Review: The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club

The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Dorothy L. Sayers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Sayers continues to develop as a writer, and Lord Peter as a character, in this fourth novel in the series.

The setup is a strong start. A very elderly general is found dead in his customary chair at the Bellona Club, Lord Peter's club, much frequented by military and ex-military gentlemen. Because he typically slept all day in that chair, nobody is quite sure when he died, which is important, because his sister also died either just before or just after him.

If she died just before him, his two grandsons, who are members of the club, inherit the bulk of her large fortune. But if she died just after him, her long-time companion, a distant relative the old lady took in, gets the lion's share instead.

Lord Peter is asked to investigate on behalf of the grandsons, who are friends of his. But in the course of his investigation, he has to deal with a conflict between the interests of justice and what is expected of someone in their "set."

The character of Lord Peter, by this time, is taking on some depth and complexity. The frivolous upper-class twit persona that was almost his whole character in the first book is very much a mask now, which he puts on occasionally when it suits him. When he's acting naturally, he's unfailingly respectful, empathetic, and quietly charming to the people around him, regardless of who they are, unless they start being narrow-minded or harming others. This is not how someone like him is expected to act, and he's starting to face the dilemma that his emotional training is making him feel bad about doing what his intelligence and sense of principle are telling him is right. He even has a couple of spats with his good friend Inspector Parker in consequence, not to mention being roundly abused by several of his club companions for acting like a damn policeman and not a sahib.

But he perseveres, and his empathy and intuition eventually solve the case and not only prevent a tragedy for an innocent bystander involved unwittingly in a criminal plot, but bring about an unexpected happy ending for a couple of the characters.

The mystery is clever, the unfolding of it engaging, and all of the parts that aren't the mystery make a thoroughly enjoyable story with some emotional weight and intelligence.

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Review: Interstellar MegaChef

Interstellar MegaChef by Lavanya Lakshminarayan
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

Unlike some other books I've read recently, this one at least makes an attempt at worldbuilding, rather than just taking a contemporary milieu and transposing it wholesale into a supposedly different time and place for the sake, apparently, of the aesthetic.

Unfortunately, a lot of the worldbuilding just didn't work for me. The backstory is that 300 years from now, Earth gave up on nations and united, and sent out interstellar missions to colonize (though of course that word isn't used) new planets. Two thousand years later, Earth has somehow fallen back into a war-torn, environmentally degraded, human-rights-violating primitive hellhole looked down on by all its probably-shouldn't-call-them-colonies, and the self-proclaimed centre of culture is on another planet entirely.

Now, I could just have bought 300 years, even if some of the minor cultural features did seem a bit too close to our own present day. But I never believed in the 2000 years even for a fraction of a second. It seemed far too long for the small amount of change and the large amount of stability (including Earth being, apparently, in a stable state of internal strife and environmental degradation). And then there were so many small details that just didn't make sense to me. For example, it's somehow more environmentally friendly to expend what must be a huge amount of energy on the city's buildings constantly changing shape (using the technology of programmable matter), and compensating for this by the manipulation of gravity so that people inside them don't notice (and I didn't understand how that would work either). This doesn't appear to cause any negative psychological effects, even though humans rely on landmarks and other constants in their environments to give themselves a sense of stability.

Cooking is a key part of the plot of the book, and even there, there was a detail that seemed odd to me. From everything I've been taught, if you were making a fish curry, you'd start out by making the sauce to give it time to develop, and cook the fish only in the last few minutes, because it cooks quickly (that's to do with how fish muscles don't have to support themselves against gravity, like the muscles of land creatures). The cooked fish doesn't need to rest, for the same reason, or certainly not for very long. But when one of the main characters, a highly trained chef in a major cooking competition, makes fish curry in the course of an hour, she cooks the fish first and leaves it to rest, then starts the sauce, and finally cooks the fish some more in the sauce and then even more inside bamboo-leaf parcels. This, to me, sounds like an excellent way to have overcooked fish, but maybe I'm missing some nuance of technique.

