Review: Thornbound

Thornbound by Stephanie Burgis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Starts very strong, with a motivated protagonist in a dynamic situation, one of the best ways to begin a novel. For me, it didn't quite sustain that momentum, and there were one or two things I didn't believe along the way, but it's a sound piece of work nonetheless.

The characters are varied and distinct, and have a good combination of flaws and strengths. The irritating man with no social skills is fully believable, and so is the woman whose manipulation and insinuation go far beyond cattiness to outright malevolence. The characters who firmly believe that the protagonist, Cassandra, is being selfish and foolish in establishing a school to educate women in magic, when that's been the province of men for 17 centuries, are believable in their opinions; they think that this will undermine the whole social order by destroying the balance between the matriarchy that rules the country and the male magicians that support them, and that it will inevitably lead to dominance by men, as in every other country in the world. I wouldn't be too surprised if the author had taken inspiration from the arguments of 19th-century campaigners against votes for women.

There is a small, subtle - I might even say quibbling - worldbuilding misstep, or it seems that way to me. The country is called "Angland," implying an Anglo-Saxon conquest, which doesn't completely square with an uninterrupted 1700-year government established by the Britannic Celtic leader Boudicca. Also in worldbuilding, there are several characters who appear (by their names and descriptions) to be of at least partial South Asian descent, implying a British Empire that includes India, but that's never made explicit; they don't appear to face any discrimination, at least not from the characters we see, but that's not to say there is none. Otherwise, it's the same premise I've seen done by various other authors: Britain borders on the fae realm in some way, magic exists, no more worldbuilding is considered necessary.

The plot I felt was a bit of a muddle, but that's partly because Cassandra's life is a bit of a muddle. She's newly married, but her husband was called away from their wedding breakfast to fight fires for the Boudiccate (the government), which is his duty as a magical officer; however, they've kept him away from her for six weeks, in an attempt to make him resign and/or pressure her to give up on her idea of a magic school for women. She's been operating on little sleep during this time, getting the school ready. The school is just at the point of opening, and the Boudiccate drops a surprise inspection team on her, including an old enemy who would vote against her even if doing so involved setting herself on fire, and an old family friend who seems to be under some constraint to also vote against her, and may also genuinely believe it's a bad idea that will crash society. Cassandra has hired a weather wizard to cover the one subject she can't teach herself, and he's a huge pain as a human being. And on top of that, someone has made a dangerous bargain with the fae who inhabit the nearby wood. Also, one member of the inspection team - the junior member - is secretly engaged to one of the new school's students, and because it's a rule that to join the Boudiccate you have to be married to a mage, they both have a lot at stake in the success of the school, but at the same time it's going to be difficult to defy her seniors and vote in favour of the school, and her single vote won't swing it. (Same-sex marriage isn't a problem; female mages are.)

It's possibly a bit too much plot compressed into too small a space, and I felt it could have been given more room to breathe.

On that must-be-married-to-a-mage issue, there's something I need to discuss in spoiler tags, which seemed too convenient to me. (view spoiler)[The protagonist's sister Amy is married to a non-mage, and hasn't been able to follow her late mother-in-law into the Boudiccate as a result. As part of the resolution of the book, a newly-disgraced member of the Boudiccate has to resign - it's unclear to me exactly what, out of several possible things, will be announced as the reason, but it's something that will reduce her standing - and apparently she gets a vote on her exit to choose her successor, which is going to go to Amy. And this is apparently all that's needed to get Amy the position - it's spoken of as a done deal, despite the fact that she's married to a non-mage, which was previously presented as a huge problem, and will be going in with only the sponsorship of someone who is having to resign in disgrace, and is related to and openly supports Cassandra, who everyone thinks is a dangerous radical. I didn't buy it. (hide spoiler)]

A book with imperfections, then, but with a solid central core, and it just makes the Silver tier of my annual recommendation list. I've read the next novella in the series previously, and I do enjoy the world and its inhabitants, and will probably read more about them in due course.

View all my reviews

Review: John Thorndyke's Cases related by Christopher Jervis and edited by R. Austin Freeman

John Thorndyke's Cases related by Christopher Jervis and edited by R. Austin Freeman by R. Austin Freeman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

At the end of the first book, Jervis, the narrator, changes his situation in a way that would be a spoiler for that book, so here come the spoiler tags: (view spoiler)[he gets engaged (hide spoiler)]. This second volume in the series is a collection of short stories, and, presumably not finding that situation interesting anymore, the author gets around it in various ways. The first story is set prior to the first book (thus contradicting that book when it shows us that Jervis didn't know what Thorndyke was doing these days, hadn't been in touch with him for some time, and hadn't met his lab assistant); another story has Jervis go back to his previous job as a locum in order to put him in the midst of a mystery; most of them just ignore the situation entirely. Also largely ignored is Thorndyke's other job, as a lecturer; it doesn't ever seem to prevent him from going off to investigate something, and indeed seldom gets mentioned. It's therefore what I term a "superhero job".

