Review: Tomb of the Sun King

Tomb of the Sun King by Jacquelyn Benson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I described the first book in this series as pulp, but that isn't quite right, even though the influence of pulp adventures such as those of Indiana Jones is clear to see. The characters are deeper than the usual stereotypical pulp archetypes, there's a consideration of wider issues like sexism and colonialism (to, perhaps, a slightly anachronistic degree), the author has done a lot more research than most people who write period fiction ever bother with, and yet none of this interferes with the book also being a thrilling archeological adventure through late-19th-century Egypt, with touches of hot romance.

In fact, the romance distinctly benefits - for me, at least - from the fact that the young female characters, while daring and even headstrong, are not the usual helpless idiots (with a decal stuck on them that says they're intelligent and independent) that you often get in period fiction. There's also a middle-aged couple whose relationship gets featured, and relationships in general - friendships as well as romances - are well handled and significant to the plot, and undergo challenge and change in the course of the book. It's a move towards an ensemble cast, and the sequel is going to retain at least some of the ensemble; the different members bring different strengths to the mix, too, and are very distinct in their personalities, which is not always a given. I was never in any danger of confusing any one of the cast members with any other, even the minor ones. The characters we were cheering weren't flawless, nor did they overcome their flaws too easily, yet they were all the more heroic for it; the characters we were booing weren't evil merely for the sake of it, either, but had reasons that made sense to them for doing what they were doing.

I had a pre-release version via Netgalley, and while I did note a few homonym errors, the odd punctuation glitch, one or two slight anachronisms and an occasional Americanism from the English characters, it's already cleaner than the first book in some other areas I noted in my review of the first book: hyphens, vocabulary (apart from the homonyms), even coordinate commas. "Arcanum" is now being used as the (correct) singular of "arcana". There are fewer fortunate coincidences, too. It's good to see an author improving their mechanics, something that happens all too seldom in my experience.

I'd say this second book is easily as good as the first, and probably better, and I look forward eagerly to the next instalment.

View all my reviews

Review: Busman's Honeymoon

Busman's Honeymoon by Dorothy L. Sayers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The last of the Dorothy L. Sayers Lord Peter Wimsey novels (the series was continued after her death by another author, who started by finishing a book that was in very early draft; I plan to read at least that one to see if they're any good, even though such efforts rarely are). This one was adapted from a play, on which Sayers collaborated with another writer, and it shows; some of the dialog and the scene staging feels distinctly theatrical, though not necessarily in a detrimental way.

It's funny. There are moments of humour in the earlier books, too, but this one is hilarious, particularly at the beginning, which is a series of letters and diary entries surrounding Harriet and Peter's marriage. We get an extended contribution from the Dowager Duchess, who is, as always, simultaneously fluffy and incisive, and that alone was worth the price of admission to me. I don't know how much of the humour was Sayers' and how much was her collaborator's, but I enjoyed it.

Conventionally, romance stories stop before the wedding (perhaps because Jane Austen never married, and bestrides the genre like a colossus), but there's a great deal of juice to be squeezed from a couple's early married life, and this book demonstrates it. Peter and Harriet are two highly intelligent, independent people who are genuinely devoted to one another and must find a way to live together and create a partnership that works for both of them. They do this with plenty of mutual respect, and it's wonderful to watch. At the same time, they work away on solving the (as it turns out) ingenious locked-room murder of the unpleasant man who sold them their honeymoon getaway/future country home, while dealing with people who want to take the furniture in payment of the deceased's debts, his rather pathetic niece and heir, one of Sayers' good-hearted but vague vicars, a neighbour who helps out with the housework and whose treatment of the vintage port breaks Bunter's legendary calm and even makes him drop his aitches, a chimney sweep with many layers of jerseys, a capable but morally questionable gardener... Unlike in some other Sayers books, the cast doesn't become a mob of largely indistinguishable minor characters; each of them has something distinct and memorable about them, and there are no spares or duplicates, almost certainly because of the story's beginning as a play.