At one and the same time, the economy of the distant planet appears to be communist (you can't choose where you live, you get assigned housing that's the same quality as everyone else's) and capitalist (there's a corporation that's been around for centuries, things it produces cost a lot and make a lot of money). I couldn't make sense of it.

I also consider the "easier to leave Earth than fix it" trope a potentially toxic one, in that it cultivates an attitude of helplessness in the face of our problems, and is arguably also not supported by the facts. That's a debate that can be had, and I do generally make allowance for tropes in genre fiction, and this one is necessary to kick off the story situation, but I'm noting that I don't love it.

The copy editing/prose is much better than average. I gather that the author was born in, and is still resident in, India; if this is the case, it seems the Indian education system is much better at teaching English than the British or American education systems, judging by the average products of British and American authors, or else this author is exceptional, or has had a very good editor. (I read a pre-publication ARC via Netgalley, and those are usually bad.) Just a few excess hyphens and a strange use of the word "hoarded". On the other hand, sometimes the prose is so exuberant and and attention-seeking that it fails at its main job of conveying what happened and what things look like, especially early on.

The three viewpoint characters are not likeable. They are egotistical and nakedly ambitious and alienated. It's not, of course, compulsory to have likeable characters, but I personally prefer it in the books I read. The most likeable of the three (for me) is the chef, who comes from an awful family of corrupt politicians and became a chef partly to escape them and partly because she loves it; her main fault is that she's obsessively driven, which from what I understand is pretty standard among top-class chefs. The least likeable is the technologist, a rude self-centred diva who is absolutely determined not to have a relationship that means anything, and drives herself and her colleagues too hard out of ambition and existential emptiness. (That would be more plausible, by the way, if the company was a startup rather than being centuries old.) In the middle is the politician, who is willing to ignore the basic principles by which the polity is supposed to live in pursuit of cultural dominance by her own planet, and the fact that she wasn't the least likeable character should give you some idea of just how awful the technologist is.

Between constantly disbelieving the worldbuilding and not enjoying any of the characters, I took a break and read something else to give the book my "do I care enough what happens to these people to come back to them" test, and decided that I didn't. Perhaps they learn important lessons. Perhaps they improve the systems that have mangled them. I didn't choose to stick around to find out.

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Review: THE MYSTERY OF THE INN BY THE SHORE

THE MYSTERY OF THE INN BY THE SHORE by Florence Warden
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I spotted this on my feed of new and updated books from Project Gutenberg, and even though I couldn't find much about it anywhere, thought I would give it a try to see what it was like.

The author was an actress and dramatist, and it shows. Everything is highly dramatic, at times overdramatic. Everyone's emotions are extra-extra large, driving them to bad decisions and, in one case, madness; the exception is the villain, who is cool and calculating (though also apparently driven by a psychological quirk) and who puts up a false persona worthy of a masterful actor. The prose, while smooth (even bad 19th-century writers wrote much better prose, or else received much better editing, than the average 21st-century writer), is neither sophisticated nor polished, and the author sometimes gets hold of a word and keeps echoing it rather than finding a synonym. There are five occurrences of "prim" in about three pages at one point.

I'm used to British writers making at least some gesture in the direction of "the class system is silly," but this one is very snobbish and unreflectively class-conscious. I did wonder whether some of that was an assumed narratorial voice based on the probable prejudices of the characters, since one of the characters, who's 40, is referred to twice as "elderly," and the author was herself 38 when the book came out. On the other hand, my grandmother, born in the year this book was published, thought of 40 as "old," meaning that she was (in her own opinion) old for more than half her life - she died at 87. So perhaps the prejudice is sincere.

