Review: Success

Success by Una Lucy Silberrad
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Not a complete pig-in-a-poke novel; I had already read this author's The Good Comrade , so I knew she wrote well and that I'd be getting something that wasn't standard or expected, but I didn't have much idea what that would be. I just picked it up off the Project Gutenberg feed.

It's not in any particular genre, and it undermines the tropes of the one genre you might think it was in ((view spoiler)[romance, since the two main characters don't marry, though they consider it; they are friends, not lovers (hide spoiler)]). But it's thought-provoking, and well worth a read.

The central character is an engineer named Michael Annarly, a brilliant man, but hard to work with because he doesn't care much what people think of him, or try to spare their feelings if he thinks they're not doing good work, and he demands special conditions that most employees wouldn't be given, in order to do his best work. When he tells his employers that he's finally finished a design for them for an "aerial torpedo" (what we would call an air-to-air missile - this is very early 20th century, and airship warfare is what's in view), something they've been wanting to get from him for a while, they almost immediately contrive an excuse to fire him. There's a good deal of hypocrisy, unfairness and outright unethical practice involved, something that becomes clearer as the story progresses.

They're an important firm, and having been fired by them for reasons that are not publicly announced, but are rumoured to have to do with his lack of professional ethics (when in fact it was theirs), he's left in a position where he probably can't get a similar job with anyone else.

Fortunately, when he's in London to plead (unsuccessfully) with one of the firm's directors, his cousin Nan sees him walking the streets, looking devastated, and kindly invites him home, where he tells her what's happened. She arranges for her father, who sells antique furniture, to give him some technical drawing work, drawing chair backs and the like for restoration and other purposes - work well below his level, but something. The two become friends, more like siblings than cousins, and in many ways it's that relationship, more than any specific work that he does, that helps Michael hang on. Nan is a quiet woman, the sort that most people overlook, and yet her intervention and her continuing support of Michael are key to the book. She also has a lot more skill than people credit her with.

It's a wonderfully humane book, full of quotable bits about engineering as well as about life. Michael is, essentially, a brilliant problem-solver, so he can go into any context where there's a technical problem to solve and figure out what's going wrong and how to fix it. At one point, though, he's brought in to do some consulting and tells his client that he can't fix the problem - it's not the machinery, it's the people. Partly through his experience, and partly through Nan, he comes to have a much better understanding of the human side of work, and is never in danger of repeating his previous mistakes.

There are some aspects of the book that fell short for me. There's a clumsily obvious foil character for Michael, the brother of a man who works for Nan's father, who, like Michael, came up with an invention that would make his employer a lot of money, and who asked for a proportionate reward. When he was given five pounds, he tore it up, threw it in his boss's face, resigned, and has now spent years working on a better invention to make the previous one worthless, as revenge. He's bitter and miserable and makes the people around him miserable too.

Then there's the moment where Nan is calling for divine judgement on the company that fired Michael just at the moment when a process he developed for them goes disastrously wrong in a way that wouldn't have happened if he'd been there, costing the directors a lot of money. (Both characters happen to be in a location close enough to the plant to hear the bang and see the flame go up just as Nan is, uncharacteristically, ranting.) It struck me as, again, too obvious.

Most of the book is not like that, though. In fact, if anything it has the opposite fault; things just happen that don't obviously contribute to the overall thrust of the book, like the extended sequence around Michael's sister's wedding, the main upshot of which is to allow Nan to meet someone who plays a relatively minor role later on. Though, thinking about it, the wedding is probably also there to highlight the conventional expectations and values of Michael's family, in contrast to how his life works out.

It's not at all a tight plot, and, with the exception of those couple of clumsy moments, it doesn't point up the theme too strongly either, which is a strength more than it's a weakness. The title, "Success," is, in a way, the theme of the book; Michael learns, as Nan already knew, that the conventional markers of success don't really matter - money, fame, marriage, recognition by your employer or by others that you've helped, like the city council whose power station Michael helps to rescue from complete disaster because he happened to be doing a consulting job next door when it failed. What matters is that you're doing good work and that there's someone who understands you; that's success. The comeuppance that is finally served to the nefarious firm and the director most responsible for Michael's dilemma is almost extraneous.

I enjoy books that are not conventional, that are quite unlike anything else, and this is one. It also has a good deal to say about topics I'm interested in: the failures and injustices built into the way work is organized, the meaning of success, the process of solving hard problems, and the importance of human connection and kindness in the world. For me, despite a couple of weaker moments, it was indeed a success.

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Review: Strange Animals: A Novel

Strange Animals: A Novel by Jarod K. Anderson
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

I was misled by the blurb, because I focused on the words "enchanting," "fun" and "cozy" and skipped over the words "haunting" and "creepy."

It's a horror novel, and I don't enjoy horror. There's a creature running round the woods killing innocent people, and it's (probably, unless there are two creatures; I stopped about of a third of the way through) a large skeletal wolf with black... stuff sometimes covering and sometimes revealing its bones. It's also intelligent and telepathic.

Really well written, well edited, fresh concepts, a terrific book in many ways, but unfortunately not at all my preferred genre, and I would have appreciated more of a heads-up about that so that I could have not bought it.

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Review: Report of Dr. Benjamin Franklin, and Other Commissioners, Charged by the King of France, with the Examination of the Animal Magnetism, as Now Practised at Paris.

Report of Dr. Benjamin Franklin, and Other Commissioners, Charged by the King of France, with the Examination of the Animal Magnetism, as Now Practised at Paris. by Benjamin Franklin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A fascinating historical document, for a few reasons.

Firstly, it's the report of a distinguished Royal Commission, including Benjamin Franklin (then US Ambassador to France), Lavoisier the chemist, and the prominent physician Guillotin, namesake (but not, as is widely believed, inventor) of the execution device which was to see so much use a few years later - including on Louis XVI, the commissioner of the study.

Second, it's an early example of experimental method, here applied to testing the claims of Mesmer about his practice of "animal magnetism". The commission concluded that there was no evidence that such a force existed, and that the effects being produced by Mesmer and his followers (one of whom cooperated closely with the commission, while Mesmer refused to do so) were the result of the physical pressure and manipulations done by the operators, alongside the power of "imagination" - in other words, what we now call the placebo effect or the mind-body connection. They established this in part by blind (but not double-blind) trials, including performing Mesmer's prescribed operations on people who were unaware of it, and not performing them while telling the subjects that they were performing them. The effects occurred when people believed the operations were being done, even though they were not, and did not occur when they were unaware that the operations were performed, confirming that it was the belief of the patient and not the actions of the operator that made the difference. It was a thorough investigation, and their conclusions are well supported.

