Review: The Journals of Incabad Reyl

The Journals of Incabad Reyl by Gregory Tasoulas
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book successfully distracted me from worrying while I was waiting for my wife to have surgery, so kudos for that.

It's a bit slow to get going, and wordy and discursive in places. But it tells a fresh and unusual story, set in an interesting universe, with characters who show integrity and courage.

Oh, my goodness, though, the copy editing. The author has English as a second language, and it really shows. Not just in the very-seldom-correct comma placement (I've seen plenty of native English speakers who have no idea where to put a comma, including more than one journalist), but in the very frequently incorrect choice of prepositions, the mangled idioms, and the extremely basic and extremely common vocabulary errors. It seems to be a rule that if your book contains airships (which this does), 95% of the time you will have a vocabulary that's much smaller than you think it is, but I've seldom read one this bad. A few of many, many examples: alit/alight, conferring/conveyting, all together/altogether, glimpsed/glanced, haggle/peddle, ruble/rubble (yes, and repeatedly), led/lead (the metal), wield/yield, tales/tails, degrade/denigrate, dose/doze, perspective/respective, galley/gallery, recourses/resources, crushing/crashing, scale/travel, except/expect, doted/dotted, errant/errand, stroke/struck, bunker/bunk, extinguished/distinguished, exonerated/extolled, expending/expecting, extrapolate/elaborate, sipping/seeping, conserving/preserving, seized/ceased, limps/limbs, chanced/changed, technics/techniques, as well as a number of more common confusions (like principal/principle and sojourning/journeying).

The small encyclopedic section at the back has a couple of dubious entries about the "breeds" (or races) of the setting. The black people's distinctive quality is their strength and muscularity; the people of the Empire of Jade have yellow skin and the ability to make very precise movements. (There are people with red, blue, and green skin too, which... maybe makes this not quite so terrible? No, still pretty terrible.) I wasn't going to drop it a whole star for the copy editing, even though it's awful, but I decided to drop the rest of that star for the stereotyping.

A good story, combining academic investigation of ancient artefacts with politics and adventure, but I've seen that same combination done much better in, for example, Marie Brennan's Turning Darkness Into Light , and there would need to be a truly heroic amount of copy editing before this one was ready for its close-up.

I received a review copy via Netgalley, so there may be copy editing before publication that isn't reflected in what I saw. Even if there is, though, the sheer scale of the problem means it is still going to have a lot of errors left.

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Review: On the Isle of Sound and Wonder

On the Isle of Sound and Wonder by Alyson Grauer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a rewrite of Shakespeare's The Tempest as a fantasy with some steampunk trappings (airships and an automaton) as well as the usual spirits and magic, set in an alternate 1873. It takes the setup of the original and goes in quite a different direction with it. For me, it largely, but not entirely, succeeded.

On the way through, I noticed that the names (of people, and even more of countries) were subtly distorted from the originals, but in a way that sometimes didn't quite work linguistically, given their origins. I felt much the same way about the change to the central character, Mira - based on Shakespeare's Miranda, but almost entirely different. Mira, rather than a naive and passive damsel, is a tough, decisive protagonist with a wide knowledge, both from reading her father's (non-magical) books and from exploring the island. To me, she went a little too far in the knowledgable direction; she seemed to understand things from the wider world that I felt she would have lacked the context for, having only read about them, and only in the kind of books that would be available when they left for the island in the late 1850s, at that.

The denouement is also just slightly too perfect a wish-fulfilment fantasy in 21st-century liberal terms. (view spoiler)[Mira's father recovers his sanity, feels guilt, and apologizes for his bad actions and inactions before conveniently dying so they don't have to decide what to do with him; the gay romance completes its arc, while the incipient connection between Mira and the boyish prince might or might not go anywhere; the king, who has disapproved of the prince's wider intellectual interests and general lack of traditional masculinity, says he loves him; the troublemaking troll/fairy/spirit is punished, the innocent "monster" rewarded; everything is as ideal as it could be. (hide spoiler)]

The island itself, while presumably somewhere near the route from Tunis to Naples (since that's where the king's airship is going), is somehow tropical, and reminded me of an old edition of The Swiss Family Robinson I had as a child: it seems to have flora and fauna from multiple continents, though the tiger is eventually explained.

All in all, it's a little too perfectly a 21st-century morality play, taking place in an island that is just slightly too obviously a stage set, with a protagonist who is a touch too exactly a modern, powerful woman. Don't get me wrong, I think powerful women are great, and love to read about them, but this one was a bit too flawless for her own good.

Other than that, this is a strong piece of writing, mostly well edited, and I enjoyed it. I won't be including it in my Best of the Year, because it's a bit too perfect in the wrong places, but I'm sure it will do well.

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