Review: Hull and Fire

Hull and Fire by James W. Cutter
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'm always keen on some original worldbuilding, especially if it's essential to the plot and not just there for decoration, and this book offers some. It takes the approach of not always explaining the world immediately, so for a while you have to just let the unexplained cultural references wash over you. For myself, I prefer a little bit of infodumping to being left wondering what the heck the thing that was just mentioned is and why it matters, but tastes in this regard differ.

We have a world where a group of islands has mysteriously appeared, changing the weather, and also there's a new continent which is in the process of being colonized and which generates a mysterious call for at least some people who go there. The world is filled with lines of magical force or connection which some people can perceive and manipulate, using them both for communication and to pull ships along. All of which is cool and has a lot of potential, though in this book it's more potential than actual; the worldbuilding is relevant a couple of times, but it's not like it powerfully drives the whole book, apart from the new continent being a destination for the characters for various reasons - and that would have worked just about as well without the continent having recently come into existence, as far as this book is concerned.

The blurb did make me nervous that the book would turn out to be dystopian or depict a lot of cruelty and tragedy, and there was some, but not more than I could stand. The main characters are mostly of an ethnic group known as Woads, who are distinguished by having blue hands; they are currently being persecuted by a post-revolutionary government who overthrew a Woad emperor, and two of the viewpoint characters are a Woad brother and sister from an ancient landowning and merchant house, recently in decline, living in a free city near the former empire. They find that their fellow citizens, who they grew up with and dealt with on what they thought were terms of mutual respect, have turned against them under the influence of the post-revolutionaries. I had a moment of disbelief that a family who had been part of the city for a thousand years would suddenly be persecuted like that, but then I thought about the Jews. Though I did have some difficulty with the idea that a genetic difference could have been around for a thousand years (or more) and not spread to the whole population through intermarriage, which appears not to be a taboo.

The author can mostly punctuate, except that he puts commas between adjectives that do not require them (very common - but I haven't seen many people put a comma after the adjective "single," which he does), and sometimes uses a hyphen when he shouldn't, such as between an adjective and its noun; in fact, practically every hyphen he includes is in a place where no hyphen should be. He's also bad with homonyms, committing a lot of the common homonym errors and even one I hadn't seen before (hew for hue). I'll pass on the full list to the publisher in the hope they can be fixed in the ebook before publication, or maybe shortly after. There are a few examples of most of the other common errors that many people make: missing past perfect tense, "may" where it should be "might," and so forth, and some comma splices.

These issues aren't constant, so I was able (mostly) to focus on the story. Unfortunately, this is very much a setup book, introducing the characters and their issues and getting them ready to go to the new continent, where presumably more will happen. They do have obstacles to overcome in getting away from the city, but the book doesn't feel like it tells a complete story or is particularly strong in plot at all, though I wouldn't call the ending a cliffhanger.

I find I'm not sufficiently engaged to quite want to carry on with the series, though I was certainly engaged enough to finish the book. Part of that, as so often happens, is the editing issues wearing away at my enjoyment, and some readers will not notice those, and will be able to focus better on the other aspects. It's an original world with some interesting worldbuilding, though that's not so far strongly incorporated, and the characters are reasonably appealing, but it just doesn't quite grab me hard enough to make me want to continue.

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