Review: Second Chance Circus

Second Chance Circus by Ryan Tang
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The worldbuilding on this one isn't so much weak (the usual issue with cozy) as it is incoherent.

In a barony which seems much larger than a barony would typically be, there are minor nobles below the rank of baron (normally the lowest rank of noble). It's populated with people who have names drawn from all over Europe, and the cities are similarly random in their naming, one sounding English, another Italian, and a third completely made up. Yes, it's clearly a secondary world, but my usual assumption is that this kind of mess originates from not thinking things through or not knowing much about the real-world originals, rather than from being creative.

There's a great deal of anachronism, which I think is supposed to be humourous; for me, it fell flat if that was the intention, as did the fact that the professors at the university have surnames which are the names of fonts (Baskerville, Roman and Arial).

The editing is also messy. There are quite a few words that are legitimate words that spellcheck will recognize, but are absolutely not the word the author obviously meant to type, or sometimes just not the right word for what he's talking about. It's particularly noticeable that he doesn't know what stirrups are; he uses the word for both reins and cart harness. He also seems to think that bunches of grapes are called "bushels". Partway through, we start to get extra commas between adjectives that shouldn't have them, and most (but not all) of the time, when a plural noun is made possessive, the apostrophe is in the wrong place, before rather than after the "s". Some creatures go from "he" to "it" or from plural to singular in the course of a paragraph. There are a lot of duplicated words and missing words, and occasionally words in the wrong order in a sentence. It's scruffy.

The story and characters are original, at least, not just made from box mix. The plot doesn't have a lot of urgency until near the end, and the characters don't have a great deal of depth, although they aren't just their role plus their archetype; they each have something unusual about them, which saves the book from being completely bland. The maid (who is more of an equal to the protagonist than a servant) is a skeptic, studying science by correspondence at university. The protagonist is a powerful necromancer with a good heart and a lack of self-confidence. The sidekick is an immortal caveman with an excess of self-confidence. Each character has something about them that you wouldn't expect, but they don't have any complexity beyond that, and there's no attempt to preserve a realistic point of view; the completely uneducated caveman apparently knows about turning things in to your professor for a grade, for example. Everyone always felt like a character in a book, and quite a simple book, rather than a real person.

I often say of would-be humorous fantasy that it needs to work as a story even if the humour fails. Since the humour in this one did fail completely and utterly for me, did the story work? It did, but I thought it was mediocre for most of its length. The characters were somewhat interesting, and the concept (which is what got me to pick it up) had potential, but the execution just wasn't at the level I'd hoped for, especially in the worldbuilding and the editing. I did put it down at one point to read something else, and ended up coming back to it, which says something, and I did finish it, and a tense climax that pulled together a few previously-set-up elements saved it from two stars. It's OK, but it lacks polish and depth.

View all my reviews