Review: Emerald of Catherine the Great

Emerald of Catherine the Great by Hilaire Belloc
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

In the popular style of early-20th-century British humour, this book generates comedy largely by making its characters ridiculous, unpleasant, stupid, and venial, with the omniscient narrator pointing at them and encouraging the audience to laugh. That's not my favourite approach to comedy by a long way, hence the three-star rating.

It's a kind of parody of detective fiction, in which the reader (almost) always knows exactly what's happened, and the characters never put the full story together. It involves an heirloom jewel that is lost (not stolen at all) during a country house party; everyone who finds it, for their own reasons, pushes it off on someone else and then throws suspicion on that person, who then passes it on to the next person before they can be caught with it. This makes it also a kind of farce, I suppose.

It has the unusual distinction of having been illustrated by G.K. Chesterton, who has captured the different characters in caricature style.

I found it mildly amusing; other readers may like it a lot more than I did.

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Review: Bitter Medicine

Bitter Medicine by Mia Tsai
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A capably written fantasy/romance with a strong element of Chinese mythology, something I tend to enjoy despite not having much familiarity with the source material.

Even in the pre-publication copy I received via Netgalley, the editing is good, with just a few very minor mistakes. As is often the case, that's accompanied by assured prose and a well-plotted, well-paced story. It's clear from early on what the protagonists' goals are, which drives the plot forward, but it's not clear how they will achieve them, which keeps up suspense. They work hard and sacrifice and make tough choices and call on allies to help them - in other words, they protagonize, they don't get handed fortunate coincidences to get them to the goal. Along the way, they feel things deeply, but they didn't come across to me as whiny, which is an easy trap to fall into when your characters experience strong emotions over legitimately terrible life events.

There were a couple of issues that kept the book out of the gold tier of my Year's Best list. Firstly, the Agency for which the protagonists both initially work is nebulously and inconsistently defined. It's not a government agency or bureau, because the supernatural world doesn't (apparently) have a government, but it's referred to as the Agency, and part of it is called the Bureau, and it operates in most respects exactly like a government agency (or bureau). And yet at the same time it's a company with a business model that's conspicuous by its absence, founded by Oberon (who is the world's worst boss); and Elle, the female protagonist, while known as "Agent Mei," appears to be part-owner of a business that operates somehow within the larger company, supplying magic to other agents. She's a cross between Q and an independent shopkeeper. It doesn't feel like it's been thought through all the way.

The other thing that challenged my suspension of disbelief is that, apart from the fact that she is technophobic, Elle reads very much as someone born in the US in the late 20th century, not (as we are told) in China in the late 19th. It's not as bad as, say, the first Iron Druid book, where the protagonist is supposedly 2000 years old, but both looks and acts 20, but I did notice it. Elle's supernatural age is largely what I've decided to call a character decal: stuck on the outside rather than integrated into the design, like those toy cars that have stickers portraying windows rather than actual windows. You see it a lot in steampunk and gaslight fantasy, where the heroine has a decal that says she's brilliant and independent, but actually keeps making the most stupid decisions imaginable and having to be rescued by a man (and at least Elle is very far from that; she rescues the hero first before he rescues her, and then they conspire to rescue him again).

Those two issues, while they reduced my enjoyment slightly, certainly didn't damage it fatally. This is a fine piece of writing, and I'd happily read a sequel.

Two warnings about the content: the sex scenes do get graphic, and there are a few untranslated Chinese characters, transliterated Chinese words, and French sentences dropped throughout, which the author discusses in an afterword (it's a deliberate choice, for a good reason). If you're reading on a Kindle, it can translate for you, though you won't miss anything vital by not having them translated (again, by design). If either of those things is a dealbreaker for you, this probably isn't your book, but if, like me, you're fine with them, I recommend it.

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Review: Isle of Dragons

Isle of Dragons by L.A. Thompson
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I love the idea of steampunk, and I'm always hopeful when I pick up a steampunk book that it will live up to the potential of the genre and be well-written. Sadly, I'm usually disappointed. Most steampunk books have awful copy editing, are full of vocabulary issues, and are not well thought through in general, with a few notable exceptions.

Also sadly, this is not one of those exceptions.

