Review: A Damsel in Distress

A Damsel in Distress by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've been reading quite a few early Wodehouse books this year, and this 1919 novel is one of the ones I've enjoyed the most. Given the title, that wasn't the outcome I was expecting; but it has an appealing hero, a heroine who at least has some personality, enjoyable secondary characters, and several twists I didn't see coming. (There was one twist I did see coming: (view spoiler)[one of the minor characters turns out to be the same person as another minor character, which I'd called almost as soon as the second of them was introduced (hide spoiler)]). It leans a lot less heavily on coincidence than many of the other books from this period to progress its plot, and the hero at least does something to be proactive, even if (reasonably believable) chance helps him along.

Modern readers will probably notice that it's occasionally offensive towards fat people, and there's a passage about men standing up to women that goes in a direction that an author would rightly hesitate to go these days. Otherwise, for a century-old book it stands up reasonably well.

The earl is reminiscent of the Earl of Emsworth (though his obsession is roses, rather than pigs); the butler has similarities to Jeeves, and the page boy to any of a number of repellent youths elsewhere in the oeuvre; there's a termagant aunt, and one of Wodehouse's interchangeable idiots as a secondary character and foil, but even great writers do tend to cast, as it were, the same actors in many different parts over the course of their work. On the whole, if you like Wodehouse you will probably enjoy this; it's not up with his greatest work, of course, but the key elements are visible, and for me it succeeded as a story.

View all my reviews

Review: Longshadow

Longshadow by Olivia Atwater
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This series continues to be charming, with a strong mystery/problem-solving plot balanced against a strong romance plot. There's enough darkness to the fantasy to provide tension, but it never takes over; I was never in any doubt that the main character was going to, eventually, resolve the plot question with perseverance, intelligence and courage, though it wasn't obvious to me exactly how she would do that until she did it. The secondary characters are well drawn, including the overprivileged girl and her mother, and the artificial, class-conscious atmosphere of 19th-century Britain is well evoked, without jarring anachronisms. There are twists and turns along the way to the resolution, and overall it was thoroughly enjoyable.

I noted on the two previous books that the author had a couple of bad punctuation habits: hyphenating where she shouldn't, and inserting excess coordinate commas between non-coordinate adjectives. She's either overcome the first one or found a new copy editor who has dealt with it, but there are still a few examples of the second issue. There are a few obvious Americanisms, and one vocabulary error ("loathe" for "loath," an easy error to make, and quite common), but given the lack of other issues it makes it to the "well-edited" shelf.

It has a good heart, and a sound head on its shoulders, and I recommend it.

View all my reviews

Review: Love Among the Chickens

Love Among the Chickens by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

While it's not at the level of his later books, this first adult novel from P.G. Wodehouse, written when he was 25, holds the germs of what was to become his signature style. The scheming is less convoluted than that of Jeeves and Wooster, but there is scheming, and it's somewhat convoluted, and it leads first to disaster and then to triumph. The character of Ukridge was later developed in what are effectively prequel short stories, and he became even more of a confidence trickster and sponger (and added a catchphrase, "Upon my Sam!", which doesn't appear in this novel). But already here, he's given to ordering things on credit with no real intention of paying for them, and his money-making schemes are wildly optimistic and impractical. When confronted with his bad behaviour, even indirectly, he somehow makes himself out to be the victim, with his other catchphrases: "It's hard, old horse!" He's married, to a young woman with minimal personality; Wodehouse eventually learned to write women with personalities, but it took him a little while.

Like most of Wodehouse's early work - before he hit on the brainy scheme of writing anti-romances, where the hero must extract himself from an engagement and so is available to go through similar shenanigans in the next book or story - this has a strong romance subplot. The narrator, who's more honest about his failings and less of an outright idiot than most Wodehouse characters, sets out to win a young woman (with minimal personality) who lives in the area, while helping out his hopeless friend Ukridge with his ill-considered scheme to make a fortune chicken farming. There's a small golfing subplot as well. The narrator is a young writer, and Wodehouse hints strongly that he's based on himself (as is usually the case with young writers).

It's an enjoyable ride, with the emotional and social stakes that Wodehouse later became such a master of, providing some ups and downs and tension and resolution. There are well-written comic moments, and more than a hint of the zany hijinks to come in future Wodehouse stories.

The Project Gutenberg edition is copyedited well.

View all my reviews

Books Not Taken: Ember's Quest

I've decided to start an occasional series of posts about why I decide not to pick up certain books for review. There's nowhere on Netgalley (where I get most of my books) to give this kind of feedback - you can only give feedback on books you do choose to read - and it might be instructive for some authors, maybe even the ones whose books I don't choose. The Division: Ember's Quest, by Kevin M. Penelerick. "One man stands between the elemental forces seeking to destroy the world of The Division, but he lays sick and dying." First sentence of the blurb, and already the author has used "between" with only one object (it requires two), and "lays" when he means "lies". My experience is that a blurb with errors typically signals a book with multiple issues, not just of copy editing, but of storytelling, characterization, plot and other basics. I could be wrong, but when I've gone against these instincts in the past I've always regretted it. Oh, and when I check on Goodreads there's a comma splice in the author's bio.