Third, what is said about "animal magnetism" itself - Mesmer's theory and practice, and how the public sessions of "magnetisation" were done - is itself interesting in several ways. The description of the theory of "animal magnetism" - which the report shows, using an earlier study, was wholly derived from since-abandoned theories of physicians from a couple of centuries previously - bears a remarkable resemblance to eastern ideas of chi, a power underlying everything that can be circulated in the body, and for which specific points on the body are significant. I'd be interested to know whether Paracelsus and the other theorists mentioned had any contact with China and other civilizations where similar theories were held.

Further than that, the descriptions of faith healing - not only by Mesmer, but by other people at the time or in the then recent past - are classic, and sound exactly like modern faith healing, including the charismatic services I witnessed myself as a young man. Working a large group of people up into a specific state of mind by a long and elaborate ceremony; the way in which, once someone starts to have a dramatic response, others join in; the explanations for why it sometimes fails - all of these are part of a playbook which is still in use more than 250 years after the publication of this report, showing that debunking is a work that is never completed, and that people don't change that much.

The tone, of the early part of the report especially, at times has more in common with such aggressive debunkers as YouTube's Miniminuteman than with a dispassionate scientific approach, and it's clear that the writers of the report (and the introduction to the English translation) considered Mesmer to be perpetrating conscious fraud, though they don't outright accuse him of doing so. They certainly do say, strongly, that the precipitation of "crises" in which people experience pain, vomit, void their bowels, and sometimes cough up blood is harmful rather than helpful, especially when repeated and taken as the norm.

The medical terminology and beliefs of the time are old-fashioned now, of course; most of our current medical science dates from no earlier than the 19th century, and largely from the 20th. But the commissioners were able, even within their own framework of understanding, to distinguish clearly between a physical and a mental cause of the effects they observed, and that's the key point they were making.

If you're interested in the history of the scientific method, in faith healing, in the mind-body connection or in the process of debunking frauds, this relatively short book is well worth a read. You will have to navigate the 18th-century language, but it's mostly clear enough to a modern reader.

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Review: The Golden Journey of Mr. Paradyne

The Golden Journey of Mr. Paradyne by William John Locke
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Essentially a midlife-crisis story, from the time when having a midlife crisis was admired, at least in men. It's much shorter than I (for some reason) expected it to be, and I read it in about an hour.

Successful lawyer Paradyne wakes up one morning and discovers he's the owner of a gypsy wagon and a horse and is travelling through France selling brushes and such, and has been doing so for several months. The last thing he clearly remembers is shortly before his departure from suburban Ealing on a holiday to France with his wife, who is not with him, though her ticket is. A mysterious, itinerant young man played a melody he'd never heard before outside his house, and that seems to have kicked the whole thing off.

He loves being a travelling brush-seller - perhaps because he was already wealthy, had a lot of money with him and still has a good bit of it, and therefore isn't living hand-to-mouth. His old life of the law was a dead life; his wife had even described him as a dead man, and he thinks of her now as a dead woman, cold and sour. He sees no downside whatsoever in just walking away from all his responsibilities and continuing his journey, and the narration doesn't contradict him in this. His options seem to be a dead life between his suburban home and his city office, or a romanticised life on the road, in the open air. There's no hint of a third way, in which he learns to truly live while also being faithful to his commitments.

It's well enough executed, but the naive romanticism loses it the third star from me. I'd hoped, at a small inflection point in my own career, that it might help me think through next steps. It did not.

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Review: Big Money

Big Money by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A standalone from Wodehouse's classic period (between the wars; this came out in 1931). It does briefly feature a minor character who was also in Sam in the Suburbs , the house agent "of druidical aspect," Mr Cornelius, and the central characters are pretty much his standard ones under different names, but he has fun with them, and so did I.

Wodehouse wrote several books with "money" in the title. As well as this book, there's Uneasy Money, Money in the Bank and Money for Nothing. His father's pension from the civil service, paid in Indian rupees because of his service in the East, had been suddenly devalued just before Wodehouse could go to university, so he knew about being a young man with a good education but minimal skills and little income, and many of his young heroes (and heroines) are stuck in this way. The typical plot involves them somehow obtaining "the needful" via comeuppance given to their stuffy, more prosperous elders, and this book has that typical plot, though with some twists. The wealthy man here decides to rip off his impoverished secretary, whose aunt left him what he believes to be a worthless mine, by buying it for less than its actually considerable worth. Meanwhile, the secretary has, by complete coincidence and without knowing who she is (or her name), fallen in love with his boss's niece, who is engaged to a close friend of his.

There's the usual tangle of multiple coincidental relationships between all of the cast members, and the usual meetings by happenstance; the hero meets his beloved three times, all briefly, and all of them involve coincidence. At this point, still not knowing her name, he proposes (which is why I give this my "thin-romance" tag). Also, of course, he has assumed a false identity, and his friend has assumed a disguise (to avoid his creditors), and everything is very complicated in the Mighty Wodehouse Manner. Courage and cleverness and a decent helping of good luck are required to untangle it all.

It's fun, though, and the prose sparkles, and I enjoyed it.

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Review: Thornley Colton: Blind Detective

Thornley Colton: Blind Detective by Clinton Holland Stagg
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Not the first blind detective (as far as I know, that's Ernest Bramah's Max Carrados), but very much in the same tradition as its predecessor, with the trope of the blind man who has developed his other senses to an extraordinary degree. He can read written or typed pages (or music manuscript) by feeling the back of the paper with his fingers, for example, and has particularly keen hearing. He can somehow grab accurately for someone's arm or otherwise know exactly where they are and in what position, which comes up on more than one occasion, and some people refuse to believe he's actually blind. He himself sometimes lectures about how people with sight are deceived by it, while he is not, because he interprets everything in a situation and makes a mental model of it and how it must have been.

It's clumsy at times. For example, in the first story, someone - in dialog - mentions Colton's secretary Sydney Thames and says his name is "pronounced like the river" - which would be obvious, since he'd just pronounced it. It would have been more natural to say that it was "Thames, like the river." There's a reason for the name, repeated in each of the stories (which I assume were published individually in magazines before being collected): Colton found Sydney Thames as a baby, abandoned on the banks of the London river, and adopted him. He's also taken on a young New York lad - the stories are set in New York - who's known as "Shrimp" or "the Fee," because he was the only payment received for solving a murder, of Shrimp's mother by his father. The boy is very keen to imitate his two heroes, Colton and the fictional Nick Carter, and gets as involved in Colton's cases as his guardian will allow, sometimes putting himself in danger as a result.

