Review: A Bayard From Bengal Being some account of the Magnificent and Spanking Career of Chunder Bindabun Bhosh, Esq., B.A., Cambridge

A Bayard From Bengal Being some account of the Magnificent and Spanking Career of Chunder Bindabun Bhosh, Esq., B.A., Cambridge by F. Anstey
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a tricky one. It's a British author pretending to be an Indian author, and comically getting English idioms wrong as he tells a story of an Indian man (not the supposed author) in England, having unlikely adventures that sometimes assume that England is like India. The illustrations are also supposedly by an Indian illustrator, though actually by an English one, and are done in a Mughal-influenced style, showing the British scenes as a not-very-knowledgeable Indian person might imagine them.

It wouldn't fly today, in other words; there would be a firestorm on Twitter, and the author would have to disappear and resurface several years later, possibly under a pseudonym. The tricky part is that the main body of the text is actually quite amusing at times, though that's brought down badly by the supposed translations of parables and the pseudo-author's commentary on the illustrations, the first of which is often not funny at all, and the second of which is heavy-handed and obvious.

On the whole, not recommended.

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Review: Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz: Stories of the Witch Knight and the Puppet Sorcerer

Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz: Stories of the Witch Knight and the Puppet Sorcerer by Garth Nix
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The contribution of the Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories to this volume's DNA is strong and clear, not only in the general feel of the world and the partnership between the two protagonists, but in the tone of the stories. The various encounters they have do not tend to end well for other characters, or even for Sir Hereward; he frequently desires to dally with women they encounter, but even if they're not outright antagonists they're often victims and/or agents of the otherworldly entities that the pair hunt down and exterminate on behalf of the Committee for the Safety of the World.

The language, too, is similar to the prose of Fritz Lieber (author of the Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser tales). It's not as over-elaborate as, say, Jack Vance, whose stories I particularly dislike, mainly for the alienated, dark characters, but also for the overwrought prose, which unfortunately gets imitated by other writers who don't have the chops to pull it off. Nor is it the highly charged, dramatic prose of Robert E. Howard's Conan stories. It's formal in cadence, but mostly straightforward in syntax, and progresses at a steady pace through these shadowy mini-tragedies, helping to insulate the reader by its very matter-of-factness from the horror of some of the events.

There is the odd dangling modifier, and there are a few too many commas between adjectives sometimes (including one after "one," which is an adjective, technically, but should never have a coordinate comma after it). Otherwise, the copy editing is good, and while the author sometimes uses an old-fashioned piece of technical vocabulary as part of his worldbuilding and tonebuilding, he always seems to use it correctly.

I'd read three of these stories when they were collected before, but was happy to come back round again and read several more. While they're darker than I usually prefer, they're well written, and I enjoyed them.

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Review: Worlds of Eternity

Worlds of Eternity by Aaron Hillsbery
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

The authors never use one short sentence when three long sentences will do, and it quickly became tedious to read. Here's an example:

"A faint vibration came from Michael's pocket. It was his phone, demanding attention. Mindful of the person seated next to him, he kept his elbow close to his body as he struggled to extract the device. After considerable effort, he finally succeeded. Straightening himself, his eyes fell on the screen, revealing a new message."

Or you could just say, "Michael's phone buzzed in his pocket. He took it out - with some difficulty because of the crowded tram - and saw a message from his sister." That's 25 words in two sentences, and it conveys slightly more information than the 54 words in five sentences above.

A lot of those long sentences involve an introductory participle (like the last sentence quoted above), and occasionally those participles dangle, referring to something other than the grammatical subject of the sentence. There are also a few issues with tense (missing past perfect, mingling of past and present), the usual excess commas between adjectives, and some odd or incorrect use of vocabulary, like "she glanced the woman" instead of "she glimpsed" or "she glanced at". It's well within the normal range of errors, probably better than average, but that tedious, long-winded prose means there's not much plot per thousand words, and slows the pace to a crawl even in the action scenes. I only got 5% of the way through, so I can't say much about characterization, worldbuilding, or plot; it moved so slowly I hadn't seen much of any of those yet, just wordy narration of the mundane and obvious.

I received a pre-release version from Netgalley for review, and some of the minor issues may be fixed before publication.

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Review: The Adventures of Dr Thorndyke

The Adventures of Dr Thorndyke by R. Austin Freeman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This author pioneered the "reverse mystery" which most famously appeared in the TV series Columbo, where we, the audience, see the crime committed and know who did it, and the interest is in watching the detective work it out. Thorndyke is no Columbo; he's a snob, for a start, and as sophisticated and elite as Columbo is an everyman. He also relies on meticulous forensic science to track down the perpetrators, no matter how careful they have been.

These stories are varied; most, but not all of them are "reverse mysteries". They're entertaining mainly from a problem-solving point of view.

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Review: The Attenbury Emeralds

The Attenbury Emeralds by Jill Paton Walsh
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There are a couple of mentions early in the Wimsey canon of his first case having to do with the Attenbury Emeralds, and in this book we finally get that story. Suffering from shell shock (what we now call PTSD), Lord Peter in 1921 was just starting to take his first tentative step back into society, a country house party with people he had known for a long time. There's a theft involving the emeralds of the title - or, rather, one emerald in particular, the "king stone," which turns out to be one of a set, sold off by an Indian maharajah to save his people from famine in the 19th century.

The whole business is rather reminiscent of a similar mystery in one of the Wimsey short stories, down to the host not wanting his guests treated like criminals and even how the stone is to be smuggled out, though in this case the plan is both less clever and yet more successful. The inept police inspector that Lord Peter later clashes with in Whose Body? is in charge of the investigation, and his sergeant, Charles Parker, is the same man who becomes Peter's friend, collaborator and eventually brother-in-law.

There are one or two very minor inconsistencies I noticed between this book and the Dorothy Sayers portion of the series. The one is that several people, in Peter's flashbacks, call him "Lord Wimsey" and he doesn't correct them, as he did in one of the early books. The possible second is that Bunter's son (now revealed to be named Peter) seems closer in age to Peter and Harriet's eldest, Bredon, than he did in A Presumption of Death, where he was referred to as a "baby" while Bredon was three years old; it's not completely out of the question to refer to a toddler as a baby, of course, and it's never actually stated that they are the same age or close to it in this book, just that they are both at Eton and Bredon is 16, which means that Peter Bunter could be 14 or so. I'm overthinking it, aren't I?

The actual mystery involves multiple similar emeralds and multiple occasions when they could have been switched in a plan that stretches over decades and requires at least three murders. In the end I felt it was improbable - the plan, that is. (view spoiler)[A woman living in poverty is so outraged by her late husband's family's rejection of their marriage that she holds on to a valuable stone that she legitimately owns and that could make her and her daughter comfortable if she sells it, because by complete coincidence she could also use it to get a weird sort of revenge against different members of the family entirely, and she picks the revenge option and kills three people to keep the very long-term plan on track? And also the two stones were both at the same party during World War II, again by coincidence, and someone present doesn't recognize her sister's close friend, and it's all a red herring, because they could have been switched then but, as it turns out, weren't? It's all a bit thin.

Not, then, as strong as the earlier Jill Paton Walsh books in the series, both of which built on much more foundation of Dorothy Sayers (the first an unfinished manuscript, the second a series of epistolary pieces published during World War II). Peter and Harriet are still mutually supportive without question or deviation, which was endearing in the earlier books, but here seems less real somehow, as if they really should argue about something, at least, given the strain they're both under. I'll still read the last book in the series, but now with reduced expectations.

That's not to say it's a bad book; it just doesn't reach the heights of the earlier ones, for me at least (and apparently for others, based on the average ratings by other Goodreads reviewers). It goes on my annual recommendation list, but in the lowest tier. (hide spoiler)]

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Review: OverLondon

OverLondon by George Penney
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Many books claim to be in the tradition of Terry Pratchett; far fewer can back it up even partially. This one, I think, can, though of course, compared with the master's best work, it falls short. Then again, compared with his best work, his early work fell short as well.

