Review: The Tainted Cup

The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I very much liked this author's previous series, and this, although in a new setting, contains the same factors that I enjoyed in those books. Most obviously, a very high-concept setting that enables a plot to work that wouldn't work anywhere else, but also somewhat morally compromised characters who are doing their best to do the right thing in a corrupt and even dystopian world. (Dystopian would normally be an automatic "no" from me, but when it's done this well - and is in the background rather than the foreground - it works.)

Enormous kaiju, who grow bigger each year, emerge from the ocean every wet season, and the might of the Empire is concentrated on keeping them from breaking through to the heartlands. And yet that's not what the book is about. Instead, it forms a suspenseful background to a murder mystery that could only happen in this world, where the bizarre mutagenic properties of the kaiju corpses are used to modify plants, animals, and humans in the cause of the anti-kaiju battle (and also for everyday purposes like building houses).

The protagonist is a young "engraver", whose alteration gives him an eidetic memory. He assists an eccentric, foul-mouthed but highly intelligent investigator who's in pursuit of a murderer with an unusual weapon: a modified plant that sprouts inside its victims and grows suddenly, killing them and destroying things in their vicinity. And soon enough, there are more victims, and this time they're engineers working on the walls that keep the kaiju out, and a wall is damaged, making it vulnerable, and now the stakes are even higher, and the pressing question is: will imperial power politics prevent the mystery from being solved and justice from being done?

I received a pre-publication copy via Netgalley for review, and apart from a few mostly minor errors and the usual overabundance of coordinate commas where they don't belong, it's cleanly edited (with a couple of months to go before publication still). While it has a dark and ugly side to the story that isn't to my personal taste, and which therefore kept it out of the Platinum tier of my Best of the Year list, it's thoroughly well constructed, compelling, and conveys a fascinating world and characters who have both internal and external struggles to cope with. Highly recommended.

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Review: The Vondish Ambassador

The Vondish Ambassador by Lawrence Watt-Evans
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Better than average for the series, with the author's usual fresh premise. A young dockworker happens to be the first person the ambassador from the new Empire of Vond sees when he arrives in Ethshar of the Spices, and gets recruited as a local guide and assistant. Fortunately, he's intelligent and loyal, and both foils an assassination plot against his employer and helps the ambassador's mission to succeed. (I don't really consider those spoilers, because this is the kind of book where of course he does, and the real entertainment factor is seeing how he does it.)

Apart from a "crevice" that sounds a lot more like a crevasse, and a few minor typos of the level of missing quotation marks, it's well edited. I continue to be a bit skeptical about how good-hearted and averse to war (and, highlighted in this book, assassination) the people of Ethshar are, given that this is also a society that has slavery, but real human societies are weird and full of contradictions.

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Review: A Little Heart: A Tale of Love and Destiny

A Little Heart: A Tale of Love and Destiny by Vladarg Delsat
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I received a pre-publication version via Netgalley for review, and as I often do, I offer the disclaimer that it may receive more editing before publication, but that even if it does, there are enough issues that inevitably some, perhaps many, will be overlooked. Mostly, those issues stem from the author not having English as his first language (probably not even his second); the English is frequently not at all idiomatic, though I only hit one sentence that I found completely incomprehensible. He also makes a couple of mistakes that plenty of native English speakers make, punctuating dialog tags as separate sentences rather than part of the same sentence, and splicing sentences together with commas that should be separated by periods. They're all understandable issues, and not really the author's fault, but they do stand in the way of immersing into the story.

But what about the story? This was the more serious issue for me, and was what caused me to give up on it halfway through. Although the setting of much of the book is a magical school of the kind that has become so popular, there's very little focus on either the magic or the school. The magic, in fact, is not much more than a complication (it's incompatible with the technology that the main character, Helen, needs to help her deal with her serious medical issues), and that complication is quite easily resolved by more magic.

In fact, there's not a lot of conflict or complication in general, apart from the MC's frequent medical emergencies, and they're all resolved almost as soon as they arise. Everyone is kind and understanding and helpful, apart from a couple of adults who behave badly and instantly get fired, never (as far as I read) to be heard from again. None of the kids are nasty to the MC for more than a brief moment, and most of them are instantly and perfectly supportive and remain completely undeveloped, indeed undifferentiated, as characters.