The openings of the stories are usually a flight of descriptive prose in the style of the time, a bit overwrought and melodramatic for modern tastes. Having set the scene, the author brings Colton into it, usually by pure coincidence - he just happens to be in the vicinity when the crime is committed - but sometimes because he's called in by people who know his reputation as a "problemist," which is what he calls himself rather than a detective. He's independently fairly wealthy, and doesn't need to have a profession or charge fees, but solves problems for the sake of the interest he takes in them and also for the good of the victims.

He places a high value on human life, though he sometimes causes innocent people emotional distress in the course of setting traps for the criminals, often to the dismay of his secretary Thames. The secretary is overawed by beautiful women, and becomes anxious in their presence, and if Colton seems to be harsh with them he protests, despite regarding Colton as a father figure.

It's tropey and sometimes ridiculous, uses some terms for various races that were common at the time but are now regarded as deeply offensive, and isn't written in the best prose I ever saw. But it's lively and vivid, the characters aren't all simply stock, and the mysteries are cleverly worked out. It has enough flaws that I put it down to three stars, but it's a high three.

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Review: The Angel of Terror

The Angel of Terror by Edgar Wallace
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A whiz-bang Wallace, with a female villain who looks like an angel but is actually a complete psychopath. Of course coincidence plays a key role in the plot, but that's more or less expected for a book of this period. Wallace manages to create an intense atmosphere of suspense around what the villain will do next (since she has basically no moral limits), and to evoke strong sympathy for the protagonist. The villain does, however, have to be a bit incompetent, and also unlucky, for the heroine to survive, and you need to suspend your disbelief a good deal and just go along for the ride.

The heroine, who has voluntarily taken on her late father's debts, is offered a bizarre proposal: marry a man wrongly condemned for murder, so that his cousins, suspected by the man's young lawyer friend of being actually behind the murder, can't inherit. She does that, and becomes wealthy as a result, but also now has a great big target on her back - and doesn't listen to the lawyer when he warns her about the female cousin.

There are some good action set-pieces, and a rip-roaring conclusion. Classic Wallace.

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Review: Beware of Chicken 4

Beware of Chicken 4 by CasualFarmer
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Two of the besetting issues of this series are that there are too many characters, and that each book has a long slow start before getting to the central conflict (if it ever does get there - this one almost does not, and then doesn't stay long).

The two things are related, and this book shows that particularly starkly. The reason it takes until halfway through - not a quarter, not a third, but halfway through - for the plot to get going is that first we have to visit about 20 character viewpoints (not a rhetorical number, it's actually about 20) and have, for each of them, a repetition of basically the same thing: a reflection on past hurt and how now, in the cozy found family started by Jin the cultivator, it's probably going to be OK. All this is interspersed with slice-of-life stuff: building onto the farm, getting new production processes up and running, celebrating festivals, playing puerile practical jokes that everyone finds hilarious and endearing, and drinking too much alcohol.

Then when something resembling a plot does get going, it consists at first of an extended flashback to ancient times as recorded on a crystal retrieved I've-forgotten-how a couple of books ago. It takes until two-thirds of the way through the approximately 120,000-word book before the present-day characters start making plans to do something, they're not quite sure what yet, about the plot problem, which has taken this long to articulate. Sure, it's a strong one. But most writers would have introduced it at about 25%, for good reason: a lot of readers don't like hanging around for 80,000 words waiting for the plot to start, even if the company is pleasant.

And then, once the problem is defined... we're back to the slice of life. There is what could have been a nice bit of intercutting of peripheral characters in a pitched battle against demons versus Jin's wife giving birth to their child, but part of what it does is show by the contrast how flat scenes can be if they lack serious challenge. The birth is a tiring but problem-free experience, with none of the potential issues that get mentioned ever eventuating. The demon fight is desperate and includes great losses, even though the outcome is never really in doubt, but it's narrated in a way that also minimises the importance of those losses.

I find the characters more memorable than the plot in these books, and maybe that's because we spend more time on character growth and insight than we do on plot progression (though the two are inevitably linked). Even though for me there was a gap of getting on for three years between reading Book 2 and Book 3, I remembered the characters fairly well - but the events quite poorly, and the fact that the author provides us with zero refresher is, therefore, an avoidable fault. For example, early in this book, Jin visits a village where Big D, the chicken of the title, has been training a disciple, and there's some sort of sign or something outside the village, and it cracks Jin up when he sees it. This sign was, I think, put there in Book 2. That was hundreds of pages and, for me, several years ago, and I have no memory of it whatsoever. But does the author give even a tiny clue, half a sentence, a few words about what it looks like so I, and other people who've forgotten, can share in the joke? He does not. Tens of thousands of words for atmosphere, but not even half a dozen for recap.

The copy editing continues to improve, though there are still awkwardly phrased sentences ("He headed down a set of stairs and began to descend them") and the odd typo, and errors like equating rabbits and hares (they're different animals). Belying is used for betraying, seller for buyer, match for march, decreed for declared, singular for single, exultations for exhortations, "cadaver" when it's not an entire body but a disembodied head, and "the first thing is first" as probably an eggcorn for "first things first."

And yet, with all these faults, it's still amusing and touching and appealing at times. It's just... it wouldn't be that hard to make it a lot better (IMO). It definitely wouldn't be hard to make it a lot shorter without losing much that I would care about.

While reading this book, I came across a Reddit AMA the author did a few years back, where he says that the published versions are already "half to a quarter" of the length of his drafts, so I hate to think how overwritten the drafts are. In that same thread, though, he specifically references "noblebright" as something he was shooting for - which he achieves, no question. Interesting that the Word of Noblebright has spread to the point that someone who is demographically different from most of the noblebright authors I know (by which I mean he's likely under 40) has heard of it and thinks it's a good thing for a book to be. We're less obscure than I thought - which, honestly, isn't hard, since "less obscure than I thought" is the direction in which there's the most space.

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Review: The Side Questers

The Side Questers by J.J. Kochmanski
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Two NPCs in a fantasy MMORPG have become conscious, able to act independently like players.

Why they've become conscious is a slight spoiler, so I won't mention it, but it creates tension and stakes in the real world as well as the world of the game, and adds a layer of dramatic irony.

This is LitRPG-adjacent, but not true LitRPG, in that the game world is explicitly a computer game, not just a gamelike isekai, and there's not a lot of time spent on stats and skills. That works better for me than the more central LitRPG experience, honestly. It's also better written than the average LitRPG, apart from some minor glitches which I'll mention to the publisher (I had a pre-publication version via Netgalley for review).