There's a particularly glaring example of the Instalove trope, and what I call a "thin romance subplot". Not only does the guy fall in love with the girl basically on sight, but less than 24 hours later he asks her to marry him, having spent perhaps one of those hours, maybe less, and certainly not more than a couple of hours, in her actual presence. She refuses him, on the very reasonable grounds that she only met him yesterday. A couple of months later - during which time they've hardly spent any time together at all, nor have they written to each other - he says that surely they've known each other long enough by now? She refuses again, but now it's because nearly everyone (except him, for no reason except he's in love with her and can't believe anything bad of her) suspects her of the crimes that have been committed, and until she's cleared she won't bring the consequences of that suspicion on him.

By about three-quarters of the way through, I was convinced that the author was going to have to cheat to get a resolution. Everyone who could possibly have done the crimes (thefts initially, but a murder halfway through) seemed to have been cleared either by the omniscient narration's account of their inner life or by the evidence. Were we going to get a previously unseen or hardly-seen character as the criminal? Was the omniscient narration misleading? Or was the author just going to ignore some of the established evidence? It was kind of the second one, combined with the false persona I mentioned earlier and some facts kept carefully out of evidence. The next bit seriously is a spoiler for the identity of the criminal: (view spoiler)[A couple of things reduced my suspicion of her: one, that she seemed highly moral, to the point of being outraged by seeing a man in a light suit on a Sunday - which the author lampshaded as part of how she'd misled everyone; and two, that she and her father were desperately poor, showing no signs of benefiting from her thefts. This is explained by her stealing only for the thrill of it and hiding her loot, including currency, in the house rather than spending it, only one of the ways in which the characters act irrationally. A key part of the book was that Clifford, the lover, trusted his love interest Nell implicitly based on his judgement of her character through, frankly, very little time spent observing her, so the fact that the criminal concealed her true character so effectively and plausibly that nobody tumbled to it despite knowing her for years is a bit of irony that I'm not sure the author intended. (hide spoiler)]

Between the melodrama, the prejudice, the instalove and the cheat of the resolution, not a favourite, but it was interesting to see what a lesser writer was doing around the time of the Sherlock Holmes stories.

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Review: Paladin's Strength

Paladin's Strength by T. Kingfisher
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I don't give five stars often or lightly, but it's hard to think of how you'd improve on this.

T. Kingfisher may or may not have invented the subgenre of "awkward romance between damaged middle-aged people in a world of swords and sorcery," but she is certainly the chief exponent of it. As always, the couple are delightful both individually and together; the berserker paladin of a dead god, with all of the grief and guilt and general pain that implies, and the lay sister of an order of nuns with a secret, the sole one of her sisters still at large after they were kidnapped en masse. The secret is kind of spoiled a little on the cover, but I'll spoiler-tag it: (view spoiler)[they turn into bears (hide spoiler)]. Both of the protagonists have been through a lot (not least because they're middle-aged and so have had time to go through a lot), and it makes them emotionally defended, which is why, even though they're attracted to each other, they hold off from doing anything about it for a really long time. As tends to be the case with T. Kingfisher, they both think the other one couldn't possibly want them because of reasons, and hesitate to commit because if it didn't last (and how could it last?) that would be more pain than they were up for, and also they both have missions (he's tracking undead golems, she's trying to find her sisters and, if possible, free them), so romance wouldn't be appropriate anyway, but he/she really is tremendously attractive... It makes for a plot with a lot of emotional ups and downs, which is great.

Also, even though this is part of a series of awkward romances between damaged middle-aged people in a world of swords and sorcery, it's not just the other books over again with different names and a bit of a paint job. The characters are distinct and different from the characters in the other books I've read, and their relationship complications are fresh ones. It hits that sweet spot of being similar to those other books I enjoyed, without falling into the trap of being indistinguishable from them.

The other thing is, T. Kingfisher is funny. This isn't billed as "comic fantasy" (a genre that frequently disappoints by its shallow buffoonery), but there were multiple occasions when I snorted with laughter at some piece of beautifully phrased dialog or ridiculous situation. Kingfisher isn't afraid to have serious things, like love and guilt and important missions and conflict, also be absurd from time to time, which is a great relief from the grim-faced epic fantasy that I now avoid. Any middle-aged person who's in, or has been in, a relationship knows that sex is awkward and ridiculous, and the book is the stronger for acknowledging that and building it into the rich tapestry of the couple's relationship.

