-of-hats aliens closely resembling humans (physically and culturally) except for a couple of minor characteristics; a genius engineer capable of single-handedly inventing FTL travel and understanding alien technology quite easily; and a science crew who can figure out a cure in a very short time for an alien disease that the aliens haven't got a cure for, even though none of the crew are medical scientists and the aliens have been specifically mentioned to have medical science far in advance of humans'. Oh, and zombies, which made no sense whatsoever.

The copy editing was good; I only noticed four or five minor glitches, which is far fewer than average. That helped to keep me reading, even though I found the plot predictable (when it wasn't nonsensical) and less than fully engaging. It was mildly amusing, mostly because of the crew's banter.

I didn't love it. I wouldn't run out and buy another one. But I thought it was better than Scalzi.

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Review: The Language of the Dragon

The Language of the Dragon by Margaret Ball
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

My abiding association with Margaret Ball is the books she "co-authored" with Anne McCaffrey back in the day, when McCaffrey was doing the "you write the book, I'll lend my name and help launch your career" deal with a number of young authors. (At least, I've always assumed that's how it worked.) She seemed to pick good writers, at least; except for a few very minor glitches, this book is impeccably written - something you couldn't always say of McCaffrey.

It's a spin-off from another series, with one of the minor characters being the main character of that series. Contemporary urban fantasy of a sort; magic exists, but is rare and not publicly known, and supernaturals are not everywhere as they are in most contemporary urban fantasy.

The specific magic here only works in a particular language, and has a cost for the spellcaster (headaches and possible brain injury). A notebook of words and phrases has made its way from a remote Central Asian location, the only place the language apparently is known, to America, and becomes a McGuffin in a struggle between a self-confessed slacker of a linguistics graduate and an unscrupulous tenured professor.

It's a well-told story, and entertaining. The main issue I have with it is that in a post-Me-Too world, the behaviour of Michael Ryan, the I-suppose-hero, comes off as creepy and intrusive; he hits on his young landlady (the slacker linguist) repeatedly, despite being almost as repeatedly rebuffed and even told that she hates him and he should leave immediately, and ends up basically forcing himself into her problems to help her solve them - something he's not a substantial amount of help with, for the most part.

There are a couple of what look like scanning glitches (capital I in place of lowercase l), which make me wonder if this recently-published ebook came from an older print edition, written in a time when that was just how male leads behaved. Regardless, it struck me as borderline at best. I'm also not a huge fan of slacker protagonists, as a class. Still, it managed to retain all four of the stars that I provisionally award any book that interests me enough to buy (adding or deducting as the content justifies). It's not a best-of-the-year book, but I would consider reading another in the same series or the related series.

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Review: Sidekicks

Sidekicks by Arthur Mayor
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It's difficult to find a good supers book. I was in the mood for one, and looked at and discarded more than 30 before settling on this one. I'm glad I picked it up; it was well done, with a bit of depth to the main character, and not too trope-ridden given the genre. The supers are not obvious knockoffs of Marvel or DC characters, and a bit of thought has gone into their powers.

It was also better edited than the average superhero novel, though sadly that's a very low bar to clear. An editor is credited; I'm sure she caught a lot (by the nature of editing, the audience never sees what the editor caught), but she missed a lot of omitted vocative commas (the "let's eat Grandma" error), some vocabulary issues (homonyms and mangled expressions), a couple of apostrophe glitches, and a few other assorted minor problems. It wouldn't be hard to clean up to a high standard.

The setting is a dark and gritty city filled with urban blight, corruption, and supervillain-organized crime, in which a group of technically illegal vigilantes known as the Guard try to protect the innocent as best they can. Led by the Batman-esque Raptor (who, unlike Batman, does have superpowers, but like Batman is grim and rigidly disciplined), they put their sidekicks/apprentices through a rigorous training regimen and impose strict rules on them, including keeping them isolated from the wider superhero community.

This is a problem when the senior members of the Guard are ambushed and killed, leaving the sidekicks out of their depth, not knowing how to access key resources or any assistance from other supers, and (thanks to the strict rules of their mentors) not really knowing, or in some cases liking, each other very well at all.

There's a strong theme throughout of the main character, who only has a low level of superpowers, having to choose between sensible safety and doing the right thing, and he goes back and forth between the two choices. His first-person narration is filled with self-deprecating banter inadequately covering over terror; he goes through some very traumatic events on his way to a rousing conclusion (that then has doubt cast on it as an effective setup for a sequel).