The characters, particularly Anya, the barkeep, who is the main viewpoint character, quickly won my sympathy. She's courageous, determined and intelligent, and I wanted her to succeed.

The world is a generic fantasy game world, which is more likely to be by design than from a failure of imagination on the part of the author. The players the characters encounter include some arrogant griefers who have bought their way to level 99, and some more-or-less-helpful gamers who regularly play together from widely separated locations.

The plot has an arc towards justice and love and The Right Thing, which I enjoyed. I couldn't see how the author was going to manage a resolution that produced a good outcome for everyone who deserved one, but he pulled it off admirably.

Recommended.

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Review: The Secret Library

The Secret Library by Amanda James
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A celebration of the power of fiction to inspire and uplift people, in the form of a magical-realist novel in which characters from books literally come alive through the work of authors, editors, and readers.

Lucy is introduced to us first as a 10-year-old girl looking forward to staying with her editor grandmother at her beautiful house in Cornwall. Inspired by her grandmother, she herself becomes an editor - but by the age of 30 is becoming disillusioned with the sameness (and darkness) of the fiction that's submitted to her company. She's an acquiring editor and a developmental editor, so she chooses which books to move forward with and then helps the authors make them as good as they can be. And she's finding it hard to come up with "diamonds"; everyone is writing the same book, and not doing a great job of it. I definitely empathise, because it's hard these days to find books to read that aren't just a rehash of the same few premises, most of them dark and depressing. Even in the positive speculative fiction subgenres - noblebright, cozy fantasy, solarpunk, hopepunk - there's a lot of mediocre or poorly crafted work that's just repeating the same ideas.

In light of the theme of books that stand out from the norm, it's a... bold move to invoke one of the most overused tropes of contemporary fantasy fiction: an inheritance from a relative that introduces a woman to her magical heritage. There's also instalove, not just one but two instances, and despite all of the lampshade hanging about how that's unrealistic, there it is at the heart of the story.

Lucy starts meeting characters from books, which isn't new to her, since she talked and played with Bilbo Baggins, Christopher Robin and Mary Poppins as a child. What is new is that, by editing unfinished manuscripts that her grandmother has left to her along with the house, and writing the authors, who had given up, encouraging notes, she reaches across the decades and causes the books to have been finished, and successful, and inspirational for readers. Their key characters emerge into the real world and start to play a role in the plot.

The book has ambitions to be one of those wonderful, inspirational books that lifts people up and influences them in the direction of kindness and generosity. I think it gets partway there. The reason that, for me, it doesn't get all the way there is that it's competent rather than brilliant in its execution, and overt and obvious in its message, which is sometimes more told than shown. The characters are well drawn, but they don't come alive and step off the page like the ones we're told about from the previously-unfinished novels within the novel; they feel generic to me. The hot fisherman with the sensitive soul, the disillusioned 30-year-old editor, her bouncy best friend... none of them have that extra spark of uniqueness. For that matter, the fictional characters who are so vivid to the readers that they enter the real world are not, in this novel, that vivid. The book's reach exceeds its grasp.

It's a commendable reach, though, and a good message, and an enjoyable book. I do recommend it for lovers of positive fiction and people who are thinking about giving up on their dreams.

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Review: Sorcery on the Sunset Express

Sorcery on the Sunset Express by Ronald D. Ferguson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Disclaimer: I requested and received a copy from the author prior to publication. We are members of the same writers' forum, where the author posted asking for readers for his upcoming book. The author explicitly stated that there was no expectation or obligation for a review.

This is a solid, enjoyable story set in an alternate North America (mainly Texas, but also Louisiana and New Mexico) in 1907. The background is that Southern wizards managed to stalemate the American Civil War and (in some way that isn't explored) transform the Confederacy into the Southern Alliance Monarchy; Texas and California are independent republics, and there is still a USA, just a smaller one. The alternate-world setting isn't just decoration. It introduces rich and powerful people who are also foreign nobility, warranting an extra layer of caution in dealing with them, and it enables the author to have both the technology of 1907 (telephones and cars - the latter more plentiful, if anything, than in our 1907) in the cities, and a version of Texas that's more like the untamed West of much earlier times in its outlying districts.

The status of slavery in the Southern Alliance Monarchy wasn't clear to me, but it's illegal in Texas, and the main characters are careful to treat the black people they encounter (serving as stewards in Pullman cars - there's a lot of train travel, as the title implies) with respect. I did find it slightly unlikely that, in the first decade of the 20th century, a young woman of respectable background would routinely travel in the same sleeper compartment as her male colleague; people do assume they're an unmarried couple, which they're not (though there are plenty of hints that he admires her considerably), but nobody acts as if it's scandalous or tries to stop them, even though there are mentions of a strong influence of Baptist morality in the Republic of Texas. Both the characters have a Baptist background, too.

Their background, in fact, is strong overall. Brandi, the female partner, has ended up as a consulting detective in part because, when she tried to study advanced physics at a university, she was told that there was no place for a woman to do so, and found herself pushed into a job as a second-grade teacher. Her father is a doctor, and she's learned some things from him. She's capable, highly intelligent, and definitely the Holmes of the pair. Unfortunately, she's also very sharp-tongued, given to lecturing her unfortunate partner Jerry not only about things he's ignorant of but also about his behaviour, which is that of a working-class Texan from a difficult family background who had to drop out of college when he was injured and lost his football scholarship. His father was a drunkard, a womaniser and a wife-abuser who pretended to be a preacher in order to get money for his other activities, meaning the family moved around a lot until he finally left his wife and son; the mother, abandoned not only by her husband but by a self-righteous congregation, struggled for a while and then died while Jerry was still a teenager. He's since been a Texas Ranger, a job he was thrown out of for taking a principled stand that wasn't politically acceptable to his bosses, and came very near to getting him lynched in the prologue.

This is a lot more character development, and a lot more worldbuilding, than I often see, though admittedly I've been reading cozy fantasy lately, which is notably weak on both of those things. Still, it means that there's some heft to the events the characters get caught up in. There are a number of violent deaths, some of innocents; serious threats and tension; and a twisty mystery to unravel.

The main mystery involves the theft of payrolls being securely (or so one would think) transported by train, watched constantly by guards, but when the train arrives at its destination the money has somehow vanished from the locked safe - not once, but multiple times, despite elaborate precautions being taken. There are also secondary mysteries, including a couple of murders.

The method of the heists is clever, and the process of solving the case entertaining, and the action scenes well described. The time and place are competently evoked, and the characters are memorable and have dimension. I recommend it.

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Review: Beware of Chicken 3

Beware of Chicken 3 by CasualFarmer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Much the same strengths, and faults, as the earlier books in the series. Fortunately, for me at least, the strengths predominate.