In terms of copy editing, there's the occasional typo, a misplaced apostrophe with a plural possessive (apparently a weakness of this author, since I've seen it before in her books), and one word used incorrectly: "catechism," which means a series of questions and answers intended to educate about the doctrine of the faith, but is being used here to mean a set prayer. I strongly suspect "liturgy" is the word the author was looking for. Compared to most books I read, that counts as clean enough to eat off.

I've read a few reviews of the third book that suggest I might not enjoy it as much, but the fourth is now out, and my library has it, so I'm looking forward to reading that one too. They're self-contained, even though they do refer to events in earlier books, so skipping one shouldn't be a problem.

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Review: Unnatural Death

Unnatural Death by Dorothy L. Sayers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Another strong book that, like the first in the series, rises above the usual level of the detective genre as it was practiced at the time. The prose is highly capable without being showy, the investigation complicated without being difficult to follow, the criminal clever, the detectives both human and humane. One way in which it differs from the usual crime novel of the time is that the action scenes are desperate and messy, and the crimes clearly portrayed as awful and tragic, giving a more realistic sense of the emotion of an actual murder investigation.

Not that it's clear for a long time that it is a murder investigation; a chance meeting in a restaurant with a doctor who felt that one of his elderly patients had died suspiciously suddenly (and had been hounded out of the community for acting on his suspicions with a postmortem) kicks the whole thing off, and it takes a while for Wimsey and his friend Inspector Parker to get hold of anything substantial to indicate that a murder had even occurred.

The relationship between the two detectives is different from the usual, too. They're not a Holmes and a Watson. Wimsey, the amateur/private/consulting detective, is more given to flashes of insight, and Parker, the professional Scotland Yard detective, takes on the role of doing the routine work (he reflects on it wryly but resignedly at one point), but they're both intelligent and capable of drawing a correct conclusion from a trail of evidence, and of observing that evidence to begin with. They're closer friends than most detective pairs, too, as signified by the fact that they routinely call each other by their first names - something that was not at all usual between men of their place, time and classes, particularly since Wimsey is upper class and Parker middle class. That's part of the greater sense of emotional warmth and involvement that Sayers creates, compared with the relatively cool atmosphere of a book by, say, Arthur Conan Doyle, Freeman Wills Crofts or R. Austin Freeman.

Another Goodreads reviewer has expressed the wish that Sayers was not so much "of her time" when it came to race, because of the language used around a character of West Indian origin. I think this is a superficial reading. As with antisemitism in Whose Body? , what she does is represent the attitudes of some people of the time without endorsing them. In both cases, a minor character, represented as small-minded, uses what is now a deeply offensive slur (and was then also a slur, though less deeply offensive) and dehumanizing language about a group of people that includes a particular individual; the narrative portrays that individual as a person with strong positive qualities, and the protagonist, Lord Peter, treats them with the same respect as any other person (and he's notable for treating everyone with respect, despite his upper-class origins). It's done with a level of subtlety that an author wouldn't risk today, in the age of Twitter hot takes; these days, the slurs would probably be alluded to but not put on the page, and the protagonist would more explicitly and clearly condemn the attitude expressed. But to me, it's clear that Sayers was not endorsing antisemitism in Whose Body? or racism here; just the opposite. She was portraying it in order to deprecate it.

In a similar vein, two couples in the book are clearly lesbians, though the closest we get to an explicit acknowledgement of that is a stumbling and still indirect reference by Miss Climpson, Lord Peter's contracted inquiry agent (who is a wonderful character in her own right). I have the impression, from reading books like this, that once women could legally own property in their own names in Britain, it became quite common for a pair of unmarried women who weren't blood relatives to set up housekeeping together in some quiet village, and everyone tacitly agreed not to speculate aloud or inquire about their exact relationship.

