Review: Unnatural Magic

Unnatural Magic by C.M. Waggoner
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read the (at time of writing) two books in this series in the wrong order, and it was interesting to compare the two of them. The worldbuilding definitely feels a level deeper in the second one ( The Ruthless Lady's Guide to Wizardry ), though it's not shallow here by any means, and the meaning of a lot of cultural ideas, like being "householded" (something between concubinage and adoption, depending) and the "releft" (apparently a holding place for souls awaiting reincarnation), are both clearer and made clear sooner in the second book. This one is still good, though, with engaging and varied characters, a compelling mystery to unravel, and plenty of magic to enjoy.

The characters range from the young and rather Regency-missish Onna, who is much better at magic than her culture is prepared to accept, to the pragmatic and foul-mouthed troll Tsira, along the way taking in an impoverished gentleman who (for excellent reasons) deserts from the army, where he's a junior officer; the greatest wizard in the world, who was raised in the theatre and is, consequently, extremely theatrical; and a number of minor characters met along the way, most of whom have something unusual about them to make them individual rather than a face in the crowd. Two groups of characters are separate for slightly more than half the book, and at first aren't even pursuing a common goal, but when they come together, both now investigating who is murdering trolls and cutting them up, they mesh well, and everything building up to that point is fully justified and important.

One thing I noticed about the other book, but didn't mention in my review, is that the majority of characters seem to be bisexual. We get more of a view of troll culture in this one, and it appears that gender and sexuality are a lot more optional for trolls than humans, though - possibly under the influence of the culturally dominant trolls - they're also more optional for humans as an accepted part of their culture than in the approximate equivalent time and place in our world (early-19th-century Europe).

I spotted the villain relatively early, not because they looked at all likely in the world of the story, but just because I know how stories work, and they were the person who would be the most dramatic choice. The pursuit of the solution to the mystery was interesting to follow anyway, and the villain's motivation was surprisingly relatable.

(view spoiler)[I did think that Onna's childhood friend's epiphany and apology were what I think of as an author's-wishful-thinking repentance, without much in the way of preparation within the story; it was the kind of scene a lot of people wish would occur more often in real life, but which seldom does. (hide spoiler)] However, this was a minor flaw.

Speaking of minor flaws, there were a few small glitches: a word repeated at the end of a sentence, the typo "string" for "sting," "lead" for "led," "laid" for "lay" and vice versa, an excess comma in the phrase "Of course I do," "straights" for "straits," and misplaced apostrophes in what should be the trolls' quarter and the wizards' club. I still give it my "well-edited" tag, because in a book this long that's a small number of mostly subtle errors.

Though at times more bloody and frequently raunchier than I usually prefer, these are excellently written books by a skilled author, and I enjoy them even when they're in territory I usually avoid.

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Review: The Knife and the Serpent

The Knife and the Serpent by Tim Pratt
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There is an intersection on my Venn diagram of books between "well written" and "not for me," and this book is in it.

Why did I pick it up? Especially considering that the premise of "relative dies suddenly, young woman goes to deal with the estate and discovers she's Special" is a) not a great premise in itself and b) the basis of many, many badly-written books?

Well, it was because this author has used that exact premise before, and elevated it into something wonderful, namely Heirs of Grace . That book has what I call the Glorious Ending, where someone makes a generous choice out of love that averts what has, up to that point, looked like inevitable tragedy.

The problem is, as I said in my review of his short story collection Hart and Boot and Other Stories , "Tim Pratt is an author of two very different aspects. The aspect I encountered first was in his Marla Mason stories (as T.A. Pratt), in which unpleasant people do unpleasant things to other unpleasant people, with a good deal of meaningless and often kinky sex, graphic violence, and occasional drug use." And that is the Pratt of this book, more so than the other, kinder, more joyful and hopeful Pratt that I was looking for. It isn't all the way up against the stop at the dark end of the spectrum; Glenn, though he clearly has issues, isn't a bad person, and Vivy's main issue is that she doubts everything about herself except her ideology, which is the thing she actually should be doubting (in my opinion), and their relationship, while kinky, is loving, but Tamsin is a straight-up Marla Mason character. She's a Hidden Princess, a type of character I'm particularly allergic to, and the only reason that she might look slightly like possibly a bit of a decent character if you stand a long way away and squint in a bad light is because she spends a lot of time standing next to a psychotic murderer, who is much worse. The murderer who killed her grandmother, who raised her. The murderer who she then hired to get revenge on the people who (she is just now learning) wiped out the rest of her family, who she doesn't remember; why she wants revenge on the people she hasn't met who killed her family members that she didn't know, but not, apparently, on the guy who's right there who killed the one family member she did know, may have something to do with the fact that her revenge would also make her rich and powerful. As far as I read, which is a little over halfway, she doesn't spare a single thought for the collateral damage that would be involved on innocent wage slaves who just happen to be in the way.