I received a pre-publication copy via Netgalley for review; it is barely possible that a truly exceptional editor has since inserted all the missing quotation marks, fixed the many homonym or near-homonym errors, and possibly even rectified the more serious issues with words out of order, paragraphs out of order or repeating what has already been said, and continuity errors like an oak tree turning into a willow tree. That would still leave random eruptions of bickering between the characters used to get the plot moving when it's stagnating; a number of moments when my suspension of disbelief crashed suddenly to the ground; and a series of poor choices and ineffective actions by the characters who still, somehow (sometimes via deus ex machina) manage to stumble their way into, if not actually a resolution, at least a position where things are not entirely hopeless by the end of the book. This is clearly a series starter, and the ending is more of a setup for the next book than it is a completion of this one (though I wouldn't call it a cliffhanger).

I won't be reading further books in the series, because, honestly, the book I read was not ready to be sent out for review, let alone publication, and I strongly suspect that it represents the published version pretty accurately. It's clearly a first novel, and not a promising one. The author has a long way to go in the craft, and I don't just say that because of the copy editing; I've seen worse (I've seen almost as bad from a major publisher). This simply reads like too early and too unpolished a draft.

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Review: Beneath the Canyons

Beneath the Canyons by Kyra Halland
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read this as part of a box set (Patty Jansen's Sword & Magic: Eight Fantasy Novels , and my few Kindle notes are attached to that volume. I'd come across another Kyra Halland book, vaguely recognised the name, and then figured out that she had a book in the box set which I hadn't read. Because she seemed to have a better than average grasp on basic writing mechanics, and I was just coming off a read where the author very much did not have that, I gave it a go even though the premise wasn't 100% me.

There were a couple of elements I disliked. Almost all the men, including the hero (though not during the story), make use of prostitutes; and the heroine spends a large portion of the book under threat of gang rape. If you have a problem with such content, avoid this one. There are no explicit scenes, though.

Other than that, I did enjoy the book, which does a decent job with all three of its genres (fantasy, Western - albeit in a secondary world - and romance; a dystopia is happening elsewhere, but not really onstage). There's plenty of suspense and tension and conflict, which for me were the best part. I could have done with a little more involvement from the heroine in the resolution of the plot, but given her untrained-mage status and the fact that she was a slender young woman surrounded by hard-bitten miners, the fact that she was somewhat ineffectual is believable, I suppose. She does go into danger alone in an ill-advised, headstrong way and have to be rescued by the hero, though, which is another element I don't love.

Despite having some tropes that I'm not a fan of, this is a well-executed novel, and makes it to the bronze tier of my Best of the Year list.

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Review: Nautilus Legends, Books 1-3

Nautilus Legends, Books 1-3 by Emma Shelford
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Competently written, for the most part; the characters have believable motivations and aren't just cardboard cut-outs, there are some tense moments in which they battle credible evildoers (with about as much competence as you'd expect from highly motivated amateurs, rather than action heroes), and the stakes are personal for them. I'm struggling to define why I didn't like it more than I did.

Sure, despite crediting two editors the text needs another (relatively light) edit, most notably for cases where the author has broken a sentence in half with a tag in the middle and hasn't punctuated it correctly, though there are also a few common homonym errors, comma mistakes and idiom fumbles. It's better than a lot of books I read in this regard, though.

Contemporary SF (which I'm counting this as, because one of the main characters is a scientist, and there's never any suggestion that the cryptids are magical) isn't a favourite subgenre for me, mostly because the characters are often aimless. These characters are not aimless. They all (initially or eventually) have things they want, which conflict sometimes, as they ought. The pace does drag occasionally for my taste, when they're not sure what to do; I felt there could have been a stronger drive towards a more defined story goal. Again, it's better than others I've read in the subgenre.

I think part of what reduced my enthusiasm is that I never really believed that all these oceanic cryptids could be swimming about without anyone ever noticing them before the story started. There were a couple of attempts to hang a lampshade on this and explain it away, but I just never found it credible, and without buying into that premise the story doesn't work.

I wish I could be more enthusiastic about it, because considered objectively it's a decent piece of work, but it just didn't click for me. I'm giving it four stars for quality, but it doesn't get onto my Best of the Year list.

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