The mysteries are not necessarily as colourful as the Holmes cases, but they are varied and clever and thoroughly researched, including actual scientific microphotographs of things like hair and seafloor sand. They're at the beginning of the forensic detective genre, and indeed of forensic science being a thing (Thorndyke is called a "medico-legal expert," but he's what we'd call a forensic scientist; he consults, rather than being part of the police force), and the emphasis is definitely on the clever unwinding of the case. Because Thorndyke always plays his cards close to his chest, and because his Watson, Jervis, is a bit obtuse (often missing things that were obvious to me), we don't get to see the great detective's chain of reasoning until he reveals it at the end of the story.

In contrast to the author's contemporary and partial namesake, Freeman Wills Crofts, the intelligence is mostly on the part of the detective, rather than the criminals; the crimes are often quite mundane once unwound, but the point is that they would have been misinterpreted if Thorndyke hadn't got involved. His specialty is rescuing suspects from wrongful conviction, some of them having been framed by the actual criminal, while others just happen to be in the vicinity of the crime (or, in one case, accident, as it turns out) with an apparent motive. Justice is done, not by the conviction of the guilty (at least not onscreen), but by the exoneration of the innocent.

Though I could wish for a slightly higher proportion of character development to cleverness sometimes, these are enjoyable, and I will keep reading the series.

View all my reviews

Review: The Red Thumb Mark

The Red Thumb Mark by R. Austin Freeman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The first of a series featuring a scientific detective, John Thorndyke, whose science and reasoning were, honestly, better than Sherlock Holmes, on whom he is clearly based. He's a medico-legal expert, and the books are written as if they're told by his Watson equivalent - also a doctor, brighter than Holmes's Watson, though nothing compared with Thorndyke.

It's an interesting premise: Diamonds have gone missing from a safe, and there's a big honking clue in the form of a fingerprint in blood that matches the safe owner's nephew. Problem is, nobody who knows the nephew believes for a second that he would do such a thing, but fingerprint evidence is generally taken as utterly compelling and incontrovertible. Enter Thorndyke, who looks beneath the surface and discovers, and eventually demonstrates brilliantly in court, that this isn't always the case.

Thorndyke keeps his plans and insights under wraps even from his assistants, so we keep reading in order to find out what they are. I did guess the culprit very early on, and even had a good idea how it might have been done (though not in the detail Thorndyke presents), but I had the motive wrong. My suspicions got stronger as the villain attacked Thorndyke with the intention of killing him and removing his contribution to the case (since only he knew what he was working on); this gave some action to the story. There was also a romance subplot, stronger and more developed than in a lot of books of the period, and because I liked both the course and resolution of it, that compensated somewhat for the fact that I'd guessed the culprit and their method.

Overall, the character work is better than average for the time, and the mystery is enjoyable and unusual, and I'll be reading more in this series. Some modern readers may find the highly-educated prose, with occasional Latin tags and quotations from English literature, offputting; it's the kind of thing Wodehouse parodied in Jeeves and Wooster, where Bertie always gets it wrong. But it's just the way that educated men of the era talked among themselves, and personally, I didn't mind it; it didn't reach the level of seeming pretentious.

View all my reviews

Review: The Cask

The Cask by Freeman Wills Crofts
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the first novel by Freeman Wills Crofts, and it has both similarities to and differences from his later works. The main thing that's the same is that the criminal is highly intelligent and capable and comes up with a complicated plot that initially baffles the investigators, but, by dogged perseverance, they eventually solve it. The main difference is a spoiler: (view spoiler)[The police investigation comes up with the wrong suspect, and a private detective ends up solving the mystery. In the author's other books that I've read, the pattern is more like: amateurs (who aren't detectives) investigate for a while, rather haphazardly, and then the police come in and do a professional job and wrap up the case. (hide spoiler)]

The appeal in this author's books is the puzzle or mystery, rather than the characters and their interactions, and the systematic approach to solving the mystery can become tedious at times. Also, in this case at least, there are multiple people who are involved in the solution, so there isn't a single protagonist that we follow all the way through. Among the careful checking of alibis and interviewing carters, porters, and other witnesses are a couple of action scenes, but mostly it's very procedural.

There's a scene, too, where a couple of things don't make sense. The detective is interviewing an informant, a typist who has been laid off, and observes that her good dress shows that her loss of employment hasn't placed her in want. However, she only lost her job a few weeks before, and presumably bought the dress while still employed, so it doesn't show anything of the kind. Also, when asked if she can prove that she worked for a particular firm for two years, she says she can't, but later in the same scene hands over a reference letter which proves exactly that. It has the feel of a scene that was added late and not properly revised or thought through, though of course I have no way of verifying that guess.

Otherwise, though, it's a meticulously crafted puzzle with some twists and turns, and an intriguing mystery. Not as good as this author's books later became, which is to be expected from a first novel, but I can see why it was popular enough that he kept writing.