She also receives a bit of plot help, in the form of a necklace she accidentally finds that enables her to access her family's hidden caches of weapons and wealth.

Glenn and Tamsin are the two first-person viewpoint characters. Glenn often finds it necessary to talk about his and Vivy's BDSM relationship, which is something that I neither grok nor want to grok, and Tamsin is just stone cold. There's also a highly annoying AI called Eddie, balanced to some degree by a more jovial (but still murderous) AI named Swarm.

It's possible, even likely, that this book also has a Glorious Ending in which Glenn (I would bet) does something generous and loving that averts tragedy, but honestly, I don't want to spend the time with these characters that I would have to go through in order to get to that ending, if indeed it is there.

I received a pre-publication version via Netgalley for review.

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Review: Inspector French and the Cheyne Mystery

Inspector French and the Cheyne Mystery by Freeman Wills Crofts
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A classic detective story which can be regarded as a pioneer of the "police procedural" type, though Inspector French, the Scotland Yard detective, doesn't appear until about the 60% mark. The Cheyne of the title is a remarkably gullible man, who's fooled twice by essentially the same scheme and then continues to believe the criminals when they tell him several more ridiculous stories. Still, I found the various adventurous shenanigans entertaining while waiting for him to figure out that he needs to involve the police.

Once French is on the case, he approaches it methodically and makes progress through sound detective work. I wasn't surprised to discover that the author was an engineer; French is, in a way, an engineer of a detective, working steadily and solidly and without much drama. Unlike most fictional detectives, he has no personal peculiarities to speak of, and is happily married (though his wife is only briefly mentioned). He's almost more a plot device than he is a character, at least in this book.

While the plot doesn't constantly rely on coincidence, there are a few lucky chances that keep the dull-witted Cheyne alive despite himself, one of which (a woman happens to find him after he's been injured, and gets help) is never explained; the woman subsequently becomes involved in the case, helping him to investigate, and eventually and inevitably becomes his love interest (view spoiler)[and is lightly refrigerated, in that she's kidnapped, removing her from the action but giving Cheyne a reason to finally go to the police (hide spoiler)], but we never find out why she was in that part of town (which wasn't her neighbourhood or anywhere close to it) late at night in the first place. (view spoiler)[The villains, who are not otherwise murderous nor experts in chemistry, rig up an explosive to kill Cheyne, careless of possible collateral damage, which also seems out of character for them, and by sheer chance he leaves the bag containing it on a café table while he goes to get another cup of coffee, thus saving his life. (hide spoiler)]

The conclusion of the book, once French figures out the puzzle, is rather anticlimactic. (view spoiler)[They pursue the villains to the location of the treasure, to find that the villains and almost everyone else who was with them are dead in a fight over the money; the exceptions include the female villain, who is forgiven, indeed rewarded, and doesn't face any legal consequences, and of course Joan the love interest; neither of them did anything protagonistic while waiting for rescue, though they did become friends. Cheyne doesn't face any legal consequences either, presumably because his various burglaries were attempts to get back property extorted from him that wasn't his in the first place, and he and Joan get married, having known each other a total of a few days and then thought about each other while separated for maybe six weeks. (hide spoiler)]

It's a curate's egg of a book; parts of it are excellent, mainly the parts where Cheyne is, somewhat ineptly, trying to solve the case himself and doing all kinds of daring, or rather incautious, things in pursuit of that goal. Once French arrives, it becomes less an adventure and more of a puzzle, and after French solves the puzzle, it wraps up rapidly, with any further excitement occurring off-screen and being reported after the fact. I enjoyed it despite its unevenness and the things that didn't make much sense, and would consider reading other books by the author if I was in the right mood, but it's not up to the standard of other classic books of the time.