Before I get going on the review itself, I will have a quick rant about the DRM. I got this book from the library via Overdrive, and because it has Adobe Digital Editions DRM on it, instead of just checking it out of the library with an app on my phone and synching my e-reader over wifi, I had to check it out, download some software to my computer, sign in with an Adobe id, go to the Overdrive website, sign in with my library card, download the epub, import it to ADE, plug in my e-reader to my computer with a cable like some sort of medieval peasant, and transfer it. It's a lot of unnecessary friction that adds no value for anyone, and I wish publishers would stop using it.

Anyway - review. The pacing at the beginning and end continues to be an issue. Slow start, banging middle, slow wind-down with too many endings. There's a big "tournament arc" section, and while it's well enough described, the big problem is that nothing really hinges on who wins, and it's pretty obvious who that's going to be, and she doesn't even seem to care all that much about the win anymore either. The aftermath of the tournament, though, with a battle against an actual adversary where there are high stakes and it's not at all clear who's going to win and we're afraid it isn't the heroes, is much more gripping. Of course, for this part to work as it does, we need to have had the earlier events to set up alliances and introduce characters, but still, the contrast between the fairly meaningless fights of the tournament with the truly tense ones of the aftermath struck me as an excellent illustration of the writing maxim, "Don't write action scenes, write scenes that require action to resolve them."

There are, as other reviewers have noted, too many characters, many of whom get a viewpoint (even minor ones that we never see again). But at least the character voices are distinct, and what they do and say is often interesting. There are also too many subplots, and since it's two and a half years since I read the previous book and there is absolutely zero time spent on reorienting the reader to what has happened previously, some of them didn't mean as much as they otherwise would have. This is one of the issues with books originally published as long-running serials, though it could be fixed easily enough with a quick "previously on..." at the front that you could skip if you were reading right through.

The copy editing seems to be getting better each time. There are now fewer instances of the same issues: apostrophe in the wrong place when the noun is plural, dialog punctuation, "may" where it should be "might," a dangling modifier, disagreement in number between noun and verb, some cases in which the pronoun reference was ambiguous because who "he" or "she" referred to had changed without notice, and a few vocabulary errors: pendants/pennants, singular/single, namesake/name, the eggcorn "another thing coming" instead of "think," observance/observation, brought/bought, filed/filled, aides/aids, "brace" when it doesn't mean "two," borne/born, even/ever, decreed/declared - some of which are confusions and some of which are likely typos.

What makes these books good, though, is the warm and generous tone, set by the central character, the "hidden master" known as Jun. He's been drawn into the world of cultivation from Canada, and it shows; he's polite and kind and generous to everyone, and his priorities are for everyone to get along and be happy and prosperous, which I personally think are great priorities, and ones we could stand to see more widespread in this or any other world. In this case, he has stumbled into having the power to spread his values, though he does so by influence rather than force; it's just that he does have the option of force to prevent people with different values from wrecking things, and to get other people with power (but less power than he has) to listen to him seriously.

Partly so that everything is fresh in my mind, but also because I enjoyed it, I'm moving straight on to the next volume without reading something else in between. Once I do the stupid multiple-step Adobe dance, that is.

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Review: Reflections of a Beginning Husband

Reflections of a Beginning Husband by Edward Sandford Martin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Reflections" is very much what this is. It's fiction, not the author's own story (he'd been married for a good many years by the time it came out, and while he and the narrator were both lawyers, the author started out as a writer and editor and became a lawyer later on). But the proportion of reflection to events is extremely high, so it's not a typical novel with a plot, more a slice-of-life book with a lot of musing.

If the musing hadn't been interesting, it would therefore have failed badly, but I did find it interesting. The setup is that the narrator, Peregrine Jesup, is in his early years of working as a lawyer, and isn't making much money, but convinces his beloved Cordelia French, the daughter of a wealthy man, to marry him anyway rather than waiting until he can keep her in the style to which she's accustomed. She's amenable, and they get on fine in a small apartment with simple food and not as much socialising as they have been used to. His parents are also well off, and both sets of parents approve of the match and are generally supportive, as are others like an older family friend who eventually takes Jesup into partnership at the end of the book. Meanwhile, the couple have a child.

That's pretty much it for events. The reflection on those events covers a number of topics. There's the relationship between men and women; Peregrine enjoys talking with Cordelia and respects her intelligence, and they have an alliance, not the War of the Sexes that's so common in American humour. There's the question of education for women. There's the question of women's suffrage, which had been around for a while (it's 1907) and would not be resolved in the US at a national level until 1920; Peregrine and Cordelia are dubious about how much difference it will really make to politics, and don't immediately buy the "natural justice" argument for it either, though they're far from settled in their minds. There's politics in general, in which Peregrine thinks he's a conservative, but not the kind that wants others to be ground under his heel; he's in favour of prosperity being more widely distributed, and is uncomfortable with the fact that, as a lawyer, he mostly works for wealthy people and their interests.

Prosperity, and what it means, is another theme (one that I'm interested in), and different attitudes to money - how much is enough, progress being driven by people wanting more of what it can buy, and the higher importance of non-material values. Peregrine and Cordelia are churchgoers, I think Methodists, though it's never made completely clear, and while it isn't a Christian book as such, Christian ideas do come in at various points.

I've given it my "comedy" tag, but it's more "humour" than "comedy," and even then pretty light. It's mainly the good-hearted tone and the wry observations about humanity that give it that feel.

It's very quotable, and I highlighted a lot of passages. I'll restrict myself to one:

"As things are, the country is run, after a fashion. The wheels do turn, and production and distribution are accomplished. To be sure, the wheels screech more or less, and the production is pretty wasteful compared with what the professional economists say it might be, and the stream of distribution runs so lumpy that it makes you laugh; but a fair proportion of the Lord’s will seems to be done, and hopeful people calculate that the proportion is increasing, though you might not always think so to read the progressive periodicals."

All of which is still true today.

While, naturally, I didn't agree with everything the author said in his reflections, he held his conclusions lightly and didn't insist on anything dogmatically, and it was interesting to get a window into the mind of one person (who represented, more or less, others of his type) at a historical moment when change was already rapid and the First World War hadn't yet hardened people.

Something I notice in a lot of the contemporary books I read is that the people who write them don't have much of a grasp on the idea that different times and places have held different ideas from theirs without being completely evil and wrong, and I wish more of them would read books like this and expand their perspectives. It's cozy and optimistic in tone, and for me the biggest fault is that it stops abruptly and without warning after the chapter in which Peregrine is given his partnership. Perhaps the author felt that this change was large enough, and disconnected enough from the domestic focus that he'd mostly been keeping, that it made a natural stopping place.

