Review: Glass Coffin

Glass Coffin by Gabby Hutchinson Crouch
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the third book of a series, of which I've not read the first two (yet, anyway; I probably will do so). However, there was enough previously-on that I got caught up easily and had no trouble following it.

At first I thought: you can have traditional fairy-tale characters, or you can have rounded characters, but it's very difficult to manage to have both, and this author is attempting to do so more by telling than by showing. However, a lot of that was the backstory/recap, and in the end I did feel like at least some characters exhibited at least some depth. There were a lot of characters, though, and most of them still felt a bit one-note.

It's reasonably funny. It's not Terry Pratchett funny, but then, what is? It's British funny, too, which works for me.

Like Pratchett, it's also good-hearted and believes in people, and their potential, and that all of them should be treated equally and fairly and as people (I can't say "human beings" in this context, given that one is a spider, and another a werewolf, and several have been transformed into one thing or another, but you know what I mean), and that the most unlikely, ordinary-seeming people can be heroes in the right situation.

(view spoiler)[When it came to the resolution, one antagonist got to have a redemption arc, a little bit implausibly to me, and the other did not. It seemed to come down to the difference between being warped by a tragic past versus just being a bloody psychopath. But I had to squint a bit to see the difference. (hide spoiler)]

Overall, the good-heartedness (and the fact that it's not chock-full of the usual copy editing issues, even in the pre-release copy I got via Netgalley) gets it into my Best of the Year recommendation list, though perhaps only by a whisker. For my taste, it's better than Jasper Fforde - I've never been a huge Fforde ffan, to be honest - but has a long way to go to be Pratchett at top form. On the other hand, this is only the third book, and the third Diskworld book had a long way to go to be Pratchett at top form, too. It shows promise, and fulfils at least some of it.

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