View all my reviews

Review: The Pit-Prop Syndicate

The Pit-Prop Syndicate by Freeman Wills Crofts
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A clever mystery, with an unusual kick-off: A young Englishman, travelling on business across France, notices a lorry-driver surreptitiously changing the number on his lorry. Intrigued, and also needing petrol for his motorcycle, he approaches the mill from which the driver had come, and meets an attractive young woman. On his return to London, he tells the story in his club, and one of his friends, suspecting there's more to the story, suggests they investigate. For the sake of the young woman, who he's fallen in love with, the original young Englishman is reluctant to involve the police, but when there's a murder they have to call in Scotland Yard and put their investigations to date in the hands of the inspector in charge.

The first half is the two friends investigating in a kind of Boy's Own Paper way, while the second half is the professional investigation led by the Scotland Yard inspector in a straight police procedural. There's still plenty of suspense and mystery left, though; exactly what crime the Syndicate of the title is committing isn't clear until late in the book, and the reason for the changing of the number plate isn't explained until even later, so that kept me, as a reader, on the hook. The romance subplot and the character of the love interest are severely underdeveloped, as was the style at the time, but the fascination of the mystery makes up for any flaws, and it's a solid, entertaining book of the period (about a century ago).

View all my reviews

Review: Inspector French's Greatest Case

Inspector French's Greatest Case by Freeman Wills Crofts
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Inspector French starred in a number of books, of which I read the second one ( Inspector French and the Cheyne Mystery ) first. They are completely self-contained, and I didn't feel that reading them out of order made any difference.

These are early police procedurals, written by an engineer, with all the thoroughness and rigour that implies. These days, people who write police procedurals usually make the investigating officer quirky or eccentric in some way and often have some interpersonal dynamics going on as well, so that it's not just working through a series of investigative procedures, but that isn't how these are written. Since reading this one but before reviewing it, I've read another one and a half books by the same author, and although the inspectors are not Inspector French, they might as well be; they're interchangeable bland Everymen, and any personal relationships they have are entirely generic. If there's a romance subplot, it's at about the usual level for a male author of the time: very little on-screen time is devoted to developing it, so the courtship takes place over a short time period and the female love interest never gets to exhibit much personality. This book doesn't actually have such a subplot, though the second in the series does, and so does The Pit-Prop Syndicate .

What this author does, then, to hold the reader's interest, is to make the mystery itself so mysterious and intriguing that you want to see it solved, and also throw in some adventure or thriller elements. In this case, there are missing diamonds, disguises, false identities, a profusion of red herrings, and chases around Europe. It's entertaining and compelling at that level, so I hardly missed the characterization and relationship development that you'd get in a more modern book of this type. This author's criminals always seem to be highly intelligent and good planners, just not quite good enough to evade the detectives, and that makes for a pleasing mystery.

View all my reviews

Review: Claws and Contrivances

Claws and Contrivances by Stephanie Burgis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I enjoyed the first in this series, featuring the sister of this one's heroine, and this book is equally fun. It does stretch plausibility to the utmost in order that certain revelations can come at dramatic moments; the hero doesn't realise for 75% of the book that the heroine is the person he has a letter for (from her sister, updating her on the events of Book 1), because he gets her surname wrong and she never quite finishes correcting him in the course of their hectic conversations in the middle of various crises, and even when he does figure it out, he doesn't actually give her the letter until the 92% mark, because he doesn't want to distract her from her plans to foil the villain. There are always reasons for these unlikely delays and miscommunications - it's not just "so the plot can happen" - but it did strain my suspension of disbelief almost to the breaking point. It makes for a fun plot, though, and I forgive it.

Apart from one "into" that should be "in to" (yes, it matters), I spotted no mechanical errors apart from the fact that, by my count, there should be 26 fewer commas than there are - mostly between adjectives, because hardly anyone knows the coordinate comma rule. This doesn't quite count as "well edited" by my standards, but it's close. The Regency setting, as in the first book, feels more authentic than most Regency romances (despite the presence of small dragons with magic powers); it's not just 21st-century people shoved into crinolines. But, again as with the first book, the form the hero's admiration takes for the heroine - listening to her seriously and respecting her abilities - is modern, while also feeling like it fits into the time period. By the way, that's also a much healthier standard of interaction between hero and heroine than you'll find in the average Regency romance (or, probably, the average romance of any period, including contemporary; I mostly restrict my romance reads to Regency, fantasy, or, as in this case, both, so I can't say this for sure, but that's the impression I've gained).

The plot is a delight, lurching from one crisis to another, mostly caused by the characters being who they are: the heroine is principled and devoted to looking after others ahead of herself, the hero principled and absent-minded, the heroine's cousins include an airhead dramatic fan of Gothic romance and a bluff and confident and basically out lesbian (inasmuch as you could be an out lesbian in the early 19th century), and the villain is an avaricious and manipulative rake. The dragons are cute, the resolution is satisfying, and I look forward to the third book.

