Review: The Spellbook Library, Vol. 1

The Spellbook Library, Vol. 1 by Uta Isaki
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A fun new manga, set in a world where Spellbook Librarians bind fantasy beasts into books in order to use them (as beasts of burden, messengers or what-have-you; this aspect isn't explored much in this volume) or, in the case of the more dangerous ones, lock them away where they can do no harm.

Two young men want to join the Library staff through its occasional entrance exam, which is fiercely competitive and requires some lateral thinking. (This is the 201st event, and the last one was 5 years before, but it's not clear whether they are always 5 years apart; if so, that would imply the library is more than a thousand years old.) One is a rough-and-tumble lad named Yan who was saved 10 years before by the elite squad who seal the most dangerous creatures away; the other a mysterious boy named Tohru who Yan incidentally rescues from muggers while they are both on their way to the exam. Tohru is apparently a noble, and seems to have strong magical powers, but in the usual way of such things in this type of story, Yan doesn't ask him about it and he doesn't volunteer, so that there's something to be revealed later on.

Thanks entirely to Tohru's intelligence (Yan just happens to be paired with him for the test, which seems a bit unfair), the two pass the entrance exam and get assigned to the Public Relations department, which consists of two people prior to their addition: one of the kingdom's princesses, and another character who's not given much development yet. Through a series of events, they find themselves fighting a powerful magical creature... and the first volume ends on a cliffhanger.

While it's certainly very much in the vein of fantasy adventure manga generally, the setting and premise are fresh and don't retread already well-trodden ground. The art style is clear and dynamic, the story keeps moving forward while also sowing hints of revelations to come, the characters have clear motivations and face interesting challenges, and this small taster gives plenty of reasons to keep engaged with the series.

I received a review copy via Netgalley.

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Review: The Rithmatist

The Rithmatist by Brandon Sanderson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Sanderson writes long books - this is almost 400 pages, which for YA is fairly long - but he doesn't do it by being verbose, by putting in a lot of filler description, by infodumping, by spending time with a lot of side characters who aren't key to the plot, or by having long stretches of nothing happening, like a lot of people who write long books. They don't feel long, because he keeps the plot moving while compactly conveying the worldbuilding and the always complex and inventive magic system, often with the help of in-world documents.

The Rithmatist is no exception. It's perhaps younger YA, simply told and with no closer approach to romance than a few reflections along the lines of "she's kind of cute but also annoying" in passing, but it has a strong mystery-adventure plot, and I never felt like the young people should not be involved, or that the adults should be faulted for letting them be involved. He builds up a clear sense of threat, often doesn't make the obvious choice for where the plot goes next (a Sanderson trademark), and generally brings the reader along for the ride. I believed in the main character's fascination with the magic he can't access as well as in his friend's frustration with having been given it when she didn't want it, and in the motivations of the other characters as well.

It is, of course, a fun and original magic system, based on drawing magical diagrams with chalk, and involving quite a bit of geometry. The setting is a version of Earth where North America is an archipelago rather than a continent, with some of the islands being roughly the shape of our world's states, and sometimes also having similar or even identical names. In this world, the JoSeon (i.e. Korean) Empire has recently conquered Europe, and North America, because of monsters of mysterious origin, was largely uninhabited before European settlement. This is a choice Sanderson might not make today; the book was written in 2013, when the idea of an empty North America as a convenient way of not having to address Native Americans may have seemed more acceptable than it does today. He even repurposes a real-world colonial woman's narrative of being captured by Native Americans as a narrative of having been captured by wild chalklings (the monsters I mentioned). Some people will definitely have a problem with this approach, and I understand why.

More than 10 years later, this book is still waiting for its implied sequel (other projects having intervened); if that sequel ever comes, I will read it, because it was solidly written in the Sanderson style. Not one of his best books, but entertaining, definitely.

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Review: Nine Tailors: Changes Rung on an Old Theme in Two Short Touches and Two Full Peals

Nine Tailors: Changes Rung on an Old Theme in Two Short Touches and Two Full Peals by Dorothy L. Sayers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've said in previous reviews of the Lord Peter Wimsey books that they're often at their best when what is on screen is not the solving of the mystery, hence my disappointment with The Five Red Herrings , where the mystery apparatus is so obtrusive there's not much room for anything else. This book is the direct opposite of that; it spends a great deal of time on establishing the scene of the crime before the crime is even suspected, and some of its best parts are, indeed, not related directly to the solving of the mystery. I was particularly moved by the way the community pulled together to cope with a natural disaster, late in the book.

