Review: Brief Cases

Brief Cases by Jim Butcher
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Harry Dresden has a highly distinctive voice, and the challenge for the author in many of these stories - those which are told from a non-Dresden character POV - is to have them sound like themselves, and not like Dresden. He does a good, though not quite perfect, job of it.

He also tells some terrific side-stories in the Dresden universe. I'd read a number of them before in other collections, but they rewarded rereading.

The last story, which only appears in this volume, is a particularly good one. Harry takes his daughter Maggie and their dog Mouse to the zoo, and each of the three gets a turn to narrate an adventure in which they deal with threats that only they can deal with (or, in some cases, perceive). And all three of the adventures are going on at the same time, so we get overlap where each of the three tells us about the same events from a different point of view. It's well done and enjoyable, and shows us that the next generation of Dresden hasn't fallen far from the tree at all.

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Review: The Best Thing You Can Steal

The Best Thing You Can Steal by Simon R. Green
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The words "Simon R. Green" on the cover led me to expect that there would be disturbing amounts of violence and other disturbing things within, and also that it would be a well-written story with a heroic arc. All of this was, in fact, the case.

An optimistic thief and con-man who has recently taken on the pre-existing identity of Gideon Sable recruits a largely supernatural heist crew to rip off the worst man in the world. I have to say, a heist doesn't have to have a victim who deserves to lose, but it certainly helps.

It's a quick read, pacey, but not just unreflective action, and the heist is extremely clever, as heists ought to be. The supernatural background is based in Catholic Christianity - there are saints, relics, angels, demons, and so forth - but none of the characters is devout. The trip is often horrific, but the ending is heroic.

I love a good heist, and this is one. Recommended.

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Review: Peace Talks

Peace Talks by Jim Butcher
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Even though this isn't as complete a story in itself as most of the series (the conclusion is in the next book), Jim Butcher is smart, and still manages to write a book that has a plot question that's resolved by the end. There are huge, cosmic events happening, and Harry needs to help deal with them, but he also has family stuff to take care of - primarily, helping his brother Thomas (which is the plot question that resolves by the end), though he's also started to try to be a father to Maggie, and finally moved his relationship with Murphy forward, and he's clashing a lot with his grandfather.

The first few chapters, in signature Dresden style, are spent getting Harry further and further into the cactus, to the point where I was wondering how on earth the author was going to get him out of the hole he'd dug for him. The eventual (partial) extraction from the hole is accompanied along the way with plenty of self-deprecating snark, a small amount of new maturity, and the usual mix of cleverness, courage, determination, judicious use of allies, well-prepped skills, absolute commitment to doing the right thing even when that's very difficult to identify, and reflections on life that have a bit of depth to them.

It all reminded me why this is one of my favourite series. While it's not the best of the series so far for me, it is highly skilled and powerfully written in the way I've come to expect from Butcher, and there's no question about putting it on my Best of 2020 list.

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Review: The Iron Will of Genie Lo

The Iron Will of Genie Lo by F.C. Yee
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The protagonist here is a young Asian American woman, and while I'm sure that it will have immense appeal to people who share one or more of those characteristics, I share none of them, and I thought it was terrific.

It's firmly grounded not only in Chinese mythology but in Chinese identity, in a way that's self-reflective without being self-indulgent, precious, or brittle, and that does an excellent job of conveying to an outsider the emotional dynamics involved. I particularly liked the part where Genie explained her (dysfunctional) family in a way that made it clear that, whatever their faults, they were hers and she loved them passionately. Also, the part where she explained to the clueless privileged Silicon Valley boy how people like her didn't get multiple chances to fail like he did. And the part where she gave Guanyin, the Chinese goddess of compassion, a sister power pep talk.

But also the parts where she bested multiple legendary beings through cleverness, determination, and just being an outright badass, all of which are very on-brand for a series based in the story of the Monkey King.

For me, just the right blend of action and depth, with characters who are flawed but full of heart; a suspenseful battle against a powerful existential threat; and a young woman coming to terms with life in an inspiring way.

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Review: Spellmaker

Spellmaker by Charlie N. Holmberg
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A strong continuation of the enjoyable first book (it's definitely a continuation, too, with minimal "previously-on"; don't start here). The romance is clean, sweet, and involves two likeable people. The mystery... progress on it stalls for a while, and when it restarts it's helped along by a slight bit of coincidence (or authorial meddling), and the team gain a new ally or two in a way that I felt was too easy and convenient. But I've seen it done a lot worse, and mostly the plot progresses through protagonism. There are some suspenseful scenes, and the climactic confrontation shows the heroine at her best, capable and intelligent.

The author really doesn't have that strong a grasp on the Victorian era, particularly class and gender relations; it's something I've noted before about her other books. But if you can overlook that, these are enjoyable stories, well written, well edited, with sound structure and a positive feel to them.

I received a copy from Netgalley for review.

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Review: Questland

Questland by Carrie Vaughn
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The setting for this novel is a kind of updated Dream Park - an immersive LARPing environment constructed with sufficiently advanced technology (an unspecified number of years into the future) that it's at least difficult to distinguish from magic. Except an energy barrier has gone up and isolated the island where Questland is being developed by a corporation headed by the usual billionaire narcissist, and said narcissist has hired a team to go in and get it back for him.

Cue the trope of "very civilian female expert is called in to consult on a matter that's under military or paramilitary jurisdiction and is super secret, and she has to deal with the militariness of it all". (Really, it's a trope, though usually the matter under investigation is first contact, in my previous experience.) In this case, there are a couple of extra layers: the expert, as the survivor of a school shooting where her boyfriend and her best friend were killed in front of her, suffers from PTSD and is not at all comfortable around the military; and her expertise is not only as a comparative-lit professor who is also deeply into the kind of nerdy pursuits that form the basis of Questworld, but as the ex-girlfriend of the prime suspect for the activator of the barrier: the head of the design team.

Ironically enough, the problems I had with this one were all about suspension of disbelief. I didn't believe in the conveniently uninhabited, idyllic island some distance off the west coast of the US. I didn't believe that the ex-boyfriend believed he would somehow be able to get legal ownership of it for the developers. I didn't believe that after five months of the island being isolated, no friends or relatives on the mainland had raised any kind of public fuss, or that the supplies were holding out so well, or that the people on the island weren't bothered by the isolation, or that the US government hadn't done more to get in there - especially since a ten-person Coast Guard crew had been killed trying to breach the barrier - or that nobody had leaked anything to the media. I didn't believe that a designer (not an engineer) could come up with the energy barrier and construct it, apparently without the help of the engineering team, in the first place, or that there would be enough power to sustain it. I didn't initially believe that three project managers, after five months, hadn't apparently made any progress in solving the problem of accessing the central system, but then I thought about project managers I've known and believed it after all. I didn't, however, believe in the central system, which none of the people who had set up the entire island seemed to really understand or be in control of. It was as if the true antagonist was a system that everyone had contributed to but nobody understood or controlled, except maybe the tech billionaire; and then I wondered if this was a callback to the first scene, and the lit prof's student going on about rampant capitalism.

So anything in the physical and technical setup I pretty much didn't believe. What I did believe was the emotional and personal setup, which is where the book was strong. The post-traumatic professor, the attitude of the military people (who clearly had respect for what she was dealing with and how she was dealing with it, even if she wasn't aware of that respect), the self-absorbed and condescending ex, the ineffectual project manager, the angry engineer who was in it for the sense of wonder - all of these I believed. There was a strong human story being told, but for me, it didn't quite come completely together, not only because of my struggles to suspend belief about the setup and the setting, but also in that it felt just a little bit undercooked. There were the elements of an even stronger, and indeed very powerful, story, but whether from inadequate on-page reflection, a lack of clarity, or not enough development, they didn't add up to as much as they might have.