The setting is an alternate-history Britain where the differences are intentionally absurd. "Floatstone" enables cities (and airships) to fly, including OverLondon, where we lay our scene. Ann Boleyn, rather than being executed, went mad, had Henry VIII executed instead, and declared herself a deity, breaking from the Catholic Church. This is mentioned as having been several centuries ago, but it's not clear exactly when we are; there are elements that feel Elizabethan, including doublets and the existence of a playwright named Wobblespeare who's obsessed with Verona, but there are other elements, like bowler hats and the general clockpunk aesthetic, that feel more Victorian. It didn't seem like the worldbuilding was intended to make much sense, so I won't ding it for the fact that, while printing (except of the Vengeful Queen's holy book) is forbidden - this is a plot point - "penny dreadfuls" still exist, a phenomenon that was only enabled by cheap printing. There also seem to be a lot more cathedrals in OverLondon than in real-life London, though we don't see any bishops. There are anthropomorphic animal people, just because that's amusing.

The book needs more editing, including for some basic things like punctuating a dialog tag as if it was a separate sentence and not preceding or following a term of address with a comma, as well as the increasingly common "may" when it should be "might" and a collection of mostly familiar vocabulary errors: tenants/tenets, reigns/reins, proscribe/prescribe, disenfranchised/disenchanted, produce/product, rifled/riffled, discrete/discreet. The authors occasionally put too many negatives in a sentence and end up reversing the obviously intended meaning, and don't always get apostrophe placement right. It's no worse than average, but needs a tidy-up. These are mostly things a lot of people get wrong, which accounts for the fact that none of the many people mentioned in the acknowledgements apparently spotted them.

The plot is a kind of farcical hard-boiled mystery; I say "hard-boiled" because there's quite a bit of violence directed at the investigators, they spend a lot of time in the mean streets, they're chronically short of money and they drink a lot (especially their leader). Also, (view spoiler)[they end up getting shafted for the reward (hide spoiler)].

Priests are exploding, and Captain Reign, a swashbuckling pirate who has just managed to save her life by signing up as a privateer, becomes a private ear or investigator to try to earn enough money to get her ship out of hock. Her ferret-girl cabin boy Flora and intellectually different bosun Sid assist, or do something that sometimes resembles assisting, as does a clever young artificer named Elias. I enjoyed the reluctant thugs, the grubby urchins, the sinister guild leaders, the Cry (the sole news medium, town criers who announce the news on the hour), the flamboyant villain, the scary nuns. It's a fun world, and although sometimes it's violence or squalor played for laughs, it never felt like dark comedy. I'm not sure what makes the difference; the overall light and zestful tone, I think, and the optimism the characters retain about life and human nature.

I would definitely read more in the series, and it makes it firmly into the Silver tier of my annual recommendations list.

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Review: The Aeronaut's Windlass

The Aeronaut's Windlass by Jim Butcher
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'm a fan of Jim Butcher's urban fantasy series, even though it's now getting darker than I usually prefer. He used to be one of the few authors I bought in hardback, because his books stand up to re-reading; he has a smooth, competent style, wry humour, and a knack for writing action, and his main characters are clever, creative and principled.

All of those characteristics are on display in this book, which I've been wanting to read for a while. I enjoy the idea of steampunk, even though the execution often lets it down, so I wanted to see how a writer I knew was above average dealt with it.

As I expected, Butcher refuses to follow the unwritten rule that you can have airships, or you can use vocabulary correctly, but not both (since I listened to the audiobook, I can't swear that there are no homonym errors, but I doubt it, because he's not prone to those). I did notice he sometimes fell into the common error of using "may" during past tense narration instead of "might," and possibly confused "hurling" and "hurtling" at one point. His young female characters are actually intelligent and sensible, though Gwen is a lot less sensible than Bridget. And he includes talking cats, an element which improves every book I've seen it used in, even otherwise bad ones.

The characters in general are varied and distinctive, and several of them get viewpoints. There are three completely different etherealists, semi-wizards whose work with ethereal forces leads to various kinds of mental illness and eccentricity, and one of them, Folly, is a viewpoint character. There are three completely different Spirearch's Guard who get viewpoints: the experienced and competent Warriorborn Benedict, the princessesque Gwen, and the physically strong and personally humble Bridget, who is technically a member of the quasi-aristocracy but whose house has fallen to the point where that doesn't make much difference in practice. She works with the cat Rowl (I'm assuming the spelling, because audiobook); there are several other completely distinct cats, but only Rowl gets a viewpoint. There's also the airship captain Grimm with a viewpoint, and one or two of the invading marines.

As well as these central characters, we get several members of Grimm's crew, none of whom I had any trouble telling apart; a couple of other guards, including an aristocratic snot that Bridget is going to duel at one point, though that whole subplot disappears and is never revisited after another spire attacks; the Spirearch, a puckish older man with a lot more political influence than he pretends, and considerable nous; and Brother Vincent of the Wayist Temple, a Buddhist-like sect of martial artists and librarians. Of course, listening to the audiobook means that the different characters literally get different voices, but I feel like I would have been able to distinguish them on the page just as easily. Their interpersonal and (in the case of the viewpoint characters) intrapersonal dynamics make sense and are in close relationship with the plot, both driving it and being driven by it, as they should be.

The worldbuilding is... local. What I mean is that we don't get much that isn't directly plot-relevant. We know that humanity has inhabited Spires, made out of almost-indestructible Spirestone by the long-gone Builders, on a hostile world for thousands of years. We know they get their meat, leather and food in general from vats, because one of the characters is from a family who has a vattery. We know quite a bit about how the various kinds of etheric crystals work, because they power the airships and the weapons and are valued, scarce resources, and another character is from a family that grows them. We know that the creatures of the surface are highly dangerous, because the heroes fight some, and that therefore wood (which apparently can't be grown in vats, but has to be harvested from the surface) is extremely expensive. But we don't know where metal comes from; it just never comes up, even though quite a few things are made of metal - usually brass, because, after all, this is steampunk - and we know that iron rusts extremely quickly if not protected by a copper coating.

Spires trade, but also fight, using airships in both cases; they're more or less countries, just vertical countries made out of extremely hard stone. And that's the background to this book. A spire that periodically goes to war for economic reasons is attacking the spire where our heroes live, and they must pull together and be heroic in order to repel the invasion. There are pitched battles, investigations, negotiations, and a small amount of romance of sorts, as well as coming-of-age-style character growth.

It gets intense; there are deaths of innocents and named characters, widespread destruction, and considerable pain of various sorts for our heroes, including a strong depiction of post-battle horror of the kind that can lead to PTSD. For my taste, it (and the recent books in Butcher's main series, The Dresden Files) are getting darker and more intense than I prefer; I'm more of a cozy fantasy reader these days. But they're so well done that I tolerate it better than I would from a less skilled author. I'd still hesitate to read a sequel, because military SFF has never been a favourite of mine. I'm a fan of Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan novels despite, rather than because of, the military parts, for example, and the ones I like the best are the least military.

The mismatch to my personal taste does figure into my rating, placing this in the Silver tier of my annual recommendation list, rather than the Gold tier it might deserve if I was rating more objectively. It's still a recommendation, especially for fans of Butcher, Bujold, and steampunk done well.

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Review: Grand Harvest: From Field to Fable

Grand Harvest: From Field to Fable by Jaakko Koivula
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I like to read books by writers from outside the US and UK (and Canada/Australia/NZ) occasionally, to broaden my exposure to other world traditions, and I don't know much about Finnish folklore (or, really, Finnish anything) apart from knowing that it was a source for Tolkien, who based Gandalf on a character from the Kalevala and whose Elvish languages were influenced by Finnish. So when this came up on Netgalley - with a cover that playfully references the famous American Gothic painting by Grant Wood - I picked it up.

