Review: The Great Faerie Strike

The Great Faerie Strike by Spencer Ellsworth
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Disclaimers upfront: the author and I both belong to the same writers' forum (though I don't think we've directly interacted), and I received a copy via Netgalley for review.

This is, in part, a pastiche of Victorian adventure fiction (the format of the chapter titles makes that pretty clear). I'm therefore going to assume that the scene where a Convenient Eavesdrop is set up by Accidental Discovery of a Secret Passage is part of the pastiche, and not a terrible piece of writing that diminishes the agency of the protagonists for the convenience of advancing the plot. Likewise the fact (lampshaded at one point) that the two protagonists keep bumping into each other by coincidence. I am trying hard to work with the author here, and give him the benefit of the doubt, because normally I would call out shenanigans like this.

There's no working around the fact, though, that it needs another quick round of edits, for vocabulary, continuity, and a bit of punctuation (a couple of missing periods, a couple of misplaced apostrophes, a couple of commas that I personally would add for better flow).

There's a surprising amount of difference between the vocabulary of England in the 19th century and the US in the 21st, and almost every 21st-century American who tries to write 19th-century British English gets it wrong to some degree, even leaving aside the normal differences between the two dialects. In this case, the quite common error "hurtle" (to move very quickly) for "hurl" (to throw) appears three times; "balmy" (having a pleasant climate) is used for "barmy" (mad); the words "bunting," "callow," "visages," "milliners," and "conflagration" appear to be used incorrectly; and, most notably, the author uses "choleric" to mean "suffering from cholera," which it doesn't, and is almost certainly confusing cholera with tuberculosis ("consumption"), which made young women pale-skinned and bright-eyed, like the vampire protagonist. So "consumptive" is probably the word he is looking for.

The Irish character also uses the word "after" a lot, but I'm pretty sure doesn't use it the way an actual 19th-century Irishman would use it. And the same woman is referred to as "Mrs. Unsworth," "Lady Elizabeth Unsworth" and "Lady Unsworth," at least two of which must be incorrect, since Lady Elizabeth Unsworth is the daughter of a duke, marquess, or earl, Lady Unsworth is the wife of a knight or baronet, and neither of them should be called Mrs.

In terms of continuity, a five-pound note becomes several one-pound notes and then turns back again, a boat docks twice, and in a couple of conversations people somehow know things that their conversational partners haven't actually mentioned.

I've nitpicked a lot, but I did enjoy the book. The characters were determined to do the right thing and persevered through extreme challenges, the villains were as villainous as possible, the heroes as heroic as possible, and it recalled Victorian sensational literature at every turn while simultaneously critiquing Victorian capitalism and colonialism - and yet not making the characters into 21st-century people with a completely 21st-century way of thinking.

Above all, it was fun (despite the high body count), imaginative, and, barring the issues mentioned above, well-written. I would read a sequel, but it's not quite going to make it to my Best of the Year list.

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