The other members of his team, apart from Butterfly, who can go into a robotlike mental state in which she can calculate odds and angles with extreme accuracy, don't get much development. Flare is mostly angry, Peregrine mostly a tool (though the rivalry between him and the narrator, Raven, does shift towards a shaky alliance in the course of the book), and Ballista mostly vulnerable; Butterfly gets an arc, in which she struggles with an issue similar to, but sufficiently different from, the safety versus heroism issue Raven faces. Her robotic mindset is a refuge from the fear and horror she's feeling, but it takes away from her humanity, so neither one is truly safe, and she needs both parts of herself in order to be an effective hero.

There's a sequel, which I will definitely read. It's a decent job of writing, with more emotional depth and subtlety than a lot of supers books, and I enjoyed it.

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Review: The Elementalist: Rise of Hara

The Elementalist: Rise of Hara by T. M. White
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

DNF at 42%. Between muddled worldbuilding, an annoying protagonist, and constant promises of action and adventure that still hadn't been fulfilled, this just wasn't for me.

There are three layers to the worldbuildng. Layer one is a fantasy secondary world, complete with continent map. The western not-quite-half of the continent has cultures with analogies to France or possibly Italy, and (judging by the names) to Ireland, but they're called something else. The eastern more-than-half has unaccountably (given its huge coastline) been enforcing a policy of isolation for years, now thawing, and (again, judging by the names) appears to have analogs of China and the Middle East. I'm never a big fan of basing fantasy cultures on real cultures, but I understand why people do it. The geography and history are, of course, not those of our world or anything close to it.

Somehow (again), the western part has had the industrial revolution and is all the way up to dieselpunk. This is where the second layer comes in.

The second layer of worldbuilding, at odds with the first, is set dressing that comes straight out of the 1920s or 1930s US, complete with fedoras, trench coats, and jazz. Early on, I noted a car stopped at a red light as challenging my suspension of disbelief (since that's a very arbitrary signal); I didn't know the half of it yet. This secondary world with a completely different history is fully furnished in a job lot of scenery and props straight out of the Jazz Age. It's like you were filming a fantasy epic and just decided to use the sound stage left over from The Great Gatsby.

On top of that is the third layer, which is the speech and attitudes of the characters. These are from contemporary USA, with no visible attempt to go for the 1920s or 30s as anything more than furniture. A nurse is more like a modern nurse practitioner, the status of women seems approximately as it is today, there are college protests against hate crimes and racism towards immigrants, and numerous small attitudes and turns of speech put us firmly in the early 21st century.

I was going to ding the book half a star for muddled worldbuilding, but it wasn't chock full of the usual sloppy mechanical errors, and there kept being promises (in the situation, and in what the protagonist was being trained for) that it would be a thrilling adventure later on, so I kept reading.

Ah, the protagonist. My personal favourite kind of protagonist is one who is strongly motivated by a personal commitment to do the right thing, and will persevere through any challenge, displaying competence and sound judgement and winning allies to her cause (because I do prefer female protagonists). Preferably, she's someone who isn't the most talented or the most gifted (and definitely not fated or prophesied as the Chosen One); she's an underdog, making up with strength of character for being ill-equipped to meet the scale of challenge she's presented with.

Voi, the protagonist of this book, is pretty much the exact opposite of all of this, except that she is a young woman. She constantly huffs, pouts, broods and sulks; she resists her training; she resists being recruited to the cause (probably quite rightly, but it makes her an unpromising protagonist); she has no self-discipline to go with her awesome powers of awesomeness that are better than anyone else in the history of talent. When she does make a decision, it's almost always an ill-judged one. I disliked her as a person and found her constantly annoying as a protagonist. Finally, when she had dangerous sex with a complete stranger because her powers were (for some reason) making her horny, I was done. Even though the many promises of action and adventure were finally (nearly halfway into the book) looking like they might start to pay off, that was just one too many negatives for me.

This book is very likely to the taste of quite a number of people, but I am not a part of that number, I'm afraid.

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Review: The Spirit Siphon

The Spirit Siphon by Ben S. Dobson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'm enjoying this series, though I still haven't found any of the subsequent books as good as the first one. This one, in particular, seems a little short on tension; I'm not sure why, because the situation (trying not to start a war while tracking down an old adversary) has plenty of tension built in. Perhaps it's that the characters never seem to make much progress on anything. They find things out, the situation complicates, they even confront the adversary, but they don't really succeed at much, and while not succeeding complicates their lives a bit, I didn't get the sense of a powerful downward spiral (followed by last-minute triumph against the odds) that an action-oriented book like this needs.