English has a lot of idioms. I don't usually notice this until I read a book by someone who doesn't have English as their first language (or, occasionally, does have English as their first language but isn't very good at it) and doesn't write it idiomatically. Many of the issues here are, as usual, with the wrong preposition being used, but sometimes it's word order, or whether something is plural or singular. The author mentions the book having had a lot of editing; unfortunately, it still could do with some more, not just for the non-idiomatic English but for some typos, occasional errors in dialog punctuation, and other minor glitches.

Setting that aside, it's an enjoyable fantasy, which walks an unusual line between an overall cozy feel (small town, people just living their mundane lives as farmers and traders and crafters) and a darker undertone; the town is under what could be described as a curse effectively disguised as a blessing, the dwarves who live there (especially their leader) have a harrowing backstory, and there are some bandits who... do not come to a good end. Also, there's been a (possibly natural) disaster which has rendered magic largely ineffective, because what runes do has changed. The dwarves and their human fellow townspeople don't think this has anything to do with them, because, for reasons connected with the harrowing backstory, they don't allow magic in the town, but... it does have something to do with them, and a couple of young wizards have to convince them of this fact in order to save everyone's lives - which they are determined to do, despite some danger to themselves, because, like everyone apart from the bandits, they are basically decent people.

If the book has a weakness, it's that most of the various dwarves aren't distinct enough that I could easily keep them straight in my head, a problem that could be alleged of the dwarves in The Hobbit or, for that matter, Snow White as well. Perhaps it's inherently difficult to make dwarves individual, for some reason. Otherwise, it's an enjoyable story with good emotional beats and arcs. The ending could have been crisper and more decisive, but it's not a big fault. I don't know that I'd bother with a sequel; it didn't grip me really strongly, and the non-idiomatic English was distracting. But it's not a bad book by any means.

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Review: Suitor Armor: Volume 1

Suitor Armor: Volume 1 by Purpah
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Since I've been reading some manga lately, I thought I'd review this graphic novel when it came up on Netgalley. It's not manga; it's Western, but it has some of the same feel as a fantasy manga.

Humans and fairies are at war, and so Lucia, a fairy girl, has to keep her wings hidden while she takes care of her mistress, the rather airheaded but non-toxic young betrothed of the serious, somewhat older king. Her mistress's father has apparently rescued her, in circumstances that will doubtless get a flashback in due course (not in this volume, though).

Meanwhile, the arrogant royal wizard has created an animated suit of armour, which defeats the previously undefeated champion knight (much to the knight's fury and humiliation; his squire has a tough job keeping him from going completely off the deep end, but he's not actually a bad person). The armour gives the rose that is the traditional prize for winning the tournament to Lucia, who starts treating the enchanted object as a person; he then starts growing into the role. Lucia discovers that she is able to use powerful magic, and does so while fairy spies are in the castle. We also get a revelation about the relationship between the knight and the squire. Nearly everyone is now keeping secrets from at least someone, and while nobody (apart from the spies) is an outright antagonist - and even they are somewhat sympathetic - differing perspectives and agendas combined with the secrets do put some of them at odds, while forging alliances among others.

Because this is Volume 1, it's mainly setup, rather than anything being at all resolved by the end. That means that it's mainly potential, not yet realized, and that, in turn, makes it difficult to evaluate. So far, none of the characters have a great deal of depth, but it's early days, and I suspect there could also be more tension and drama to come than we see in this initial volume. I'd say it's promising enough to keep reading, but not an instant favourite.

(By publisher request, review held back until the week of publication.)

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Review: The Emperor's Soul

The Emperor's Soul by Brandon Sanderson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Most people, when they're taking a month's break, do something that isn't related to their job.

Brandon Sanderson, apparently, writes a Hugo-winning novella.

At novella length, the worldbuilding and the magic system are a bit thinner than his usual, not very far beyond the initial inspiration of looking at some East Asian seals in a museum and thinking (in the way Sanderson does), "What if that was a magic system?" The main character uses such seals to "Forge" - that is, to alter the essence of something in a way that is plausible if it had a different history. She's been caught stealing from the Imperial Palace, fortunately at the exact same time as the emperor has been brain-damaged in an assassination attempt and can be expected to spend 90 days out of the public eye in mourning for his assassinated wife, and the faction that backs and largely controls the emperor want her to do the impossible - Forge his missing soul, so that he can continue ruling and they won't be displaced from power.

The idea that she achieves this (and so much else) in 90 days when it should take years is made somewhat more plausible by the knowledge that the author wrote this book in a month (though he did have plenty of time to revise and improve it). As a novella, it's inevitably somewhat linear, though it does have some clever structural features which are fully visible only when you reach the end. The protagonist is clever and skilled, and I do enjoy watching a clever, skilled person do what they do so well (and here I mean the author as well as the protagonist).

The antagonist still feels like a threat, even though we know, at a meta level, that the protagonist will win out; the way in which she wins out is clever and, in its way, amusing, though this isn't as humourous a book as many of Sanderson's. The East Asian feel is present, though not as in depth as a novel would make it.

Given the length Sanderson usually writes at, a novella is his equivalent of a short story from a more normal writer, and it should probably be judged as such rather than compared to his novels directly. Considered as a short story, it has everything it needs to succeed.

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Review: Echoes of the Imperium

Echoes of the Imperium by Nicholas Atwater
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

Too dark for my taste, but as far as I read (not very far), well done.

Opens with a bloody and destructive battle at the fall of the Imperium; in the next chapter, 20 years later, the narrator is an airship captain with a serious drinking problem. The words "dark," "gritty" or "brutal" are not in the blurb, but ought to be, because they warn people like me off books like this that we won't enjoy. I've enjoyed the much, much gentler books of Olivia Atwater before, so massive death and destruction in the first chapter blindsided me.

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Review: A Presumption of Death

A Presumption of Death by Jill Paton Walsh
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Continuation novels - continuing a classic series, but written by someone other than the original author - are always controversial. Some fans will always find something that strikes them as a jarring note, that marks this upstart thing as inferior to the genuine product, that doesn't ring true to them for the characters. And Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane are complex characters, too, both highly intelligent, determined to respect one another in a way most couples of the time did not, and with by now a complicated pair of backstories to be reckoned with, not to mention their habit of quoting widely from English literature.

All that as preface to saying that for me, this did work as a continuation of the series, and that's a big compliment to the author. It draws in part on the "Wimsey Papers," a series of epistolary pieces that Dorothy Sayers published in 1939 in the Spectator, so Jill Paton Walsh did have a foundation to build on of events in the characters' lives and their thoughts about the war.

If anything, I felt that there were moments when it seemed a little too carefully researched, or expressed thoughts which make sense to us in hindsight but which might not have occurred to people at the time, like the reference to Quisling ("may his name be cursed for centuries" - his name is, indeed, a synonym for "collaborationist traitor" now in English and several other languages, but at this point he was in many ways an obscure figure who was not obviously going to have such a fate). I did wonder, too, whether there was going to be too much intertextuality, a common failing of continuation novels, when the topic of advertising people came up; but there wasn't, in the end, a reference to Lord Peter's undercover stint at an advertising agency. (There was in the previous volume, briefly.)

Generally, though, to me it read smoothly, and the characters felt continuous with their earlier appearances. We even got Miss Climpson, with her distinctive rambling and opinionated but still insightful style of communication, and Miss Climpson is my personal favourite.

The plot is not quite like any of the previous books, and this, too, helps it to resemble the previous books, no two of which are quite like each other. In fact, I could make a stronger case, on purely internal textual grounds, for The Five Red Herrings not belonging to the canon than I could for this one, without cheating any more than the average textual critic.