We do still get a lot of quotation from (mostly) English classic literature, though here it's highlighted as a feature, and partly interpreted to the reader, because the police superintendent is self-educated in the classics, and he and Lord Peter play a kind of game of apt quotations (with attribution). There is some untranslated Latin and a couple of letters in untranslated French, which always strikes me as an annoyingly elitist move whenever I see it in Golden Age British crime novels (Agatha Christie did it too); unlike educated British people of the 1930s, I don't read either French or Latin fluently. Fortunately, these days it's easy to find the translations online.

For me, the non-English portions were the only significant flaw in an otherwise excellent novel, which worked as the portrait of the beginning of a marriage between two admirable people trying hard to be good to one another, as well as a clever murder mystery. Not only does the romance get extended past the wedding, but the murder mystery gets extended past the trial, conviction, and execution of the criminal, and we get to see Peter's ambivalence about the consequences of his "hobby" of detection and the ways in which he tries to mitigate them. The emotional beats are sound, the writing assured and capable, and along with those elements, the depth of reflection the characters undertake on the events places it strongly in the Gold tier of my annual recommendation list.

The edition I read has a few typos in it, but they're the kind you get from a human typesetter (such as "Mrs Climpson" for "Miss Climpson"), rather than the kind you get from an OCR program, so that's something.

View all my reviews

Review: Curtsies & Consequences

Curtsies & Consequences by Melissa Constantine
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I generally avoid books that offer me a princess character, and when this book starts, Kira, the female lead, is an example of why I do that. She's petulant, rude, immature, entitled, and convinced that, despite all of this, she should have been allowed to accede to the throne in advance of her 21st birthday, rather than being placed under the regency of her stepmother (who everyone else sees as much more competent, with good reason).

Yes, there is a regency in this book, though it's not, as the form of the title suggests, a Regency book. The setting is a mostly generic fantasy world with a late-medieval feel, although also with some random anachronistic features like chocolate bars with gold-coloured foil, an icebox, and someone referred to as being "gun-shy," though we don't see any guns. We also get the word "Muppets" dropped at one point. Unfortunately, given the prevalence of aristocratic characters, the author makes some basic blunders in terminology, referring to the queen as "Her Highness" (the correct title being "Her Majesty") and sometimes having the male lead addressing the princess as "My Lady," inaccurately calling all nobles "royals" (only the monarch and their immediate family are royal), and referring to all noble territories as "kingdoms". Only a territory ruled by a king is a kingdom; one ruled by a prince is a principality, and one ruled by a duke is a duchy, so the so-called "Known Kingdoms" are, in fact, a single kingdom. She also (like a lot of fantasy authors) doesn't seem to know that a league is, by definition, the distance one can travel in an hour, so it's not possible for someone who started out maybe half an hour before you to be several leagues away, no matter how fast he rides.

Sadly, the ignorance doesn't stop there; there are also dozens of mechanical and vocabulary errors. Far too frequently, a sentence will make no grammatical sense at all, because there are whole phrases missing or a verb in completely the wrong tense, or maybe a word that's not even the right part of speech, or the wrong preposition, or a key word that appears to be chosen almost at random and have nothing to do with the intended meaning. For example, at one point a character is told "She has assured me you are quite revenant and I am not to fear from you." Apart from the odd phrasing "not to fear from you," "revenant" is a noun, not an adjective, and refers to a kind of undead creature, which doesn't fit the context whatsoever. Sometimes I can guess which word was intended, but sometimes, as with "revenant," I have no clue. Other random words along this line include "erstwhile" (which few authors use correctly), "fissure," "fop," "fallacy," and "inert," none of which strike me as particularly obscure vocabulary.

And apart from the random vocabulary words, there are a lot of homonym or near-homonym errors, some extremely basic: advanced/advance, definitive/definite, sensibility/good sense, jam/jamb, envelope/envelop, creek/creak, steal/steel, hoard/horde, wrap/rap, sight/site, hearty/hardy, stripped/striped, tact/tack, tuffs/tufts, reigned/reined (and reigns/reins), scrapped/scraped, manor/manner, led/lead (and not the verb, either, which is easily confused; it's the metal), who's/whose, proceed/precede, Robot/Robert, repelling/repealing, check/cheek, laying/lying, legions/leagues, everyone/every one, rammed/crammed, ring/wring, ascent/assent, mele/melee, ascended/descended, outrange/outrage, and it's/its. Some are clearly just typos, but if there is a way to misspell a word, this author will unerringly find it. It makes me wonder whether she mainly reads via audiobook (and never sees words spelled) and/or uses dictation software and doesn't know enough to clean up the homonyms afterwards.