I probably mainly enjoyed it because it muses on topics that interest me too, but it's warm and easy-going and insightful, and if you don't mind it having very little plot per thousand words and find the thoughts of someone in 1907 worth thinking about, I recommend it to you.

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Review: Cat Dragon

Cat Dragon by Samantha Birch
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Cozy doesn't need to mean low stakes, and this is an, at times, extremely tense story of a witch who has never quite fitted in, doing her best with her companions to stave off disaster from her home. Cute familiars and other animal companions, a loyal best friend, a love interest with reluctance because reasons, a chance-met apparent-ally-but-can-we-trust-her, and a couple of other chance-met associates round out the main cast, and were easy to keep straight, though none of them developed great depth.

Worldbuilding is not a strength of the cozy genre, sadly, but this book at least has the third-lowest-effort approach to it. The lowest-effort approach is to take the author's familiar surroundings and change a few names of things and say there's magic, without it ever impacting anything even slightly. The second-lowest-effort approach is to take the author's culture and beliefs and place them in front of some generic sword & sorcery scenery flats, which is what most cozy books do. The third-lowest-effort approach, used here, is to take whole cultures and languages from our world and just import them into the secondary world with a vaguely new geography. Latin exists, for example, and is the language used for scientific naming; photography and the wireless are mentioned, but never seen, and the world feels like the usual generic fantasy world that's vaguely at a late-medieval/early-renaissance tech level, except where it isn't.

I read it on my Kobo from the library, so I'll have to mention the specifics of the copy editing here rather than linking to Kindle notes and highlights. It's mostly good, but there are enough minor glitches that it didn't get my "well-edited" tag. There are a couple of vocab issues ("alike" for "like", "foreman" for "footman" - clearly a mistyping - and the overcorrection of "laid" to "lay"), a few missing or mistyped words ("on top everything else," "precious else left," "had been a kind a", "coming into land" where it should be "in to" - the "to" is not a preposition but part of the verb), the use of "may" instead of "might" in the past tense sometimes (but not often), the occasional dangling modifier, and of course a lot of commas between adjectives which don't need them - it's almost more common for authors to make that mistake than to not make it. It's better than average.

Like other reviewers, I did feel confused about what was happening at a few points. The author, I'm sure, had a clear idea in her head about what the events meant and how the viewpoint character understood them, but she sometimes needed to get more of it on the page for the reader to share in that understanding.

All of those minor flaws aside - and they were minor - I enjoyed it, it had a genuinely cozy feel while still being about something happening, the main character was a believable mix of self-doubt and competence, and I will happily read the sequel once it's available.

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Review: Spooky Hollow

Spooky Hollow by Carolyn Wells
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Occasionally wordy and florid, never suspenseful, and I spotted the murderer very early on and never doubted my choice.

A mysterious stranger visits a wealthy eccentric's country mansion in Vermont. By next morning, the sister of the owner has been murdered, apparently stabbed inside a locked room; the stranger has vanished, leaving behind his hat and coat (both new, along with all his other clothing); and the sister's large, valuable ruby has also vanished. Suspicion falls in the obvious place, but this Henry Johnson doesn't appear to exist, and efforts to trace him fail.

Meanwhile, there are disturbing revelations about the wealthy eccentric's niece's family background - disturbing, that is, in a time when the elites mostly believed in eugenics, and the possibility that she might be the illegitimate child of an unknown mother rendered her basically a leper. Her suitor, to his great credit, sticks by her regardless, and spends his own money on investigating both her origins and the death of her aunt, to which end he calls in a famous detective (of whose series this book is part). The detective finds the criminal, and it's... exactly who I thought it was all along. I didn't figure out how the locked-room part was done, but I probably should have.

Not a great mystery story, but I've read worse.

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Review: The Locked Room

The Locked Room by Holly Hepburn
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Picked this up on BookBub, and I was glad I did. It's a solid cozy mystery.

The heroine, Harriet/Harry, works for the bank that sits in the part of Baker Street that includes number 221, and it is actually true that there was someone employed there for a while to answer letters addressed to Sherlock Holmes, which is Harry's job. Her job doesn't really play much into this book, and indeed she spends hardly any time at work, instead investigating several mysteries that turn out to be connected, based on a notice in the Times personals signed "Moriarty".

It's the third book in the series, and I haven't read the first two, but now I want to. There's clever investigation, daring action, disguise, and a variety of crime, just as in the Holmes stories. In fact, it feels so Holmesian that, despite the cars, telephones and jazz bands, I felt more as if I was in the 1890s (Holmes' heyday) than in the 1930s, when the book is actually set. This is probably partly because, as the granddaughter of a baron whose father is the heir, Harry is still under the same old-fashioned expectations about protecting her reputation and the kind of person she will marry that would have been the case 40 years previously. There's a slow-burn romance that's clearly been under way across all three books, with a worthy fellow, and also (sigh) a bad boy who's clearly wrong for her but thrills her.

It helps that the author is British, which saves us from the Americanisms that inevitably creep in when an American author sets their book in Britain. I didn't spot any obvious anachronisms either, though, having read a lot of fiction written in the period, I didn't get quite the same subtle sense off it of a dark, claustrophobic, rigid and hidebound Britain (where everyone constantly smokes) in the background of the events. I think I would have spotted it as a modern book even if I hadn't known, and even without the scene in which homophobia is brought up and briefly spoken against. Still, a truly authentic 1930s feel is hard to achieve, and maybe not even worth shooting for.

The copy editing is generally good, with just a few minor continuity glitches (such as which of two neighbouring houses is referred to, and briefly the gender of a street urchin), a couple of sentences where the grammar has got slightly mangled, and a single homonym error: loathe for loath, which is an easy mistake for an author to make and an editor to miss.

The characters don't have the depth of Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham or even Josephine Tey, but they're adequate for their roles, and there were plenty of early-20th-century mystery books in which the characters were thinner than this. The plot is relatively simple but well handled. All in all, it's competent rather than amazing, but sometimes that's all I'm looking for, and next time I want a pleasant, competent, fun cozy read, Holly Hepburn will be on my list of authors to consider.

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Review: Murder at the Vicarage

Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've seen at least one of the TV adaptations of this book, and I may well have read it many years ago from my grandmother's large Agatha Christie collection. Given that I couldn't even remember from the adaptation whodunnit, it's not surprising that I don't remember whether or not I've read the book. Like most Christie, the interactions of the characters are more interesting than the details of how the crime was committed (which isn't a criticism; I'd rather that way round than the other).