Speaking of the plot, it's one that is particular to its time and place, rural England in early World War II, and both time and place are strongly evoked. It has resonance for me, because it involves youthful members of the RAF, and just five years later than this book is set, my father went to England with the RNZAF and had a lot of the same experiences as those young men (he was then 22) - I'm sure including hiding his actual feelings in order to be able to carry on. There are also a couple of references to servicemen snatching what might be the last opportunity to be intimate with their girlfriends before going off to fight; the mother of my oldest friend was the result of just such a liaison. The reality of an entire population not having enough food or sleep and yet somehow carrying on comes through strongly, and it's made clear how the government was out of touch with the population and often poorly organized, and how some of their measures were resented and even circumvented, even while people in general were fully committed to the goal of winning the war.

Peter spends much of the book off on a secret mission somewhere with Bunter, with Harriet left to happily take care of not only her own but her sister-in-law Mary's children at their country house, to participate in village life (much changed by the war), to do the initial spadework on the murder of a land girl during an air raid practice, and to overthink everything, particularly her own feelings about the war (which is classic Harriet).

The ultimate resolution of the mystery is very much in tune with the feel of the times that the whole book has created: a messy, uncomfortable, improvised, best-efforts thing that's not at all how it would have been done in peacetime, but that tries its best to live up to at least some ideals in non-ideal circumstances. Because the rest of the book's emotional beats come to a satisfactory conclusion, this works.

I'm looking forward to reading the next book in the series, where Jill Paton Walsh had even less of Dorothy L. Sayers to work from and had to create it largely out of whole cloth. Will it still feel organic with the rest of the series? I think it's likely.

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Review: A Presumption of Death

A Presumption of Death by Jill Paton Walsh
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Continuation novels - continuing a classic series, but written by someone other than the original author - are always controversial. Some fans will always find something that strikes them as a jarring note, that marks this upstart thing as inferior to the genuine product, that doesn't ring true to them for the characters. And Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane are complex characters, too, both highly intelligent, determined to respect one another in a way most couples of the time did not, and with by now a complicated pair of backstories to be reckoned with, not to mention their habit of quoting widely from English literature.

All that as preface to saying that for me, this did work as a continuation of the series, and that's a big compliment to the author. It draws in part on the "Wimsey Papers," a series of epistolary pieces that Dorothy Sayers published in 1939 in the Spectator, so Jill Paton Walsh did have a foundation to build on of events in the characters' lives and their thoughts about the war.

If anything, I felt that there were moments when it seemed a little too carefully researched, or expressed thoughts which make sense to us in hindsight but which might not have occurred to people at the time, like the reference to Quisling ("may his name be cursed for centuries" - his name is, indeed, a synonym for "collaborationist traitor" now in English and several other languages, but at this point he was in many ways an obscure figure who was not obviously going to have such a fate). I did wonder, too, whether there was going to be too much intertextuality, a common failing of continuation novels, when the topic of advertising people came up; but there wasn't, in the end, a reference to Lord Peter's undercover stint at an advertising agency. (There was in the previous volume, briefly.)

Generally, though, to me it read smoothly, and the characters felt continuous with their earlier appearances. We even got Miss Climpson, with her distinctive rambling and opinionated but still insightful style of communication, and Miss Climpson is my personal favourite.

The plot is not quite like any of the previous books, and this, too, helps it to resemble the previous books, no two of which are quite like each other. In fact, I could make a stronger case, on purely internal textual grounds, for The Five Red Herrings not belonging to the canon than I could for this one, without cheating any more than the average textual critic.

Speaking of the plot, it's one that is particular to its time and place, rural England in early World War II, and both time and place are strongly evoked. It has resonance for me, because it involves youthful members of the RAF, and just five years later than this book is set, my father went to England with the RNZAF and had a lot of the same experiences as those young men (he was then 22) - I'm sure including hiding his actual feelings in order to be able to carry on. There are also a couple of references to servicemen snatching what might be the last opportunity to be intimate with their girlfriends before going off to fight; the mother of my oldest friend was the result of just such a liaison. The reality of an entire population not having enough food or sleep and yet somehow carrying on comes through strongly, and it's made clear how the government was out of touch with the population and often poorly organized, and how some of their measures were resented and even circumvented, even while people in general were fully committed to the goal of winning the war.

Peter spends much of the book off on a secret mission somewhere with Bunter, with Harriet left to happily take care of not only her own but her sister-in-law Mary's children at their country house, to participate in village life (much changed by the war), to do the initial spadework on the murder of a land girl during an air raid practice, and to overthink everything, particularly her own feelings about the war (which is classic Harriet).

The ultimate resolution of the mystery is very much in tune with the feel of the times that the whole book has created: a messy, uncomfortable, improvised, best-efforts thing that's not at all how it would have been done in peacetime, but that tries its best to live up to at least some ideals in non-ideal circumstances. Because the rest of the book's emotional beats come to a satisfactory conclusion, this works.

I'm looking forward to reading the next book in the series, where Jill Paton Walsh had even less of Dorothy L. Sayers to work from and had to create it largely out of whole cloth. Will it still feel organic with the rest of the series? I think it's likely.

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Review: Uncle Dynamite

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

Despite references to the atom bomb and Eric Johnston (president of the MPAA at the time of original publication, 1948), this is clearly set in Wodehouse's eternal interwar period for all practical purposes, and the characters have not noticeably aged from their pre-war appearances. In fact, it remixes so much of his classic material that any Wodehouse fan will recognize most of the elements immediately. There's an uncle, to start with (Uncle Fred/Lord Ickenham), one of Plum's genial, eccentric old buffers who ought not to be let out without a keeper; an ill-tempered retired British civil servant; a determined, managing young woman, daughter of the civil servant, to whom a hopeless poop (Lord Ickenham's nephew Pongo Twistleton) is engaged; a bright young thing, to whom the hopeless poop ought to be engaged; a large Man of Action type, to whom the managing young woman ought to be engaged; a ponderously interfering policeman; a country house; a Maguffin which ought, by all principles of natural justice but against the actual letter of the law, to be stolen from said country house; and a complicated plan to do so that involves people impersonating other people and sneaking about at night, and that is foiled by one of the many coincidences which abound in the plot (most of them aimed at getting the cast together in one place).

Is this a criticism? No, it's not, because as Wodehouse fans we love these elements, and will read them over and over in fresh combinations, all the while distracted by the sparkling of the language.

One element that I don't remember seeing before is the sympathetic treatment of a middle-aged woman, the wife of the grumpy retired civil servant and mother of the managing young woman. She looks like a horse, but that's not her fault, and she personally regrets it; she makes up in good-heartedness for the failings of her spouse, which she puts up with out of devotion to him. There's also a housemaid who has a lot more personality than most of the female servants in Wodehouse, who usually have few and basic lines and act like frightened poultry when they're not simply furniture. This one rises to the level of a character, and a determined, intelligent and effective character at that, despite her Cockney origins, gender, and occupation, which don't normally get such positive treatment in the master's earlier work. He appears to have been quietly progressing in some ways; perhaps his experience of being interned during World War II played a role.

The other shift I noticed from his pre-war work is that, for Plum, this has its risqué moments. There are several references to Lord Ickenham's grandfather's collection of nude statues of Venus, and a young woman gets her dress accidentally torn off while escaping a policeman. The actual relationships are just as pure as always, though.

Though Wodehouse had been involved in controversy because of his wartime (non-political) broadcast from Germany while interned there, and had suffered some loss of popularity as a result, he still had plenty of dedicated fans, and perhaps he didn't want to risk alienating those he had left by too much of a departure from his classic style. In any case, his classic style is what this is in, and if you enjoy Wodehouse it will be pleasantly familiar.