I could go on and on about the many, many issues: the misplaced apostrophes when the noun is plural or a proper name ending in S (at one point, we get "Mrs. Banes's, "Mrs. Banes'" and "Mrs. Bane's" all within a couple of pages, of which either of the first two is justifiable - but it should be consistent - and the third is completely wrong), the missing past perfect, every kind of missing or misused punctuation, including mispunctuated dialog, frequently missing or misplaced commas, nearly every error it's possible to commit with a quotation mark, missing question marks when the sentence is a question and a question mark where the sentence isn't a question, capitals for terms of address that aren't titles and for the cardinal directions, and hyphens where they shouldn't be... it's a mess. Simply throwing it into Google Docs, by the way, would go a long way in finding issues like this. I marked about 400 issues, which compares poorly with the usual couple of dozen I find in an average book.

It's not just the editing, either. Plot points are dropped without notice (there's a promise of a noble title - incorrectly described, of course, as a "royal" title - that's never followed up on). There's a Convenient Eavesdrop, my absolute least favourite plot device, though it ends up not being that significant. "Oak seeds" (which the author doesn't seem to know are called acorns) are used in a metaphor that involves them circling in the breeze like dancers; that's not something acorns do. We never get an explanation of why the spell spread to the orphans specifically, or why Xav is Robert's best friend given that they come from widely separated places. Even though the chapters are headed with the name of the point of view character, in one chapter it hops back and forth several times.

But what about the characters? There's a gay couple - same-sex relationships are not an issue in this setting, and apparently political alliance is more important than succession - who we're told are happy together, but what we're shown is that one doesn't understand the other at all, and they're frequently fighting in an immature way; one is described as "kind," though I never saw him do anything kind, and several times saw him do something unkind. But they're not the main couple in the book. The main couple is the awful Princess Kira, whose only positive quality seems to be that she's beautiful, and the unfortunate Sir Robert, to whom I was metaphorically shouting, "Do not engage! I repeat, do not engage!" every time she came near him. I was actively rooting for his childhood friend, the third leg of the rather half-hearted love triangle, even though she had no particular qualities other than not being Kira, and even though I know the childhood friend always loses. Seriously, Kira is the worst. It's true that she had a loveless upbringing, and she is fairly nice to children, but... she's every negative thing I mean when I call someone a princess, and I was deeply sorry for Sir Robert, forced by the plot to be her partner against his better judgement.

A woman whose mother has been persistently not listening to her and is trying to marry her off for political reasons to a drunkard tells her "You're the best mother in the entire world." I worry for the author, I really do.

Fortunately, and to my surprise, Kira does get a character arc, which went some way to redeeming her in my eyes. She still toxically misinterprets what Robert says and leaves him wondering what he's done wrong, so it's still an unhealthy relationship, but at least she sees some of her most egregious flaws and commits to working on them. He's still in for a world of pain, poor sap.

I picked this up (via Netgalley), despite the presence of a princess, because the blurb sounded intriguing. I kept reading past the middle largely to see if I'd correctly guessed the identity of the main antagonist (I had not; (view spoiler)[my guess of the stepmother was, in fact, practically the only person who wasn't guilty, so kudos to the author for avoiding that worn-out trope (hide spoiler)]). It wasn't without its positives, notably the character arc of the initially awful female lead (who still has significant issues by the end, but at least is addressing some of them). I considered putting it on the lowest level of my annual recommendation list, which is where I've put books with sound storytelling but bad editing before.