I find this author's books a mixed bag. When she's good, she's amazing, but when she's a bit off her game - and, for me, this is one of those books - it's disappointing, because I know she's capable of more. There was a lot of potential here that I felt remained unrealized.

I received a review copy via Netgalley.

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Review: Villains: Superpower Chronicles Book 4

Villains: Superpower Chronicles Book 4 by Arthur Mayor
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I think the copy editing, which was shockingly bad in the earlier books, actually got a bit better in this one - though neither the author nor the editor he credits have run spellcheck, still.

Setting that aside, I like these books, because Ryan/Raven is a classic underdog. He doesn't have much in the way of superpowers, though it seems like his powers have got a bit better in this book (I don't remember his super-healing, though maybe that's me). He can't fly, he's not super-strong or invulnerable or anything useful like that, he can't fire energy beams or set things on fire. He learns physical actions really easily, so he's a parkour expert and martial artist, and he can (sometimes, unreliably) go into a subjective "slow time" mode which gives him more time to react to what's going on. That's it - except it isn't. His real superpower is that he's good at recruiting allies, even from among the villains; and he's really, really determined to do the right thing (protect the city and the people who live there), at any cost to himself, despite being comprehensively outmatched at every turn. He's also a decent detective, though that's mainly down to the allies thing.

At one point, he has what could easily have been the stupid Convenient Eavesdrop trope, except the author makes him earn his eavesdrop by deliberately hiding in a precarious position to overhear what he knows will be an informative meeting (which in turn enables him to be at another meeting to eavesdrop and allows him to save someone and recruit another ally). There are one or two small coincidences to advance the plot, but nothing too convenient.

Superhero fights form a large proportion of the book, again, and it was almost a little too much, again, but not quite. The action is varied, there's always more at stake than just "do they win the fight," and watching Raven improvise his way to another narrow victory is always entertaining. The author knows how to write an action plot, and the snarky narration is genuinely amusing.

His mess of a personal/family/school life is more in the background for this volume, though it's getting more and more entangled with his superhero life.

I came out of this one wanting to read the next, but I will still wait for the price to drop a bit. The normal price of the books is too high for the poor standard of copy editing.

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Review: Hex Breaker

Hex Breaker by Stella Drexler
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

At the end of this book, for some reason, there are "questions for discussion". One of them is "Which character did you like the most?"

It brought me to the realization that not only did I strongly dislike the main couple, there wasn't anyone in the book I didn't dislike. I suppose I disliked the heroine's friend (the one with the magic shop) the least, but that may be because she was more of a vending machine for solutions than an actual character. And, like every other person in the book, she was obsessed with sex.

The book itself has three very explicit sex scenes, two of them with a character that is not the one the heroine ends up with.

I was going to put spoiler tags around that last bit, but really, it's obvious pretty early on, because of the strongly structured nature of romance, who the couple is and that they will end up together, despite the fact that he's an arrogant rich guy and she's angry at everyone, but especially him, because he was involved in the death of the love of her life ten years before. I didn't like either one of them, as I mentioned, and I didn't like their interaction (which was angry and hostile and involved quite a bit of grabbing one another's arms and shouting), and I didn't believe for one moment that getting together would be good for either one of them, or would last very long. Consequently, I didn't care if they got together or not, and in fact wished they wouldn't. I had more sympathy for the heroine's original boyfriend; sure, he was a bit of a tool (but no more so than anyone else in the cast, and less than most), and sure, he was jealous, but he absolutely had good reason to be. My feeling was that he had a lucky escape when she dumped him.

The heroine's hostility gives her a conversational style where she spends a lot of her time blocking her conversational partners by arguing against everything they say, which drags out the dialog scenes and kills their momentum (besides making her extraordinarily annoying).

I know the "hate to love" arc has a long pedigree in romance, going back to the ur-romance, Pride and Prejudice, even though it rarely happens in real life (I'm aware of only one example among people I'm personally acquainted with). In this case, though, the characters were so unappealing that their past trauma, and the revelations of how things had gone differently from how the heroine thought, weren't enough to make me care about their relationship or make me want to see them together.

The mystery subplot was OK. The paranormal aspect (magic exists in the contemporary world and is publicly acknowledged) I felt had the usual problem of that scenario, whether the setting is contemporary or historical: it wasn't sufficiently developed, and the world didn't feel different enough.

So this one was not for me, though it's probably for someone.

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Review: Vigilantes

Vigilantes by Arthur Mayor
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Again: dude. Use spellcheck. It's free with any tool you might reasonably use to write a book. And then check for homonym errors, because spellcheck won't catch those, and there are a lot of them. After that, look at your punctuation, especially capitalization.

But setting aside the many, many copy editing issues that kept throwing me out of the story, this isn't bad. There's an element of coincidence (people meeting out of costume who know each other in costume), but it increases rather than decreases the trouble the protagonist is in, so it's allowable under the Pixar Rules.

Ryan/Raven, the hapless protag, is trying to be a good, normal teenager, but the city won't let him; it keeps needing him to save it. And everyone is making moral compromises (including him, to a degree, mostly in who he's accepting help from), and it just keeps on getting worse.

There are a lot of superhero fights, maybe one or two too many, though they are well done.

Overall, these are good supers stories, but I really wish he'd get a better editor.

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Review: Storm Cursed

Storm Cursed by Patricia Briggs
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Darker than I prefer (torture and death of humans and animals, on a large scale). Also, we've reached the point where Mercy is facing challenges that ought to be way out of her league and is essentially just pulling solutions out of the air, either discovering unprefigured powers she can suddenly use or else conveniently having someone with her who does the same.

It holds onto its fourth star despite this, because it's well written, but reading the reviews of the next in the series I wonder if I want to continue with them.

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Review: The Brass Queen

The Brass Queen by Elizabeth Chatsworth
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

My problem with this one was simple. In a romance (and this has such a strong romance subplot that it is arguably a romance), I need to believe in the attractiveness of both parties in order to buy in. And I found the heroine of this one very unattractive.

At one point, the hero says, "I don't know why men aren't lining up around the block to marry her," and I thought, "Oh, I do."

She's high-handed, hot-headed, self-centred, and has no people skills whatsoever, possibly because she believes everything is about her, and so doesn't bother to consider what other people might be thinking and feeling. Also, though this wouldn't put off the noblemen she hopes will marry her, since they share the quality, she's severely overprivileged. And finally, though at this point the hero and the noblemen don't know this (the reader does), she's an arms trader who has no hesitation selling weapons, legally or otherwise, to criminals, imperialists and despots. This is more because she doesn't think about how they will be used than because she thinks about it and doesn't care, but that doesn't exactly make up for it.

Queen Victoria is one of the aforementioned despots, by the way, having (in a development that seems highly unlikely for anyone who knows much British history) dismissed Parliament so that she can rule uninhibited. Several characters we're supposed to sympathize with, including the heroine, are in effect propping up her despotic and dystopian rule and helping her to conquer other nations.

Steampunk is prone to bad copy editing, for some reason. Since I got a pre-publication version via Netgalley I won't say much about this, except that I hope there's another round of copy editing before it's published. It's already better than a lot I've seen, but that's a sadly low bar. I'd expected a better starting point from someone with an English literature degree, frankly.

I'd also expected fewer obvious Americanisms in the POV of the British characters from someone born in the UK, but there we are. Perhaps they're deliberately translated for a US audience.

Leaving all of these problems aside - which is difficult - there were good aspects. There are genuinely funny moments (though cruelty and despotism played for laughs didn't get any from me). There are thrilling action scenes. The hero, if possibly a bit underdeveloped, is a decent guy.

