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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