Review: City of Serpents: The Secrets of Ormdale, Book 4

City of Serpents: The Secrets of Ormdale, Book 4 by Christina Baehr
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

These books make me feel things - amusement, mostly, but also sadness and tension in sympathy with the plight of various characters - and that boosts their rating in my personal system. The main character and narrator, Edith, is a delight - principled without being pompous about it, brave, clever, and showing a delightful humility, and a willingness to work with others rather than go it alone, that I wish more protagonists had.

It does have a few minor flaws. Because I listened to the audiobook, I can't comment on the copy editing, except for a couple of language issues that came through even in audio format. Firstly, Edith (or rather the author) sometimes says "lay" where an actual speaker of Edith's dialect would use "lie," and secondly there's an instance of the "she glimpsed at me" error I've seen a few times. It should be either "glimpsed" or "glanced at," depending on whether the subject is doing it deliberately or not. Both imply momentary seeing, but "glimpsed" means something like "happened to see momentarily because of already looking in a particular direction"; it implies passive observation, whereas "glanced at" implies that the subject was directing their gaze, which is why it gets the "at" preposition and "glimpsed" doesn't. There are occasional minor Americanisms, too.

The plot doesn't completely rely on coincidence, but coincidence does help it along now and again and keep the cast tight and densely connected.

The various dragon-keeping families have several times now mentioned lighting beacons to signal each other for aid, but it's unclear how that would work, given that beacons are a line-of-sight signal and someone in between would have to pick up the signal and pass it on (the distances are great enough that line-of-sight doesn't apply).

My other question was, did young women routinely carry walking sticks in 1899? Young men certainly did, but I don't think healthy young women did, so arming themselves in this way would have been rather obvious.

None of this was even close to being fatal for my enjoyment of Edith's voice and her actions, and this largely real-feeling version of England (mainly London) at the end of the 19th century. The author reads extensively in literature of the period, and it shows. A lot of people who set their books in earlier time periods fail to give them any sense of authenticity, and I think it's partly because they've either never read or at least never really thought about anything written at the time. Edith is of her time while being fully relatable to a present-day reader, and it's an admirable feat of craft that makes her that way.

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