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Review: Thrones, Dominations (Lord Peter Wimsey) by Dorothy L Sayers (5-Jun-2014) Paperback

Thrones, Dominations (Lord Peter Wimsey) by Dorothy L Sayers (5-Jun-2014) Paperback by Dorothy L. Sayers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

One of the reasons we admire the work of particular authors is that they do something that nobody else can do. It might be possible to pastiche their works, but they're essentially inimitable. So if, after their death, another author attempts to extend the series, all too often it ends up as bad fanfiction (there is such a thing as good fanfiction, but Sturgeon's Law applies). I'm thinking here of Eoin Colfer's awful sixth book in the Hitchhiker's Guide trilogy, or the review of Sebastian Faulks' continuation of the Jeeves series which runs "FAULKS stop WHAT ORANGE BLOSSOMS stop WHY ORANGE BLOSSOMS stop CONSIDER YOUR PLOT THE FROZEN LIMIT stop WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY PLANTING YOUR LOATHSOME BEAZELS ON MY HEROES LIKE THIS stop DEEPLY REGRET YOUR HEAD HUNDRED MILES FROM ETHEREAL REALM AS UNABLE TO HIT YOU WITH BRICK stop LOVE PLUM".

So I approached this continuation of the Lord Peter Wimsey series with more than a little trepidation. Technically, it is partly by Dorothy L. Sayers; she began the book and set it aside for other work, and the incomplete draft was found in a publisher's safe and passed to the already respected crime novelist Jill Paton Walsh to finish.

I have to say, I was favourably impressed. It felt like a Lord Peter Wimsey novel, even to the persistent fault of introducing a lot of similar, and inadequately distinguished, characters all in a bunch, though it didn't have the persistent fault of going so deeply into some obscure area of knowledge that the reader has to just let it wash over them, aware that a lot of nuance is being missed. It builds on and extends the relationship established between the newlywed couple of Lord Peter and Harriet Vane in the last book completed by Sayers, Busman's Honeymoon , without (as far as I was concerned) contradicting what that book and its predecessor, Gaudy Night , had established about the characters individually and as a couple. Like several previous books, it teases me with a mention of Miss Climpson, my favourite character in the series, but doesn't bring her onstage. It quotes and references English literature like a Wimsey novel. I'm happy to accept it as a Wimsey novel, and a good one, though not one of the best; I enjoyed it about as much as Have His Carcase , which I liked.

It takes a third of the book to get to the actual crime, but the setup is (mostly) necessary. There are several subplots concerning Harriet's integration into Peter's world, her ambivalence about continuing to write, her sister-in-law Helen's disapproval of her, and Peter's valet Bunter's relationship with another photographer. Harriet gains a lady's maid, who has the unlikely surname of Mango; a few of the new characters struck me as having Dickensian names, more so than in previous books, where the names have tended to be characteristic of the place where the crime occurs. Mango gets a chance to shine as an undercover operative in the solution of the crime at one point.

The main crime itself - the murder of a woman with whom Peter and Harriet are slightly acquainted - has a personal dimension for them, and the authors do a wonderful job of compare-and-contrast between the dead woman's relationship with her husband and the very different "marriage of true minds" that Peter and Harriet are striving for. The detective couple's self-doubt and mutual support are both very much in evidence.

For me, at least, this works as an extension of a beloved series with distinctive characters who have grown across the series, and continue to grow in ways that make sense for their complex personalities. It's also a good detective mystery.

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Review: The Sea Mystery

The Sea Mystery by Freeman Wills Crofts
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'll start by saying this: you don't read a Freeman Wills Crofts book for the characters.

In particular, you don't read one to enjoy the quirky antics of an unusual detective. This is not Poirot with his little moustache and his tisanes, or Lord Peter Wimsey with his monocle and his collection of rare books, or even Holmes with his indoor target practice and his shag tobacco kept in a Turkish slipper. In an earlier review, I've referred to Inspector French as more of a plot device than an actual character, and while this is perhaps too harsh, it contains a lot of truth. The author was an engineer, and he designed French as a crime-solving machine, with no extraneous parts.

French's appearance is never described, at least in this book. We don't learn his hair or eye colour, the style of his clothes, his height, what he likes to eat, drink, or smoke. He appears to have no interests outside his work, and no distinctive possessions or non-professional associates. The existence of his wife is referred to in a single sentence, but she plays no role (in one of the other books, she does act as his sounding board in one scene). He is Everyman, if Everyman is a dogged policeman who solves crimes perpetrated by criminals more clever than him by systematically following every clue to its absolute end.

Except that, in this case, he rebukes himself for not doing so sooner with one key line of inquiry, which almost leads to disaster. It also takes him quite a bit longer than it took me to click to a key point about the evidence ((view spoiler)[that the identification of the deceased depends upon people who he now suspects of involvement in the murder (hide spoiler)]). The author did at least know that watching a perfectly efficient machine work flawlessly is not interesting for very long.

What is interesting in a Freeman Wills Crofts story is the intricate and original crime and how it's unravelled, and this book is no exception. Starting with a body found in an estuary inside a packing case of unusual dimensions, it progresses rapidly via a combination of sound logic and thorough investigation by French; he figures out where and when the case must have been put into the water, how that was done, where the case came from, finds a case of disappearance of two men that would account for the body (but where is the other man?), rounds up a set of suspects and investigates each of them thoroughly. Because he isn't quite thorough enough, there's a scene of considerable risk and tension before he brings the case to its conclusion.

If the thing you enjoy most about a detective story is the bits that aren't the detective story, this one will disappoint you. But if you enjoy the puzzle aspect, with a judicious amount of detail about the beauty of the locations, a few technical details and some clever work by both the criminal and the detective, those parts are excellent of their type.

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Review: Tourmalin's Time Cheques

Tourmalin's Time Cheques by F. Anstey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An early piece of time-travel fiction, which has fun with the trips back in time being out of proper order, so the time traveller is struggling to figure out what's happened prior to the moment he's in. His trips are to an earlier point in his own timeline; the premise is that, stuck on a ship from Australia home to Britain, he's bored and wishes the time would pass more quickly, and a mysterious Bank Manager offers him a deal. Deposit your currently-unwanted time in our Time Bank, and you can draw it out later, using this handy chequebook!

The thing is, Peter, the traveller, has been sent on this voyage by his fiancée Sophia, an intelligent, managing woman who suspects (justifiably, as it turns out) that he's infirm of purpose and that he'll be tempted to make connections with young women on board the ship. It's a test to make sure that he's faithful to her, and he passes - but only because he's banked the time that he might have spent with two other young women, who, in contrast to Sophia, are neither intelligent nor serious. Once he's back in England, married, and starts drawing on his account at the Time Bank when life with Sophia gets a bit too earnest for him, he discovers that he's apparently been, as it were, making time with both of the young women, though at first he's, let's say, at sea as far as the details are concerned. He tries to be a faithful married man, but apparently his earlier self wasn't quite so scrupulous, and also kept being creatively misunderstood by his "friends"...

Peter is unlike the solid, worthy heroes of the other two Anstey books I've read, The Tinted Venus and The Brass Bottle . He's a slacker without much spine, who looks forward to being managed by Sophia in general but finds it a trial in particular. He has generally good intentions, but lacks the strength of character to stick to them. That makes him less appealing than those other heroes, but he's presented as so hapless (in Anstey's classic style of ever-escalating farce) that I couldn't help but feel for him anyway.

The ending is a classic cheat, but doesn't completely ruin the book; the journey is still fun, even if the destination is a letdown. While it's not as much to my taste as the other two Ansteys I've read, I still found it enjoyable. I will warn that Anstey has the somewhat long-winded style of his time (late 19th/early 20th century), and some readers will find that tedious.

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Review: The Lost Book of Anggird

The Lost Book of Anggird by Kyra Halland
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Kyra Halland can spell and punctuate, which is a lot less common than it ought to be for authors. It's unfortunate, then, that I don't always totally love her characters; they're often a bit grimier and grimmer than I really prefer.

Both of the lead characters here have a traumatic background from their childhood, the man more so than the woman. He also has a high sensitivity to pain, though it only seems to be a problem when the plot requires it to be.

The plot, in fact, has a lot of momentum, in the sense that it moves the main characters rapidly from a classic Odd Couple who consider each other vaguely attractive physically while being deeply annoying (because opposite) in personality, to banging like a screen door in a hurricane. I found the transition abrupt and inadequately set up.