It feels very much like a transitional book, inserted to move the characters from one situation to another, rather than being a complete adventure in itself.

The half-orc character's zest for life is still on display, but not as much (and that's one of the best aspects of the series, for me). Nor is her human partner's cleverness and ability to defeat mages by getting inside their heads.

All in all, not the best entry in what is still an enjoyable series.

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Review: The Glass Magician

The Glass Magician by Caroline Stevermer
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is an experienced author, and it shows in the smooth and assured writing. Unlike most period pieces, it isn't full of obvious anachronisms (with an exception I'll mention later) or regrettable vocabulary glitches. However, the plot, the characters, and especially the setting all fell a bit short of excellence for me.

There's nothing really wrong with the plot. It's more or less mystery with a chance of romance, though there's a dash of coming-of-age in there as well. The protagonist must deal with the discovery that she isn't who she thought she was, that her family situation is not as she's been told, and that her mentor isn't who she thought he was either. Meanwhile, she's prevented from working as a stage magician, which brings a brief threat of economic difficulties, quickly averted. She ends up the house guest of a man who both attracts and annoys her, caught up in the murder of a rival magician, and under threat from what amounts to a force of nature because of her newly discovered identity.

It's probably a bit too much for a book this length, and some of the elements don't really get the development they need. The denouement to the mystery is a painfully awkward attempt at a villain reveal which, rather against the odds given how badly it's done, succeeds in flushing out the murderer. The pursued-by-manticores plot at least has a level of tension that's largely missing elsewhere. There are a few conflicts ("I must clear my mentor's name, but doing so risks my life") set up by the interweaving plots. It's not outstanding, but it will do.

The characters are all right. There's nothing really wrong with them either. They're not complete cardboard cutouts or straight out of central casting, not quite. But they don't have an uncommon amount of individuality or depth either. You can describe each of them in a phrase (the rich young man, the rich young man's dilettante sister, the mentor, the monster hunter, the Romany magic shop proprietor, the landlady) and there's not a lot to add to that brief capsule description. The protagonist and viewpoint character has the most to her, of course, and she does develop and change in the course of the story.

There were a couple of things about the setting that tripped me up and challenged my suspension of disbelief. We're in an alternate 1905, similar to our own 1905 in many ways (including some prominent people), but different in many other ways. Firstly, as well as baseline humans ("Solitaires") there are shifters ("Traders") and people who have some kind of nature affinity that's never really made completely clear ("Sylvestri"). The three can interbreed. In order to shift forms, you have to be a Trader on both sides of your family, but if Traders intermarry too much they produce manticores, monsters that can shift into apparent human form in order to stalk young Traders who are not yet in full control of their shifts and eat their magic, killing them in the process.

For some reason that is never made clear, pretty much everyone who is prominent and successful is a Trader, and vice versa. The lack of an explanation for this was one of the things that tripped me up. I couldn't figure out a history in which the ability to turn into an animal (and the loss of human thought and memory beginning around the age of 70) translated automatically into becoming rich and powerful. Several of the actual historical figures mentioned are Traders, and the impression one gets is that nobody can just rise to prominence on their talents (as some of those people did in our reality); they have to be a Trader. Why?

Most Native Americans are Sylvestri, and they have a treaty with the other Sylvestri that has kept the centre of the North American continent theirs, while the coasts are apparently colonised - both seem to be part of the United States, though that isn't said explicitly - and a railway runs between the two. Again, this seems unlikely; it doesn't play a big role in the plot, except that the Sylvestri ambassador is a minor character. (He is stationed in New York. Is New York the capital, then? Ambassadors are posted to capitals, consuls are posted to non-capitals.) And yet the Gilded Age is in full swing on the Eastern seaboard, unsupported by the resources of the central US. (The wealthy in the real Gilded Age often had extensive holdings in those central states.)