Some of the non-mystery parts are about campanology (bell-ringing), and I'll admit that they were so technical I didn't follow them much, but I don't think I was supposed to. They created an atmosphere, and I got a clear enough idea of how the change-ringing was done to understand when that became relevant to the plot. The Rector of the small village that Wimsey happens to end up spending New Year's in after a minor car accident is a dedicated campanologist, and one of Sayers' delightfully discursive characters, whose dialog gives you everything you need to know about his character and is also enjoyable in itself. Like most if not all of her Church of England clergymen, he's genuinely devout and a deeply kind person, which speaks well of her father, an Anglican vicar.

Some time after Lord Peter takes part in a record-setting all-night bell-ringing session and goes on, car repaired, to his original destination, a man dies of illness, and when his recently-deceased wife's grave is opened in order to add him to it, the gravediggers discover another corpse, mutilated to be unrecognisable, that has been there roughly since New Year (shortly after the legitimate inhabitant of the grave was interred). Discovering who he was and how he got there turns out to involve a jewel theft from years before in which the loot never turned up, and a bizarre and complicated series of events involving false identities, mistaken assumptions and an unusual cause of death.

I did spot how the victim had died some time before Wimsey, but I think I was supposed to (the author dropped a clear hint), and the scene in which he realizes the explanation was powerful and vivid enough that I forgive his not working it out earlier. It's one of several strong scenes, and the whole book has wonderful description of the landscape and weather of East Anglia, good characterization, and plenty of incident both relevant and irrelevant to the plot which is enjoyable in a cosy way. It's excellent work, and because of that and the moving passages about the flood, I'm putting it in the Gold tier of my annual recommendation list.

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Review: Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and Dashes

Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and Dashes by Ella Cheever Thayer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Spotted this on my Project Gutenberg feed, and it was well reviewed, so I gave it a try. It's a rom-com from the 1880s about two people who meet online - or rather, "on the wire," through their common occupation as telegraphists. It would actually make a pretty good movie.

There are six characters at the centre of the plot, three men and three women. Among them, we get most of the possible romantic pairings and mispairings and misunderstandings; A loves B, B loves C, C loves D, but thinks that D loves E although D actually loves C back, and F loves E but for a long time won't admit it... Not all of these romances end happily, which is a note of realism a modern romance novel might omit, but I think the book is stronger for it. There are also a small cast of supporting actors: two very different middle-aged landladies, one of whom thinks it absolutely scandalous that a young man and a young woman should be communicating via the telegraph; the father of one of the women, mostly a loud voice offstage; and a despicable man who's the equivalent of an online troll.

The flirting and the banter is lively, the young people are likeable and have distinct personalities, the emotional arc is sound, and the working out of the premise is irresistibly reminiscent of how young people used current technology about 115 years later, in the early days of the public internet. I met my own wife online back when that was considered weird, and the exchanges between "N" and "C" are reminiscent of our early email exchanges, allowing for personality differences.

A fun, light romance with moments of seriousness that aren't overplayed. Recommended.

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Review: Murder Must Advertise

Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy L. Sayers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The previous book in the series, The Five Red Herrings , disappointed me because it was so busy being a complicated mystery novel it had no time to be anything more. This is a return to form; not only do we get a good deal of human observation, but it's a ferocious satire on advertising, the industry Sayers herself worked in until her books became successful enough to provide her with a living. I have to say, I'm glad I've never hated my job as much as Sayers clearly hated hers.

We also get more of Lord Peter Wimsey, though most of the time he's pretending to be his fictional illegitimate and disreputable cousin, Death Bredon. He's gone undercover in this identity at an advertising agency where there's been a mysterious death, but the murder investigation becomes entangled with the investigation his brother-in-law and close friend, Chief-Inspector Parker, is conducting into the drug trade in London. There are vivid (occasionally bordering on lurid, though it's kept tastefully vague) scenes of the night life of the rich and addicted, among the scenes of gossipy, back-biting ad-agency life (a lot of people seem to do very little work there), and assorted vignettes such as an inter-company cricket match. It's a box of chocolates, with something for most tastes.

