Fool's Proof by Eva SandorMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is one of those books - I've seen a few lately, so I assume it's a new trend - that brings back an older narratorial approach of an omniscient implied narrator with an ironic tone, moving freely between the viewpoints of a number of hapless characters, who may or may not be protagonists. One of the characters even gets his heavy accent into the free indirect speech in which his viewpoint is depicted. (I didn't find it especially credible, by the way, that someone should have such a very heavy accent who, although originally from a remote mountain area, had grown up mostly not in that area. But this was a minor point.)
That ironic tone, the sometimes gruesome trials and often reduced agency of the characters, and the fact that children were always referred to as "brats" were not especially appealing elements to me, and did not prepare me for the ending, where (view spoiler). The intersections and progressions of the various characters are strongly driven by coincidence, which is not my favourite way for a plot to be driven.
The setting is one in which women are the fighters and labourers (apparently being the physically stronger sex) while men do the accounting, reading, and philosophizing. Both genders can be rulers. There's reliable contraception through chewing "maidenroot". All this was more in the background than the foreground, but gave an interesting spin to the world.
The copy editing was mostly OK, apart from some capitalization issues ("Brother" should be capitalized when it's part of a person's name, and "Harbour" when it's part of a place's name) and a few minor typos.
It's capably done, and the ending was unexpectedly satisfying, but the journey had too much ironic detachment from truly nasty events, too many clueless characters, and too much coincidence for me to really love it, or to add it to my Best of the Year list.
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