It's hard to resist the idea that Native American sovereignty over a large portion of their land is simply something the author put in because she thought it should be that way, especially given other indications. There are black people in this alternate world, but they have a much higher status than was the case in our 1905 (40 years after the Civil War, let's not forget); a black woman is a prominent lawyer, and two other black women form two-thirds of the influential Board of Trade, who rule on certain important Trader matters. (The status of women seems a little higher, too.) Race is something that's constantly highlighted; the viewpoint character is a white woman, yet every person she meets, most of whom are white, is described by their race as well as whether they're Solitaire, Trader, or Sylvestri (which she generally seems to be able to tell as easily as their ethnicity). I'm not a conservative person and am mostly sympathetic to liberal viewpoints, but this does read to me like conspicuous 21st-century white liberalism projected intrusively onto an earlier age.

Overall, then, I found this book fell short of being fully satisfying. The plot, while servicable, lacked the momentum it could have had, and the mystery resolution was painfully bad; the characters stuck mostly to type; and there were, for me, big holes in the worldbuilding that distracted me from the story.

I received a copy via Netgalley for purposes of review.

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Review: Max and the Multiverse

Max and the Multiverse by Zachry Wheeler
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Max is basically the epitome of why I hesitate to read books with male protagonists these days. He is an arrogant, ignorant, aimless slacker, completely oblivious to how his life is made easy for him by the work of people he despises (including his parents, whose role in the story consists entirely of their absence). The narrative voice manages to add more ignorance (of the complex role of religion in the development of society and technology; of the religious origin of names like "Veronica" - the AI in the non-religious utopia; of how you need a whole society, not just an intellectual elite, for anything to function), and contempt, notably for fat people, "stupid" people, and religious people - who are equated with stupid people. The descriptions of the space lesbians having amorous interludes are creepily enthusiastic. It's no wonder that he several times depicts people in service professions being rude to the protagonist because of how annoyingly ignorant and boorish he is; most of us have not had that experience, but I wouldn't be surprised if the author had.

Though most (not all) of the sentences are punctuated correctly, if one ignores the interrobangs, far too many of them have words accidentally left out; there is a profusion of dangling modifiers; and the author affects a high-flown vocabulary and several times stumbles over it. "Don", for example, means "put on clothing" (it was originally "do on"); it does not mean to wear clothing. It's used incorrectly four times and, oddly, correctly once. "Visage" means face, not sight. The prose has an unfortunate tendency in a purplish direction, overall, which eventually becomes wearing.

Part of the schtick, which is important early on but loses all relevance later, is that Max shifts universes when he falls asleep. But, as often happens in alternate-world novels, the most arbitrary things about his life, the things that are most likely to change - his very existence, his address, his cat, the identity of his girlfriend, his parents happening to be absent - are exactly the things that remain constant. Events even flow from universe to universe, so he breaks up with his girlfriend in one universe and in the next universe that was also something that happened, even though so much else has changed.

In the end, the multiverse shifting has absolutely no relevance to the plot whatsoever, except that it enables Max to get into space (in an advanced utopian version of the world that changed completely 20,000 years earlier and yet still somehow has Max in it). Space in an alternate universe is astonishingly like contemporary America, but with funnier-looking people and the usual whiz-bang technological furniture space adventures tend to share. It's lacking in imagination; it may be intended as part of the satire, but satire needs to be a bit more... satirical than this.

I promised myself that if the mediocre white guy ended up sleeping with the space lesbians essentially because he was the mediocre white guy, I would ding it another star, but happily that didn't happen. I should probably ding it half a star for the fact that he saved the day in the crucial moment when the otherwise competent women were helpless, and did so by pretending he was sleeping with the space lesbians and making them act like brainless bimbos. So it's two and a half stars, rounded up to three. But I will definitely not be reading another book in the series or another book by this author.

The cat was good, though.

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Review: One Blood

One Blood by Sabrina Chase
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read the first of the series some years ago, but there was enough reminder/backstory stuff to catch me up without having to refresh myself.

I remember the first book as being very well edited; this one has a few minor glitches, mostly apostrophes and commas, but for the most part it's smooth and even, and I could relax into it without being constantly irritated by the copy editing.

It's an enjoyable ensemble-cast adventure. The "it's us humans together against the alien Other" premise rings a little old-fashioned to me, but it's far from the worst take I've seen on it, and there are plenty of hints that the Earth-humans, at least, have a slightly more sophisticated take on war than that. The military background of several of the characters came across to me as convincing (I have not served in the military, though, so take that for what it's worth). There's lots of winning hearts and minds and clever problem-solving, as well as a smaller amount of blowing stuff up, which works for me as a balance.