I realised something about Wimsey in this book that I'd vaguely been aware of before. He's always kind to honest people, but can be fiercely unkind to the dishonest ones. Not always; if he feels sorry for someone, even if they're a criminal, he can be very sympathetic. He's also good with children and young people.

Favourite characters from previous books - the Dowager Duchess (Peter's mother), the impeccable manservant Bunter, and Peter's love-interest, Harriet Vane - are either only referred to or else appear very briefly. We do get to see the domestic life of Parker and his wife, Peter's sister Mary, but because Peter is incognito most of the time, his usual cast of backup characters is absent. To make up for this, we get plenty of new characters, vividly and succinctly drawn, in the advertising agency and the demimonde (and at the cricket match, where the elderly sponsor of the opposing team declares robustly and sincerely that he doesn't care who wins as long as they play the game).

The advertising-agency setting gives a fascinating glimpse into commerce as it flourished between the world wars, and among the insights it offers is that advertising is mainly aimed at people who don't have much money, but can be convinced to part with it easily, because their lives are mundane or miserable and they're vulnerable to pitches that suggest they can improve it by buying something.

There's a lot going on at once, and for me, it's well handled and well integrated. There are, perhaps, a few too many minor characters at the ad agency to be kept track of, but otherwise it's strong. The quality of the writing and the pointed satire on the advertising industry lift it into the Gold tier of my recommendation list; the author experiments, I think successfully, with techniques such as stream-of-consciousness narration and an omniscient viewpoint that understands things about characters that they are not themselves conscious of, but she does it judiciously, so it doesn't become tedious through overuse.

The edition I read has clearly been scanned from an earlier edition and set using OCR; there are tell-tale errors like "bell" for "hell" and "he" for "be," and a number of commas and full stops that are either missing, inserted, or substituted for each other. If you use OCR, you need to put in more proofreading than this to get a clean edition, and Hodders, characteristically, have not done so.

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Review: Bee Sting Cake

Bee Sting Cake by Victoria Goddard
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

So it turns out that the lack of protagonism from the main character in the first book, which I was so scathing about, was part of his character arc - at least, it is now if it wasn't before. At just over 60% through this one, the worm turns and he decides to stop reacting and start initiating. Not before time.

It runs straight on from the first book, which I read three years ago and didn't remember all that well, and also has a lot of backstory from the author's other books in this setting, which I haven't read at all. So the first half, or a little more than half, is pretty dense with references to other books, character backstory, setup, and pipe-laying, and didn't grip me particularly strongly. It definitely picks up in the second half, though, with a dragon, riddles, noble titles, hypocrisy, a race, a baking contest, highwaymen, and the breaking of a curse.

The tone of these books is uneven; some parts - mostly the early parts - are the most languid slice-of-life cosy fantasy you can imagine (set against a background of epic, tragic apocalyptic fantasy that's happened as recently as the previous generation), but high magic and deep plots and desperate heroics take place in the latter parts of them.

The editing is a bit uneven too, with a number of sentences that got partly revised but not fully, and so don't make grammatical sense. An example with two issues in it: "He reached out to the off-set spatula and running his finger down the edge to the collect the cream." There are typos, too, and misplaced apostrophes ("Mrs. Ingleside's sister" where it should be "Inglesides'", since the S is part of the name; "in each others' company" instead of "each other's company"), and the homonym error "dowsing" for "dousing". There are about an average number of these problems; I've seen far worse.

The worldbuilding, too, veers from deep and elaborately thought through to the inclusion of such this-worldly things as haiku and the ace of spades. And I didn't always find the protagonist's few competent actions particularly plausible.

Still, there are some good lines: "You don't expect people to be wicked on purpose, somehow. By accident or mischance, yes, but on purpose?" (establishing the book's noblebright credentials right there), and "The heart of culture is taking the time to do the unnecessary in the most picturesque manner possible." And Jemis Greenwing, the protagonist, is at least a protagonist for the last 40% of the book, and is likeable throughout (if sometimes self-pitying), and his friends are likeable too.

Overall, though, it's too uneven and not quite fully cooked enough to get a high rating from me, and just makes it to the lowest tier of my annual recommendation list.

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Review: Company For Henry

Company For Henry by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A standalone Wodehouse in the classic style, despite being written in 1967. I had the impression that it was set in his usual time period (between the world wars), despite an anachronistic reference to the UN, and the sums of money mentioned tend to confirm that; an annual income of 800 pounds through a legacy would certainly enable someone to leave their job in, say, 1930, but in 1967 not so much. Also, 8000 pounds is considered a reasonable price for a house in London.