Overall, though, I just couldn't stand the heroine.

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Review: Gods & Lies: A Novel

Gods & Lies: A Novel by Elizabeth Vail
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An interesting world, in which Graeco-Roman-style gods live among humans, and you can (under certain circumstances) go and talk to them, and it's a secondary world (or at least the names of countries are different), but the technology level is that of our contemporary world.

This forms the background for a good solid murder mystery. The investigator is a priestess of Justice, and she's assisted by a former criminal informant/demigod who is trying to get his act together, and faces an uphill battle to do so.

The gods are privileged (in the original meaning of the word: they have a private law, which is different from the law that applies to humans), and the investigator has a big problem with that. Especially since the clues in the murder keep pointing to it having been done by a god, and she has no jurisdiction if that is the case.

The undercurrent of attraction between the ill-assorted pair (who alternate as viewpoint characters) adds to the already well-drawn characterization, the mystery is textbook in its execution, and all in all it's a good bit of craft, as well as being entertaining.

Copy editing is good, too, with only a few small typing errors. I'll be looking for more from this author.

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Review: Lucky

Lucky by R.H. Webster
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was OK, but not great. The romance was leisurely and clean; the mystery subplot wasn't that mysterious (I spotted the "surprise" criminal well before the characters did); the technology didn't make a whole lot of sense; there seemed to be elements that had either been incompletely cut out or not fully developed; and it needed another edit for typos. (I had a review copy from Netgalley, but the publication date is a couple of years ago, so I assume I have the published version.)

This is one of those space operas where most of the non-spacefaring technology is, if anything, a bit behind the current real-world state of the art, especially the information technology. Much is made of the heroine's ability to organize the ship's files by "alphabetizing" and making them searchable, but every filesystem available today can search files for keywords already. Printed books have been entirely replaced by electronic copies for environmental reasons, but instead of people having one device through which they access everything (such as the ones that already exist in real life), there are a profusion of "flex screens" that, while they appear to be reusable, also get handed round with single documents on them; people carry multiple ones of them. There's also a reference to a "printer" which never seems to get used, and it's not clear what it would be used for, given the other tech that's mentioned. There's no ship's AI even as good as Alexa, and if you want to talk to someone on the ship, you do an announcement over the general PA to the whole ship rather than calling their individual phone (which do exist). It's apparently cheaper to use oppressed humans than automation to do manufacturing. In general, I had the impression that the tech hasn't been thought through, and that the author maybe doesn't know much about current technology.

The colonised planets are fairly dystopian, corrupt and harsh, and society seems to have become more conservative (which could happen; such things come and go, but there's no real sense of a historical reason for it). One of the planets has a "magnetic east," which makes no sense (magnetism flows between north and south; east and west are based on the planet's rotation with respect to its star).

There's an odd distinction made between the captain of the ship and the commander of the ship; these are two different people. It's never clear what the captain does if he's not in command.

I could ignore all this, which was mostly background, but the plot itself gave a sense that either not everything has been revealed by the end, not all the elements had been fully developed, or big chunks had been cut out and left traces behind. For example, at one point someone references (deprecatingly) the ship commander's religion, but this mention is the only indication that he's religious; we never see any hint of it when we're in his viewpoint. The heroine falls asleep without turning out her bedside light; when she wakes up, it's off, and the person who came to wake her turns it on. The fact that this is mentioned seems like it should be significant, like someone or something turned it off, but nothing ever comes of it, and it ends up seeming like just an odd continuity error. There's some business about a deck plate that keeps coming loose in flight, and other issues with the ship's artificial gravity, but it never ends up getting properly explained. (There is some mention of the gravity being manipulated to hide things being smuggled, but it's not fully worked out or ever completely summarized.)

Then there are a lot of minor typos - the usual thing, small words missing from sentences or substituted for other small words, like "the" for "then" and the like, which are hard to pick up unless you're very vigilant, and some missed quotation marks. There's the occasional missing past perfect tense, too.

If it didn't have all these minor issues, it would still be kind of average and nothing special; entertaining enough, but bland and lacking much development. A solidly three-star book.

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Review: Doors of Sleep: Journals of Zaxony Delatree

Doors of Sleep: Journals of Zaxony Delatree by Tim Pratt
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Some time ago, I read quite a bad book with a main character named something similar to Zax, which is what this book's main character is called by his friends. Not only that, but the author's first name was not too dissimilar to Zaxony. And the premise was that whenever the protagonist fell asleep, he shifted into another universe.

So I wondered, when I picked this one up (having been fortunate enough to be invited to review it by the publisher, via Netgalley), whether it was prompted by the author reading that same book I read and, in frustration, deciding to write a better one.

Nothing else about the books is remotely similar, so it may be complete coincidence. But the most important difference is that this is really good.

I've talked in other reviews about how there are two versions of Tim Pratt. The "dark" Pratt writes gruelling stories about nasty people having a bad time, often because of what they do to each other; the "bright" Pratt writes hopeful stories about good people overcoming the evil of others, often by generosity and self-sacrifice. This book, happily, is by the "bright" Pratt.

The main character, Zax, is an early-career harmonizer, a kind of social worker who helps individuals and groups find ways to get along. Through mysterious events (they get a bit less mysterious in the course of the book, but are never fully explained), he begins to shift universes every time he goes to sleep. He's able to take someone with him if they're both asleep and in close contact, and, in a probable salute to Doctor Who, he has a series of companions, some of whom leave him when they get to a place they want to stay. One of them, however, the Lector (the chief administrator of a university and a talented scientist) betrays him and tries to take the secret of his universe-shifting by violence.

The story opens some time after his experience with the Lector, which is later told in flashback. He's travelling from universe to universe, and they're diverse and sometimes dangerous and sometimes extremely beautiful. The societies he encounters range from utopian to dystopian, and some are both depending who you are. He soon rescues a new companion, Minna, who's talented with genetic manipulation - just how talented he doesn't realize until later - and an indentured servant of remote and cruel overlords.

And then the Lector catches up with him, and reveals his plan to create a multi-universal empire, and Zax, Minna, and an AI they've picked up along the way called Vicki must find a way to thwart him.

The story puts Zax's training and ideals as a harmonizer directly into conflict with the Lector's as a conqueror and organizer, raising important questions about self-determination, civilization, and what is good. It's well handled, for the most part, and thought-provoking, and doesn't come to set conclusions about political structure, though it does have some things to say about attitudes and general approaches to relations between people and groups.

There are one or two moments when satire is applied with too heavy a hand, as when Zax visits a world where everyone has retreated to (literal) bubbles in which they can be with only the people who "share their exact values and biases", this being a ploy to end a civil war. The bubble he arrives in contains people who drink craft beer, ride electric scooters, have elaborate facial hair, believe in respect and kindness... and spend a lot of time using small electronic devices made in another bubble where people believe in child labour. I thought that was a bit on the nose. But that's an aberration in a story that's usually a lot smoother and more subtle, and the varied worlds are imaginative and interesting, reminding me irresistibly of Roger Zelazny's Amber and Corwin's trips through Shadow. It could, in fact, have easily become a series of vignettes, which would probably still have been entertaining, but the overarching story with the Lector as antagonist adds tension and weight.

The ending suggests that we might be in for a series, and if so, I'm very happy and will follow the series eagerly. This book has no trouble making it to my Best of 2020 list.

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Review: Heroes

Heroes by Arthur Mayor
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a really difficult book for me to rate.

On the one hand, it's a well-told story, the pacing is good, the snark is excellent, the main character grapples with significant issues in a well-rendered manner.

