Review: Short Fiction

Short Fiction by R.A. Lafferty
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Every Lafferty story I've read goes more or less the same.

1. Something weird happens, either to an individual or to the world, for reasons that are largely unexplained and unexplored.

2. Not-especially-ethical people deal with it the way such people do.

3. This doesn't end well.

It's not a formula I love, and I didn't much enjoy these stories, particularly since Lafferty had the misogyny that was common in his time very much on display. It's often mentioned that Lafferty, like Gene Wolfe, was a devout Catholic, but I see very little evidence of it in most of their work; the tone is generally cynical and misanthropic, and rather than being set in a well and benevolently ordered universe, their fiction shows us random, inexplicable events. At least Lafferty's characters mostly behave like human beings, even if they're generally the less admirable type of human being. I've never felt that Wolfe's characters made any sense at all.

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Review: Hot Water

Hot Water by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Wodehouse is best known for his series books, but he wrote some wonderful standalones as well, and this is one.

It's very much in the formula, but it's a formula I enjoy, so that's fine. There's a man of action at the heart of it, a decent fellow who nevertheless doesn't scruple about a few falsehoods in a good cause. He's engaged to one of Wodehouse's attractive-but-managing young women, who is determined to develop his sensibilities, whether he wants her to or not. There's also a managing older woman whose husband, having lost his own money and being dependent on hers, is a cypher in the home, and resents it deeply, but doesn't see what he can do about it. His wife wants him to become American Ambassador to France, which is the last thing he wants, and is putting the screws on Senator Opal to make that happen. One of the screws she is putting on Opal is that he accidentally swapped two letters, and sent his refusal of her invitation to his bootlegger, and an order for alcohol to her. Given that he's a prominent Dry (a proponent of prohibition legislation) in public, this is powerful blackmail material, and the letter therefore becomes a McGuffin.

Of the twelve characters with a part to play in the plot, six of them are operating under some form of false identity at some point during the book, and the hero, Packy, ends up using three false identities, if you count pretending to be the Senator's daughter's fiancé. I don't think that's even a record for a Wodehouse hero, but it leads to wonderful complications for all concerned, as Packy tries to retrieve the letter for the Senator, definitely not because he's in love with the Senator's daughter, given that he's engaged to the managing beauty and the daughter is engaged to the wet Bloomsbury novelist. No, it's definitely not for that reason.

Meanwhile, there are four different crooks and an undercover detective operating in the French Riviera chateau where most of the action happens, drawn there by the managing older lady's jewellery (given to her by her husband during his prosperous years, before the stock market crash wiped him out). Also, there's a disreputable and dissolute, but basically harmless, young French aristocrat who's a friend of Packy's and the son of the owner of the chateau.

The farce is high, the prose, while not as crammed full of quotations as Wodehouse often is, sparkles along, the plot is intricate and beautifully handled, and overall it's a good time.

As is often the case with these Cornerstone Digital editions, this one shows clear signs of having been scanned using OCR and then given little or no proofreading, something which it badly needed. There are a great many missing quotation marks, some other missing punctuation (usually at the ends of sentences), and inserted hyphens where, in the print version, a word broke across two lines. There are even a few instances of what look like page numbers dropped into the middle of the text. It's distracting and unprofessional, and I recommend not buying these editions. (I got my copy from the library.)

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Review: The Case of Jennie Brice

The Case of Jennie Brice by Mary Roberts Rinehart
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A short book - I read it in not much more than a couple of hours - but full of good material. The narrator is a woman from a wealthy family who was cut off by that family completely when she ran away from school to marry an Englishman named Pitman (since deceased). Shockingly, this turned out not to be a great decision, though she's mostly philosophical about the consequences - she's now running a theatrical boarding-house in a dubious part of Pittsburg that floods each winter, near her childhood home. By coincidence, her niece, who has no idea of the relationship, becomes peripherally involved in the story.

Content warning, by the way: a number of people and animals drown in the annual floods. Mrs. Pitman is regretful but philosophical about this too.