The characters, including the non-Earth-human ones, are easily distinguishable, and the two main characters in particular, the military leader and the suddenly-superpowered geek, have some depth and heft to them. I believed and enjoyed their strong personal relationship, too.

Extra points for a cat, as always.

It's good enough that I'll consider adding it to my Best of the Year, though not so good that it's going on that list automatically. Definitely a strong four stars, but it lacks that extra depth or something outstanding that would take it to five.

I'll read the third in the trilogy, though, for sure.

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Review: Purrfect Magic

Purrfect Magic by Samantha Coville
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Light and cheerful (considering the multiple messy deaths in it), this NA magic academy story rides the popular wave begun by Harry Potter. The first-person protagonist starts out as an overprivileged brat, but quickly gains a sense of responsibility as the school comes under threat.

The romance feels more middle-school than post-high-school, and the numbers don't always add up (somehow, 25 people are divided into pairs, for example, with nobody apparently left over). The villain's inside person was pretty predictable, partly because so few characters are developed at all, or even named; and almost every significant person has the cliched green (or rather "emerald") eyes.

The pre-release copy I got from Netgalley has all the usual kinds of errors, though not in too great profusion, and a good copy editor could have it nice and clean for publication without too much trouble.

The kittens who are also ancient demons were fun, and the defend-the-school plot moves along briskly, but it never threatens to rise above the general run of its genre, as I'd hoped it might. A solid three stars, entertaining but unspectacular.

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Review: Witches Protection Program

Witches Protection Program by Michael Okon
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Logging on to Goodreads to review this, I was presented with a quote by Tracy Chevalier: "I have consistently loved books that I read when sick in bed."

My experience differs. This book, for example.

It's essentially an average action movie in book form. The plot is thoroughly expected, and the characters never attain any depth beyond their familiar types. What worldbuilding there is is tissue-paper thin. It seems to be trying to be Men in Black, but it doesn't even quite pull off being Men in Black II.

If it had been played for comedy throughout, elements like the mind-controlling face cream and the inexplicably steampunk weapons might have worked, but as it is they're simply absurd.

There's nothing really wrong with it, as such - apart from the occasional mid-scene shift in point of view, which is generally considered a rookie error - but it's so thoroughly mediocre that the only rating I can give is three stars.

I received a copy via Netgalley for review.

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Review: The Books of Conjury: The Complete Trilogy

The Books of Conjury: The Complete Trilogy by Kevan Dale
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

At a high level, this generally worked for me as a story, with exceptions that I'll talk about below. At the level of detailed execution, though, it has a lot of room for improvement, hence my three-star rating.

It also contained a lot more mayhem and death of innocents than I usually prefer, though it wasn't like I didn't know that going in.

I picked it up (on a BookBub promotion) in part because a couple of the Amazon reviewers specifically described it as "well edited". I'm afraid they were mistaken. Most (though not all) of the commas and apostrophes are in the right places, true, which puts it ahead of a lot of books, but it's rife with hyphens where no hyphen should be, words missed out of sentences, sentences mangled in revision, verbs not agreeing with their subjects, fumbled idioms, vocabulary errors (like confusions between straight and strait, taught and taut, loathe and loath, wretch and retch, belied and betrayed, synched and cinched, troupe and troop, gate and gait, internment and interment), and a long parade of dangling modifiers. I marked 220 issues (including some that weren't copy editing issues, which I'll discuss below), and I didn't mark every one. Even considering that this is three books in one, that's still on the high end for books I review, which is why I've put it on my "seriously needs editing" shelf.

Apart from the copy editing, there were issues with anachronisms, continuity, and things I just didn't believe. There's a suspicious number of large windows for the glass technology of 1736-37, which is when the book is set; there's also a very minor female character called Aubrey, which was a name not used for girls until the 1970s (or for boys in the 18th century, for that matter), and a mention of adrenaline (discovered in the 1890s).

Other problems of background include a mention of a group of lords, "one a member of Parliament, no less". All British lords, properly so called, are members of the House of Lords, and none can be members of the House of Commons, so this is nonsense.

Early on, a woman supposedly freshly arrived from England appears to recognise hemlock trees, which are North American natives. This same woman (the viewpoint character and protagonist) has nothing remotely English about her; both she and her master, also supposedly from London, use the very American phrasing "off of" repeatedly, for example. I was never convinced of her Englishness in any way (and it would have worked just as well for the story if she'd arrived from some other American colony).