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Review: The Secret of Sarek

The Secret of Sarek by Maurice Leblanc
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Every one of the Lupin books I've read so far has been different, and this one is a bloody melodrama, in which Lupin isn't even mentioned until 39% of the way through the book. The overall tone is highly sensational, and very early on there's a harrowing description of a mass murder, made worse in that the viewpoint character believes one of the murderers to be her long-lost son. No fewer than five characters are, at some point, believed to be dead but actually turn out to be alive.

Lupin's contribution is his classic "manipulate people's perception to pull off a seemingly impossible illusion," some elements of which are not especially convincing. (view spoiler)[Working apparently without a jeweler's specialized tools, he's able to fake a very specific ring out of old jewelry only based on a description, which fools someone very familiar with it. (hide spoiler)] Another key feature of the plot is based on contemporary misunderstandings of the properties of a then-little-understood substance. (view spoiler)[The substance is radium, which is more concentrated than it ought to be (even given the knowledge of the time; this is acknowledged) for vague and speculative reasons, and has the power to heal as well as kill, and to promote the growth of plants. (hide spoiler)] And the whole plot, we're asked to believe, is constructed largely upon (view spoiler)[a combination of coincidence and the credulity of a madman who takes a meaningless prophecy seriously because it happens to match up with a large number of contemporary circumstances. (hide spoiler)]

It was gripping, though, and even though the amount of suffering and death was wildly excessive for my taste (my taste being for very little of either), and even though I set it aside for some time to read other things, I still found it compelling to read when I went back to it; there are weaknesses in the plot, for sure, but this is still a highly skilled writer, and I have to give it a (low) spot in my Best of the Year list just based on how well it's done.

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Review: Emissary

Emissary by Melissa McShane
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was surprised to discover (from the author's husband's review) that this was Melissa McShane's first book. Right out of the gate, she's demonstrating the strengths that make her one of my favourite authors.

In just the first two chapters, we have a motivated protagonist in a dynamic situation, plenty of worldbuilding without infodumping, the protagonist's character and powers shown rather than told, a setting that already feels solid and lived-in rather than a bunch of scenery flats, and two important relationships set up: the solid, capable support of the protagonist's friend/companion/sidekick/bodyguard, and the believable opposition of a minor antagonist. Also, it's not made from box mix; it's a fresh concept in a secondary world, though not so fresh as to be hard to relate to.

We soon get a number of well-motivated political complications; the protagonist, a priest of the god of death, has a mission (to investigate a number of apparitions of dead people, which are not like the ghosts she usually deals with, in an important city), and a number of highly-placed people have various agendas that conflict with that mission or want to use her for their own purposes. I did have slight trouble keeping track of who was who sometimes, but only occasionally, and as soon as I searched their name in my e-reader and saw the context where they'd first appeared, I knew exactly who they were and what their role was. Nobody acted out of character or was just inexplicably evil; they all had good reasons for doing what they did, even the gods, several of whom appear as characters late in the book.

The other thing I like about Melissa McShane books, including this one, is that, apart from the occasional small glitch ("X hill" should probably be "X Hill"; "councilor Y" should definitely be "Councilor Y"; typo "food" for "foot"), it's smoothly edited, so I'm not constantly distracted by basic mechanical errors.

More than solid, this is a fine debut novel, at least as good as most of the author's other excellent books. (My absolute favourite, The Smoke-Scented Girl , is also an early work.) It's a firm recommendation from me, and it makes the Gold tier of my Best of the Year list for 2024.

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Review: Journey to Everland Bay

Journey to Everland Bay by Lynne Shaner
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

A lack of contractions leads to stiff dialog, and a frequent absence of the past perfect tense makes for temporal whiplash. And then we get the worn-out and, if you think about it much at all, unlikely trope of "magic is (about to be) forbidden," and this was a DNF for me quite early on.