I'm confident that there will be a third book, because there's a third sister, the earnest but dreamy mathematician Harry. I thought when I finished the first book that she would be paired with the hero of this book, the earnest but dreamy dragon expert Mr Aubrey, but I now see that the author is smarter than I am; that would have been too much dreaminess all in one place. The hero of the first book has a handsome brother, who I initially thought would end up with the heroine of this book, so... we shall see.

View all my reviews

Review: Bookshops & Bonedust

Bookshops & Bonedust by Travis Baldree
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is an unusual one: a prequel (to Legends & Lattes that has the main character in common, shows how she obtained the sword that is a minor but significant symbol of her old life in Legends, but has basically no other overlap apart from the epilogue. They're set 20 years apart, and certainly that's enough time to fall out of touch with people when you're a travelling mercenary, so it's plausible enough.

Mechanically, it's to mostly a good standard, with a few small flaws. There are a couple of dangling modifiers, and the usual excess commas between adjectives (very few authors or editors seem to have a good grip on the coordinate comma rule); the seaside inn is named after a freshwater fish (The Perch), there are a couple of mentions of a "passenger frigate" when a frigate is specifically a warship, and the author writes "wrangle" where he means "wangle". In the scheme of things, this, and a couple of other even less significant glitches, are nothing compared to the mess in most of the books I read. It's well crafted overall.

Although it's mostly cosy fantasy, it isn't just a low-stakes slice-of-life idyll. It could easily have gone that way; Viv, the protagonist, is a mercenary in a sword-and-sorcery world, but she's recovering from an injury in a quiet town. It could have just been about her developing friendship with the owner of the local second-hand bookshop, her discovery of the joys of reading, and her awkward romance, acknowledged from the outset to be short-term, with the baker. That probably would have worked fine for many readers (though not all), but the author gives us a bonus subplot with the threat of the necromancer that Viv's party was pursuing when she was wounded, and a creation of hers who becomes an important character. There is (eventually) action, though Viv's status as a mercenary is always in the picture, reminding us that action is a possibility.

For me, this blend worked, alongside the strong work developing not only the various characters but also the relationships between them. It's more intelligent and definitely more sentimental (in, for my taste, a good way) than the average sword-and-sorcery tale, but also more suspenseful and exciting than the average slice-of-life cosy. It's not, in its own terminology, "moist"; although Viv reads several romances that are implied to be explicit, there's nothing explicit in the book itself, and we're left to fill in our own interpretation of whether or not her romance with the baker ever progressed beyond kissing.

It has enough development of the characters, enough reflection on life, and enough touches of beautifully-phrased but not self-indulgent language to make it to the Gold tier of my 2024 Best of the Year list.

View all my reviews

Review: Sargassa

Sargassa by Sophie Burnham
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

Another case of "well written but not for me."

It's dystopian, which is not a genre I enjoy, and it also features the kind of characters who you always feel are about to make a terrible decision that will plunge everything into tragedy, which I also don't enjoy. That's about taste, not quality; the author writes well, the mechanics are unusually good, and the premise (the Roman Empire somehow survived and, as far as I can make out, colonized North America; I think that's where we are), but it just isn't the right book for this reader.

View all my reviews

Review: The Copper Box

The Copper Box by J.S. Fletcher
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An unusual mystery story from 1923; there's no murder, and, indeed, no crime at all, and the viewpoint character doesn't solve the mystery that there is, and yet I found it a satisfying journey. There's a romance thread that doesn't get enough development to rise to the level of a subplot, even though it's important to the conclusion, but it's no less developed than plenty of romances in books of this period, and at least the couple spend enough time together to make it somewhat plausible that they know each other well enough for a successful relationship.

There are a few chance meetings between the viewpoint character and several other characters that serve to facilitate the progress of the plot, but it's reasonably credible that they would happen to be in the same place at the same time, so I haven't given it the "plot relies on coincidence" tag; and while the hero doesn't solve the mystery, he does protagonize, so I'm not going to tag it as a "main character lacks agency" story either.

View all my reviews

Review: Little Rays of Moonshine

Little Rays of Moonshine by A.P. Herbert
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A collection of good-naturedly facetious pieces, most of which originally appeared in Punch. I can tell that there are a lot of topical references that I'm not getting (not knowing the society and politics of Britain around 1920 in the same detail as someone who lived there), but I still found them amusing. I especially enjoyed the piece in which Herbert proposed songs along the lines of the Labour movement's The Red Flag for other political parties; the Tories' one is to the same tune and called The White Spat.

Occasional use of language that, a century later, is considered offensive.

View all my reviews

Review: Cursed Under London

Cursed Under London by Gabby Hutchinson Crouch
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

An unconvincing and under-utilized Elizabethan setting for a dark comedy that, for me, was too dark and not comedic enough, involving undead, fae, dragons, and sentient police birds.