On the other hand, the copy editing is abysmally bad. I feel frankly disrespected by how bad it is. This is why I waited for the book to be on sale; I sampled it and found "robed" spelled "robbed" and thought, "I'm not paying $4.99 for that." I'm willing to pay a little more for an indie book that has impeccable editing, like Melissa McShane's, for example, but this one is so bad that I feel a bit ripped off having only paid 99c.

An editor is credited. Now, I've been an editor, and I know that if you get a truly terrible manuscript and miss 10% of the issues (which is about the average number that you'll miss), it still comes out looking as if it hasn't been edited, because nobody can see what you've fixed. But this one hasn't even been spellchecked. Spellcheck is built into any tool a sensible person would use to write a book. The author could have spellchecked it. But it appears that neither the author nor the editor has done so. Add to that missing commas before terms of address (to me, the clearest mark of an amateur); shonky capitalisation; proper nouns inconsistently spelled; simple punctuation errors like double periods, exclamation mark and period, or no space after a period; apostrophe issues; vocabulary glitches... I spotted over a hundred errors, and I don't usually see more than a couple of dozen in a book this size.

It's bad enough that I'm dinging it a star, even though the story was good and I had no complaints about it. These days, indies just can't get away with being this unprofessional.

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Review: Defending the Galaxy

Defending the Galaxy by Maria V. Snyder
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've very much enjoyed this trilogy, and a lot of that is down to the protagonist.

Sure, she's literally a Chosen One. But she's not chosen because of some stupid prophecy or because of her "bloodline" (as if we still believed in the Divine Right of Kings). She's chosen because she's smart, skilled, and principled (for a certain value of "principled"), and she specifically has to solve problems for herself, not just refuse to learn anything and then get her powers handed to her at a moment of crisis. Although there was a moment when I thought the author had dropped a deus ex machina on us, it actually was an opportunity for her to rescue herself and everyone else through cleverness, persistence, and hard-won skills.

The villains are suitably villainous (disgruntled because entitled, setting out to improve their own lives at the cost of others'), there's a strong vibe of "I couldn't do this without my team," and there's a realistic amount of "we're not listening to you because you're a child" followed by "you've proven yourself to be responsible, maybe we should listen to you after all".

The premise is fresh and original, the execution is sound, and all in all it's a good ride.

Don't start here; this is very much the third in a trilogy, and there's very little "previously-on" to orient you if you haven't read the first two books. They form a unit, to be read in order.

I received a copy via Netgalley for review.

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Review: Red, White, and the Blues

Red, White, and the Blues by Rysa Walker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a cut above the usual level of writing. It has a complex plot that's nevertheless fully comprehensible and clear. It's well-researched, but the author doesn't make us drink from the exposition bucket, or throw in research facts that don't make any difference to the story just because she worked hard to obtain them. And despite the review copy I received from Netgalley billing itself as an "uncorrected proof," I noticed hardly any copy editing issues (which is vanishingly rare).

Sure, I've complained in previous reviews of the author's books that the genetic science is bunk, but I'm happy to forgive that, especially since it doesn't figure into this installment all that much. The history is solid, and it's not the usual stuff that everyone knows with the same old historical figures (though Einstein does make a brief appearance); it includes a number of now-obscure real people who were well known at the time, and who either promoted or (in a couple of cases) opposed Nazism in the US prior to the US entry into World War II.

Because this is the story of a nefarious plot to "flip" the timeline so that the US never did enter the war, and the Nazis won. Or rather, it's the story of the struggles of a number of determined, courageous people (and one complete bastard) to flip it back again.

The author seems to be fascinated by World's Fairs; a significant amount of the first series in this setting takes place at the one in Chicago at the end of the 19th century, and this one has the New York World's Fair of 1939-40 as a pivotal location. Again, though, that part of the setting is shown to us with restraint, only featuring the things that are either important or highly noticeable.

The whole story is told in first person present tense, from three different viewpoint characters. The present tense makes all kinds of sense as a way to narrate a time travel book; the first person, though, takes me to the only significant flaw I noted in what was otherwise a highly skilled piece of writing. All three narrative voices sounded exactly the same, despite their quite different backgrounds and personalities, and I often had to flip back to the start of a section to check the name so I knew whose viewpoint I was in (especially when I put it down partway through a section in the same viewpoint and picked it up again later). A writer who is as otherwise skilled as this author should be able to make the character voices much more distinct.

Apart from that one complaint, I enjoyed this very much, and will happily continue to follow the series.

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Review: Matthew Henson and the Ice Temple of Harlem

Matthew Henson and the Ice Temple of Harlem by Gary Phillips
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

An old-style pulp adventure updated for modern sensibilities, starring real historical figure Matthew Henson, the Arctic explorer, in the title role.

The author has done a lot of research on the period, and it shows - too much. He's constantly dropping names of contemporary celebrities and bits of researched background that aren't germane to the story. Just because the research well is deep is no reason to make the reader drink from the bucket; it needs to mean something. Some other historical figures are given small parts, though, not just observed in passing - Nikola Tesla, aviatrix Bessie Coleman, gangster Dutch Schultz, and others.

Having done all that research, he then ignores a few historical facts for the purposes of his story. It's set in the early 1920s, at which point Henson was in his late 50s and married to his second wife, but in this version he is (apparently) much younger, and single.

The story is fine, moving along well (despite the research dumps - they are, at least, brief), with lots of action, plenty of threats, high stakes, and fantastical McGuffins. The character reflects on his life a bit in between the action, and if he doesn't come to any real conclusions, at least the thought was put in.

I had an advance review copy from Netgalley, and I am skeptical that the many, many, many copy-editing issues can be fixed before publication - most of the common issues (punctuation, homonyms and near-homonyms, dangling modifiers), but a lot more of them than I usually see, even pre-publication.

If you can ignore those and just enjoy the ride, it's a decent pulp adventure with an overlay of history that makes the Harlem Renaissance come to life for a modern audience.

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Review: Super Humans

Super Humans by T.M. Franklin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was competently written (including good copy editing, which is rarer than it should be). I'm only giving it three stars, though, because there's nothing much else outstanding about it, and it's not a complete, satisfying story in itself.

I wondered why a new viewpoint character got introduced at the 60% mark, when normally you would introduce all your key characters and their conflicts by 25% through the book. When I got to the end, I realized that this is the setup for a series, and is essentially Act I of the story that is (presumably) told in that series. The whole book is the first 25% (or so) of a complete story, and it's clear by the end that we have several more characters to come yet, so maybe it's not even all of Act I.

The characters were OK, but didn't have an outstanding amount of depth to them. The threat they faced was mostly vague and generic. In general, it needed to grab me a lot harder in order to keep me reading, if it wasn't going to give me the satisfaction of a fully resolved plot arc.

It was OK. But I wanted something more than that.

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Review: Windsinger

Windsinger by A.F.E. Smith
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The third Darkhaven novel keeps up the standard of the previous two, and also keeps up the level of tension, conflict, and really bad things happening. The central characters are thoroughly decent people in a world where that is not particularly the norm, making it easy to cheer for them. Although they're dedicated, skilled, and in one case extraordinarily powerful, they're not always able to protect those they care about, particularly against the cynical manipulation of antagonists who will use people's love for others as a way to threaten them into compliance and complicity with their schemes.

It's an interesting world, the stories are well told, the prose is good, the tone is (overall) hopeful, and all these things mean I can stand a bit more darkness in the plot than is usually to my taste.

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Review: Liberty Justice for All: A Marvel: Xavier's Institute Novel

Liberty Justice for All: A Marvel: Xavier's Institute Novel by Carrie Harris
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Tie-in novels, novelizations of movies, and so forth are all too often hack-work, poorly edited and relying on coincidence, cliche, and the popularity of the franchise to carry off a mediocre story. Happily, this X-Men novel does not fit any of those stereotypes. While strongly tied into the lore of the long-running Marvel franchise, it's mostly fresh, well executed, and gives some depth to the characters and their relationships. There are some gaping plot holes, but for me they didn't spoil my enjoyment too much.