(view spoiler)[We do arguably get the "Bury Your Gays" trope, in that the first couple are dead at the beginning of the book (one made the money that's the motive for the crime, the other's death is the initial crime and the inciting incident for the book), and the second couple are dead by the end (one murdered for knowing too much, the other a suicide). As a counterpoint, I don't think this is necessarily just because they are lesbians; it's hardly uncommon for murderers in detective fiction of this time period, facing execution if convicted, to opt for a quicker exit, and the murderer also kills another straight woman and attempts to murder two men and another woman, so the fate of her lover isn't surprising in that context. (hide spoiler)]

I'm coming to the conclusion that Dorothy L. Sayers was the C.L. Moore of the detective genre, adding emotional depth to a genre that had largely been lacking it (though Sayers is the better prose writer by a good margin). Her detectives are more human and less purely plot devices, the crimes carry a genuine sense of regret and tragedy, and yet she doesn't lose the intellectual appeal of the solution of a complicated puzzle that is the defining characteristic of detective fiction. It's true that I did work out one of the key plot points well before the detectives did ((view spoiler)[the dual identity (hide spoiler)]), but I suspect a lot of detective fiction deliberately leads the reader to this kind of stuff to make them feel smarter, and I've certainly done it with other authors of the time too.

I'll certainly keep reading this series, and look forward to even more depth from it as it goes along.

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Review: The Layton Court Mystery

The Layton Court Mystery by Anthony Berkeley
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This started out feeling like a very standard 1920s detective mystery. Country house party, body of host found in library, locked from the inside, apparent suicide... but is it? Cast of characters includes gruff military man, attractive young woman, snooty aristocratic lady, etc.

As it unfolded, I wondered, "Is the point of difference that the amateur detective is an idiot?" He keeps misinterpreting things in a Watson-like way, even being misled into suspecting a "man" who, to me, was obviously an animal of some kind - I initially thought a dog, but it turned out to be a bull - mentioned in a letter he finds in a rubbish heap. He's always completely confident of his wrong theories, too. Along with this misplaced confidence goes an arrogant assumption that he should be the one to make the call on whether the whole thing gets handed over to the police, based on who the victim was, who the murderer was, and the circumstances. A professional police detective, on the other hand, would be duty bound to pursue the cause of impartial justice, on the grounds that it's not up to a random individual to decide whether this crime or that crime is "justified"; it's up to society as a whole, operating through the police, the courts, and the jury system, to enforce the law that says that it's also not up to a random individual to decide who lives and who dies. That arrogance annoyed me, and was all of a piece with something that nevertheless startled me: a nasty piece of antisemitic sentiment apropos of nothing in the middle of the book. (The narration says something to the effect that the only thing the amateur detective hated more than tapioca and prunes, which is what he was eating for dessert, was Jews.)

And then at the end we get the twist, which I didn't see coming; I'd had it in mind as one possibility among many, but didn't see it as a particularly strong one. The author says in his foreword that he set out to play absolutely "fair" with the reader and not keep back any clues, but he doesn't quite deliver that; there's a bit of knowledge that he has relating to lattice windows, and another opportunity to observe footprints in a flowerbed, that are key clues which, if the reader's attention was drawn to them, would give away the ending, and those are withheld until the final setting out of the solution.

(view spoiler)[Also, the butler is never treated as a serious suspect, even though the murderer was a large, strong man and the butler is a large, strong man who shows no regret at his employer's passing and later is revealed to have had good reason to want him dead. The matter's just never discussed, and I have to suspect that it's because there was really no strong evidence against him being the murderer, but the author didn't want to take it in that direction. After all, "the butler did it" is such a cliché. Or perhaps he was dismissed without discussion because he was an ex-boxer and therefore, in the author/main character's prejudiced view, not smart enough to have cleaned up the crime scene? (hide spoiler)]

In several ways, then, this one was unsatisfactory to me. An arrogant, blundering detective with a distorted sense of justice; a cheat where we'd been promised no cheating; and that antisemitic sentiment out of nowhere took it down to three stars in the end.

