Review: The Meister of Decimen City

The Meister of Decimen City by Brenna Raney
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I made it about halfway through this one, but I wasn't loving it and switched to reading other things, then never felt like going back. The problem for me was that Rex is just bad at everything that isn't mad science, to a horrible degree, and the angst and ineptitude were eventually too much. If there had been a strong plot to pull me past all that I might have stuck with it, but there wasn't; it was more slice-of-life, which can be fine if I like the characters.

Has the very common issue that the author doesn't know when not to use a comma between two adjectives. She also overcorrects "laid" to "lain" when referring to eggs, writes "aids" when she means "aides" (repeatedly), and makes a few other minor errors. See my notes. For a supers novel, this isn't actually terrible, because they tend to be awful, but it needs more work.

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Review: The Twelve Trials of Doug

The Twelve Trials of Doug by Jeremy Brundage
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

Let me state upfront that I'm a tough audience for comedy.

Having said that, the approach this book takes in attempting to be funny completely failed to raise even a small smile from me. It consists mostly of anachronism (it's set in mythical Ancient Greece, but has many contemporary cultural references; for example, the protagonist works for a yoghurt franchise in a food court, and is, of course, named Doug). There are also footnotes. I assume the footnotes were inspired by Terry Pratchett, but just because Pratchett made something work for comedy doesn't mean that someone else can do the same. The footnotes are frequent, intrusive, and mostly asides that are intended to be comedic but, as I said, fail to hit that mark as far as I'm concerned. I stopped reading about 10% of the way in, just before the announcement of the quest that I gather forms the main plot, so I can't comment on how well that plot is handled. To me, a would-be comedic book that fails at comedy can redeem itself by having characters that aren't just stereotypes with silly names, and a plot that works in its own right as an interesting story. I hadn't yet seen any evidence of character depth, but I'll give the plot the benefit of the doubt.

The book has probably had a very good editor go over it, since the mechanics (as far as I read, and in the pre-publication version I got via Netgalley) are mostly correct, apart from a couple of instances of dialog where the tag is incorrectly punctuated as a separate sentence. That's rare in the books I see these days, and deserves to be commended. So if your sense of humour is more like the author's than mine, this may very well be a good book for you.

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Review: The Eight Strokes of the Clock

The Eight Strokes of the Clock by Maurice Leblanc
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The author of this series continues to try new things with it, which I appreciate in an author of a popular series; he doesn't feel constrained to reproduce the thing everyone liked last time, which inevitably means some fans will be displeased. In Neil Gaiman's terminology, he's an otter, not a dolphin; he does a different trick each time.

This time, we see Lupin operating under one of his many aliases - the introductory note from the author claims that Lupin told these stories to him in the third person, but that he's sure the hero was Lupin himself. It's a nice way to trade on the popularity of an existing character while writing about, in a way, a different character. Because this is not Lupin the criminal (although he doesn't always stay within the law); we see "Prince Renine" acting as a freelance troubleshooter, ferreting out problems and injustices and solving them for people with Lupin's inimitable mix of brilliant insight, confident bluff and ready resourcefulness. He may prevent more crimes than he commits in this book, I think.

Part of his goal, aside from the inherent value of helping people and righting wrongs, is to impress and excite a young woman who he meets in the first of the eight linked stories. While Lupin is repeatedly unlucky in his loves through the series, he remains ever optimistic, and he's always at his moral best when there's a woman in the picture.

Unfortunately, the women, including this one, remain largely passive, acting more as an admiring audience than as effective characters with agency (though they occasionally do something important to assist him, it's usually a one-off). This woman has an opportunity to break out of this mould, but she muffs it, and Lupin has to step in and resolve the situation after all.

The problems are varied and the resolutions ingenious, and I continue to enjoy the series, though this isn't one of the best for me.

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Review: The Ministry of Time

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The general level of historical awareness among many of today's writers is... frankly woeful. So it's refreshing to read a book like this.

The premise is that the British Government has formed a secret Ministry of Time because they have got hold of a Time Door from the future, and they've used it to bring a few carefully selected people to the 21st century from their own (earlier) times, where they were missing, presumed dead. This includes Graham Gore, an actual historical figure who was lost on a disastrous polar expedition in the late 1840s, along with a World War I officer, a soldier from a 17th-century battle, and two women, one of whom came from the Great Plague of London in the 1660s. The other plays little role, and I've unfortunately forgotten her details already.