The protagonists are two new recruits to the New Xavier School, run by Cyclops in the wilds of Canada. We first get some scenes with their roommates and other classmates and teachers that establish not only their powers, but that they are emotionally intelligent, keen to help others, able to take effective action, and more sensible and mature than some of their peers. They're college age, but read more YA than new adult.

Sent off on a training exercise in the X-Copter, they pick up a distress call from the infamous mercenary Sabretooth, and decide to help him. This was the weakest part of the story for me. Not only is there never any explanation of how Sabretooth was able to radio them, but the stupid decision they make to ditch their training mission, not tell their seniors, and help someone untrustworthy with an unknown danger is distinctly out of character for them. Unfortunately, it's also necessary in order for the plot to exist.

Bad decision made, the action moves swiftly, and they encounter hostile police (until they inexplicably stop encountering police where I would have expected them); Sentinels; a dangerous magical artefact reminiscent of Night at the Museum which can kill the living and resurrect the dead (including, apparently, models of the dead such as Neanderthals, who are stereotypically dumb cavemen communicating in grunts); and a powerful enemy they've previously encountered in backstory, who they're terrified of. Throughout, they manage to be courageous, mostly effective, clever, and committed to doing the right thing, and it was this, and the well-handled dynamics between and within the characters, that kept the book its fourth star for me despite the handwaving of some key plot points. All the characters, even a couple of the minor ones, come across as complex people, not flat stereotypes, and the main characters experience satisfying development throughout.

It's a pleasure, too, to get a book from Netgalley that isn't full of basic editing issues. Kudos to the author and copy editor.

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Review: Corpselight

Corpselight by Angela Slatter
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I gave 5 stars to Vigil, the first in this series, because I felt it took the "kickass supernatural PI" genre into a higher key with its focus on family and relationships (of widely varying types).

This book has many of the same strengths, but also at least one of the same weaknesses and a couple of (I think) new ones, so it didn't quite make it to 5 stars - though it still makes my 2020 Best Of shelf.

Finding myself short of good books, I decided to look for sequels to books I'd enjoyed in previous years, and was glad to find this one. There's plenty of action and plenty of heart, and it's delivered in sound prose - but with a few minor typos that I don't recall seeing in the first book. That's weakness number 1.

Weakness number 2 is, for me, the big one. It's the way in which the main character's male partner - who I characterised as a genderflipped damsel in distress in my review of the first book - is now a genderflip of the wife who has no role other than to be supportive to the hero. He doesn't pass a reverse Mako Mori test; he has no arc of his own, no agenda of his own, even. He's there to look after the baby and do emotional work on behalf of the protagonist so that she can go out and kick ass, and he embraces this fate with barely a complaint. He's a solution, never a problem (though, of course, he's also a vulnerability, at risk of refrigeration). I don't like this when the genders are the other way round, so I don't see why I should approve of it in this instance.

Noticing this completely supportive character got me noticing how all the rest of the supporting cast are also so very supporting, how it's all about the protag, to the degree that she's almost (not quite) a Spoiled Protagonist. (That's my term for someone who gets handed help she hasn't earned just because she's the protagonist. In this case, she's arguably earned it, but it does seem like she gets an awful lot of it.) I love an ensemble cast, but this is not one; it's a hero and her support team, and because it's all about her, she's the only character who ends up with much depth.

Weakness number 3, which often goes along with a spoiled protagonist, is that there are a couple of convenient coincidences; the person being investigated has two other, apparently completely random, connections to the main character, and while this helps drive the plot and raise the stakes, I am never a fan of putting coincidence where protagonist effort should be.

Once again, though, the thematic subtext of the book saves it and propels it above the run of the mill. In book 1, it was all about family: good families, bad families, close families, families at war within themselves, found families, dysfunctional families. Here, the focus zooms in a bit; it's on motherhood specifically, and again, it looks at motherhood through many different lenses, good mothers, bad mothers, mothers who neglect or abandon their kids or worse, mothers who try to make up for mistakes of the past...

There's just more depth of humanity in this series than in the average urban fantasy, and even if most of it is in the hands of the protagonist, it still lifts the book. Verity has a great line of snark and is, at one and the same time, a coarse, rude, abrasive person and also deeply compassionate and dedicated to doing the right thing. That chimes with my (limited) experience of Queenslanders, though it may dial both tendencies up a bit for cinematic purposes.

Like its heroine, this series is certainly not perfect, but well worth following, and I look forward to reading book 3.

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Review: Newborn Pixie Cozy Mysteries - Books 1-3

Newborn Pixie Cozy Mysteries - Books 1-3 by Willow Mason
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Stop me if you've heard this one: (probably) twentysomething young woman whose life is a bit of a low-level disaster gets a mysterious inheritance from an elderly relative. It turns out she's magic, and the inheritance is magic, and other people want it, and there's an attractive policeman, and she can talk to her cat now, and there's a murder, and she helps to solve it.

Hundreds of people have written this story, to varying levels of quality. Tim Pratt, for example, has written it very well ( Heirs of Grace ), taking what's essentially fast food - made in bulk to a formula - and elevating it. This version by Willow Mason is appealing, with good-hearted, if not highly developed, characters and a New Zealand backdrop.

It sets out to do a particular thing, and it does that thing enjoyably enough that my first instinct was to give it four stars; but it's not really a four-star book, not for me. It follows a well-worn pattern without much deviation, and badly needs a copy editor.

At first, reading the sample, it seemed fairly smooth, with all the commas in the right place, so I bought it. I should have been warned, when I saw that the plural of Christmas was written as "Christmas's", that apostrophes were going to be a problem; almost all of them are either missing or in the wrong place, and that's true of a few commas as well. There are also vocabulary issues and a couple of dangling modifiers.

Overall, if this is the kind of thing you like, you will like this; it's typical of its genre in all the good ways as well as a couple of (for me) bad ways. As a bit of fun between more serious books, it worked OK for me. Bigger fans of the form will no doubt be more enthusiastic.

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Review: Miss Landon and Aubranael

Miss Landon and Aubranael by Charlotte E. English
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is quite a mild Regency romance combined with fairy tale, though it's not a retelling of any one tale in particular. The influence of Beauty and the Beast is there, and so is Alice in Wonderland in the mad tea party, but it's its own thing. It sits in a slightly odd place age-wise; the main character is 29, but it has the simplicity and the general feel of YA or even younger. Nothing steamier than an extended kiss occurs.

This is the second book I've read by the author, and as with the other one, the writing fault I noticed most is that she frequently uses "may" instead of "might" in past tense narration. She also confuses "principle" with "principal" a couple of times, and there are a good few simple typos of the kind that spellcheck doesn't catch but any reasonably alert reader should (such as "pull" for "full," "day" for "say," "about" for "out," "dead" for "head"). There's the odd missing or misplaced word, too, and a couple of excess coordinate commas between non-coordinate adjectives, but the punctuation is generally good.

The characters are pleasant enough, but don't have much depth to them, especially the secondaries. I did like the main pair and wanted them to succeed (not that I was ever in the slightest doubt that they would). The plot is straightforward, and, like the setting, is mostly assembled from prefabricated parts of Regency romance and fairy tale.

I appreciated that the female main character, while she is rescued by her friends at one point, then takes decisive action that makes a difference; she's not passive or helpless. She's clumsy, except for her one strong skill (sewing), which is a bit of a cliche for a heroine.