It's certainly in his usual milieu: an old country house, with train trips to London (45 miles away). And the characters and plot are very much what he'd been writing since the 1920s, even down to his abiding fault, no doubt picked up from writing musical comedy, of keeping the cast tight by having them coincidentally connected in multiple ways and always happening to stumble over each other in ways that complicate the plot. He even re-uses a plot device from Money for Nothing : P.G. Wodehouse’s Original 1928 Vintage Collectible Edition, British Comedy Classic , the fake theft of an entailed heirloom.

All in all, it's a Wodehouse book, no better, but certainly no worse, than plenty of others in a similar mould. We get the sparkling banter, the mistaken and/or false identities, young love (and, in this case, middle-aged love), money as a complicating factor, schemes practical and impractical that cross and foil each other, and a happy ending.

The Everyman edition, to my surprise, lived up to its claim of being a fine edition; it's very well edited, something that can't always be said, for example, of the Penguin editions of Wodehouse.

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Review: Kingfisher

Kingfisher by Patricia A. McKillip
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Unusual, in that it gives us a setting that combines contemporary life as it's lived on one of the more northerly coasts of the US (I couldn't decide which one) with Arthurian fantasy, and makes it feel like it just belongs. The legend of the Fisher King and the quest for the Holy Grail are strong influences, and a lot of the names more or less subtly reflect that (notably Pierce = Perceval, Merle = Merlin and Ginevra = Guinevere, though the Lancelot character's name is Leith; we also have a Vivien and a Morrig and a few others), but it isn't just a straight retelling by any means.

In fact, it's a twisty, complicated retelling, with perhaps just a few too many characters with their own arcs. In particular, there are three characters who seem like protagonists: Pierce (son of Leith and the sorceress Heloise), Daimon (son of the king and the mysterious Ana), and Carrie (daughter of Merle), and their arcs don't mesh completely. There are also an abundance of antagonists, major and minor: the Knights of the Rising God, who take the rivalry between the devotees of the kingdom's leading god and the leading goddess too far; the maiden/mother/crone trio trying to restore an ancient semi-fae kingdom; whatever the ultramodern chef/molecular gastronomist Stillwater is; a random sorceress at one point. There are multiple factions, all of whom want the Grail and believe it rightfully belongs to them, and who are more or less politely opposed to the others. This makes for something that isn't so much a plot as a swampy river delta of crisscrossing streams, in which the Fisher King myth is strongly alluded to but ends up not being that central, partly because nothing can truly be said to be central in such a diffuse book.

The otherwise impeccable editing is marred by only three things: an occasional missing closing quotation mark; a lot of commas between adjectives that shouldn't have them; and a couple of unexpected homonym errors ("dowsing" for "dousing" and, at one point, "gaff" misspelled as "gaffe").

Did it succeed? For me, each of the individual lines of narrative worked in its own right, but the intersections and interactions between them didn't necessarily connect up as well as I would have liked, so that it ended up being slightly less than the sum of its parts. The characters were, at least, distinct, and making an Arthurian kingdom which at the same time had cellphones and motorbikes seem natural was a feat in itself. I wasn't ever clear, though, on the function of the knights in the society; I thought at first they might be law enforcement, but they weren't, and by the end I had the impression that there were knights largely because, traditionally, there had always been knights. They didn't seem to have much of a raison d'etre or a source of support. My overall feeling was that this was an overly ambitious novel that just barely worked because the author was so skilled.

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Review: The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England

The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England by Brandon Sanderson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

As the author himself notes in an afterword, this isn't a typical Brandon Sanderson book. It's more science fiction than fantasy (though it has strong fantasy elements), the worldbuilding is often handwavy, and if you dropped the print version on a small dog the dog's chances of survival would be decent. It was written originally just for his wife's amusement, but she (fortunately) convinced him to share it with the world. I believe it was part of a highly successful Kickstarter.

It does have a couple of Sanderson hallmarks, though. It's funny, for one thing. Not all his books are funny, but when they are, they're funny without trying too hard. The characters are also not just their role in the plot plus their archetype; they have backstories and goals that provide them with believable motivations, and they have complexity to them.