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Review: Clouds of Witness

Clouds of Witness by Dorothy L. Sayers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The second Wimsey novel, for me, didn't quite live up to the promise of the first, for a couple of reasons. First of all, there's quite a bit of coincidence in it; the plot doesn't outright rely on coincidence, but several significant moments do, and I prefer to see more of the discoveries driven by the actions of the protagonist. Secondly, I fell out of sympathy with Wimsey over his attitude to a side issue. (view spoiler)[His brother won't give an alibi for the murder because he was committing adultery at the time with the wife of a neighbour; Wimsey doesn't blame him, both because the woman is very attractive and because his brother's own wife is hard going. In an age when almost the only thing we can agree on across political and religious lines is that cheating on your partner is a bad thing, this doesn't play well. (hide spoiler)]

Still, it gives Wimsey a strong stake - his brother is suspected of murdering a man who was engaged to their sister. I did wonder whether he would have been allowed to participate in the investigation, given his personal stake in the outcome, but then again, they're members of the nobility, so the rules are different. Indeed, when his brother comes to trial, because he's a duke, the trial is held in the House of Lords, with full pomp and ceremony. I got the impression that the author had a lot of fun researching what this would look like, and then describing it in a way that contrasted the realities of vague peers not used to doing what they're told with the importance of precise organization of the occasion, and also contrasting the medieval pageantry with the modern world, as Wimsey flies back from America in a small plane with a flying ace through dangerous weather in order to bring the crucial bit of evidence to the trial.

The winding path of the clues, the various people who get suspected, and the development of the characters make the book engaging. Because there is more development than you usually get in mysteries of the period; these characters aren't just stock, even though there are some moments of cheerful mockery of stereotypes (such as the bohemian socialists). They have contradictions and weaknesses and unexpected bits of history. The genuine friendship between Wimsey and Inspector Parker, the genuine respect and affection between Wimsey and his efficient manservant Bunter, the way in which Lady Mary (Wimsey's sister) handles being both the daughter of a duke and a socialist, the beautifully depicted rambling stream of consciousness that is their mother's conversation - all of these, along with the effortlessly fine prose, raise it into the Silver tier of my annual recommendation list. Yes, parts of it are melodramatic, and parts have too much coincidence, and I didn't agree with Wimsey's values on at least one key point, but it's a solid piece of work for all that, and entertaining.

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Review: Whose Body?

Whose Body? by Dorothy L. Sayers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'm on a bit of a run of reading century-old crime novels at the moment, largely for lack of anything good that's come out recently. I'd heard that the Wimsey novels had a bit more depth than most, and could easily believe it, having read some of the author's dramatic work years ago.

I'd also heard that the Wimsey of the first book isn't as developed as he later became: more of an upper-class twit (or a very intelligent man pretending convincingly to be an upper-class twit), less complex psychologically. But we do get references to his backstory: shell-shocked in World War I (there's a heartrending scene where the stress of the case gets to him and throws him into flashbacks of the trenches, and his manservant Bunter comforts him), and returned from the war to be rejected by his fiancée - I'm guessing because of the shell-shock, though it's not made explicit. And as well as effortlessly capable writing, we get at least two scenes that I found moving, the one I've already referred to and the closing scene, where Wimsey reflects on the case and its tragedy.

For it is a tragedy; the victim is well-loved and a kind, generous man, though also a canny businessman. He's Jewish, which is the occasion for antisemitic remarks and slurs from various characters, but not from Wimsey or the author; it's a book that reflects the antisemitism of the time without (in my view) participating in it.