This isn't just badly edited, though. It's inept sometimes to the point of incomprehensibility, and absolutely not ready for publication; it would take, I estimate, a month's solid work by someone skilled to even get close. As always, I feel bound to note that the books I get from Netgalley may, theoretically, receive more editing after I see them and before publication, but this one has so many issues that there's no way it can be fixed in the time, so I'm giving it my "seriously-needs-editing" tag in the confidence that it will still seriously need editing when it's published a couple of weeks from now. Taking that into account, it gets three stars, and lucky to have the third one.

View all my reviews

Review: Oops! I Broke the Wizard's Android!

Oops! I Broke the Wizard's Android! by Royce Roeswood
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A mostly successful blend of SF (of the space-opera variety) and fantasy, as the title suggests.

That title refers to an event that occurs more than halfway through and isn't, perhaps, as crucial as its place in the title implies. The fix for the problem sets up for a "twist" that I knew was coming the moment the fix happened, and that I didn't believe would never have come up for anyone previously; but I read a lot of books, so I often see plot twists coming a long way off.

Something else I see a lot of is poor mechanics (punctuation, grammar, usage, vocabulary errors), and this book has many of the usual ones. (Disclaimer as always: I read a pre-publication version via Netgalley, and it is possible, though not highly likely, that there will be another edit before publication.) Excess commas between adjectives, of course, because nobody seems to know the coordinate comma rule; incorrect punctuation of dialog (a capital when the sentence resumes after a mid-dialog tag); apostrophes in the wrong place for things like the Lamplighters' Guild (which presumably has more than one lamplighter in it, so the apostrophe should go after, not before, the S); simple mistypings that happen to be valid words spellcheck doesn't catch, even though they're not the word intended, like "try" for "tray," "It" for "I," "add" for "and," "of" for "on," "she" for "see"; basic homonym errors like "diffuse" for "defuse," "horde" for "hoard," "loathe" for "loath" and (only once) "it's" for "its"; lack of the mandatory comma before a term of address; occasional lack of the past perfect tense where it belongs; and a number of other small issues, like grammatically distorted sentences, unusual word choices and hyphenation issues. It's about average for an indie book (trad-pub books sometimes have just as many errors, but typically different ones), but unfortunately, average means scruffy and, to me, at least, distracting.

What about the story? It's a simple enough plot. This is a universe in which high-ranking wizards are placed in charge of planets, moons, space stations and what have you, and aspiring wizards, after their university training, are sent for a year's apprenticeship - basically an internship - with a master wizard, doing their mundane chores in return for instruction in advanced magic. The protagonist, Ninienne, is such an apprentice, and her master wizard is incredibly old, not entirely compos mentis, and obsessed with portal magic (now mostly obsolete), whereas Ninienne intends to be a researcher in the field of creature healing - magical veterinary science. The creatures, by the way, are often a combination of a couple of Earth-type animals, like Ninienne's frogdog familiar, or the crowhorses that are used for farm work, or even of animal and plant.

There's an odd mix of eras in the worldbuilding; there are interstellar spaceships and androids, but the farming feels 19th- or early-20th-century, and rather than electric lights, the wizard's tower is lit with flame spells. In 1950s space opera style, all the inhabited worlds appear to have entirely Earth-compatible biomes, with no difficulties about being able to eat the local life or farm crops from other planets. Intelligent aliens in the SF sense don't seem to be a thing, but there are dryads and demons and such. It's basically a fantasy universe with a bit of light SF grafted on.

As the story progresses, Ninienne struggles more and more with her mentor, and he looks more and more sinister. Where is his previous apprentice? What about his wife and daughter? Why is he so obsessed with portal magic? Will he near-arbitrarily decide to fail her, in which case her magic will potentially be bound and she will be left in desperate straits? Meanwhile, her closest friend is having a great time in her apprenticeship (a long way away) and isn't much help, the android Ninienne tricks her mentor into buying to do the scut work is, perforce, on the mentor's side because of its programming (even if odd things are happening with it), and there's a guy from a nearby farm who seems to want to be the romantic interest, but Ninienne can do without the complication, given everything else that's going on.