Review: The Part About the Dragon was (Mostly) True

The Part About the Dragon was (Mostly) True by Sean Gibson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A step up - not a big step, but a step - from the usual attempts at "funny" fantasy. Most of these books rely on bad puns, silly names, the highlighting of tired genre tropes, toilet humour, the characters being too stupid to live, and anachronistic references to our world - and all of those things are here, for sure. But what a lot of attempts at fantasy humour fail to deliver is a story that works by itself apart from the comedy, even if the comedy falls flat, and this book does manage to give us that. The characters start out an inch deep and end up maybe two or three inches deep, and the premise - the gap between the PR put out by a bard about an adventuring party's campaign and the reality - goes some way to pull the whole thing together and make it something other than a series of pratfalls and stupid insults.

Oh, the insults. One of the things that didn't work so well for me was one particular form of joke that was used a lot: One character insults another by comparing them to something in their world. The narrator then goes into an often rambling, self-interrupting parenthesis with, typically, one or two additional embedded parentheses, explaining what that thing is and why it's insulting to be compared to one.

It's a pretty widely understood principle of humour that if you have to explain the joke, it's not funny. I think this joke pattern may have been inspired by the Guide entries in the Hitchhiker's Guide books (there's a digression on a very small unit of currency that reminded me of Flainian pobble beads), but the author is no Douglas Adams, and the explanations lack the self-contained charm, clever worldbuilding, and ridiculous humour of the Guide. They're repetitive and not especially imaginative, and, like the bard narrator's self-praise, wear thin, becoming irritating rather than amusing.

I was amused, though, often enough that I debated between three and a low four stars. I'm starting to mark more harshly, though, and really it's a three-star book (most similar books being, for me, two stars). Enjoyable enough as a distraction, and a good palate-cleanser after a very serious epic fantasy, but it stretched its material out too much, repeated the same not-funny joke too often, and (despite the author's BA in English) included several homonym errors - one of them being horde/hoard, which is particularly bad when you're talking about a dragon.

View all my reviews

Review: The Griffin Mage Trilogy

The Griffin Mage Trilogy by Rachel Neumeier
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Told in orotund epic-fantasy periods, with sentences that include not only semicolons, but colons, quite frequently at their centres (especially early on). Very serious, too, without much in the way of humour or lightheartedness - which is fine, but I note it because I enjoy some of that in a book. The griffins' names are multisyllabic, multivoweled, utterly unpronounceable and impossible to remember. All of this (plus the excessively repetitive making of the point that the griffins are not like humans, and the slow pace) put me off the first book when I attempted it in 2012, and I decided not to persevere with it based on the sample. I must have become more accepting of some of these elements in the nine years since, because this time I bought and finished the trilogy.

Despite the epic-fantasy-prose feel, the vocabulary is not especially high-flown and is used correctly, though it's sometimes repetitive, especially in the first book. The characters are reserved, and not given to angst or demonstrative feelings, and I think that leads some readers to have difficulty relating to them; it didn't bother me. There are female characters in both of the first two books who come across as neuro-atypical, who have difficulty understanding or caring about social conventions, though they're otherwise very different: an awkward rural 15-year-old and an absent-minded scholar in her (I think) 30s. The female lead in the third book is a little out of the ordinary too, but less markedly so. Unfortunately, the third book, while reintroducing the woman from book 1 as a significant character, makes almost no use of the woman from book 2; I felt this was a waste of potential.

There are a few dangling modifiers here and there, and the odd misplaced apostrophe for a plural possessive in the first book. In the second book, there are more errors, including apostrophes in a couple of words that are plural but not possessive, and that lost the whole trilogy the "well-edited" tag that I initially applied to it. The editing standard of the third book is the best of the three, with few if any issues.

In the second book, there are a couple of big convenient coincidences to help the plot along, which I consider a fault. Two people happen to be in a waiting room at the same time, and team up as a consequence. Someone needs a particular kind of assistant, and the perfect candidate just happens to present himself through an unlikely and unpredictable series of events. But the coincidences are "so the story can happen" coincidences rather than "rescue the plot from its own complications" coincidences, which is more forgivable, and the other two books don't have this reliance on coincidence.

Other reviewers have remarked on the worldbuilding and logistics, which aren't especially convincing or real-world-accurate sometimes, and the fact that the magic doesn't always make a lot of sense. I don't think it's intended to be the kind of magic that makes sense to a scientific way of thinking, though, so that part didn't bother me so much.

Overall, it's a little patchy, but at its best, I found it competently written, compelling, dramatic and enjoyable. I'll be looking out for other work from the author, who shows potential here, and has had some time and a few more books to build her abilities since these books were written.

View all my reviews