All in all, it's pleasant but bland; nothing (apart from the editing, and I've seen plenty worse) is badly done, but nothing is amazing either. I enjoyed it enough to let it keep its fourth star, though not enough that I'd bother with a sequel or seek out other works by the author.

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Review: The Magic Series: Box Set 1 of the Calliope Jones Novels

The Magic Series: Box Set 1 of the Calliope Jones Novels by Coralie Moss
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I'm going to be the dissenting voice among all the praise.

It started out well, with an appealing main character, a woman in her 40s (rather than the usual teen or twenty-something), a mystery plot, a romance plot (the two favourite plots), and editing looking fairly clean. Somewhere along the way, though, I spotted about 150 editing errors, the middle-aged woman fell into the tropes of the foolish young woman, the mystery got muddled, and I didn't understand the anticlimactic resolution to it at all.

I was glad that I had the collected one-volume edition, because the first book is essentially Act 1: get everyone on stage, set up the situation, everything is now prepped for development in book 2, which continues immediately from where book 1 stops. Reading it in one volume, I didn't feel too disappointed in the lack of resolution at the end of book 1, but I think if I'd bought the first volume separately I would have hesitated to carry on.

Because it takes so long on the setup, it does get a little bloated, especially with the size of the cast. I felt that it wasn't necessary to have three almost indistinguishable druid sidekicks for the love interest; they could all turn into otters, they all started relationships with local witches, and there wasn't a lot else to help me tell them apart other than initial (quickly forgotten) physical descriptions. They could easily have been compressed into one character, probably River, who is the brother of another significant secondary character. Likewise, several plot threads started in book 1 don't really end up going anywhere, just muddying the main plot.

Lack of clarity is the big problem that starts to creep into volumes 2 and 3. Things happen that obviously are clear in the author's head, but were not, to me, clear on the page. In particular, the final denoument, which I'll put in spoiler tags:

(view spoiler)[There's a Bigger Bad who, in book 3, is revealed to have been behind the Big Bad who we've seen (mostly from a distance) in the first two books; he's been pulling the strings, unsuspected, in the background. Some pains are taken to depict him as a ruthless, wealthy, powerful, implacable foe, capable of stranding Calliope on an island overnight dressed only in her cocktail dress and a light shawl, as a pressure tactic to get her to cave to his demands. The next day, she defeats him with her magical dress, brings the teenagers to see him at his office, tells him that the Big Bads from books 1 and 2 have been doing stuff behind his back, and... for no reason I could understand, he has a complete change of heart, gives in to all her demands, and turns out to be not that bad a guy and almost an ally. (hide spoiler)]

That moment, to me, was what decided me to label Calliope as a spoiled protagonist (which is my technical term for someone who gets handed help and victories they haven't earned in order to move the plot along). I could kind of accept that her numerous allies were loading her up with magical gifts and making their witchy celebrations all about her, because she had powers that would be useful in resolving a situation of concern to all of them, and because they were nice, generous people. It still took us kind of into spoiled protagonist territory, though. Add to this that Calliope is a Very Special Witch with powers beyond ordinary witchkind (that have been undeveloped and suppressed up until the story starts, when she's 41), and that she has a superhero job (supposedly demanding, but actually able to be abandoned indefinitely while she participates in the plot), and it's getting harder to resist the spoiled protagonist label. That climax finally took it over the top.

Her job, by the way, is working for the government. She doesn't seem to report to anyone; she's the senior person on the island (with an assistant), but she must presumably have a boss on the mainland. No such person is ever mentioned, though, and she doesn't seem to need to account for her time. She's a middle-aged civil servant and a single mother of two teenagers, but she doesn't worry about the financial impact of taking an extended leave of absence from her job, even though her ex-husband is always claiming he's cash-strapped and isn't contributing much towards the kids, and as the plot progresses she's adding on to the house and feeding half an army. I didn't buy it.

She caps off the spoiled protagonist act by going off on her own without telling anyone and getting into trouble and having to be rescued, like every dumb female protagonist ever. It was disappointing.

The author did do decent work on the character side; those characters who were developed (0ut of an outsize cast) were interesting, likable people with relatable problems. The plot, though, suffered from the lack of clarity and the spoiled-protagonist issue that I've already discussed, and the blurb frankly oversells it in terms of how much tension there is.

The copy editors missed some apostrophe placement issues; quite a few coordinate commas between non-coordinate adjectives; a few commas before main verbs; hyphens joining things that, in context, are not compound adjectives; a small collection of dangling modifiers; simple past used instead of past perfect tense; vocabulary issues; missing words in sentences; number disagreements; and several continuity errors. I suspect it started out a lot worse. There was a different copy editor for book 1, and she seems to have picked up the missing words in sentences but missed several apostrophe problems; the other editor, other way around.

Overall, then, it had potential, and the trip was fairly enjoyable, but it ended up having some significant issues that left me less than satisfied. I could probably have coped with the borderline spoiled protagonist with a superhero job if the climax hadn't let all the air out of the plot, or even if it had been sold to me in a way that made sense of what had happened. That's what took it down from a low four stars to a mid three stars for me.

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Review: TESSA

TESSA by Kfir Luzzatto
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

So, I had some issues.

Firstly is the squick factor of a middle-aged man writing a highly sexualized 17-year-old girl as protagonist and narrator.

Secondly, while the English is fluent, it is not quite completely idiomatic. It certainly doesn't read as the language of an American teenager; it's quite stiff at times.

And then there's Tessa herself: she's manipulative, by her own admission, and though she has some moral awareness and moral qualms, she doesn't seem to find it too difficult to overcome them. I didn't much enjoy following her as a protagonist.

Had the story been anything out of the ordinary - had the premise been a bit more convincing or less dependent on good fortune and the protagonist being Special, had the thriller elements been less matter-of-fact and more exciting, had the secondary characters had more depth to them - it might have made up for the other flaws. Sadly, this wasn't the case; it was all a bit average.

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Review: The Midnight Queen

The Midnight Queen by Sylvia Izzo Hunter
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I very much enjoyed this. It was deeply, beautifully literate (and I found only one very, very minor typo, a missing "the"), I felt it was well-paced both for the romance and for the thriller plot, and I liked the main characters a lot, not least because they're not the usual gorgeous specimens you get in romance novels.

I took particular delight in a thing I all too often see done badly: the names. This alternate Britain of approximately Regency times has a setup whereby paganism has continued in Europe, with Christianity existing but never having taken off. A lot of authors throw that kind of thing in and never think it through; their paganism is generic, and their characters are called things like Jonathan, even though the Bible has theoretically had no influence on their society.

This author has thought it through. A lot of the rites (and customs generally) preserve Roman patterns, and above all, there is only one name from the Jewish/Christian tradition in the whole book. I thought at first it was a mistake that had slipped through, but no, it's explained, in a moment which also gives us more background to the world and shows us character. There are plenty of familiar names - Henry, Edward, Graham, Sophie, Amelia and the like - but all of them are Roman, or Saxon, or Celtic in origin. The Isaac Newton equivalent is called Ivor Newton.

This kind of attention to detail (and just knowing that there is detail to pay attention to) would normally, along with my enjoyment of the story, have earned it five stars. But I had to deduct points for a couple of things. One is that fortunate chance and Convenient Eavesdrops play such an important role in the plot, and the other is a spoiler:

(view spoiler)[There's a lost princess, and she's the subject of a prophecy, and she possesses awesome magical power beyond normal people. (hide spoiler)]

As a matter of taste, I don't care for those elements I just mentioned inside the spoiler tags, and they're hackneyed by this time. And the excessive role of coincidence is, to me, a craft fault in an otherwise well-written book.

In addition, there is what is almost literally a deus ex machina at the denoument.

I'd still happily read the rest of the series.