As far as storytelling is concerned, while there's nothing amazing, it's all sound, solid stuff, entertaining, with a decent arc and good emotional beats. The worldbuilding isn't particularly in depth, but it does its job. The characters have believable motivations. It's a good first effort, and although of course I wish the author, like nearly every author I read, could level up his game when it comes to writing mechanics, I've read plenty of books that are far worse in that regard (I'm reading one at the moment, in fact). It earns a spot in the Bronze tier of my annual recommendation list, which is still a recommendation, even if not a high one.

View all my reviews

Review: The Book of Atrix Wolfe

The Book of Atrix Wolfe by Patricia A. McKillip
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

Time to admit that I'm not going to finish this; I've finished 14 other books since I started it, and about 10 of those since I stalled at not quite halfway through, and I don't feel any pull to go back to it.

It's not because it's not a good book. It is a good book. It's just not the kind of book I enjoy anymore; it's epic and persistently serious and has a strong tragic undercurrent, and all of the characters are stoic under terrible events, beautifully narrated. It's not grimdark - the characters are not irredeemable people of bad will - but it's grimdark's slightly more humane cousin. Maybe there's a wonderful turn late in the book, but I wasn't enjoying it enough to stick around and find out.

The 30th anniversary edition which I got from Netgalley contains a few telltale signs of having been scanned from an earlier edition and has not had all the OCR errors edited out. I don't know if they'll be there in the published version or not; watch out for the error "fanner" as a misreading for "farmer," and em dashes rendered as hyphens, and that will tell you whether or not it got another pass after I saw it.

View all my reviews

Review: Minor Mage

Minor Mage by T. Kingfisher
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A classic underdog kid story; the publisher's editors insisted it wasn't for kids, just about them, but there's a lot more darkness in a lot of kids' stories than in this one, often without a happy ending, and if I had kids aged between, say, nine and about 14, I'd certainly encourage them to read it. It's enjoyable for adults, too.

It's also a classic "incompetent mage" (or rather "barely-competent mage") story; the 12-year-old protagonist, Oliver, only knows three spells (though he does, it turns out, know quite a few charms that don't count as spells within the meaning of the Act, so this is a slight cheat to make him sound less competent than he is). He uses two of them to excellent effect in some tense moments; the other one deals with his allergies, so it doesn't really count.

It's a classic trope of YA that the kid is sent off to do something dangerous because the adults are incompetent or incapable or uncaring, and in this case it's the incapable one. Oliver is the only mage the village has, his very elderly and not particularly compos-mentis mentor having died, so (while his mother is helping her daughter with a new baby in another village), he gets sent off by a slightly apologetic mob to do something about the drought that is threatening everyone. It's vaguely known that there are Cloud Shepherds off in the mountains, and that a mage can go there and bring back rain, so that's his mission.

It's a dangerous road, so it's just as well that he's inventive and courageous, though he does have a realistic reaction to the various trials he encounters; he's not one of those stoic heroes of Very Serious Fantasy. This isn't Very Serious Fantasy, by the way; it has more than a hint of Terry Pratchett, not least in the apt observations about life that are dropped in occasionally ("If humans don't let things out, they get weird," says Oliver's armadillo familiar, for example).

The snide familiar is great, Oliver is appealing and feels real, and all in all it's a fun ride. There are certainly dark moments, but there are some hilarious moments and touching moments and moments of great kindness and humanity generously sprinkled in as well, and ultimately it's that side that wins out.

The editing is decent, but not perfect; the three copy editors have missed the author's persistent bad habit of putting the apostrophe in the wrong place when the noun is plural, and three or four places where she's missed a word out of a sentence, and a couple of places where there's a comma after "Sure" or "Of course" in a context where it shouldn't have a comma, because it's just agreeing with an earlier statement. Generally, though, it's clean.

View all my reviews

Review: The Crack in the Crystal

The Crack in the Crystal by Barak Engel
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

D&D-inspired (the characters are based on the party in a game that the author runs), but not simply D&D; there's no question of copyright issues. While the characters' classes are recognizable - sorcerer, rogue, ranger/druid, bard - their abilities aren't from a template common in their world, but are unusual and specific to them.

Because it doesn't simply follow a D&D game, but is a story created from scratch, it has more depth and coherence than you might otherwise expect, and the twist ending adequately accounts for the coincidences that are needed to make it work. The characters grow and change at least a little, their relationships develop, and the plot makes for a satisfying arc.