There are a few minor continuity problems, but the big one is that two characters set off on a dangerous journey to get a particular magical substance that is locked up in a specific place. However, by the time their journey ends, their purpose in making the journey has changed to enacting the magical ritual for which the substance is needed, and (without having visited the place one of them specifically said it was in) they appear to have had the substance with them all along.

That same journey also gave me some of the biggest examples of things I just didn't believe: a large man in his early 80s able to make it through a gruelling physical trial, and a woman in her late teens able to haul him around physically, including onto a horse. Given that there's magic, and it can do a very wide range of convenient things, they could have used spells to give themselves more strength and endurance (at the risk of injury or exhaustion later on), but they didn't.

There's also the idea that, along with everything else she was studying, plus all the work she did, Kate managed to learn German, a notoriously difficult language, well enough to read a random passage, in less than a year (along with, presumably, a number of other languages; the spells are mostly in languages other than English, and are quoted in full a bit more often than necessary). And, among all the death, that certain characters made their way through a highly dangerous area and didn't die. (A few of them had magical protection, but the soldiers and others with them didn't.)

And, of course, there's the staggering coincidence at the beginning, when someone who should have died somehow doesn't, and ends up meeting exactly the person who can help her, and who she can help, because without this meeting there is no story. It's a bit too obvious a hand of fate/God/the author.

So, numerous issues. The heart of the story is sound, though, and with better editing; more attention to detail, time period, and continuity; and a bit of reworking of the less believable parts, this could be a strong four stars.

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Review: Buzz Kill: A Novel

Buzz Kill: A Novel by David Sosnowski
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was a difficult one to rate, and I finally went with my gut; the three-star rating partly reflects the fact that it was such a downer, which is not to my taste. (The title turned out to be accurate in a couple of ways that took me unpleasantly by surprise, though it's not like I wasn't warned at all; I just kept hoping it would turn out better than it was threatening to.)

I've read a few books now in the genre you might call "contemporary science fiction," as spawned by William Gibson of All Tomorrow's Parties, and they tend to have three flaws.

First, they're world-weary and cynical. This book is definitely those things, though it is at least witty about it.

Second, they tend to feature alienated losers wandering through a series of events without much in the way of goals, and therefore without much plot. For a long time - until about 45% - and with the "losers" part in brackets, I thought this book checked that box off as well, but the pair of protagonists do finally get a goal, or a pair of aligned goals. It is very much choked with exposition and high-flown prose, though, with long infodumps (either via a character or directly from the narrator) about artificial intelligence and various other topics. The explanations are plot-relevant, but there are an awful lot of them. I gained the impression that the author/narrator was a bit in love with the sound of his own voice.

The third flaw that many contemporary SF books share is the flaw that (according to Sturgeon) 90% of everything shares: they're crap, in the sense that the author has a poor grasp on the basic tools of writing like punctuation, sentence structure, and vocabulary, not to mention plot, characterisation and setting. This book has, I think, had extensive copy editing to remove most (though, in the review copy I got from Netgalley, not quite all) signs of those problems, and reads as better written than average. That would normally have kept it at four stars, but sustained cynicism and a tragic ending were not what I was hoping for, and when you spend almost the first half of the book waffling around with backstory and the characters feeling and thinking and experiencing a lot but doing very little, I will ding you for it.

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Review: The Dragon's Banker

The Dragon's Banker by Scott Warren
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The author of this book set out to do something difficult - tell an interesting story about a merchant banker in a fantasy setting - and, in my view, achieved it. I kept wanting to get back to reading it, which is an excellent sign. It helps that the banker in question is atypically honest, and, despite his frequent protestations, generous to others.

It's a kind of riches-to-rags-to-riches story, though the rags are relative rather than absolute. For a long time, I was thinking it was going a bit too easily; the protagonist kept succeeding in whatever he attempted, and had a clever plan that looked as if it was going to come off without a hitch. I was still interested enough to keep reading, but I did wonder if there was going to be some more tension and conflict and challenge coming - and then there was plenty, and the plot took a series of twists, and overall I was very satisfied with the outcome.

I will mention a brief jarring moment, in which the protagonist has a drunken one-night stand with a junior employee. It felt out of place with the rest of the book.

I'll also mention that in the review copy supplied to me by Netgalley, it's obvious that the author is reaching well beyond his vocabulary, and often using words in senses that are either highly unusual or flat-out wrong.