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Review: D

D by Michel Faber
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Reads like a very old-fashioned children's book with an avuncular and intrusive narrator. Dhikilo, the protagonist, is 13 but reads younger, and the plot is a linear there-and-back-again, encountering various odd characters along the way. I'm apparently not the only reviewer to be reminded of The Phantom Tollbooth.

I was left with questions, including: If the child from our world, who must do the thing that apparently nobody in the world on the far side of the portal is capable of doing, is African, is it still a white-saviour trope? And if the stupid, violent, primitive, cannibalistic savages with spears are grey in colour and the person they capture and threaten is African, is it still offensive?

I'm inclined to answer "yes" to both of those questions.

What I did like was that the civil servant in one of those odd encounters was as helpful as he could be, and as defiant of the regime as he could be, while still overtly observing the rules. So at least in some ways we are stepping beyond the tropes and stereotypes - though mostly we are not.

There are some important themes here about despotism and how it gains, keeps, and loses its hold on people, which are more relevant than ever today. But the delivery vehicle was a bit lacking for me.

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Review: Kitty's Mix-Tape

Kitty's Mix-Tape by Carrie Vaughn
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A varied collection of short fiction in the world of the Kitty Norville stories. I say "in the world of" because it includes a couple of stories set in the 19th century, which seem not to feature any characters from the main (contemporary) series - and with a number of characters being unaffected by ageing, that isn't as odd a sentence as it sounds. In fact, there's one story about Rick the Conquistador vampire and some experiences of his from 50 years ago that suddenly become relevant today.

A couple of the pieces are just short vignettes written for posting on social media, and could have been skipped without losing anything from the book, but they're short enough that it's not a problem. Others are side-stories for characters in the books; the books are all from Kitty's viewpoint, but these give other characters a chance at centre stage.

Carrie Vaughn is that unusual thing, a novelist who is also a good short story writer, and while I've read standalone short stories of hers that are better than many of the ones in this volume, that isn't to say these aren't good. And if you're a fan of the main series, you'll probably enjoy these glimpses into other characters' lives and other places and times.

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Review: The Last Uncharted Sky

The Last Uncharted Sky by Curtis Craddock
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read and enjoyed the first in this series when it came out several years ago (long enough ago that I didn't remember that much), and somehow missed the middle one. But there was enough "previously-on" that I didn't feel too confused.

It's a wonderful high-concept swashbuckler, with a world of floating skylands and skyships plying between them, multiple imaginative types of sorcerers, political intrigue, religious fanaticism, ancient magical artefacts, action, adventure, exploration, quests, espionage, loyalty, friendship, mentorship, twue wuv... really, it has a bit of everything, but doesn't feel patched together as a result. All of the elements are well handled, and the multiple plot threads are brought to a rousing and satisfying conclusion.

Unfortunately, in the pre-publication ARC I got from Netgalley, it's clear that the author is an extremely sloppy typist and has a slightly smaller vocabulary than he thinks he does, two things that will take a lot of work from a good editor to correct. Hopefully it will get that work, because it is a terrific story.

And the protagonist is exactly the kind of protagonist I love: an intelligent, capable woman who is also unshakeably determined to do the right thing, which is the kind thing; who wins over others (even the crazy memories of her awful ancestors) by her goodness and insight and empathy, without ever being weak or foolishly idealistic, and accepts risk herself rather than pushing it onto others.

Now I want to read the second volume.

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Review: The Second Star

The Second Star by Alma Alexander
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I have liked several of this author's YA books, but this (coincidentally or not, not YA) I didn't much care for.

There was a lack of clarity and momentum to the plot, because it kept swapping around story goals. Each goal was in itself compelling for the protagonist, but there was no real throughline.

Christianity (Catholicism) comes into the story, but the research is not there. Jesuits are clerics regular, not monks (which is fairly well known, I thought), and the magi, despite what your Christmas cards may have told you, were not kings, quite probably were not three in number, and did not attend the birth of Christ.

The world of 200 years from now felt much, much too similar to today. Despite a great deal being made of how people from shortly after our time would not have been able to cope with all the changes, we weren't shown very many changes at all. Cellphones, for example, are still around, and in people's pockets, not (for example) installed in their heads; new versions come out periodically, and old technology may or may not be compatible with new, and yet how they work and what they do is indistinguishable from how they work and what they do today.

I was not a fan of the big reveal, either, and it came out of nowhere late in the book.

There was one good feature, which was the psychologist protagonist's powerful commitment to the wellbeing and just treatment of her patients. If it had been coupled with better decision-making on her part, I would have liked her even more.

As it was, this was not a book I much enjoyed, and if it had been the first I'd read from the author I probably wouldn't read another. It's not representative of her other work, though, so I will keep picking up her books - but with more caution in the future.

I received a review copy via Netgalley.

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Review: The Midnight Bargain

The Midnight Bargain by C.L. Polk
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A secondary-world fantasy that is strongly Regency-romance-adjacent, and has (for me) the best parts of Regency romance.

It's all too easy, I suspect, to write a Regency romance about silly, vain women and stern, harsh men without confronting key truths about the era. Namely, that women of the upper and upper-middle classes were prevented by their society from doing anything productive or learning any useful skills, that they were supposed to be silly and vain, and that their economic security hinged terrifyingly on marriage to a (probably) stern, harsh man who would quite likely keep getting them pregnant until they died of it.

Those facts are very much present in this book, which also adds a fantasy layer that brings them out more sharply. In this setting, several different kinds of magic exist, including "high magic," which involves summoning and binding spirits. These spirits are capricious and hard to control, and love to experience the physical world via their hosts; if a pregnant woman has one, it will embody itself in the child, taking over from the human soul. So married women are bound with collars that prevent them from accessing magic throughout their fertile years.

The two main female characters of the book find this horrifying, and one of them is (in present-day terms) asexual or something like it as well; she wants to avoid marrying completely, and pursue magic instead. The other, the main protagonist and viewpoint character, also deeply desires magic, but she is in love, and struggles to choose between what seem like two incompatible goods. The object of her affections is a man who isn't stern and harsh, but empathetic and supportive; despite this, he still doesn't really get what the women are on about for a long time, a touch of realism that I appreciated.

The whole is well handled, with a motivated protagonist in a dynamic situation from the start, a powerful and seemingly insoluble dilemma, strong secondary characters both supporting and antagonistic, courageous and determined action from the main character, and a rich setting. The only criticism I really have is that I didn't see enough evidence of magic's impact on society in ways that didn't relate directly to the plot.

Highly recommended if you enjoy Regency romance with a feminist slant that still has room for positive portrayals of men, and adds in a magical dimension that contributes greatly to both plot and theme.

I received a review copy via Netgalley.

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Review: Pundragon

Pundragon by Chandra Clarke
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It's rare for me to encounter a comic fantasy (other than Terry Pratchett, of course) that I actually find funny. I found this one funny, though, and I'm glad I picked it up from Netgalley, having earlier reviewed the author's more serious Echoes of Another: A Novel of the Near Future and found it enjoyable.

What often lets "funny" fantasy down is that the protagonists aren't too bright, and nor, often, are the authors, meaning that the humour can be heavy-handed and overly obvious. This author has (for my taste) a good level of judgement for when to let the reader pick up on the joke for themselves.

There are, as the title hints, lots of puns. That's not to everyone's taste, but I personally love clever wordplay, and the puns here are that. The punning is done with restraint, too; there aren't dozens of them used to paper over weak spots in the plot, as I sometimes see in so-called funny fantasy.