Particularly saintly (and more developed) is Philip, who instantly befriends the MC when she arrives at the magic school and becomes her caregiver, selflessly helping her with a maturity well beyond his twelve years. The whole middle of the book then largely consists of: medical emergency, Philip does something that saves Helen, Helen gushes about how he's her angel and as long as he's with her she'll be fine, repeat. This became cloying to me after a while, and lost any sense of momentum.

I checked the ending to see if it was what I thought it would be, and unfortunately it was. (view spoiler)[Any discussion of disability fiction I've read always brings up the problem of the "cure narrative" - that the only way most writers can think of to wrap up a story about a disabled person is to have them be cured, which obviously is not the experience of the vast majority of disabled people, and which implies that this is the only way in which their story can end happily. This book ends with Helen cured, by means of what is almost literally a deus ex machina (though there is a bit of foreshadowing). (hide spoiler)]

The author is from Russia originally, though ethnically German, and it struck me that a Russian author trying to write a book that isn't about suffering is a bit like a British author trying to write one that isn't about social class, or a French author one that isn't about sex, or a Chinese author one that isn't about family: the book will end up being about that anyway, just in a different way from usual.

Let's be clear: as a caregiver myself, or just as a human being, it's great to see a book which centrally features disability and the many challenges it brings for both people with disabilities and their caregivers. The author, according to his bio, has personal experience of raising children with disabilities, and it's the main theme of his writing. It's just that, for me, there needed to be more tension in the struggles, and the solutions needed to be less instantaneous, and the characters more human and less perfectly saintly, for it to work well as a story. For me, it falls into the category of "Worthy, but not especially enjoyable as fiction."

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Review: Who P-P-P-Plugged Roger Rabbit?

Who P-P-P-Plugged Roger Rabbit? by Gary K. Wolf
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

This is a book with some faults, for sure. Not only does it need more editing (for excess commas between adjectives, missing quotation marks, other punctuation errors - including "rabbit's" when the plural, not the possessive, is intended - and homonyms like dowsed/doused and leeched/leached), but it overdoes the hard-boiled imagery more than somewhat, and drops an awful lot of brand names, presumably to give the feel of the time. I wouldn't mind so much, except it feels like the author is trying too hard for an effect that he's still not always pulling off.

Also, it's creepy enough that Baby Herman, a 36-year-old in the body of a baby but with the drives and bad habits of his actual age, pursues every woman in Hollywood; it's even more creepy that he frequently catches them. Please don't think about that too hard, or indeed at all.

It's full of small anachronisms, too, though the author tries to head those off with a foreword implying that his alternate version of the world differs from ours in a number of historical details as well as by having living "Toons". It's not completely clear when this is set - possibly 1939, since Gone with the Wind is about to be filmed and Clark Gable hasn't yet married Carole Lombard, though maybe postwar, since Gable's Air Force service is alluded to - but the foreword is signed "Eddie Valiant, 1947," and we get a number of cultural references from later than that. For example, the phrase "Say goodnight, Gracie" (from a TV show that debuted in 1950); a reference to Yul Brynner's role in The King and I, which began in 1951; a mention that Joseph McCarthy would have reason to target Edward R. Murrow, though Murrow's criticism of McCarthy didn't occur until 1954; and Rodan and Godzilla (the kaiju), 1956 and 1954, respectively. I think we can probably just assume that it's set generally in the period of the late 1930s to the 1940s (excluding the war years), in a loose historical continuity that isn't too close to ours, with the odd 1950s reference included by mistake. (In case you're wondering, I look up the references in Wikipedia using the function on my e-reader, and I happened to notice that a lot of them came from after 1947. The author, to be fair, didn't have such ready access to check this stuff when he wrote this in 1991, but that's also more than 30 years in which these issues, and the editing, could have been fixed but weren't.)

Still, it's otherwise amusing, and the mystery works as a mystery even when the comedy doesn't.