What it isn't is a heist. It starts out looking as if the characters are being assembled as a heist crew, but... they're not, and the heistlike parts at the beginning are rudimentary, and we're soon on to something else. I like heists, so this was a bit of a disappointment, but it's not like the quest/investigation plot that it turned into wasn't enjoyable.

Much of the prose is well edited; the author avoids several common mistakes, in fact. The main exception is that the past perfect tense is frequently missing. This was a constant irritation to me, because of the temporal whiplash of the narrative in simple past tense continuing to use simple past tense when it referred to events earlier in the past (prior to the narrative moment). I read a pre-publication version via Netgalley, so there is some chance that a good editor will fix this before publication, though honestly I would be a bit surprised if that happens. That's a big part of what kept the story from rising to the Silver tier of my annual recommendation list, though it's solidly in Bronze. This is a promising author, and I hope he learns to use the past perfect more consistently before writing a sequel, because I'd like to read it.

View all my reviews

Review: Dressed to Kill

Dressed to Kill by Crown Fall
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It's an odd fact that certain genres - notably steampunk, superhero prose and this book's genre, LitRPG - seem to attract authors who have very little idea of basic writing mechanics (commas, apostrophes, how to punctuate dialog, how to use the past perfect tense) and also have much smaller vocabularies than they think they have, so they write things like "disbursed" for "dispersed," "alight" for "light" (as in "light a fire"), "astride" for "alongside," "singular" for "single," "taught" for "taut," "wretched" for "retched," "seems" for "seams," "capitol" for "capital," "adorning" for "donning," "sheering" for "shearing," "sheathe" for "sheath," "wailed" for "whaled" (as in "whaled on"), "affixed" for "fixed," "pouring" for "poring," "shuttered" for "shuddered," "incidence" for "incident". All of those examples are from this book.

It's a pity, because this is a well-told and engaging story, if you don't mind the usual LitRPG business of the status screen with its stats and the absurd game logic. It's a fresh concept, too: the local Noble deliberately isn't clearing a dungeon, knowing that this will cause the safe space around the dungeon to contract, ultimately destroying the town there and forcing the townspeople out, whereupon he can take advantage of their lack of options (at least, so they believe). So two young women in the town with crafting classes are creatively misapplying them to clear the dungeon instead. One of them, the narrator, has been reincarnated after a life in our world, which doesn't make much difference - her otherworldly knowledge is useless in a setting where all the rules are completely different, not to mention that I got the impression that neither she nor the author has much useful knowledge about, say, engineering, farming, or medicine in any case - but it does provide an anchor for the reader and lets the author make comparisons to things in our world without it seeming out of place. (Except that it does seem out of place to some of my fellow reviewers, who have missed the fact that the character is a transmigrator.)

Even though there are three late-teenage characters, two female and one male, there's not the slightest hint of romance in any of the possible combinations; it's all about the dungeon-clearing. The guy is a blacksmith, and something of a coward (he makes himself impregnable armour and a huge shield but doesn't carry a weapon, and refuses to participate in clearing the dungeon). The two young women are a butcher and a seamstress, the seamstress, Gwen, being the narrator; as well as using her skills directly to kill monsters, she crafts gear out of monster parts to help them fight future monsters.

Unfortunately, as well as the all-too-common poor mechanics and vocabulary issues, this book has an issue I've never encountered before: the author has often copied and pasted, instead of cut and pasted, entire sentences or paragraphs in the course of revision, and the result is that the same words or a minor variation on them appear in two different places in the same scene. The continuity is also janky; for example, at one point Gwen's mother tells her explicitly what skill a piece of gear has attached to it, but in a later scene Gwen says that her mother didn't tell her, and they have to find out for themselves. Add to that the very common LitRPG fault that the numbers (for the levels of stats, amount of XP, and so forth) often aren't kept consistent between mentions - to the point that I suspect the author doesn't have a functional system to keep track of them, and I know that they haven't done a final consistency check - and this is a book that needs several more careful editing passes to bring it up to the standard that its storytelling deserves. Although I enjoyed it, I can't put it higher than the Bronze tier (the lowest tier) of my annual recommendation list; the execution is just too lacking in polish. But I would read a sequel, so that's something.