Mrs. Pitman is very much the main character, even though as far as the events of the mystery plot go, she's at least as much observer as participant. She is the first to be suspicious when one of her boarders, Jennie Brice, disappears after quarreling with her husband, and she supplies important clues and observations, but the work of solving the case is done mostly by an amateur detective who happens by in a boat, from which he has been feeding animals trapped by the floodwaters. He gets interested in the case, and moves into the boarding house, the better to pursue it. He's retired, with a little money, so he can do what interests him.

Mrs. Pitman's character is well developed, with her occasional musings about the course of her life, her surreptitious encouragement of her niece and the niece's suitor, her rivalry with Molly Maguire next door, and her observations on the mystery.

The mystery takes several twists along the way, and is cleverly resolved. In other books I've read by this author (notably The Man in Lower Ten ), the focus was so much not on the mystery plot that I came out of it disappointed, but this one has a better balance between "story of someone involved peripherally in a mystery" and "mystery story." It also (again, unlike The Man in Lower Ten) doesn't overplay the role of coincidence. There is some coincidence, notably the connection with Mrs. Pitman's niece, but it isn't central to the plot.

Written in 1913, the book shows us a world in which telephones are becoming common, but gas lighting is still used, and there are still a lot more horse-drawn than motorised vehicles. It's an atmospheric period piece with an appealing central character and a well-plotted mystery.

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Review: Dorcas Dene, Detective

Dorcas Dene, Detective by George Robert Sims
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An early "lady detective," who was formerly an actress, so she's amazing at disguises. Her Watson (whose name is Saxon) is a sometime theatrical producer who knew her in her acting days, and becomes a friend of hers and her (blind) husband's. I did suspect that he was a little in love with her, though, as a decent fellow and a friend of the couple, he didn't do or say anything about it.

The big flaw of the stories is that they tend to tell us the solution rather than showing us how it was reached sometimes, though this isn't a universal fault. The very-end-of-the-19th-century setting is interesting (the more so because, having read a few books set in the following decade, I was amazed how quickly things changed). The detective is competent and clever, the Watson admiring and not up to much in terms of figuring out mysteries, but a good man to have nearby in case any action becomes required, and doesn't seem to have any difficulty finding time to assist the detective. In other words, he's a classic Watson - let's remember, Sherlock Holmes had debuted only ten years earlier.

Mrs. Dene takes a pragmatic view of the sometimes scandalous lives of the people she investigates, and is always professional and capable. An enjoyable set of stories, not among the greats, but better than plenty of other now-obscure classic mysteries, many of which deserve their obscurity.

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Review: The Standard Book of Anything

The Standard Book of Anything by Andrea H. Rome
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

This, for me, falls into a gap between two very disparate genres. One is cozy fantasy, and the other is dystopian. The scene in which the MC is rendered unconscious for sinister purposes by means of a spa treatment epitomises the clash between an element that should be cozy and an outcome that very much is not. I'm not sure how intentional the mixture is, but for me, it was always on the edge of not working.

Unfortunately, the writing is also in severe need of much more past perfect tense. The past perfect is used sometimes, but it needs to be used consistently. First of all, when referring to events that happened prior to the narrative moment, so that the reader doesn't suffer temporal whiplash trying to figure out the sequence, particularly in one case where the narration starts at one time, flashes back briefly to earlier events, and then returns. It's like a car changing lanes abruptly without signalling. As well as that, though, there are several cases where the author writes something like "she never knew X" when, in fact, she now does know X, having just learned it, and so the phrasing should be "she had never known X".

This isn't the only lack of clarity, either. At one point, a female character cups another female character's chin. This is described as "She cupped her chin," the obvious reading of which is that the character cupped her own chin, but two sentences later we discover that the "she" and the "her" were two different people, meaning I had to go back and re-parse the whole paragraph.

A dog who is a long way off, leading pursuers away, is, suddenly and with no transition, right there with his people.

Then there are the vocabulary issues. "Millennia" used as if it was singular (that would be "millennium"). "Marshall" with two Ls, which is a surname, used in place of the job title "marshal" with one L. "Betraying" for "belying" (most people get those confused in the other direction), "discrete" for "discreet" (a very common error), "bedclothes" for "nightclothes" (bedclothes are sheets and blankets), "peaked" for "peeked." There are misplaced commas now and again, and a couple of misplaced apostrophes. Nothing I haven't seen before, but it all adds up. One I hadn't seen before is "annuls" for "annals."