An unpopular man has been shot at the desk in the study of the vicarage. This makes a change from the usual formula of being shot (or stabbed) in his own library in the manor, but is rough on the vicar, who narrates. The middle-aged vicar has multiple trials to contend with: the gossipy elderly women of the parish; his young and unsuitable wife, who he loves despite himself; his curate, a nervous and not particularly competent young man with High Church leanings; and his teenage nephew Dennis - basically a good lad, but with the lack of discretion and foolish impulses of his age. And now murder.

Inspector Slack is determined to belie his name, to the point of being rude and abrupt and not even letting the vicar explain a key fact (that the clock in the study was always kept fast). The exact timing of the murder is important for who has and who doesn't have an alibi, because plenty of people have motive.

Miss Marple, who has the cottage next to the vicarage and is always out in her garden watching people come and go, not only supplies key information but also figures out how the whole thing was done, and explains it to the Chief Constable and the vicar. (For purposes of being the narrator, the vicar has been allowed to be a lot more involved in the investigation than is realistic, especially considering that he said shortly before the murder that if someone murdered the victim, it would be a good thing.)

It's a solid classic cozy mystery, a good start to the Miss Marple series. The idea of an elderly woman as detective was not completely new at the time - the first Miss Silver book, Grey Mask , had come out a couple of years earlier, and wasn't the first either - but Christie did a great job with the concept of a woman whose life experience was almost completely confined to a small village, but who had such a sharp mind, such a talent for observation, and such an insight into human nature that she saw through the most complicated murder plots.

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Review: The Bone Riders

The Bone Riders by Cady Fletcher
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A lot of urban fantasy/supernatural suspense books are written very much to a formula, which doesn't interest me. The blurb for this one suggested that it broke out of the formula, so I picked it up (from Netgalley, pre-release), and I'm glad I did. It's a solid, enjoyable piece with some original ideas.

The Bone Riders are magic users who have a specific application of their magic. They create (from the bones of dead horses) magical horses which are real and alive and behave like normal horses most of the time, but have some extra abilities when paired with their riders. For example, they can move much faster than ordinary horses when necessary, which simplifies the logistics of getting around the small city which is the setting for the story. The Bone Riders also help separate the leftover energy from things that have died if it hangs around; they have a sense of wrongness that enables them to detect it. All of this is cool, and it's not just "they're grim reapers" or "they're necromancers".

The viewpoint character, Drew (short for Andrea), came into her powers relatively recently, when she died in a car accident and then pulled herself back into her body. Her boyfriend, feeling responsible for the accident, broke up with her, but is still obsessively trying to be in her life, to a slightly creepy degree. She holds firm about them being exes, though she does rescue him at one point; she doesn't hate him, just knows they're better off not being together. He and a new guy she meets who might possibly be a new love interest down the track have names that sound similar (they're Cole and Case), which I found confusing at least once.

There's an apocalypse I wasn't expecting relatively early in the book, when the magic that has been seeping through into the city through a "rift" erupts into it and causes widespread damage, magical phenomena, and the empowerment of a number of citizens. There was both less problem with food supplies and a longer delay for aid to arrive than I suspect would be the case with a real disaster (even one that had such widespread effects), but that's largely in the background, as the Bone Riders battle the increased number of not-completely-dead humans and animals to release them, and deal with the new reality.

Right before the apocalypse, there's a set-piece that the author clearly put a lot of thought into, where Drew's terrible boss fires her for no good reason and she gives him her views on the toxic nature of employment relations in the USA.

In terms of copy editing, there are just a few typos and a number of surprisingly basic homonym errors (which I'll mention to the publisher, so they may well be fixed by publication). It reads smoothly apart from those, and as it looks like being a series, I look forward to spending more time with the Bone Riders.

Calling it now, though: Fiona is not human, but some sort of minor god-level being.

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Review: A Trade of Blood

A Trade of Blood by Robert Jackson Bennett
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Robert Jackson Bennett confuses me, because I shouldn't like his books, and yet I do. In fact, I consistently rank them among the best books I've read in a given year.

This is basically SF/horror/mystery in a setting that feels like fantasy because the technology is biotechnology, and the mechanical tech is at a medieval/renaissance level, like a lot of fantasy books. I am not at all a horror reader. I usually favour cozy fantasy or cozy mystery, and this couldn’t be less similar in most ways. But what it has that cozy fantasy usually falls very short on is a high concept and a richly developed setting, and what it has in common with my more usual reading is that Din, the viewpoint character, is at heart a decent person doing his best in bad circumstances. And the mystery is well done, too.

There's extensive gore and mass murder and a gritty, oppressive-feeling empire full of people (and animals and plants) that have been horribly distorted by the biotechnology - derived from massive kaiju, though that doesn't come into this book as directly as in the previous ones in the series. It features a sweary, ill-tempered, annoying detective and her sad-boy assistant, who’s just discovered that the time when he’ll go mad from his bioenhancements is probably not as far away as he’d hoped. Also, fungal mind control.

And yet Bennett does it so well (and somehow conveys that he, too, hates how the world is, rather than celebrating it in a torture-porn sort of way like, say, Terry Goodkind) that I can’t help wanting to read it anyway.

There's a strong theme, for instance, of the cattle industry, which is the dominant industry in the area of the action, being not only wasteful of resources but also morally degrading, because of the way in which it normalises the suffering and slaughter of living creatures.

It isn't perfect, certainly. There are too many exclamation points in the dialog, too many commas between adjectives that aren't coordinate, the occasional number disagreement between subject and verb, and a couple of words that don't mean what the author thinks they mean. (I had a pre-publication version via Netgalley, so some of this may be fixed before publication.) But none of these things much inhibited my enjoyment of an excellently-crafted story with top-notch worldbuilding.

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Review: Sweet Danger

Sweet Danger by Margery Allingham
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

More of a thriller than a mystery. (My working definition: in a mystery, the protagonists are trying to solve a crime that's already happened, while in a thriller, they're trying to prevent a crime from happening or otherwise battling criminal opposition.) In this case, it's a treasure hunt, racing against a powerful and unscrupulous enemy. The complicated and somewhat unlikely backstory is that there's a very small Balkan country that was granted to an English earl in the Middle Ages, and then bought by one of his descendants from Metternich when the map of Europe was being redrawn after the Napoleonic Wars, and now an earthquake has opened it up to the sea and also revealed that there is oil there - meaning it could become a refueling point for the British Navy. But the line of earls has died out - or has it? There's a family that claims to be the legitimate descendants of the last earl, but they can't prove that their ancestress was married to him, and they also need to find three items to make their claim - a crown, the medieval grant, and the Metternich receipt - which have been hidden for decades, nobody knows where.