It's set up for a sequel - which looks like it will be an academy arc - by the ending, which unfortunately lets all the air out of the main antagonist and is a bit of a letdown in a way. It's an enjoyable journey to that point, though, so I still give it a positive rating.

View all my reviews

Review: Gaudy Night

Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It was clear from reading Murder Must Advertise that Sayers hated her time working in advertising; it's equally clear from reading this book that she loved her time at Oxford. In it, Harriet Vane, Lord Peter's love interest, returns to her old college and becomes involved in solving a mystery (not a murder mystery; there's someone sending unhinged and abusive notes and committing minor vandalism), at the same time wrestling with her own existential questions. Could she, even part-time, be a scholar as well as or instead of a mystery writer? Could she, can anyone, balance being a female academic and a wife, or is it one or the other? How does she feel about, and what should she do about, the fact that Lord Peter Wimsey loves her and has asked her several times a year for the past five years to marry him? Can a man and a woman be equal partners, or would she inevitably have to give up part of herself? Is the pursuit of truth the highest value, even above humane considerations? What is the responsibility of someone who unknowingly does harm with good intentions? The answers are complicated, and at least some of the questions seem to have been questions the author had as well; she is now known not only for her mystery novels but for her translation of Dante, for example.

Harriet Vane has an odd place in the Wimsey novels. She was introduced in Strong Poison , in which she was on trial for murdering her lover and in which Peter fell in love with her (for, as far as I'm concerned, inadequately justified reasons, though they receive some shoring up in this book), and also cleared her by discovering the actual murderer. In Have His Carcase , she discovers a murder (that may not even be a murder, but a suicide) by chance, and Peter takes advantage of the fact that she calls him in to help investigate by asking her repeatedly to marry him, which she repeatedly refuses to do. She's not mentioned at all in The Five Red Herrings (which comes between Strong Poison and Have His Carcase); she's mentioned only briefly, indirectly, and not by name in Murder Must Advertise , next after Carcase, and not at all again in The Nine Tailors , which comes between Advertise and this book. But here she's the viewpoint character most of the time.

The introduction to the edition I read was by the actress who played her in a TV series originally to be titled Harriet Vane, and covering Strong Poison, Have His Carcase and Gaudy Night, which became the inaccurately titled A Dorothy L. Sayers Mystery and then, for American broadcast, was renamed Lord Peter Wimsey, ironically in view of its original working title. So this adaptation of books by a woman, with a woman as a key unifying character, in which the man goes out of his way to give her independence and dignity, still ends up being named after him.

The book itself is complex, more of a true novel than a detective story, though it has both the good old standby subplots of mystery and romance going on (albeit not in a conventional way in either case). There's a lot of jargon and reference to features of life in academic Oxford, and English and Latin literature of the kind that one is presumably introduced to at Oxford, or was in the 1930s, at least, all of which requires annotations to make complete sense of; this site does a good job of providing such annotations, particularly necessary for the final scene, which contains a good deal of nuance that is lost if you don't know the background (and what the Latin means that Peter and Harriet speak in it). For me, it was a bit too much inside its milieu, like the earlier Murder Must Advertise with advertising and The Nine Tailors with campanology, awash in jargon that someone from outside that milieu would just find incomprehensible, even though it was never key to following the plot. Like both of those books and The Five Red Herrings, it also had a few too many minor characters who weren't adequately distinguished from one another and were hard to keep straight, in the absence of a dramatis personae page giving both their name and their role or occupation; this was especially the case in Gaudy Night, since sometimes a character would be referred to as "the Dean" or "the Warden" or "the Bursar" and sometimes by their name. These two factors (the overabundance of jargon and the large and inadequately distinguishable chorus) kept it out of the Gold tier of my annual recommendation list, despite the fact that it has exactly the kind of depth and reflection on the human condition that would normally put it there; it sits in Silver, with works that are solid but not brilliant, because the way in which it's brilliant wasn't particularly accessible to me and, therefore, not as enjoyable as it might have been. It's a failing in me as much as in the book.