It's also a fascinating mystery. A middle-aged Jewish man has disappeared, apparently from his house in the middle of the night; the corpse of a middle-aged Jewish man has appeared in the bath of a hapless architect, also in the middle of the same night. Are they the same man? If they're not, are the two connected other than by coincidence? Lord Peter, who has an indirect connection to the architect, who in turn has been accused of the crime by an incompetent police officer, lends his skills as a private detective, working closely with a competent police officer who's his friend.

There are a couple of moments where context could have been given earlier: it's not clear until well into the first scene with Wimsey and Parker that Parker is a police inspector, and there's an inadequately signalled scene shift where Wimsey has been talking to a witness and then, at the start of the next paragraph, is talking about that witness, and then we learn (after a few sentences of dialog) that it's several minutes later, he's somewhere else, and the person he's talking to is now Bunter. But these are minor glitches in an excellently written book. It does bristle rather with allusions to contemporary brands and phenomena, London landmarks and English and classical literature, which, having grown up a century later and on the other side of the world and received a very different education from Lord Peter (or Dorothy Sayers), I didn't get; but since they're decoration rather than being essential to the plot, that didn't matter much.

The plot itself held my attention; I did work out the murderer earlier than Lord Peter did, though he has the excuse that it's difficult to believe such a person as a murderer - until he looks more closely, and then it becomes believable. (view spoiler)[As in Chesterton's Father Brown novels, the author does tend to equate atheist/rationalist = capable of any immoral act, which in my experience isn't necessarily true, but certainly there were some highly immoral acts rationalized as "scientific" and "leaving aside outdated sentiment" by sociopaths in this time period. (hide spoiler)]

Largely because of the effortlessly excellent prose and the two scenes that moved me emotionally, this gets into the Gold tier of my annual recommendation list. It has its imperfections, keeping it out of Platinum, but it's a promising start to a series I intend to keep reading. And, because it's a popular series, I will be able to get hold of all of the books, either from Project Gutenberg for the early ones or from the library for the later ones; I also have several on my bookshelves, inherited from (I think) my grandmother. Some of the other old series I've started exploring are hard to get hold of after the first few, because they're neither out of copyright (and hence on Gutenberg) nor still popular enough to be in my local library system.

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Review: The Phoenix Keeper

The Phoenix Keeper by S.A. MacLean
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

This book reminded me of Coffee, Milk & Spider Silk because of the worldbuilding, or lack thereof. In both cases, in imaginary worlds that are very different to ours in some ways, the culture - people's names, technology, institutions, attitudes, values, even slang - are ported wholesale from the west coast of the USA, circa right now. In this book, the geography of the world is very different - not only the names of places, but also the shape of the continents. There are magical creatures, some of them based directly on mythical creatures from our own world, others more invented. But the plants seem to be the same as ours, and the culture is indistinguishable from today's Southern California, where the author lives. The story could just as well have been set in, say, the San Diego Zoo in an alternate version of our world; the new geography is a difference that makes no difference, except to make the culture less plausible. For that matter, even the mythical creatures seemed to be there for aesthetics rather than having any obvious impact on how the story unfolded; they could equally well have been real-world endangered species, at least as far as I read. Since I didn't finish the book, I can't say definitely that this was the case, though.

In terms of copy editing, I personally would have used the past perfect tense more often, though it is usually used in places where the sentence doesn't have a more explicit way of orientating the reader to the fact that it's referring to events earlier than the narrative moment. The commas and apostrophes are correctly placed, and the vocabulary correctly used, even in the pre-release version I had from Netgalley, which puts this far ahead of most contemporary books I read, and gets it the "well-edited" tag.

Although the weak worldbuilding was a problem for me, the reason I stopped reading was the main character. She's so anxious that she's barely able to function, and I much prefer calm, competent protagonists. I don't mind if they're emotionally troubled as long as they don't whine about it, but I felt like she did.

As I often do, when I was finding the book hard going I took a break and read something else; after reading three other books I realized I wasn't going to go back, because I didn't want to spend more time with the main character. This is about my personal taste rather than the quality of the writing. This book will definitely have an audience; it's just not me.

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