Once they're together, they go off to solve a problem that, conveniently, they are uniquely able to solve, for multiple reasons that had to come together by chance. It's convenient for the plot, but not for them, since it involves getting people who don't approve of them to put them through difficult training while they're periodically threatened by other, adjacent people, and then they have to perform a difficult and dangerous task. Meanwhile, they're wanted by the authorities.

I stopped reading for a while, because I wasn't sure, at one point, that things weren't going to collapse into disaster that would be harrowing to read about, but it didn't; there was only a bit more torture (never a favourite of mine) and some comprehensive ignoring of all principles of justice and fairness. The government they had to deal with kept the populace contented and prosperous in order to keep them docile, but it was set up to be secretive and unaccountable, and quite capable of becoming dystopian and breaking its own rules when threatened.

Overall, then, although it was well written, had strong emotional beats, and was mostly mechanically sound, it wasn't a good fit for my personal taste, and so I place it in the lowest tier of my recommendations list for 2024. People with different tastes will enjoy it a good deal more, especially if they don't care about or don't notice the slightly railroaded plot.

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Review: The Brass Bottle

The Brass Bottle by F. Anstey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is my second F. Anstey read, and like the other one ( The Tinted Venus ), it involves an ordinary honest fellow troubled by a supernatural being who interferes with his life in general and his love life in particular. It was first published in 1900, right at the end of the Victorian era, and that's very much the milieu, but if you wanted to film it (and someone really should; it has, in fact, been filmed three times, but the latest was 1964), you could probably set it in most eras, including today's, without much difficulty. Indeed, the 1964 version, with Barbara Eden as the love interest (not the genie), was apparently set in the then-present day; from Wikipedia's account, it was so Hollywoodized as to fail to capture the charm and humour of the original.

The best thing, the truly original thing, about this tale of a man who releases a genie from the brass bottle where he's been imprisoned since the time of Solomon is that the man concerned, Harold, doesn't want fame and riches, at least not without earning them for himself through hard work in his profession as an architect. He (with good evidence from his observations of public figures) believes that unearned wealth will make him miserable rather than contented. The problem is that the genie insists, over Harold's escalating protests, on rewarding him for his unwitting favour in releasing the genie with the kind of rewards that most men of the genie's time and culture would have coveted. For example, he redecorates Harold's moderate lodgings in high Eastern style when his fiancée and her parents are coming to dinner, and has slaves serve Eastern delicacies to them, when Harold's prospective father-in-law is very strict on young men being extravagant and Harold only wanted to serve a decent plain meal cooked by his landlady. Of course, Harold's love interest isn't good enough in the genie's eyes, and he sets out to break up the engagement and substitute a relative of his.

The various shenanigans of the genie are hilarious, the more so as Harold gets more and more frustrated with them, and Harold has to exercise considerable ingenuity and tact to get the genie to reverse his schemes. It's a fun ride, and clever, and original.

There's some language in it, used by Harold's landlady and landlord rather than Harold himself, that is not acceptable today (referring to the dark-skinned servants the genie conjures up; I think you know what word I mean). Apart from that, it's unobjectionable.

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Review: The Mage War

The Mage War by Ben S. Dobson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A strong finish to a series that also had a strong start, though for me one or two of the middle books seemed like they were mainly there to get the plot from situation A to situation B, without a lot of tension or development. That's not a problem in this book whatsoever.

There's plenty of tension and action; most of the second half of the book is an extended struggle by the now-ensemble cast against difficult odds, using varied skills and approaches to meet a variety of challenges. In the course of those struggles, they grow and develop as characters and some of their relationships also develop or change. The emotional beats are more than solid - in fact, I was moved at multiple points by the bravery and dedication of the characters and the losses they sustained during their fight for what they believed in. This is a true noblebright book, in which the line between good and evil is the line between people who will accept suffering and loss for the benefit of others, and people who will push suffering and loss onto others for their own benefit.

The worldbuilding, and the way in which the author has conveyed that worldbuilding, is good enough that I predicted multiple times how the characters would solve a problem right before they did so. This is a strength, not a weakness; it shows that the world makes sense and the magic system conforms to Sanderson's First Law.

The characters themselves are distinct and memorable. I read the previous book four years ago, but it didn't take long for me to remember who they all were and how they were connected, a mark of an author who has made his characters feel like people, rather than stereotypes who have roles in a plot. I'm sure the fact that I was listening to the audiobook helped, since the narrator did a good job of distinguishing the voices. His voice for the villain hit just the right note of arrogant, condescending smugness, and the characters who had accents had consistent-sounding accents that were not just Earth accents taken over into a fantasy world; I appreciated that.

Because I listened to the audiobook, I can't comment on the copy editing, though it's been mostly good in the previous books. I did wonder a couple of times if the author was writing "hurtling" when he meant "hurling".

There's very little to criticize here, and plenty to praise. The final book definitely brings a lot of things full circle from the first book, including the original premise of the Magebreakers: that the biggest flaw in magic is the mage, and if you can exploit that, you can defeat an enemy who has magic without having it yourself. I was glad to see it come back, after dropping somewhat out of sight in the middle books while they set things up for this rousing conclusion.

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Review: Murder in the Maze

Murder in the Maze by J.J. Connington
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A reasonably promising series starter, with an unusual detective - unusual in that he's the Chief Constable of the county where the murders occur, which is not often a post that involves detective work. The author was a chemist by profession and wrote on the side, and his chemical knowledge comes through in several places.

The title is slightly misleading in suggesting that there was one murder in the maze; in fact, there were two, twin brothers who looked similar (it's never clarified whether they're identical, but people who know them well distinguish them easily) and habitually dressed in similar clothes. There are clear motives for murdering either of them, and no shortage of suspects, so... did the murderer aim to kill one of them, discover that the first victim was in fact the other, and rectify the mistake? After all, what could be the motive for killing both?

Well, that was extremely obvious to me, though not to the Watson figure in the story: (view spoiler)[a family member who stood to inherit would have a motive for killing them both, and making it look like one had been killed for an external reason and the other by mistake. I didn't guess which family member, though, and for a while thought that the detective's eventual fixing on a particular one was poorly justified, though he made it work in the end, based on knowledge the murderer had that, by their own statements, they shouldn't have possessed. I also guessed that the "death" of the third victim was faked. (hide spoiler)]

It doesn't really stand out above the pack of Golden-Age mysteries for me. The detective, although not someone you'd expect, doesn't have much distinctiveness and has a rather high-handed attitude to determining who should face the process of the law, given that he holds a high position as a law-enforcement official. The Watson, though said to be smarter than he looks, is not at all smart. The detective's process is largely hidden from the reader until the end, though at least the clues are not. The suspects are the usual country-house lot. It's OK, but it isn't one of the greats. I might give the series another go eventually - the third one is also on Project Gutenberg - in case the author's skills improved as he went along.

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Review: The Viaduct Murder

The Viaduct Murder by Ronald Knox
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Clever, but disappointing. The exact reason needs to be in spoiler tags, but, being as vague as possible: it frustrates the usual expectations of the genre. I think it's still worth reading, if you're interested in how genre books, and particularly mystery books, work (or potentially fail to work), but if you're wanting entertainment only, I don't recommend it.

Also, there's an intrusive omniscient narrator who has Opinions about how all of the characters are some sort of inadequate human being, about Society, and (at some length through the mouth of one of the characters, in a chapter that's marked as optional) about various issues of the day. These are the opinions of quite a conservative Catholic priest in 1925, so... be advised.

The amateur detective is a man who during World War I wasn't fit for active service, and instead got a minor clerical job in Military Intelligence, which he habitually overplays to imply he was some sort of operative. He conceived a contempt for the police, because they seldom followed up on the matters he passed on to them, so he thinks he can do better than the police at solving a murder that has occurred on the grounds of the golf club where he lives. He has no particular occupation; his friends are a vicar who thinks more about golf than faith (to the overt disapproval of the narrator, naturally), a retired professor who's an ever-flowing font of useless information and whom his friends mostly ignore, and a third man who's on a golfing holiday, is an old friend of the would-be detective's, and slips into the role of Watson.