I was also highly annoyed to be teased not once but twice with the possibility of Miss Climpson, my favourite character from the series, becoming involved, only to have her turn out to be unavailable to assist and so never seen on the page. (I would read the juice out of a book in which Miss Climpson and Bunter, my second-favourite character, team up to rescue Lord Peter, or to do anything else, for that matter.)

The Hodders edition I read shows telltale signs of having been set using a scan and OCR and then not proofread adequately; there are double commas, missing commas, inserted commas, commas that should be stops and vice versa, and typos (increasing towards the end, which suggests a rushed deadline), including several words that a simple spellcheck would have caught. A typical sloppy Hodders job. Get a different edition if you can manage it.

View all my reviews

Review: The Ballad of Sprikit The Bard And Company

The Ballad of Sprikit The Bard And Company by Sean O'Boyle
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It's very seldom that any book compared to Discworld is remotely close to the genius that was Sir Terry Pratchett, and this is not one of the rare exceptions, as far as I am concerned. I found it mildly amusing at best. At least it doesn't, like most of the Discworld would-be imitators, rely solely on stupid fantasy tropes and silly names for characters that are about as deep as the ink on the paper; there is some depth developed for the main character. There's not as much as I'd like, though, and the secondary characters, even the ones who are onscreen a lot, remain little more than their archetype plus their plot role. The setting is an extremely generic sword-and-sorcery world, though with hardly any magic in it. About the only original note is something I didn't find credible: the story takes place in the Free Lands, a lordless buffer zone between two large kingdoms/empires, which, though it certainly contains criminals hiding out from the law, is remarkably free of ruthless warlords taking advantage of the power vacuum, and seems to run surprisingly smoothly for the most part. Also, soldiers from one of the neighbouring powers are free to wander round it without anyone challenging their right to be there pursuing a supposed criminal (the main character, who has been framed). And I was never clear on who was minting the currency they used; maybe it came from one or other of the neighbouring powers.

Not only is it far from Terry Pratchett, it's not to be compared with The Lies of Locke Lamora , either. Where that book involves subtle and elaborate heists, this book mostly involves Sprikit telling lies that wouldn't fool a chicken and then having to flee when they are inevitably seen through.

My common-errors bingo card filled up quickly; especially prevalent were missing commas after such sentence-introductory words as "well" and "yes," and before and after terms of address (a very basic rule), but also commas inserted between adjectives that shouldn't have them. There are some mispunctuated sentences of dialog, a few sentences that don't make logical or grammatical sense or use the wrong preposition, and some vocabulary issues, notably "phase" for "faze," "wretched" for "retched" and "wailing" for "whaling," all common mistakes, but also "hilt" to mean "sheath," "namesake" to mean "name," and "binds" to mean "bonds" or "bindings". Apostrophes are often in the wrong place when a plural noun is involved, the past perfect tense is not always present where it should be (and sometimes when it is there, the verb is in the wrong form, though this may just be the author's dialect), and "may" is consistently used in past tense narration where it should be "might". "Lay" is used a couple of times for "laid" (a common overcorrection for an even more common error). All of these issues, as I say, are ones I see a lot, but here we see not only all of them but dozens of instances of some of them, which degrades my reading experience compared to a well-edited book. At just over halfway through (which is where I stopped), I had marked nearly 150 issues, and I'd stopped marking "Well" at the start of a sentence with no comma to follow it, because there were so many instances of it I would have been constantly marking them. This makes it, at a rough calculation, approximately 12 times as bad as the average book I read in terms of number of errors.

The book has strengths as well. Some of the set-pieces are well paced, with a good ebb and flow of tension as the protagonist almost escapes, then is very nearly caught, then is forced to an even more desperate action and almost escapes again... The closing in of the villain on the party gives us some sustained tension too, though not so much so that I wanted to keep slogging through the mediocrity in order to finish it.

Overall, it's a generic fantasy that I didn't find all that funny, or at all deep, and that needed a ton more editing. The author shows promise, but will need a lot more work to reach his potential.

View all my reviews