They're assigned "bridges," officers of the Ministry whose responsibility is to acclimate them to the 21st century with a view to making them useful, and the never-named first-person narrator is Gore's bridge. Like the author, she is half Cambodian but able to pass for white, and I suspect that at least some, and probably most, of the very specific experiences and details she includes in the narrative are the author writing what she knows.

This in itself would be promising: a modern woman with an uncommon background interacting with a Victorian naval officer. But the execution takes that promise and develops it more fully than I had any right to expect.

Firstly, the inner lives and relationships and interactions of the characters are beautifully observed and unflinchingly portrayed. As a matter of personal taste, I wished the author had flinched a bit more than she did; most of the last third of the novel is pretty dark, darker than I prefer, and I almost dropped it from five to four stars because of that. It is really well done, though, so I couldn't bring myself to penalize it for achieving what it set out to do so well, even if I didn't personally enjoy that part much.

Part of why it's so well done is hinted at in my opening sentence of this review. A lot of 21st-century authors (looking straight at you, Casey Blair) feel obliged to recite whatever the current orthodox credo of progressivism is, right in the middle of their novels supposedly set in a very different society in a secondary world. Kaliane Bradley is smarter and more nuanced than that; she knows that the values of the 2020s are not inherently the peak of history and better than all values coming from every other place and time, and that they too have their problems, contradictions, weaknesses and pitfalls. And she doesn't just tell us this, she shows us. Gore, for example, summarizes dating as "like trying on clothes for fit, except the clothes are people," which is as devastating a short critique as I've ever seen.

There's a lot of fine imagery scattered through the book, in fact, though not in a self-indulgent or overdone way; it adds to the vividness, it doesn't sit there drawing attention to itself for its own sake. The speech of the 17th-century woman rings true to me, too, and I've spent a bit of time studying 17th-century literature, admittedly many years ago now. In fact, the author's grasp of language is at a level that I rarely see, and I noticed few errors in the pre-publication version I got from Netgalley for review (the worst being "sojourn" used to mean "journey," which is the opposite of what it means - but that's a very common mistake).

Intelligent, well crafted, moving, nuanced and insightful, this book goes straight to the Platinum tier of my Best of the Year list.

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Review: The Spriggan Mirror

The Spriggan Mirror by Lawrence Watt-Evans
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In a departure from the series pattern, not a coming-of-age story for a YA protagonist; this protagonist is an adult man. It involves characters we've seen twice before, in With a Single Spell and The Spell of the Black Dagger, which is more continuity than was common in the early part of the series. The mirror of the title was created in With a Single Spell when a spell went wrong, and is bringing thousands of spriggans - small, relatively harmless but annoying creatures who can't be killed - into the World. They're becoming a problem just from their sheer numbers, so the protagonist, who has a reputation of being able to locate and source magical items or ingredients for wizards, is commissioned to find the missing mirror so that it can be neutralized.

He does so primarily by applying common sense and talking to the spriggans, something the wizards didn't think of, though he does also use a good bit of magic. Quite often, the magic he uses isn't necessarily guaranteed to work and has a decent chance of making matters worse, but luck (i.e. the author) is on his side.

It's a fun ride, with a plot (and a resolution) that would only work in a magical world like this one.

And if you're wondering, the dragon on the cover is actually in the book, although it's technically not exactly a dragon.

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Review: Ithanalin's Restoration

Ithanalin's Restoration by Lawrence Watt-Evans
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A return to lower, more personal stakes after the last couple of books in the series (one of which I skipped, because it didn't sound like something I would enjoy). A wizard's spell goes wrong and distributes his soul (or equivalent) between a number of household objects, most of which then flee the house and go missing. The wizard's young (late-teenage) apprentice must track them down and perform a restoration spell to get him back. The title kind of gives away that she succeeds, but how she succeeds is the enjoyable bit: she exhibits determination, cleverness, the smart use of her resources (including spells, friends, and a new potential love interest), courage, and a level of forethought that is, for her, a mark of personal growth.

The timeframe overlaps with The Spell of the Black Dagger, and the events of that book distract all the senior wizards enough that the apprentice has to be the one to take care of this book's problem, which is a neat trick on the part of the author.

Like a lot of these books, a coming-of-age novel - more so in fact than most of them - but none the worse for that. Still, it isn't the best of the series so far for me. It's perhaps a little bit too much of a linear problem-solving quest, with not much going on beyond that. Still enjoyable.

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