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Review: The Confessions of Arsène Lupin

The Confessions of Arsène Lupin by Maurice Leblanc
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A collection of short stories from earlier in the Lupin continuity than some books published before it, which shows the multiple facets of the adventurer: clever rogue and trickster pulling off remarkable heists and daring bluffs, omnicompetent helper of the underdog (particularly if the underdog happens to be an attractive young woman), solver of mysteries, creator of mysteries, flawed and vulnerable human being barely saved by lucky chance and the goodwill of a stranger.

It's packed with action and clever plots, and even if Lupin is a bit in love with himself, he is just as remarkable as he thinks he is. The whole series is reliably entertaining, not despite but because of its varied and non-formulaic nature, and there are plenty of fun surprises throughout.

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Review: Waterspell: The Complete Series

Waterspell: The Complete Series by Deborah J. Lightfoot
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

Even though this is much better executed than most books I've read lately, I ended up giving up partway through the second book. The male MC bounces back and forth between generous lord and scary angry damaged dangerous person, and the female MC/viewpoint character is understandably scared of him and unable to see his positive side, but also keeps making bad, headstrong decisions. They're believable as a teenager's decisions, but still often facepalm-worthy. The whole thing feels very serious and fraught in that YA manner that I don't love.

I didn't ship them as a couple, but apparently they become one later, which is what I thought would happen. For me, a romance doesn't work if it's between people who I think are toxic or foolish, and he's toxic and she's foolish.

Not for me, but it will have its audience. Kudos on the good editing.

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Review: Divots

Divots by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

UK title: The Heart of a Goof.

Only P.G. Wodehouse could tempt me to read a book of stories about golf and then make me enjoy it (though he didn't pull off the, I suspect impossible, feat of making me actually interested in the game as such). He does this by his wonderfully farcical writing, and by making the stories not really about golf; instead, they're about people who happen to be obsessed with golf, but who also have other conflicts going on (mostly romantic in nature), with which their obsession is somehow intertwined.

As usual in Wodehouse, these characters generally have no jobs to distract from their participation in the plot; they're either retired businessmen or people who apparently enjoy private incomes large enough that they can play golf all the time. (They're not necessarily filthy rich, but at least comfortably off.)

All of the stories have a frame which involves the golf club's Oldest Member buttonholing another member of the club, in the style of the Ancient Mariner, and insisting on telling him the story despite his obvious reluctance for the role of auditor. It's an extra bit of fun. (My father was also an enthusiastic raconteur, who was equally impossible to prevent from telling his stories, and it brought back fond memories of him.)

The stories originally appeared in magazines on both sides of the Atlantic, but the author still manages to make several of them sequels of each other. He cleverly does this by having the Oldest Member tell them to the same person, who says (after the first one), "You already told me that one," and summarizes the previous story's plot. The Oldest Member then informs him that this is a different story involving the same people, and proceeds from the point at which the previous story left off. This makes for a nice reminder for someone who had read the previous story in an earlier issue of the same magazine, and orients anyone who missed the earlier story too.

The stories themselves are pretty classic Wodehouse; the stakes are never any higher than a successful romance, and often lower than that, but whatever they are he makes them feel vitally important just by how much the characters care about them. There are misunderstandings, miscommunications, worms who turn, and even a cad reformed. It's enjoyable light comedy, skillfully executed.

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Review: The Lost Plot

The Lost Plot by Genevieve Cogman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

These are solid, well-written books with a protagonist who solves problems with courage and intelligence, despite occasionally wishing that she wasn't always the one who had to fix things.

You need to read them in order, really, to get the most out of them, though each has a separate story problem that's solved by the end.

Their big weakness, which I've mentioned before, is that it's never quite clear what the magical Language can and can't do, so it operates as a plot convenience - but that's less obtrusive here than in some of the earlier volumes. Most of the problem-solving here is Irene using her ability to bluff and/or negotiate with scary beings, whether they be fey assassins, 1920s-style New York gang bosses, or dragons. She has the near-impossible task of extracting a fellow Librarian who's been blackmailed into working for a dragon while maintaining the Library's status as a neutral force, something that would be a lot easier if she had fewer scruples about collateral damage.

The pacing is gripping at times, the challenges varied and ingenious, the editing nearly impeccable (so it doesn't distract me and bounce me out of immersion), and all in all this is a high-tier recommendation from me.

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