This is especially the case for the main character, who starts out with amnesia, but soon remembers that his name is John West. A character starting with amnesia can be an awful cliché in the hands of a bad writer, but of course Sanderson is not one of those; it can also be a powerful premise in stories like The Bourne Identity , which Sanderson cites as an inspiration, or Nine Princes in Amber , which I was surprised that he did not cite.

In particular, starting your character with amnesia gives the opportunity for a particular kind of character arc, which is the one in this book. We tend to believe we're better than we are, and tell ourselves stories to this effect, though we can also tell ourselves that we're less than we are if enough people have told us that story that we've come to believe it. John exhibits both of those effects, and ends up becoming a better person than anyone, including him, expects, partly because he had the process of self-rediscovery from his amnesia.

The world is important in a Sanderson book; it's not just taken off the rack, it's always tailored. In this case, the in-universe documents interspersed between the chapters (another Sanderson trademark), which come from the handbook of the title, introduce us to a dodgy corporation that is exploiting a technological method of travel from our world in the late 21st century to what are effectively alternate worlds. Some of these worlds, including the one that this book takes place in, are the equivalent of an earlier stage in our world's history (the reason for this is handwaved), and of those, some of them - again including this one - contain a version of the British Isles in which people speak recognisable modern English, despite being, in this case, from the Anglo-Saxon period. This is not just handwaved but lampshaded as implausible. Non-diegetically, it means that, apart from specialist cultural vocabulary, the protagonist has minimal issues with communication, and allows the story to proceed at pace.

And proceed at pace it does. There are Viking raiders, gangsters from our Earth, fights, chases, rescues, True Love (or something like it), mysterious help from a supernatural source, and a genial Zoroastrian missionary. The protagonist and the locals he quickly comes to care about are always underdogs, which makes it all the more satisfying when they succeed against the odds.

It's not the best Sanderson ever, but there's plenty of space between "not the best Sanderson ever" and "bad," and this is an enjoyable, solidly written light read.

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Review: Thornhedge

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

This is a novella, which often means "underdeveloped novel" or "stretched-out short story," but in this case does not; the novella length is the right length for the story it tells.

It's a flip of the Sleeping Beauty story, but (view spoiler)[Sleeping Beauty (here named Fayette) is a changeling, a faerie who is, in human terms, a psychopath, and the main character, Toadling, is the formerly-human fae who was the child Fayette was swapped for. Toadling was raised by Greenteeth in a place where time ran faster, and sent back to Fayette's christening to release a spell which would prevent her doing harm (it's an inter-Fae struggle, partly), but gets it slightly wrong and has to cast Fayette into enchanted sleep and build the thorn hedge around the castle after all the inhabitants have gone, to protect the world from Fayette. (hide spoiler)]

I've spoiler-tagged all of that because we get it as a gradual revelation, through flashbacks and reflection and main character Toadling explaining things to the Muslim knight Hakim (not a prince) who shows up and, for reasons I never quite grasped, feels he has to make his way into the castle and deal with what he finds there. That was the weakest part of the story for me; it wasn't clear to me why he did that, why Toadling didn't try to stop him, or what either of them thought would be the outcome. (view spoiler)[The outcome is something rather close to a Disney Villain Fall, so neither of them bear moral culpability for killing Fayette, who obviously has to die because she just isn't someone who can safely exist in the world. (hide spoiler)]

The story is strongest when it's developing the character and background of Toadling (Hakim gets a lot less development, which is not to say that we don't learn things about how he isn't just what you'd expect from his background and his role in the story). It's weakest when it's addressing what to do with Fayette/Sleeping Beauty. (view spoiler)[I assume this is because the author believes in psychopathy and its incurability, but doesn't believe in putting people to death; I could be wrong. (hide spoiler)] It sets out, in part, to break the traditional equivalences of beauty = goodness and ugliness = evil, which of course the original Sleeping Beauty story (like princess stories in general) is all about, and to my mind succeeds. Toadling is ugly, and she isn't going to become beautiful when some curse is lifted; that's just what she looks like. But she is a good person, if ineffectual and indecisive; hence the strength and weakness I've described above.

Far from a perfect story, and dark in places, though also often funny. Not the best T. Kingfisher, but it was an early one (published after several that were written later), and I can see the strengths of later works in this one. Her later protagonists, happily, were more proactive and decisive, on the whole.

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