The other thing about a comedy for me is that, in order to work, it needs (like Dorothy's companions) a brain and a heart and a bit of courage. This book has all three. The prose shows some skill, there are clever bits that aren't trying to be too clever, it has a strong emotional arc, and it's not afraid to tackle a couple of serious issues among the comedy. The protagonist learns a lot from his portal-fantasy trip, and becomes a better person. And I cheered for the critique of grimdark fantasy, as well.

Recommended.

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Review: Taking Time: a Tale of Physics, Lust and Greed

Taking Time: a Tale of Physics, Lust and Greed by Mike Murphey
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Started out promising, though without much of a central question to drive the plot; but unraveled in the second half, and only managed an OK ending by taking a couple of dubious shortcuts.

This book, for me, has two major problems. The first is that it's not clear to me what genre it's attempting, but it is clear to me that it's not succeeding in whichever one it is. If it's a thriller, it needs a tighter plot, a clearer goal, and a faster pace, especially in the first half. If it's a comedy, it needs to be funnier, and have more going on than an extended dick joke. If it's serious SF, it needs not to be so absurd; there's an incredibly handwaved explanation of why the time travelers' destinations are distinguishable by the theme songs from old TV shows that play over the tracking equipment when they get there, which makes no sense whatsoever. There's never a satisfactory explanation for the fact that any non-living organic matter catches fire and explodes when the travelers are sent through the equipment, either; that seems to be just a setup to require the travelers to be nude, for (inadequately) comedic purposes. It also doesn't seem to apply to the fillings in their teeth, for example, though it does apply to breast implants (apparently as an excuse to underline that the most attractive female traveler is all natural).

The time travel itself, with the travelers' bodies disappearing although it's really only their minds that are traveling, makes little sense either. And (view spoiler)[it has the issue of a lot of alternate-world stories, in that the travelers' existence, probably the least likely thing to remain constant between different worlds, remains constant, while everything else up to and including their evolutionary biology changes. (hide spoiler)]

The other major problem is that, at several key moments, rather than the (perfectly competent) characters discovering plot-relevant facts by their hard work and cleverness, they discover them by overly convenient coincidence. This is how the ending is achieved, in fact, along with a bit of continuity being forgotten about.

Also, especially early on, the narrative timeline wanders around, dipping suddenly into flashbacks (often without the past perfect tense or past continuous aspect where they should be). I couldn't decide if this was a deliberate (but unsuccessful) attempt to reflect the theme of time travel or if the author just wasn't very good at telling a story in coherent order and using grammatical markers.

There were positives. The relationships between the characters, and their internal struggles, are mostly depicted well. If the author could manage more clarity of focus and more character agency (along the lines set out so well by Jack M. Bickham in Scene & Structure ), he could probably write a good book. But for me, this was not it.

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Review: Captain Moxley and the Embers of the Empire

Captain Moxley and the Embers of the Empire by Dan Hanks
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is basically what you would get if an author said to himself, "I would love a highly cinematic, almost video-game-like pulp novel set in the 1950s, but with a female protagonist who's a former Spitfire pilot and woke about colonialism. I should write one."

If you're up for that - and don't mind some deaths of innocents, quite a bit of swearing, a protagonist who's cynical and world-weary but also carries on when injured to a ridiculous degree, highly unrealistic temples full of traps that are fully functional despite their great age, and a number of small anachronisms - this is the book for you.

Personally, I do mind those things, though, which lost the book a star. The temple-traps thing is a trope of the genre, I suppose, and normally I give those a pass, but they really are over-the-top unbelievable.

I think I was predisposed to notice the other issues because of the names. I'm very aware of the fact that fashions in naming change a lot over time, which is something that not many people seem to be aware of - including many authors who set their stories in a historical period. Here we have Samantha, for example, born in the 1920s, and named after an 18th-century French woman - but Samantha was a very rare name indeed until Bewitched made it popular in the 60s. Her sister, born about 1930, is Jessica, also a rare name until a couple of years before the story is set (1952). It even bothered me slightly that Jessica's friend William was known as Will (as he would be today) rather than Bill (as he would more likely be mid-century). Most people are not going to notice these, or other anachronisms and setting details that made no sense for where they were, but I did, and it wore away at my enjoyment of the book and predisposed me to disbelieve some of the more unlikely plot points.

Because I read a pre-publication version via Netgalley, I'm not mentioning examples which are likely to change by publication; I'm focusing on things like the characters' names, and the protagonist's ex-military rank - which she insists on, and which is part of the book's title. "Captain" is not and has never been a rank in the RAF, which 30 seconds with Google will confirm.

Of course, there weren't any women flying Spitfires in combat in WW II either, but I'm willing to put that in the same category as the ancient Atlantean magic: part of the setup for the plot, a necessary counterfactual. If you want people to buy into the big counterfactuals, though, it serves you well to do your research and make all the small details believable, so that people aren't wasting their suspension of disbelief on things that don't matter.

Leaving all that aside, there's plenty of cinematic action in varied locales to carry you through the story, if you're not thrown out of it by things that are hard to swallow (like a character who is specifically not a badass briefly becoming one for plot purposes). The ending is not a cliffhanger, as such, but it does take a left turn leading straight into setting up a sequel, and for me it was a downer, almost an anticlimax in a way.

I won't be reading that sequel. But plenty of people will probably love this and follow the series on through.

tl;dr: Not for me, might be for you.

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Review: Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women (1958 to 1963): Yesterday's Luminaries Introduced by Today's Rising Stars

Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women (1958 to 1963): Yesterday's Luminaries Introduced by Today's Rising Stars by Gideon Marcus
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This reminded me very much of The Feminine Future: Early Science Fiction by Women Writers , in that it reintroduces us to excellent stories by writers who are mostly, undeservedly, forgotten today. The other book has an earlier timeframe (1873 to 1930), and there are some clear differences. The women of that earlier time were mostly writing male points of view, sometimes under male names; by the late 1950s, when Rediscovery kicks off, women were still sometimes writing under male or ambiguous names (as indeed they are today), but a lot of their stories were from a female viewpoint.

It also reminded me a little of stories I've read by male authors in the same period, in that a lot of the stories assume that men are inherently this way and women are inherently that way, and the sexes are at war, and there will never be peace or alliance between them; they're too different. However far we still have to go, the intervening three generations have, at least, made progress in both of those respects; we recognize a much wider (and much more overlapping) range of ways of being for both men and women, and, while, as I say, there's still plenty of room for improvement, men and women are now able to be friends, allies, and colleagues while also being or not being lovers. Here, though, we see the early stirrings of modern feminism, when men (rather than patriarchy) were still seen as the problem, and a hard problem at that - perhaps insoluble.

Not every story is like that, though (and, don't get me wrong, the ones that are like that are still fine stories with a strong impact). Some of them are just really good stories of their time; some would stand up well if first published today, though there are a few that lean a bit too heavily on the tropes (and social assumptions) of the period to have aged well. They often take those tropes in a new and interesting direction, though.

One unfortunate thing, and I will mention it even though I read a review copy from Netgalley, because I know the book's been out for a while and assume I got the published version. Stories of the pre-digital age are usually reprinted by being scanned and having optical character recognition run over them, and despite being in use for more than 25 years, this technology is still not always accurate in its transcriptions and tends to produce typos. Some of them were easy to miss (some of them, no doubt, I did miss), but about half of the ones I noticed could have been caught with spellcheck. I don't know why people use OCR and then don't spellcheck. (Getting a machine to read it aloud while you read along would also be a good means of avoiding these issues, if you had the time.)

This doesn't detract much, though, from what is a fine collection of stories that should be more widely known. They are unpredictable, emotionally powerful, thoughtful, humane, and excellently crafted. As the editor's introduction notes, because of the prejudice against women that existed in the SFF field at the time, a woman had to be that much better to compete, and these women are fine writers who are long overdue to be rediscovered.

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