There's also a big clanging anachronism: "They weren't on the empress's radar." That's the kind of mistake you can only commit if you don't give a moment's thought to the literal meaning of the cliche you are using. This has got past half a dozen beta readers and an editor, according to the author's note at the end, so I can only imagine there were a lot of other issues distracting them from it.

Em, the protagonist, while she is one of those infuriating characters who gets in trouble by making the same stupid decision repeatedly, is well-intentioned, and in a difficult situation that's none of her making, but stepping up to try to solve it. That is what kept me reading, despite the mechanical problems. Her use of magic items at one point is moderately clever.

She's a person who fixes things, as in a handyperson - that's her occupation. This is the second book I've read recently where a young woman is portrayed as capable by making her someone who does home repairs (the other being Partridge Up a Pear Tree (and Dragons) ), but I felt this one did a better job of incorporating it into her character and making it part of how she approached the world, rather than just being a decal that said, against all other evidence, that she was competent and practical. I like a competent young woman protagonist, though I prefer ones who don't keep making the same stupid mistake.

The world is one where magic use is fading. The government (headed by an empress) is actively suppressing it, in fact, but it turns out there's a good reason - magic has caused a lot of problems. Still, the goon squad who come in search of one of the protagonist's friends to arrest him for magic use is needlessly brutal and bullying, and their captain, who later is portrayed as not so bad after all, does nothing to stop them, something that Em doesn't confront him about. Em's village has lost its guardian tree, which was suppressing negative emotions and producing a cozy-style village artificially - perhaps the whole book is a critique of the cozy genre? The loss of the tree causes a surge of negative emotions that tears the village apart, and Em leaves to find a solution, having a series of adventures. She's guided, or misguided, by the magical book of the title, which hints at directions for her to follow but never tells her everything she needs to know in order to get it right.

Em echoes, but never just follows, the fantasy cliche of the young orphan craftsperson who must leave the village when it's destroyed, encounters helpful and loyal companions and gains useful magic items; that side of the story is genre-savvy, and I think there may be some thought going on about artificial utopias, dystopias, negative consequences of attempting to make people happy and contented artificially, and the contentment of one group being purchased at the price of tragedy for another. (view spoiler)[Unfortunately, the resolution doesn't back up the direction of "you can't fix things with magic, but you can fix them with skin" (possibly misremembered Granny Weatherwax quotation). The magic tree isn't a good way of helping people, but another magic plant with healing properties instantly gets the villagers over their mental and emotional confusion and distress and enables them to go back to being sane and neighbourly. The text says "without enchantment," but that's simply not true. The solution was magic all along. That struck me as backing down from what could have been a more powerful and developed theme. (hide spoiler)]

If the execution had been better, and the resolution had stuck the landing, these underlying ideas could have worked, but it's not enough just to have a good idea about a theme; you have to pay attention to the details that convey it to the reader on a sentence-by-sentence level, with clarity and accuracy that let the reader absorb the story undistracted by mechanical glitches, or by having to re-parse poorly phrased sentences. For me, that quality wasn't there, and this lands in the lowest tier of my annual recommendation list, along with other books that could so easily have been so much better. There's definitely potential here, but I don't feel it's been reached.

Note: As of next year, I will be scoring books at this level three stars. I'm keeping four stars until the end of the year for consistency in my annual Best of the Year list for 2025.

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Review: The Charm Collector Box Set: Books 0-2

The Charm Collector Box Set: Books 0-2 by Melissa Erin Jackson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

So, the prequel novella had me looking forward to an urban fantasy with an established married couple, sensible, capable, underpowered but making up for it with intelligence, private investigators who know about the hidden supernatural world. Sure, the husband didn't have a lot of personality - the wife was the narrator - but I assumed that would change as we went along.

Book 1 starts - and we're in the viewpoint of their daughter (in utero in the prequel). The dad is dead, the mother has disappeared, and the daughter, far from being a PI, makes her living by stealing artefacts, and is also implied to be making a number of other poor life choices. Not what I was hoping for at all, and not nearly as appealing to me. I'd much rather read about a smart, capable person solving problems that aren't of their own making in the cause of the greater good. Also, it felt (at least at first) like it rendered the prequel more or less irrelevant.

