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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