The author has chosen to just use modern speech rather than attempt anything remotely Elizabethan for the dialog, and I think that's a good call; 99.9% of authors (probably more) aren't capable of doing Elizabethan dialog that's remotely authentic, and those who are capable still shouldn't, for the sake of the readers who are not familiar with the literature of the period. (The 99.9% who can't do a good job with it also shouldn't, for the sake of the readers who are familiar with the literature of the period, but this doesn't always stop them trying, sadly.)

The author has also chosen not to attempt to avoid anachronism, or else has done a poor job of avoiding it, probably the first one; it's amazing just how many everyday things have been invented or discovered since the reign of Elizabeth I. Business cards, for example. The fact that fish contains fatty protein and that might be good for a hangover. Boiling your water before using it to wash wounds, I would imagine. Off ramps, definitely. Passports as something every traveller needs and has. Hypnotism. Dating. Shopping bags? Not sure. Coffee, it turns out, was known in Britain by the late 16th century, though it would still have been a rare curiosity.

Even though I think the choice to use modern speech is right (both because I doubt the author could have pulled off accurate Elizabethan speech, and because even if she had, it would have made the book harder to read), I do think she could have avoided the worst anachronisms if she'd wanted to, and that the book would have been stronger for it. The anachronisms turn the Elizabethan era into scenery flats rather than a realized setting. The greatest drama of that day was fully capable of anachronism in the service of the art, and is none the worse for it, but really, the Elizabethan setting here goes to waste for lack of effort. Take out a couple of historical characters that everyone's heard of (Kit Marlowe and Shakespeare), who have minimal impact on the plot, and a brief cameo from Elizabeth herself at the end, and there's not much Elizabethan left. Honestly, very little would have changed if it had been set in almost any other era up to the early 20th century.

Speaking of the plot, I saw the resolution coming a very long way off and wasn't even mildly surprised when it arrived, with minimal assistance from the supposed protagonists, who had just been shown to be largely ineffectual puppets throughout the whole book.

Mechanically (bearing in mind that there may well be another round of edits to come after the pre-release version I read via Netgalley; I hope there is), there are some issues too. The book as a whole needs more hyphens, a few more apostrophes, and not quite so many commas (and some of them in different places, like before a term of address). A number of the excess commas are not unequivocally wrong; they're at places that are, at least, grammatical boundaries, but ones that normally wouldn't be marked with a comma. Some are, of course, between adjectives that are not coordinate, because just about everyone gets those wrong at least some of the time.

There are point of view shifts within a chapter, generally considered poor craft if you are writing in third-person limited, which the author seems to be doing.

I requested this book from Netgalley because I remembered enjoying another book by the author ( Glass Coffin ), though I think had it confused with another book by a different author, and I'd forgotten that I'd also read another book ( Wish You Weren't Here ) from this author that I didn't much enjoy because it was too dark. This one was also darker than I prefer, with an extended torture scene that I skimmed, and not as funny as I would have liked, and between that and the anachronisms and the shonky mechanics, I didn't love it. But I didn't completely hate it, and I enjoyed the hard-working, world-weary police swan Dame Isobel Honkensby (reminiscent of early Sam Vimes, though without as much personality), and a few other incidental moments along the way, so it just squeaks in for three stars.

View all my reviews

Review: The Complete Convergence Trilogy

The Complete Convergence Trilogy by Melissa McShane
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There are a lot of things I like about Melissa McShane's books (most of them; I'm not a fan of every series).

Firstly, they're well edited. This one has a few typos and other minor glitches, but I spotted a total of a dozen across all three books, and most books I read have twice that number in a single book, or more.

Secondly, the main characters are likeable, committed to doing the right thing, capable, intelligent, and have some depth to them; if they have tragic backstories, they don't whine about them or use them as an excuse for bad behaviour, and if they make bad decisions, they figure that out and do their best to recover and not do so again.

Thirdly, unlike a lot of prolific authors, McShane manages to introduce some depth to the fiction, provide insight into human nature and explore themes, and does that without bogging down the plot in a lot of navel-gazing or repeating herself unnecessarily.

Fourth, her settings and worldbuilding are original and feel solid and lived-in. No painted scenery flats or overworn cliché elements here. In this book, for example, we have two worlds, originally one, separated by magic that went wrong and now, centuries later, coming back together; each has its own part of the original magic system, and a significant thread throughout is figuring out how they relate to each other and whether they can be re-integrated.

If that was the whole thing, it wouldn't be exciting, but we also have romance, politics, war (between and among the people of the two formerly separated worlds), self-discovery, and a strong theme about leadership.