However, as the book goes on, she does start solving problems not of her own making in the cause of the greater good, along with several other initially unpromising characters, so I started enjoying it again.

In the second book, the allies assembled in the first book are dodging the authorities and trying to solve the threat, split into two groups, with separate interwoven narratives. The main character's thread continues in first person, and her friend's story is in third person. The alternation isn't chapter-by-chapter, which I think was a good choice, and usually switches at moments of high tension, which is the best way to do a split narrative. There's a slow-burn romance subplot for the MC's friend, but the parties to it are mostly focused on the main plot. And eventually, the events of the prequel do become relevant again. It gets gripping and impactful - a lot of the best writing is in the second book, but it needs the first book to set it up.

The world is interesting, with hidden supernatural cities dotted across the USA (and presumably the world), where magical technology functions, sometimes just replacing mundane technology (magical lights instead of electric ones), sometimes doing things mundane tech can't do (teleportation stations). The thing is, magic is said to be limited on earth, so why use it to do what mundane technology is capable of? It's not because mundane tech doesn't work; it does. Yet blue "fae lights" instead of more natural-spectrum LEDs are the choice for lighting, including flashlights, in the hidden cities. Perhaps it's a vibe/nostalgia/hanging-on-to-culture thing.

The copy editing is mostly fine, with the occasional small issue. There are a few places that need an apostrophe, but when an apostrophe does occur, it's in the right place. There's the odd homonym error, too, of the kind that a lot of people make, like leach/leech (always a tricky pair), tick/tic, base/bass, borne/born - it's surprising how often people write "borne" (carried) when they mean "born" (birthed) - plus a few other vocabulary choices that are either highly unusual or just wrong for what is evidently the intended meaning. Those mistakes are widely scattered, though.

There are other minor glitches. For example, a continuity issue: the MC, on her way to a teleportation station, worries about whether her stored-value card has enough credit on it, because she's not carrying her bank card or any cash. And then at the other end of her teleport, she gets a cab. Paying for it how? There's also a piece of dialog where the speaker is trying to say "I'm not out of your league, you're out of my league," but actually says "You're not out of my league, I'm out of your league." Since it isn't called out as a fumble by the character, I assume it's a fumble by the author. And a zoo established in the early 20th century and abandoned not long afterwards is very much set up like a modern zoo, including features like an "insect exploratorium" (the word "exploratorium" was first used in the 1960s).

So there are opportunities to tighten up and improve it further, but the heart of it is sound - a strong, distinct cast with interesting synergy and some push and pull between them, a compelling problem for them to solve that they have to push hard and risk everything for, plenty of action that means something, an original world (as far as I know) that mostly makes sense, and skilled tension-building cuts back and forth once it splits into two storylines. The ending is suitably dramatic. Overall, I enjoyed it, and will look out for other books in the series and from the author.

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Review: The Ministry of Witches: A Cozy Fantasy Novel

The Ministry of Witches: A Cozy Fantasy Novel by Dael Astra
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

A frustrating mixture of original and needlessly derivative, well-edited but with one huge persistent fault, emotionally sound and then emotionally unconvincing, predictable and unexpected, and also overly wordy for my taste. It's hard to rate as a result.

I say "original but needlessly derivative" because, although I don't think this is actually set in the Harry Potter universe - HP is not the most consistent universe, so it's hard to tell for sure - it uses multiple terms from that universe: galleons and sickles (the monetary units), house elves, Whomping Willows, gillyweed, the floo network. None of these terms are even slightly necessary to the story that's being told - they could very easily be something else, and nothing would be lost - so it's risking a lawyer's letter for no good reason. The rest of the worldbuilding, though done with a light hand, is sound and original and fit for purpose, so I haven't given it my "weak-worldbuilding" tag.

There are very few editing errors, and the big one that it does have is something many people won't notice, because almost nobody understands how the coordinate comma rule works. The simple explanation is that English has a preferred adjective order, which goes "number-opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose," and if you have two adjectives that are in different categories, they don't need a comma between them, because they can only go in that order and feel correct; it's only if they're both in the same category that you need a comma, to signal that they're both, as it were, modifying the noun as equals.

