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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