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Review: The Ruthless Lady's Guide to Wizardry

The Ruthless Lady's Guide to Wizardry by C.M. Waggoner
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In theory, I shouldn't have enjoyed this book.

The protagonist smokes, drinks too much, swears, has casual sex (even while pursuing a relationship with someone else), steals, and runs minor cons. Her brilliant plan to resolve the story problem involves cooking what is essentially magical meth (so as to get in with the villain, who is running a magical-meth operation). She has some reasons for all this, in that her mother was an addict, her father apparently absent, and she was brung up any old how in extreme poverty. One of the things that makes her likeable despite it all is that she doesn't use this as an excuse; she's aware that she makes bad decisions and takes responsibility for the consequences, and in the course of the book, though she still makes a number of bad decisions, she does start to make better ones. She's also not nearly as awful as she thinks she is; she has very low self-esteem. For example, she thinks she's unattractive, but that's clearly not the case, since multiple other characters are attracted to her in the course of the book.

The other thing that saved it for me was the voice. It's quirky, individual, and frequently hilarious, and it's delivered with very few flaws. Alarm bells tend to ring for me when I read that an author has a creative writing degree; whatever they're teaching in those classes, it's not basic mechanics or, as far as I can make out, much in the way of craft, and books from creative writing grads are often awful. In this case, either the author went to a particularly fine program, or she learned how to write independently of it, or she had an especially talented editor, or some combination of the three, because apart from a few missing capitals and a typo or two, the copy editing is excellent. There's nothing wrong with the structure, the emotional arc, the characterization or the worldbuilding, either. (I did spot one minor worldbuilding inconsistency; the small denomination of currency is the "sen," but at one point the characters pay for something with pennies.)

I did think for a while that the many dire warnings of how bad Delly's decisions were meant that this was going to turn into a tragedy, but happily it did not, allowing me to rank it in the Silver tier of my Best of the Year list. It's knocking insistently on the door of Gold, but the negatives I listed at the start of the review mean I can't quite bring myself to let it into that exclusive company. They also led me to wonder, as I was reading, whether I would read another book by the author, even though I was enjoying the voice of this one so much; by the end, I'd decided that I do want to read the previous book in the (apparently loose) series, which sounds like it's about how the parents of one of the characters in this book get together.

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Review: Illuminations

Illuminations by T. Kingfisher
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A fun read. The protagonist, Rosa, is "ten, nearly eleven," and children around that age would enjoy it - the language is kept straightforward - but as an adult, I enjoyed it too.

Rosa is a good kid, not immune to a touch of jealousy and making bad decisions from time to time, but with good intentions, and she loves her family and they love her. The talking crow is delightful. Nobody is perfect, but everyone has a lot of good in them (apart from the non-human antagonist, and even it gets treated with some empathy for how it became what it is), and the overall vibe is of a hopeful, kind world; even the ruler of the city appears to be a good ruler, sponsoring valuable public works for the good of the people.

The world is enjoyable, too, full of small magics. The illuminations of the title are magical illustrations that do useful things like keeping away mice or preventing food from going bad quickly, and Rosa's family's craft is creating them. The specific forms of the illuminations mostly make no sense whatsoever, and that's part of the fun; one, for example, can be any kind of cat, as long as it has blue eyes. It turns out that Rosa's habit of doodling fanged radishes is very close to being a new kind of illumination that's just what they need to solve the problem they're facing (which could be taken as a convenient coincidence, but also might be some kind of subconscious talent at work, so I'll give it a pass).

The author credits not one, but two copy editors, and they have mostly done a good job, except that apparently neither of them knows where the apostrophe should go when a possessive noun is plural, either for a group, like the Merchants' Guild, or a family, like the Mandolinis' house; the placement I've just given is the correct one, but the book places the apostrophes before the "s" in each case.

If you enjoyed the author's A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking , this has a very similar feel. I enjoyed them both.

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Review: Terrestrial Passions: A Regency Romance, with Aliens

Terrestrial Passions: A Regency Romance, with Aliens by S.P. Somtow
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I had never previously heard of this author, although he's a well-known polymath who has written a number of books, some of which are speculative fiction. I picked the book up because I enjoy both spec-fic and Regency romance, and this offered a combination of the two.