This means, for instance, that number words like "single," "one," "two," "few" or "dozen" will basically never be coordinate and should not have commas after them. Nor should "each" or "own" or a great many other adjectives that this author sticks a comma after. I'm used to authors getting this wrong occasionally, especially in edge cases. These are not edge cases, and they're constant. I counted 40 instances in the first 10% of the book, which suggests that there are several hundred in total. It made it, for me at least, a chore to read. The most important part of the coordinate comma rule, and the one too few authors observe, is the part that tells you when not to use a comma, and this author has clearly never heard of it, and has faulty intuition on the subject to boot.

The author's style is lush, which means most of the nouns get at least two adjectives, sometimes three, and they almost always get commas between them, and about 70% of the time they shouldn't. It's wordy in general; repetitive (it's hammered home at least once too often that Aleda isn't doing command-and-control but empathy and empowerment), and, for me, outstayed its welcome by having too many wrap-up chapters after the main resolution. I personally prefer a compact style, and this is the opposite of that.

Multiple chapters should begin with the word "the," but oddly do not. Something to do with the drop caps, perhaps?

Anyway, the story. The protagonist, Aleda, is a humble gardening witch who is suddenly elevated to Minister of Witches (why that title, when it's neither a national office, nor British, but part of the government of New York City, and when male magic users are called wizards?) by the invocation of a peculiar old administrative rule on the departure in disgrace of the previous minister. The previous minister was a corrupt politician whose "modernizing" over a 20-year period has thrown the whole magical system out of whack, though the consequences of this mostly seem to be low-key disturbing and disruptive rather than, at least so far, catastrophic, even though the Ministry is supposed to head off catastrophes, and we later see it doing so. With her gardener's intuition, Aleda is able to restore the magical ecosystem to balance, in a series of emotionally sound and believable events. (view spoiler)[And then she has a crisis of confidence, which I didn't believe, either in its origin or in her recovery from it. And then she convinces an implacable foe of the Ministry, who is trying to pull its budget, to change his mind - and I didn't believe that either. I thought a real person who held the attitude he held would have accused the witches of fakery, since the crisis they averted wasn't verifiable, and also just because people who hold ideology-based opinions are rarely convinced by any amount of evidence. The author, in other words, doesn't sell these emotional events to me. Other readers, no doubt, will differ.

The archivist has a big flashing neon sign above his head that says "Enemies to Lovers." I suspected that trope was coming when he was first described, at his introduction, as "handsome" (his appearance, apart from his clothing, is never otherwise described, as is the case with most of the characters; only the twins get a hair colour, red, which I suspect is an echo of HP's Fred and George). I was sure of it by the time he was called "handsome" for the third time. And I was right. It was totally predictable. Yet most of what goes on in the book is not predictable or tropey at all. (hide spoiler)]

Continuity is not a strength. After the Board does the thing that gives Aleda the "Minister" title, they are never mentioned again except in reference back to that event, and their members (apart from one) never play any further role. The number of people on the Board also seems inadequate for the number of factions that are later described. There are several continuity issues within a chapter, too, such as when someone says "We did it!" and, after another couple of lines of dialog separated by a lot of descriptive waffle, several pages later, '"We did it," Aleda corrected.' Except she isn't correcting, because that's exactly what the other character said. It feels like things have been changed in editing and the rest of the chapter still left with the earlier version, creating a contradiction if you're reading closely.

It is absolutely cozy. There's an enchanted tea trolley that dispenses the exact beverage you need for the mood you're in. There's a wise cat. It is as cozy as you could possibly wish, and the crises are solved not by power and control but by listening and empathizing and finding ways for systems and people to work together. That part is great. It just falls into the all-too-common basket of "could so easily be so much better" because of completely avoidable faults: the unnecessary use of terms from another author's universe, the constant muffing of the coordinate comma rule, a predictable trope signalled far too clearly far too early, some emotional shifts that I didn't feel were justified well enough, minor continuity glitches, wordy prose that could stand tightening. The right developmental editor and (please) copy editor could make this amazing with relatively little work. As it stands, it's an awkward mixture of rare strengths and unfortunate weaknesses, and the weaknesses land it in the lowest (Bronze) tier of my annual recommendation list.

I received a pre-publication version via Netgalley for review, and further changes may take place before publication.

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