Review: The Quavering Air

The Quavering Air by Simone Snaith
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A kind of book I enjoy from time to time is something that, while feeling a lot like D&D, isn't just D&D. That's the kind of book this is; the various intelligent species, monsters, spells, and character classes are not just the familiar D&D ones (whether for copyright reasons or otherwise), but they have the same kind of vibe to them. For example, the main character has the ability, by a kind of meditation or concentration, to use her cloak to make herself hard to see; she then lays about herself with a staff. She's not exactly a monk, but she's not exactly not a monk either, just as the guy with the antlers isn't exactly not a ranger, the huge guy isn't exactly not a barbarian, and the little old crotchety guy isn't exactly not a wizard (nor is he exactly not a gnome).

They've been assembled by a council of near-immortals for an important quest. The world they live in is kept separate from a dimension of monsters/demons by a pair of magical clocks, which, when they're set an hour apart, prevent travel between the two - but someone has synched the clocks. Their mission is to fight their way to the tower where the clocks are and de-synch them again. This calls for plenty of courage and determination, a number of pitched battles in which they get significantly battered (with minimal magical healing available, and what there is doesn't restore them to full health), and some clever tactical decisions. A good many of those decisions are made by the main character, who has to prove that humans are not lesser than some of the other stronger or longer-lived or more magical peoples. There are personal stakes, there are questions about loyalty and commitment to the mission, there are interpersonal squabbles and personality clashes, there's character growth, there's even a romance subplot. It's good stuff.

While I did like the freshness of the world in many ways, it also was one of the drawbacks, because I couldn't just go with "Oh, he's an elf, I know what they're like"; I had to put in some effort to remember what each of the different party members looked like and could do, which since they were all introduced in a single scene was initially difficult. Likewise, since all the monsters were new and their names didn't convey anything about them, it was sometimes hard to keep them straight. But on the whole, I think having a fresh take on the world was more of a benefit than otherwise, even if I had to work harder as a reader to imagine it clearly. I also enjoyed the fact that the sky didn't have the usual astronomical bodies, but swirls of light and colour, different ones for day and night, and that this ended up being a plot point as well as a decorative piece of worldbuilding.

I had a pre-release version from Netgalley, and it was in better shape in terms of editing than most books I get that way. The author does need to learn when not to use a comma between adjectives (when the order of them couldn't be swapped without it sounding weird, basically, though there's a bit more to it than that); how to punctuate a sentence that has a dialog tag in the middle of it (no capital when the same sentence resumes); and how to choose the correct one among a few easily confused homonyms. But these are minor issues, easily taken care of by a good editor.

Overall, the book scratched an itch that I have more often than I find capably-written books to satisfy it, and I would read more from this author.

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