The following really is a spoiler: (view spoiler)[We're reminded several times that the amateurs shouldn't be doing what they're doing, but should leave the catching of criminals to the police, and that's reinforced in a particularly obvious way when the amateur detective, Reeves, gets absolutely everything wrong, including setting out to exonerate the murderer in the belief that he's innocent; the police, who are barely characters in the book, solve the case abruptly offstage; and Gordon, the Watson, writes a summary for Reeves at the end which explains all of the odd features that seemed like vital clues as just meaningless coincidences. The author effectively red-herrings the reader a couple of times; I was convinced that the murderer and the victim were the same man, since they were never seen together, and was surprised at how early the retired academic came to the same conclusion, but it was a mistake. I was also convinced at one point that the victim's ex-wife was the murderer and her admirer was covering for her, but apparently not. (hide spoiler)]

The process is the familiar process of a detective novel: gathering clues, forming theories, laying traps for the murderer. There's even a chase after a fleeing suspect. It has all of the machinery of a classic detective story, right up to the end, but then that machinery slips a gear and grinds to a disappointing halt. It reminds me of a science-fiction story I read in which the characters are working desperately throughout to avert a planetary disaster, and then they... don't.

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Review: Tress of the Emerald Sea

Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I'm not sure precisely what I was expecting from this, but it wasn't exactly what I got. What I got was better, though.

It's told deceptively simply, and has a 17-year-old protagonist, so is it YA? The author says in his afterword that it was aimed at adults (and I enjoyed it, but then I do enjoy YA from time to time). He also says that his influences included Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch , which I can totally see. I kept getting a welcome Terry Pratchett vibe off the absurdities, wordplay, and pithy wisdom about the human condition that the narrator provides us with.

The narrator is Hoid, a trickster figure who appears in various books set in Sanderson's Cosmere universe; I didn't remember him from any of his appearances, which are generally on the periphery of events, but then I don't have an encyclopedic grasp of the Cosmere (far from it). In this book, he's been cursed to absurdity by the Sorceress, who is a traditional-feeling sorceress with impressively fairy-taleish powers of cursing, despite her interplanetary origins and the general science-fictional feel that Sandersonian fantasy often has.

Yes, there is, of course, completely original worldbuilding. Sanderson is the exact opposite of the all-too-common author who effectively grabs a few left-over scenery flats from an old production of some other sword-and-sorcery novel (or rather, almost any other sword-and-sorcery novel) to serve as a mostly non-functional backdrop to their also-not-original plot and characters. Every world he creates has some clever, innovative, meticulously worked out point of difference (or, usually, several of them) which the characters exploit creatively to progress and resolve the plot.

This one has spore seas. The planet is surrounded by twelve moons, tidally locked and geostationary, each of which pours down a different kind of spore, forming twelve connected seas. Air bubbling up from underneath makes them behave like water, but they're not water; water, in fact, makes the spores sprout, explosively and dangerously, and, of course, each one has a different effect, whether it's growing sudden vines, burning fiercely, exploding in a puff of air, growing a crystal, creating sharp, dangerous shards, or even forming into creatures that can be controlled as familiars. (That's six; we don't get to hear about the other six, which presumably are on the other side of the planet.)

Our hero, Tress, lives on a small island in the Emerald Sea, the one whose spores grow into vines. She's shyly in love with the son of the local duke, who pretends to be the duke's gardener so they can meet on a more equal basis, even though he's no good at lying and both of them know that both of them know it's a polite fiction. When he gets captured by the Sorceress, Tress decides that nobody else is going to rescue him, so she has to (this idea came from Sanderson's wife wondering aloud to him what would have happened if Buttercup had gone after Westley instead of becoming the Princess Bride, a very fair question which addresses the biggest flaw of that wonderful film).

Tress is exactly the kind of protagonist I particularly love, and is about 50% responsible for the fifth star I'm giving this book; the other 50% is its depth of reflection on humanity. She's a deeply pragmatic, sensible young woman, unwaveringly courageous because she cares about her cause (rescuing Charlie), intelligent and creative in the solutions she comes up with, and wins practically everyone she meets to her cause because she's genuinely kind and decent without even thinking about it. I totally believed a duke's son would fall in love with her, if he had the basic sense to see what was right in front of him. She is, in a way, an "ordinary" hero - not powerful, not noble, not fated, not Chosen, which I always approve of in protagonists - and yet she's completely extraordinary. There's a lovely passage about how all the other girls she knew declared they weren't like everyone else, and she came to the conclusion that she (alone) must be "everyone else," in part because all the other girls were so good at being unique that they all did it in unison. In other words, she doesn't have a decal on her that says she's different, talented, intelligent and courageous; she actually is those things, but in a natural and unassuming way, and that makes her able to face her challenges without the author having to gift her any emergency last-minute powers that she hasn't worked for, like all those entitled Chosen One idiots.

The author does need to commit a couple of Fortunate Coincidences to get his cast together, but they're subtle enough - and troublesome enough for long enough - that I only spotted them when I thought about them afterwards, so I think he gets away with it by the Pixar Rules.

The minor characters all have things they want and pursue them in ways that make sense and, together with Tress protagonising away like mad, create the plot naturally. It's a strong plot, with sound emotional beats, dramatic moments, loss and perseverance, and character change that, again, feels organic.

As usual with Sanderson, who runs his books past a couple of dozen people at least before they're published, the editing is very clean. All I spotted was a page where the same word is spelled "eyedropper" twice and "eye dropper" once, and a dangling modifier which starts out talking about some golems in a sentence where the grammatical subject is not the golems, but Tress. It's a medium-large book, so this counts as practically impeccable.

I frequently give Sanderson's books five stars, more so than any other author, and it's not just because the characters he writes are exactly the kind of character I like to read about (though certainly that). It's because his craft is absolutely sound, and on that strong foundation he erects brilliant worlds that nobody else could think of, and that are absolutely integral to how the plot works out. There are other authors with sound craft, but without his wild creativity; sadly, there are a good many who have wild creativity, but without the proper foundation of craft (or basic writing mechanics) to live up to the potential of their ideas. Sanderson is a triple threat: he can tell an inspiring story with wonderful characters, can spell and punctuate, and can take you to a world of wonder you've never visited before.

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Review: The Mystery of the Yellow Room

The Mystery of the Yellow Room by Gaston Leroux
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The last time I saw something this French it had half a pound of butter in it.

French mysteries feel quite different from English mysteries. Where English mysteries are soaked in a consciousness of class and frequently proceed at a leisurely pace, with maybe a gentle and shy romance as a subplot that doesn't really affect the main plot, French mysteries are dramatic! and suspenseful!! and full of love affairs that are mostly unwise, unhappy, ill-advised, illicit, intense, and essential to the story.

This classic from the very early 20th century (set some years earlier, so there are no motorcars or telephones mentioned, and everything is still lit by gas or candles) feels very much like its close contemporary, Maurice Leblanc's stories of Arsene Lupin, and the respective authors probably read each other's books. I wonder if the young detective in one of the Lupin books, who Lupin mocks so mercilessly, was influenced by the young detective in Leroux?

The difference, of course, is that these Leroux books are from the point of view of the detective, not the criminal (though Lupin does eventually switch sides and become a detective). The detective in this case is an 18-year-old journalist, a brilliant youth who sets himself up to compete with a middle-aged professional detective from the Surete (please excuse my lack of accents). The criminal is eventually revealed as a Lupinesque swindler and master of disguise, who has hidden himself in plain sight in a very Purloined Letter way. The difference from Lupin is that Lupin would never assault a woman (or anyone else, usually, except in self-defence); he prefers to beat people in a battle of wits, where he is particularly well equipped.