There are good leaders and bad leaders in this book, but not all the bad leaders are bad for the same reason. The main antagonist is a bad leader because she's both psychotic (not always in touch with consensus reality) and psychopathic (treats people as things), but she's the empress of an empire that treats its rulers as avatars of the divine, so... that's a problem. But there are also leaders who are capable administrators but lack a broad perspective because of personal ambition or bigotry, and petty leaders who put their own advancement and glory ahead of the actual aim they're supposed to be working towards, and a leader who isn't very bright and whose decisions are largely driven by cowardice, and leaders who, while both capable and willing to join in the effort for the greater good, are utter weasels. On the flip side, during the course of the story the protagonist gradually comes into her own leadership abilities, which she at first doubts; she's a good leader in part because she's humble. And she observes the leadership style of her love interest, and comments on it throughout; he learns some things about leadership too.

The story is told through her diary entries, which isn't going to be to everyone's taste; I know some readers don't like the epistolary style, though personally I enjoy it. The entries are written after the events, of course, so there's a lot of foreshadowing, and sometimes she has to stop and start again and tell things in the right order, all of which underlines the diary conceit and makes it more believable (though, again, there will be readers who find it annoying).

There's plenty of tension; multiple well-handled, intersecting emotional, character, and plot arcs; and just so much sound craft on display that I can't give it less than five stars. Highly recommended.

View all my reviews

Review: The Golden Triangle

The Golden Triangle by Maurice Leblanc
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Every Lupin book is a little different, but this is one of a group of at least three, written around the same time, that have some strong similarities. We get a long period of setup during which Lupin isn't even mentioned, then someone calls him in as a consulting problem-solver. By this time, we've had drama amounting to melodrama, intense love (often involving someone married to someone else), intense hatred (generally involving the someone else), tragedy, treachery, and patriotism; it couldn't be more French if you fried it in butter and stuck a tricolour flag in it.

In this one, you have sinister Levantines, hidden gold, two people who discover that a mysterious benefactor has been working for years to bring them together, murder, the backdrop of the Great War, a courageous but headstrong protagonist, and, of course, the extreme cleverness and Peter-Pan-like crowing of Lupin as he solves the mystery. It's all thrilling and sensational, if sometimes a bit too much so.

Unfortunately, we also have a black colonial soldier who is literally treated like a dog (he's largely unable to talk because of a war wound, so the protagonist pretends to have discussions with him when thinking aloud, as you would with a pet); he's several times called something that is deeply offensive these days, and (view spoiler)[ends up dying in the service of his "master" (hide spoiler)]. That does introduce a flaw into what is otherwise a rip-roaring novel of action, mystery and suspense.

View all my reviews

Review: Legends & Lattes

Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'd been going back and forth about whether I wanted to read this, having read mixed reviews, but two members of my writing critique group recommended it, so I gave it a go.

I'm glad I did. Unlike the earlier, in some ways similar, novella Coffee, Milk & Spider Silk , it makes full use of its sword-and-sorcery setting, mashing it up with modern coffeehouse culture but at least changing the names of things in a way that made sense for the fantasy world. The fact that Viv is an orc and used to be an adventurer matters, in a way that the MC in the other book's identity as a drider and a former cop absolutely did not.

I should disclose that I dislike coffee, as Tolkien said of Dune, "with some intensity," and don't frequent coffee shops, but I still enjoyed this cosy fantasy about the first coffee shop in a fantasy city. When I say "cosy" fantasy, that's partly about tone (I wrote about this in a blog post a couple of years ago, entitled, tongue in cheek, A Cozy Manifesto); but it's also about the stakes being relatively local and personal, rather than global or cosmic or even national, and this book certainly matches that part of the definition. Still, an important element of the book is that not only Viv, but a number of other people, come to care about the success, and indeed the existence, of her coffee shop; the stakes are interpersonal as well.

And this isn't just a slice of life, in which Viv and co. putter along putting new things on the menu from time to time, though it's that too. There's a plot, with challenges to overcome, and part of the importance of it is that Viv doesn't deal with it the way she once would have when she was an adventurer (of, if I had to guess, the Barbarian class), by taking her greatsword off the wall and going about beheading people; she forms alliances instead.

If I have a quibble, it's that the challenges are overcome quite easily, though that's not unexpected in a cosy, after all. People (mostly) act sensibly and with goodwill; the one character who would belong in a grimdark fantasy stands out in stark contrast. This warm tone is the essence of cosy.

In terms of editing, apart from a few too many commas between adjectives that don't require them (a mistake practically everyone makes these days), and a dangling modifier or two, it's very clean. In an interview that's included in the back, the author quotes (unfortunately without attribution) an excellent piece of writing advice that he follows, and that I wish more authors would follow: "Write using words you know, in your own voice."

The result is an enjoyable, well-executed piece which makes me want to read more from this author.