Unfortunately, while it has some elements of a Regency romance, it manages to be almost completely unlike one, like the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation vending machine in Hitchhiker's Guide that always produced a beverage almost, but not entirely, unlike tea. The overall tone is much closer to an 18th-century bawdy comedy (like The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling ) than to Jane Austen, and while I wouldn't say that it has more anachronisms, Americanisms or malapropisms than the average 21st-century-written Regency romance, it does have different ones. Note that I read a pre-publication ARC (which had some significant formatting issues, and was therefore hard to read, because of the file format I received it in), and some of the errors I outline below may be fixed before publication.

The author was born in Thailand, educated at Eton and Cambridge, and spent some time living in the US; sometimes the words he uses are used in the US rather than the British sense ("betimes" and "celebrants," for example), and sometimes they are just wrong, like "mealy-mouthed" to describe a character who is extremely frank and uncensored, the opposite of what "mealy-mouthed" means. He's fond of the word "melisma," and sometimes uses it, incorrectly, for instrumental as well as vocal performances. The word "lugging" is used to indicate "throwing".

There are a couple of instances where some cultural detail is a little off, too, such as styling noblemen "the Right Honourable" when they are not ministers of state, or referring to "the ton" in a way that does not reference a single united body. I didn't believe that someone would be "the Earl of Little Chiswick"; it would be "Earl of Chiswick," with Little Chiswick being one of the associated places. Nor did I really believe "Lord Chuzzlewit"; it's too Dickensian a name.

There are a couple of minor continuity errors; an unimportant character who starts out as Lady Sanditon becomes Mrs. Sanditon, and a conversation which starts at the end of one chapter as people arrive home for a party continues at the beginning of the next chapter, but takes place before they leave the party.

The characters, who live a couple of miles from London, are so non-cosmopolitan that most of them are entirely prepared to believe that a blue alien is a Frenchman, and they react with surprising aplomb when he performs apparent magic using his advanced technology, or speaks about his alien culture in ways that a Regency English person, in an era of French cultural dominance, should know are not true of France. In fact, that was one of my biggest issues with the book: the way people acted didn't ring true, either to human nature in general or the time and place in particular. One of the key things about Regency romance is how much people care about certain things (the opinion of the ton, getting an advantageous marriage, proper behaviour - all of which are, of course, deeply entangled); the things these people care about, or rather the things they don't care about, don't feel authentic to the period.

Of course, a lot of Regency romances written today impose the sensibilities and cultural values of, often, the contemporary US on the England of 200 years ago. This book mostly doesn't do that, but still manages to be jarring with it. Arabella, one of the several main characters, is a (largely self-taught) intellectual, and holds advanced views on the position of women and on slavery which are not anachronistic for her time, though they line up with our modern sensibilities. But when she discovers that her love interest, a slave owner in America, had children with multiple slaves, who he didn't consider human enough to even consider them bastards, by means of sex that was coercive, even if it wasn't violent, because of the power differential (a point she herself has made earlier in a slightly different context) - she doesn't appear to care. It's not a dealbreaker, or even much of a concern. Her mother, another of the main characters, discovers that (view spoiler)[her brother the vicar has been getting regularly buggered by their black manservant (hide spoiler)], and is completely unperturbed. Arabella's sister Anna (view spoiler)[marries a man she is largely indifferent to, who is inexplicably attracted to her now that she can play the piano well, despite her lack of money, charm or social position; the plot requires him to be attracted to her, so he is. (hide spoiler)] Anna is also foul-mouthed in a way that would bring instant shock and condemnation from any actual member of the Regency middle class; nobody is at all bothered by this. That's what I mean when I say that it feels a lot more like an 18th-century story than an early-19th-century one, though with extra anti-Christian sentiment that feels more like the author's intrusion.