The bonus story, while in dire need of basic copy editing (again, in the version I had; the published version may well be a lot better), I found genuinely amusing. It's the story of a fated Chosen One, the focus of dozens of mutually contradictory prophecies, who refuses the call so hard that he actually ends up succeeding in a completely unexpected way. It's not just tropes and silly names, but clever and well plotted, which I believe a comic story needs to be.

Definitely recommended, though I would like to see the author bring his knowledge of the basics of vocabulary and punctuation up closer to the level of his excellent plotting.

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Review: The Lawrence Watt-Evans Fantasy Megapack

The Lawrence Watt-Evans Fantasy Megapack by Lawrence Watt-Evans
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Some of the stories are a bit insubstantial, and some read more like scenes from novels than short stories (there is a difference, which writers who are mainly novelists don't always appreciate). And there is a bit more casual death and mayhem in a few of the early ones than I was looking for. But on the whole, amusing and entertaining.

The copy editing needs another run-through (minor scruffiness, nothing really big; OCR errors, missing minor words and the occasional dropped quotation mark, mainly) and the formatting and paragraph breaks are occasionally out, but it's not enough to be a dealbreaker for me.

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Review: The Quantum Garden

The Quantum Garden by Derek Künsken
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read the first in this series and enjoyed it, despite its frequent tragedies and challenging setting, so I requested this one from Netgalley. Thanks to the publisher for granting the request.

I found it easier to follow than the first, though like the first one, it does have a long series of events in which things get worse for the characters and they have to make terrible choices. Like the first, it ends with at least a hint of hope. Unlike the first, it doesn't really incorporate a heist.

It's a complex setting, with several kinds of genetically engineered posthuman, AIs, time travel, quantum effects and aliens. It's not just your generic paint-by-numbers space opera, for sure. As well, it's a powerful emotional story about people having their deepest beliefs about themselves and their lives challenged and having to come to terms with their responsibility for terrible consequences of their actions.

If that's something you're looking for, I recommend it highly; it's done with a good deal of skill.

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Review: Chasing the Shadows

Chasing the Shadows by Maria V. Snyder
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've come to the conclusion that these books aren't so much science fiction as fantasy with some SF trappings (aliens, spaceships, planets). It's lampshaded that the laws of physics are not being well observed here, plus the main character is developing what I can only call a psychic connection to the self-aware cyberspace known as the Q-Net. It very nearly got onto my "SF-with-bad-science" shelf, but I don't think the unscientific bits are a result of ignorance (as in the other books on that shelf); they're deliberate.

Somehow, I liked the main character, despite the fact that she's a bit of a perfect Chosen One. I can see why everyone else finds her irritating, since she keeps being right about things and has basically superpowers. She gets away with this for me because of her self-deprecation, even if she claims not to be sensible and is, in fact, extremely sensible, accepting necessary limitations without irrational teenage rebellion, and taking all of her risks for good reasons.

Despite the flawed science and flawless heroine, I did enjoy this, and intend to keep reading the series. I like the voice, I like the mystery, I like the fact that it isn't just the same old thing reheated once again, and I want to see where it goes from here.

I received a review copy via Netgalley.

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Review: Stone Unturned: A Legend of Ethshar

Stone Unturned: A Legend of Ethshar by Lawrence Watt-Evans
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Right up my alley: a book full of magic-users, with a (main) protagonist who's simply motivated by doing the right thing, because he's a good person.

The author describes this series as "light-hearted," and if by that he means "not dark and tragic and full of angst" then I endorse that description. It's refreshing to have sword-and-sorcery tales that aren't packed with antiheroes, and I will be checking out the rest of this series (which consists mostly of standalones that can be read out of order).

The setting was originally developed for a game, and the magic-users show their D&D roots, though not to excess. (Mainly it's the names of the spells.)

There are three storylines, with different viewpoint characters, starting in different times, and they eventually merge in pretty much the ways I'd expected. The main plot ends up escalating to stopping a villain, and the solution they come up with for both the villain's scheme and one of the other main story problems is, again, something I saw coming. But the predictability didn't dent my enjoyment much.

Slightly scruffy in the copy editing, with a few missing words and misplaced quotation marks, a continuity error and a homonym slip, but the issues are not constant, and most of them are not too egregious.

On the whole, an enjoyable palate cleanser for more serious books, fun and full of action but not lacking a brain.

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Review: Chasing Solace

Chasing Solace by Karl Drinkwater
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A compelling, suspenseful story of survival and quest.