This criminal murderously attacks the daughter and assistant of a prominent scientist, who, unusually for detective stories, survives, though badly wounded and traumatised. The interesting part is that, at the time the struggle was heard, she was in a locked room - that favourite of detective writers - and an assailant could not possibly have escaped unnoticed from it. Later, the same man disappears from the midst of several people who have him surrounded. Is this a case of the scientist's area of research, the discomposition of matter? (He's supposed to be a predecessor of the Curies; the science is all bunk, as was not uncommon in stories of the time, but it doesn't play any real role in the plot.)

People being unwilling to talk in order to protect their various secrets is a theme throughout, which hinders the resolution of the mystery. The narrator takes the Watson role, assisting the brilliant young detective without understanding anything he's doing until it's painstakingly explained to him. There's plenty of drama along the way, and the solution to the mystery is brilliant and, to me, not at all obvious; it's revealed in a courtroom scene that makes up in sensation what it probably lacks in realism. (I can't imagine even a late-19th-century French court that was trying a highly sensational case being so forgiving of shenanigans as this one.)

If the author has a fault, it's writing in long, complex sentences that take concentration to parse, but that's mainly a problem at the beginning; the prose settles down a bit more as it goes on. If you enjoy the Lupin stories, you will probably enjoy this, and vice versa.

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Review: The D'Arblay Mystery

The D'Arblay Mystery by R. Austin Freeman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

By this point in the series, Freeman is working a bit to a formula when it comes to setting up the story. There's a young doctor, a former student of the medico-legal detective Thorndyke, who comes across a mystery and takes it to his old mentor. There's a mysterious patient that the doctor is asked to see, who (at least not by coincidence this time) is at the heart of the plot. There's a young woman who's described as "attractive," but mostly not otherwise described, who the young doctor falls in love with inevitably and immediately, and who needs protection. (She is, at least, a competent woman who is supporting herself in a trade, but her competence doesn't extend to having any active impact on the plot; she's a purely passive character, like every other non-villainous woman in the Thorndyke stories.) Thorndyke plays his cards so close to his chest they're practically embedded in his ribs, but he needn't be so cagey, since the young doctor has taken the John Watson correspondence course and is as dense as a very dense thing, unable to figure out the most blindingly obvious clues. This is probably so the reader can feel superior to him.

All of these elements we've seen in the series before, some of them multiple times. The mystery itself, though, is a fresh one, and so is its complicated resolution. Thorndyke points out what I've often thought when reading mystery stories, that the failing of criminals is that they set out to make themselves safer after the initial crime and, in so doing, inevitably create more clues.

It's not the best of the series in my mind, partly because it's retreading a lot of ground in the setup if not the resolution, but if you don't mind the dated elements, it's a tricky and clever mystery with suspense and danger, and humane feeling towards the victims of crime.

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Review: Good Neighbors: The Full Collection

Good Neighbors: The Full Collection by Stephanie Burgis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I enjoy Stephanie Burgis; she somehow manages to keep things light and amusing and cozy, while also having just enough of an edge to keep you from feeling like you're drowning in pink bubble-bath. I'm subscribed to her newsletter, in fact, which is how I found out about a sale on this collection.

Mia, a mad-scientist-adjacent inventor with magical power over metals, moves in next to a necromancer. Hilarity ensues, but so do romance, suspense, and a battle for justice. Mia, while being (to me) relatably introverted, turns out to be capable of social interaction when it's for a purpose she cares about, and while at the outset she only cares about protecting her father - injured by a mob who burned down their previous house because of her "unnatural" abilities - by the end she's extended her umbrella of protection much more widely.

Because Mia has the viewpoint, we don't get as much of the hot necromancer Leander's inner life, and he does feel a bit too perfect, even though he was emotionally damaged by his awful parents and his first master. (Seriously, those parents....) But he's brave and loyal, and fully on board with Mia's desire to protect other "unnaturals" from the "Purifiers" who are rising in influence in wider society. There's a bit of dystopian in the middle of the book when the pair go to a city controlled by the Purifiers, where neighbours are denouncing each other in fear of the authorities; it's an effective setup for the later section where the Purifiers come to the closest town to Mia and Leander's homes and try to pull the same tricks. (The book is made up of three linked stories, each of which progresses the overall plot arc.)

In terms of editing, most of the issues are with extra commas between adjectives - a very common blind spot even for otherwise capable authors - and occasional over-hyphenation.

It's a solid, enjoyable piece that's simultaneously in a Gothic aesthetic and cheerfully noblebright, and it slips easily into the silver tier of my annual recommendation list.

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Review: The Tinker's Daughter

The Tinker's Daughter by Josephine Angelini
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was surprised to discover that this is Book 2 in a series, though it doesn't end up mattering; it stands alone quite happily.

It's humourous, adventurous and romantic, and does well at all three. True, the romance is a bit rapid, but because both of the people involved are actually appealing, I forgive it. The female lead (and narrator) is the kind of competent, pragmatic young woman I particularly enjoy reading, and the male lead is good-hearted, brave, kind, generous and, when necessary, fierce in a good cause.

I did find that some of the minor characters, several of whom were introduced all at once, weren't easy to keep straight; repeating some of the key words from their introductions when they came back onstage would sort that out easily enough.

Its big weakness is that, whether because the author uses dictation software and doesn't check it properly or is just bad at spelling, it's full of basic homonym errors. Most prominent among these is, of course, "horde" for "hoard," since there's a dragon in it, and his hoard gets mentioned frequently; it is, at least, consistently spelled, which is something, even if it's always the incorrect version. We also get ringing for wringing, flair for flare, cantors for canters (which is one I've never seen before), enormity for enormousness (though we've probably lost that fight, which is unfortunate, because there's no other word that means exactly what enormity meant before everyone started confusing it with enormousness), you're for your, chord for cord (and chorded for corded), their for they're, anymore for any more (anymore only refers to time), apprising for appraising, beset for set, lest for unless, and birth for berth (as in "a wide berth").

Note that I had a pre-publication version via Netgalley, so if it goes past an editor who can spell between now and publication, these should all hopefully be fixed. Otherwise, there weren't too many copy editing issues; just commas after "of course" where there shouldn't have been (because it was just agreeing with the previous statement), and two queens calling each other "Your Highness" instead of "Your Majesty," plus a few sentences that would have benefited from a comma to signal the grammar more clearly.

The storytelling is strong, and hits the emotional beats well. The characters are appealing, the conflict is engaging, and the humour doesn't try too hard. It's a recommendation from me, and would be a higher-tier one (silver rather than bronze) if the author knew how to spell.

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Review: Craving of the Sands: A Runebreakers Novel

Craving of the Sands: A Runebreakers Novel by Cearnach Grimm
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

I shouldn't have picked this one up. The blurb gave me little reason to hope that it would be good, and my expectations were not exceeded.

It's wordy, and not because it spends a lot of time on the inner life of the characters or on the setting; the characters are paper-thin, no more than their stereotypes plus (if they're lucky) their role in the plot, and the setting is bland, generic, and barely described. It's wordy because it takes a long time to cover every tiny detail of the mundane and obvious, sometimes repetitiously.

I found it even less funny than most "funny fantasy". There's a broad and obvious parody of Tik-Tok, and that's about it. Most so-called "funny fantasy" consists largely of silly names and fantasy cliches; in this one, even the names aren't particularly silly, and the fantasy cliches don't even seem to be being played for laughs a lot of the time.

Continuity is not a strength either. A red dragon becomes a silver dragon within a couple of pages.

I had a pre-publication ARC via Netgalley, and hope it gets a good deal more editing before publication, by an editor who is good with commas; I saw examples of just about every comma error I've ever come across, and even one or two I think are new, although they weren't in every sentence or even on every page. At the point that I stopped, 16% of the way through, there's an it's/its error, though otherwise it's fairly good with homonyms.

I've read worse books, but it just didn't do anything for me.

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