View all my reviews

Review: Eluthienn: A Tale Of The Fromryr

Eluthienn: A Tale Of The Fromryr by Sam Middleton
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

Sadly, it appears to be an unwritten law that you can have airships in your book, or you can use vocabulary correctly, but it's either one or the other. This book conforms to that law, and is also frequently missing the past perfect tense; in fact, it has a fairly complete collection of common issues, including dangling modifiers, sentences that change grammatical direction partway through, and commas before the main verb. I'll note, as always, that I read a pre-release version via Netgalley and the published version may have fixed some of the issues, though there are enough of them that I'm confident a lot will remain. Some of the vocabulary errors were very basic, too, like taught/taut or even it's/its; another demonstration that having an English degree does not mean you've learned good mechanics.

The story was better than the execution, but more tragic and serious than I personally prefer; there's an occasional bit of humour, but it's usually coarse jokes by secondary characters. It wasn't so good that I was willing to keep slogging through the ropy mechanics to see how it ended, though. I did my usual test, when I'm finding a book heavy going, of going off and reading something else to see if I cared enough about the characters to come back to it, and discovered I didn't.

At the point I gave up on it, about halfway through, the two storylines and their two protagonists had not yet intersected. Other reviews indicate that once they do, things get more exciting, though the action scenes weren't really what I had a problem with. There was the occasional scene where the description of every step the character took through the (admittedly somewhat interesting) setting became a bit much, and I wanted more summary of things that didn't matter so we could get to the things that did; the author, I think, is proud of the setting, having done a lot of work on it, and wants to show it off, but overdoes it now and again.

I had some trouble believing in the idea of a vast underground realm where flying ships nearly 1km long and 400m wide (assuming a "league" has its usual meaning of three miles) have plenty of room to maneuver, and things being hexagonal or octagonal apparently because it was cool rather than for any practical reason didn't help, but at least it was fresh and original.

I'm following my usual practice of not giving a star rating on Goodreads to a book I haven't finished, but Netgalley will make me give a rating; it will be three stars, because honestly most authors have bad mechanics these days (though these are worse than average), and the story wasn't awful, just not much to my taste. Lots of people will enjoy this more than me.

View all my reviews

Review: Unnatural Magic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

View all my reviews

Review: The Knife and the Serpent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

View all my reviews

Review: Inspector French and the Cheyne Mystery

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

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

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

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

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

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

View all my reviews

Review: The Secret of Sarek

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

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

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

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

View all my reviews

Review: Emissary

Emissary by Melissa McShane
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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

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

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

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

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

View all my reviews

Review: Journey to Everland Bay

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

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

View all my reviews

Review: The Ruthless Lady's Guide to Wizardry

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

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

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

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

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

View all my reviews

Review: Illuminations

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

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

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

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

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

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

View all my reviews

Review: Terrestrial Passions: A Regency Romance, with Aliens

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

View all my reviews

Review: Princess of Prophecy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

View all my reviews

Review: The Untold Story

The Untold Story by Genevieve Cogman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A rip-roaring conclusion to an excellent series. The hints about the origin of the multiverse, the Library, the dragons and the fae that have been teased in the last couple of books come into the foreground, and once again, Irene has to step up and do brave and principled things with the help of her loyal allies to keep widespread badness from affecting multiple worlds. The pacing is brisk, but not at the cost of exposition or character development, and the action is intelligent and means something; it's not just pretty fireworks.

One thing I appreciated that you wouldn't get from every author: Even though all of the arcs come to an emotionally satisfying conclusion, we don't get a neat explanation of everything. The original motivations of the main antagonists for setting up the situation as they did remain ambiguous, with several different possibilities proposed and no clear evidence as to which one is correct. And, in context, this works much better than the alternative.

As with all of the books in the series, the editing is good, though I did spot half a dozen typos. All of the words mean what they're being used to mean, the commas and apostrophes and hyphens are in the right places, and the author knows how to narrate in the past tense. I wish this didn't make this book stand out above the vast mass of books, indie and trad-published, that I read, but sadly it does.

I hope the author goes on to write many more books as good as this, now that this series is concluded; I'll certainly be watching for them.

View all my reviews

Review: Money for Nothing

Money for Nothing by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Not in the absolute first rank of Wodehouse, but a solid, amusing piece nonetheless, featuring several characters who turn up in other books; the hapless criminals "Chimp" Twist and Dolly and Soapy Molloy first appeared in Sam the Sudden and also have roles in several subsequent books, and Ronnie Fish and Hugo Carmody are later seen in the Blandings novels Summer Lightning and Heavy Weather (Ronnie being a nephew of the Earl of Emsworth).

The central romance involves Hugo's cousin John, a worthy but diffident man, unlike most other Wodehouse characters in that he has a job (manager of his uncle Lester Carmody's dairy farm), is good at it, and apparently likes it. He is, and has been for years, in love with Pat, the daughter of his uncle's currently-estranged friend Colonel Wyvern (the stock retired military man of the village), but she doesn't rate him because she sees him as lacking backbone. In the course of the book, he demonstrates that this is not the case.