The author writes horror, and this does have some horror aspects - most of the book is the protagonist making her way through a deserted spaceship that's an abbatoir, with all of the disgusting fluids, sinister tools, and reminders of industrial-scale suffering that implies. Plus monsters trying to eat her face.

I'm not a horror reader at all, but to me, this didn't end up being offputting. It was mitigated by the fact that the protagonist was sealed away from all the gunk in an environment suit, and that she'd survived a similar trip in the previous book and looked certain to survive this one. There was still plenty of suspense and action, well paced.

The character had a clear goal (find her way to her missing sister), and worked steadily and bravely towards it, while her resources, weapons, and tools were gradually used up or lost. The chapter numbering is in reverse order, which provided a kind of countdown that, for me, helped to give a sense of momentum and urgency.

Importantly, the protagonist isn't without someone to talk to: the AI from her ship. This gives another layer of relationship to the story, and helps us come to know the protagonist better, while still leaving her battling physically alone.

There are, near the end, some genuinely alien-seeming aliens in a genuinely alien-feeling setting, which is hard to do and, here, is well done.

I wouldn't recommend reading this one without having read the first in the series; there's no real recap or backstory feed, and a lot of it will make no sense if you start here. But if you enjoyed the first book, for my money this is even better, and the first one was already good.

Disclaimer: The author gave me a review copy (and no other inducement) because I'd reviewed the first book. I don't normally do reviews by author request, but in this case I'd enjoyed Book 1, so I made an exception - and I didn't regret it.

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Review: Turning Darkness Into Light

Turning Darkness Into Light by Marie Brennan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've only read one and a bit of the Lady Trent series, having bounced off the uneven pacing of the second book. But I knew the author to be very skilled, not only from reading some of her work but from interacting with her on a writers' forum we both belong to, so when I saw that this one had a new character in the same setting (a couple of generations later), and a premise that sounded promising in terms of a compelling story with strong stakes and sustained tension, I requested it from Netgalley. Thanks to the publisher for granting the request.

I wasn't disappointed, either. It starts out, like the Lady Trent stories, focused on the scholarship, but even at the beginning there are strong hints of why the outcome of the protagonist's efforts to translate an ancient text are going to be politically important. As the story goes on, it becomes more and more clear that there's something dodgy going on, and the action ramps up rapidly. Throughout, there are a series of interactions between the protagonist and her former love interest that develop the complexities of that relationship in a way I've seldom seen achieved.

It's presented through a series of documents - journals, letters, police reports, the translation that lies at the heart of the story - and that's well done, though I did stumble a little when I realized that the very confessional, diary-like tone of one piece was actually still part of a witness statement made to the police. It was the sole misstep I noticed in the epistolary part of the book, and since it's lampshaded, was probably intentional.

The other thing I stumbled over a little was the worldbuilding. My personal philosophy is that if you choose to create a world that's not our world, rather than just have a version of our world with (say) dragons in it, it shouldn't resemble our world too closely (or what's the point of the difference)? This world sometimes resembles ours too closely, with countries that I mentally dubbed MightAsWellBeEngland, MightAsWellBeChina and MightAsWellBeIndia.

Apart from that, which is really just a philosophical difference, I enjoyed this very much. The sentence-level writing is excellent, the pacing good, the plot compelling, the characters and their relationships more complex and messy and (hence) realistic than I usually see. It easily makes my Best of 2019 list.

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Review: The Forbidden Stars

The Forbidden Stars by Tim Pratt
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A space opera heist caper, where the target is an entire solar system, and the mark is a group of fascist aliens (servants of Mythos-esque, godlike, ancient malevolent aliens, who are sleeping but not dead).

Because it was structured as a heist, and because it was so enjoyable, I forgave the ease with which the tiny crew achieved everything they set out to do. The third time the main progagonist went in alone into a facility full of enemies, this time almost literally with her hands tied behind her back, rather than being put off by the over-the-top unlikeliness I just thought, "Oh, it's like when Miles Vorkosigan goes into the prison camp, naked and alone, and you know that it's everyone else that's in trouble. This will be cool to watch play out."

The banter and snark are fun, the stakes are high enough to keep up some tension without ever dragging the story into the dark, and overall it's a good ride.

I've read the first of the trilogy, but not the second; I didn't find that caused me any confusion, but I will go back and read the second one, because I enjoy these books so much.

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