There's a Cinderella vibe running throughout, with the alien in the role of fairy godmother, providing the wherewithal for the sisters to go to the ball and thereby attract their mates. There's even a clever classical reference to a book with a Latin title that means "turning into a pumpkin" - there's the Eton and Cambridge coming out - and the magic/advanced technology indistinguishable from magic ends at midnight (view spoiler)[(including the girls' dresses, which require them to wrap themselves in tablecloths that are, apparently, the only real things in the entire banquet) (hide spoiler)]. To me, though, the happily-ever-after ending felt both unearned and unconvincing.

The spec-fic aspects came across to me as contrived, the aliens being so advanced that they might as well be powerful Fae or demigods; it was a thin shell of technological language over whatever the plot required in order to be more strange and wonderful, or just to have a sense of movement (the alien requires certain resources in order to remain alive and contact his people, but this doesn't quite manage to provide urgency to the plot). The alien is also aware of Earth technological and cultural references that are in the future from the point of view of the setting, though time travel is never mentioned.

Overall, I felt it was a bit of a mess, which missed any authentic feel of the genre or the time and place and also didn't work for me in terms of an emotional arc for any of the characters or a plot that made much structural sense. The multiple characters diffused the plot in too many directions, and they seemed not to care about the things they ought to have cared about. It's a miss as far as I'm concerned.

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Review: Princess of Prophecy

Princess of Prophecy by Alexander Thomas
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Let me start out by saying that I found this funnier than most so-called "funny fantasy"; I actually laughed twice, and smiled a number of times (I'm a tough audience for comedy), and that by itself merits a fourth star. However, the execution was mostly mediocre, the satire felt too heavy-handed at times, and as a story, rather than a satire, it only just worked for me.

It satirizes both the fantasy-quest genre and our contemporary world. The problem was that it was hard to tell at times whether something clunky in it was part of the genre satire or just the author's actual ability level (stories that satirize bad writing generally have this issue, unless the author is extremely skilled). And the contemporary satire, particularly the mayor who refuses to face facts he doesn't feel able to deal with and actively works against a solution to real problems because of it, is driven into the ground. On the flip side, the hipster characters are repurposed along the way as very non-hipsterish archers and turn out to be effective in that role, which undermined the satire for me.

There's one character - fortunately for my sanity, only one - who speaks an awful cod-medieval dialect full of inaccurate usages. This has the benefit of making his voice distinctive, at least, but there's no explanation for it, and the medievalisms are deeply inaccurate, and I don't know if that's because the author doesn't know the correct usage or is trying to be funny. I always tend to suspect the "doesn't know" explanation, because most people don't know, and the general standard of the prose backs up that explanation; there are many excess coordinate commas, a few missing capitals, missing verbs, misplaced or missing apostrophes, badly phrased sentences, mispunctuated dialog, and vocab errors (whence/whither, laid/lain, laying/lying, reigns/reins, oxen/ox, knicks/nicks, bestride/astride, marshall/marshal). See my notes for specifics. I wish I could say the copy editing is average, but it's below average, despite (according to the author's afterword) having been past about 20 people. Only one of those was an editor, and it's not clear if she was a copy editor; if she was, she needed to make another pass or two (or else isn't aware of some of the issues).

But what about the story? Well, the thing is, it's supposed to be a satire of bad quest stories with a princess and a prophecy and a bunch of assorted companions encountering various unlikely challenges and ultimately prevailing, more by good luck than anything. But... it's largely exactly the thing it's supposedly satirizing, complete with one-note characters. Reading Terry Pratchett has taught me to expect characters, even in a "funny fantasy" satire, to have more to them than just a single quirk and a motivation that doesn't stand up well if you look at it too closely. I know, comparing most "funny fantasy" books to Pterry is like comparing most Regency romances to Jane Austen, but one of the things that can make a satire stand out from what it's satirizing is to give it more depth and self-reflection, beyond one scene in which the characters talk about why what they're doing makes no sense in the world in which they're doing it. One of my success criteria for comic novels is that they should work as a compelling story even if the humour fails to land, and even though some of the humour in this one landed for me, the story... didn't.

On the humour side, there were some good running gags, some passages where a metaphor was amusingly over-explained, and a couple of flashes of satirical insight.

All in all, then, it makes it into the Bronze tier of my 2024 recommendations list, mainly because it was intermittently funny. Better execution would have landed it in Silver.

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