Lester Carmody conspires with the criminals, not knowing that they're career criminals, to defraud his insurance company and convert some family heirlooms that are entailed to the estate into ready money. Of course, everyone double-crosses everyone else, and through a combination of courage and outright good luck, John is able to foil the scheme; in this sense, it's a kind of anti-caper in the same way that the Jeeves and Wooster books are generally anti-romances. Along the way, we meet a typical menagerie of vivid minor characters, from the elderly, rabbit-loving Carmody butler to the ex-sergeant-major who works for "Chimp" Twist under the impression that he's a respectable physician running a legitimate health farm, the gossipy local chemist, and John's opinionated Welsh terrier, Emily.

It's all good fun, well paced, full of reversals and near-misses and shenanigans, conveyed in the trademark playful-but-apt Wodehouse language. The copy I had from Project Gutenberg is based on the US publication, which has a few passages that the British edition lacked, according to the Madam Eulalie fan-site; it's well edited and shows minimal scan issues.

View all my reviews

Review: Empire of Shadows

Empire of Shadows by Jacquelyn Benson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is pulp - intentionally so - with both the strengths and weaknesses that implies.

In terms of strengths, it's an exciting adventure with a Smart, Plucky Gal and a Hunky-but-Sensitive Man going into the wilds of British Honduras (now Belize) after a legendary, and apparently magical, artefact, in contention with a sinister and capable villain representing a shadowy cabal. The characters have personal weaknesses as well as strengths, have believable reasons for (in her case) not being initially honest and for (in both cases) not pursuing the romance they both come to want, and they are clearly of good intent. The storytelling and pacing are sound, and the emotional arcs well executed. The intelligent young woman is actually intelligent, both in that she knows a great deal about archaeology and in that she doesn't make obviously stupid decisions and have to be rescued from the consequences every five minutes (she rescues him at a key moment, in fact), and the decent guy is actually decent, which for me makes for an appealing romance couple; when the romance heats up, even without being explicit it's steaming hot, partly because they have such good chemistry. Ellie is also a more convincing archaeologist than, say, Indiana Jones or Lara Croft; she does her best to prevent the destruction and/or looting of archaeological sites, and values them primarily for the knowledge they hold. (view spoiler)[That doesn't totally work out, but... she tries. (hide spoiler)]

I went into the book not knowing anything about British Honduras in 1898, but the local detail felt authentic and gave the impression of an author who'd done the research; someone who knows more would very likely spot errors (judging by the issues I saw in the aspects I do know about, of which more below), but to someone like me who knows nothing about the setting, it's more than good enough to pass. I assume the discovery of another civilization ancestral to both the Maya and the Aztecs is part of the fiction, but (again, to a layman) the author sells it convincingly.

It's a long book, but the pace never lags, and I didn't feel tempted to put it down and read something else.

In terms of weaknesses, it requires an Accidental McGuffin Discovery followed by a Convenient Eavesdrop to get the plot in motion, and that's not the last coincidence either (turns out there's another connection between the chance-met main characters that raises the stakes of the romance plot). The characters have some lucky escapes, too. (view spoiler)[It's eventually suggested that all this is not coincidence, but manipulation by supernatural forces. (hide spoiler)]

Like practically every book written by a 21st-century American with 19th-century British characters, it has a good many minor anachronisms (like a character who's being laid off asking about "severance pay" in 1898, and phrases like "sociopathic human lie detector," which is two anachronisms for the price of one); Americanisms in the mouths of British characters ("someplace," "off of"); and instances of incorrectly used vocabulary (like "malingering," which means pretending to be sick to get off work, used for someone who's been lurking around and spying); several British idioms are also used incorrectly, particularly "the rub" used to mean, I think, "the nub." The errors generally consist of substituting a word that sounds vaguely similar to the correct one, but means something completely different, which for some reason is a characteristic problem for fiction written in the 21st century but set before World War I. I think people attempt the more formal English of the Victorian era and end up using words they think they know, but actually don't. "Laid" is consistently used where the word should be "lay," too, and "arcana" is used as if it was both singular and plural (the correct singular is "arcanum").

The author is better than average with commas, apart from coordinate commas, which hardly anyone seems to get right, and which her volunteer editor, fellow author Olivia Atwater, is also bad at. She only messes up apostrophes occasionally, but makes almost every mistake it's possible to make with hyphens (again, Olivia Atwater is particularly bad at hyphens): putting them where they don't belong (such as between an adjective and the noun it modifies), not putting them where they do belong (such as in numbers between twenty-one and ninety-nine), or putting some but not all of them in compound adjectives like "two-thousand-year-old". She also misses the occasional word out of a sentence.

I also get the impression that the author is, at best, vague about the distinction between a rifle and a shotgun, which if you're writing adventure fiction you really should take the time to learn.

Note that I read a pre-release version via Netgalley, and some of these issues may be fixed by publication.

Still, although - like practically every book I read these days - it could benefit from more polishing, it's entertaining, suspenseful, fun and features a likeable couple, and I enjoyed it.

View all my reviews