It's packed full of eccentric English characters, from the pub owner who keeps telling everyone that he's honest and the wacky local doctor to, of course, Campion himself and his manservant Lugg. The family with the claim to the earldom and its associated tiny kingdom features a gamine young woman (not quite 18) who is running the local mill, but makes most of her income from running a dynamo to charge the batteries for people's wireless sets. It's a backwater rural village with no phone and no mains power.

On the other hand, there are some bland characters too, notably Campion's three assistants, barely distinguishable upper-class chaps who could step straight into the Drones Club and no questions asked. The miller's older sister is also quite bland and generic, and while her younger brother, the putative earl, does have some distinguishing characteristics, he isn't one of the great eccentrics either.

Campion shines throughout, manipulating events, anticipating problems, hatching complicated schemes and pulling off daring feats when things go wrong. His pose of upper-class near-idiocy fools almost nobody. The villain is appropriately sinister, an unscrupulous businessman who's used to having his own way, with plenty of loyal minions to do his bidding. The plot zips along, and the action is, as always from this author, well described and original. It's a fun ride, and I was happy to ignore the unlikely elements and be carried along by the excellent writing.

The Vintage Digital ebook edition is not the worst edition I've seen of a classic novel, but it does have a good few scan errors that have gone uncorrected, including a lot of commas missing or inserted and several misreadings, and I don't recommend it.

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Review: Big Foot

Big Foot by Edgar Wallace
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Not one of the great Wallace books in the end, because of a couple of cheats, but enjoyable for most of its length.

One of the big cheats/coincidences is the astonishingly mobile tramp with mental issues who manages to move by unexplained means, and for largely unexplained reasons, between the three main locations (central London, a coastal town, and a rural suburb of London), apparently solely so that he can play a key role in the plot. He also has a coincidental connection to another character.

There's a massive red herring which had me completely fooled, not least because there's at least one scene where someone tells someone else something that, given the final resolution, they ought not to have told him. (view spoiler)[The police sergeant lies to his boss about another character's alibi, which is in accordance with the red herring (that the sergeant appears to be the villain) but not the resolution (that the boss was running him the whole time to fool the criminals into thinking the sergeant was bent). (hide spoiler)]

There's the usual side romance, between a lawyer and the secretary of the man who has the neighbouring office; it's nothing special.

Still, Superintendent Minter (known to everyone as "Sooper") is a fun character, with his pose of anti-intellectualism covering a clever and insightful mind - a bit like Colombo in a way, pretending to be "just a plain man" while outmaneuvering someone who thinks they're his social and intellectual superior. His disreputable motorcycle is also a bit like Colombo's car, and like his later American counterpart he dresses like a scarecrow. He appeared in at least one other Wallace book, but unfortunately my library doesn't have it and it isn't on Project Gutenberg either.

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Review: The Early Worm

The Early Worm by Robert Benchley
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Absurdist humour, which I found oddly readable for no reason I could put my finger on. Very much embedded in its time (1927), with a lot of references to contemporary people who I had to look up on Wikipedia, because in the ensuing 100 years they've dropped out of the popular consciousness.

Several of the pieces form a series, originally published in Life magazine, in which a fictionalised version of the author leads an expedition, supposedly sponsored by Life, to the North Pole by bicycle. This was the time of Byrd and Peary, and the North Pole was topical. They end up making it as far as upstate New York.

A surprisingly pleasant distraction for a quiet afternoon, but no classic.

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Review: Cream of the Jug: An Anthology of Humorous Stories

Cream of the Jug: An Anthology of Humorous Stories by Grant Martin Overton
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

As even the editor admits in his introduction, this is a mixed bag. Some stories are by well-known authors still known today like P.G. Wodehouse or F. Scott Fitzgerald, others by authors well known at the time but now obscure, and a couple by authors who weren't even that well known when the book came out. As in any anthology, I enjoyed some more than others.

The Wodehouse I'd read in another collection somewhere. It's the Earl of Emsworth competing against Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe in the agricultural show, this time with a giant pumpkin - before the days of the pig Empress of Blandings, and indeed before Parsloe lived at Matchingham Hall. There's not a lot of protagonism on display from Lord Emsworth, who's the recipient of a good amount of luck in order for everything to work out for him, and it's not a top-flight Blandings story; nobody even goes to Blandings under a false name.

A lot of the stories have soft endings, and several of them rely on dialect (black dialect in one, Jewish dialect in another) for some, although by no means all, of their humour. The "negro" story is, at least, about a black film company from the US South shooting in Algeria, so it's not a stereotypical situation, and would still work if you took the dialect out or, for that matter, if you told it about white people. There's a third dialect story, too, told by a New York blue-collar boxer. That was one of the ways humour was done 100 years ago (think about Damon Runyon). But in all three cases, the situations provide a lot of the humour as well, and the dialect is just spice.

Overall, it's the definition of three stars for me: good enough to recommend, with some caveats.

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Review: The Feywild Job

The Feywild Job by C.L. Polk
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This isn't just better than most licensed fiction; it's better than most fiction I come across.

The thing with licensed fiction is that it's often just officially sanctioned fanfic, and while there is some excellent fanfic here and there, it's not common. Usually, you're going to see a better result from an author who has come up with an original world, situation, and characters, because if they can do that, they're probably talented enough to also tell a good story. (Lots of exceptions in all directions, of course, but that's the way to bet.)

But the thing with D&D licensed fiction is that, while the author is handed a detailed and complex world, they do generally come up with an original situation and characters, and that's what this book is.

A further advantage is that modern D&D is built for creating storytelling potential. Take the idea of a warlock. Here's someone who has made a deal with a powerful otherworldly being in order to get power for themselves. That's just bristling with possible stories. Firstly, it's a relationship that involves a power differential, so you know there's going to be some exploitation happening. Secondly, the warlock has to have had a reason they wanted that power and were prepared to trade for it; what part of them is broken that caused that to be true, and how will that continue to play out? And thirdly, they're now more powerful than the ordinary people around them; how are they going to abuse that?

The central character of this novel (and it deserves to be called a novel) is a warlock, Saeldian, who serves an archfey patron and has made a career out of con games. When Saeldian's old partner, the bard Kell, is forced into doing another job with Saeldian - who left Kell after their last big score in circumstances that looked like a horrible betrayal - we have motivated protagonists in a dynamic situation, and that's always an excellent story engine.

Alongside Saeldian and Kell we have the rogue Jubilee, who's Saeldian's new partner, and the druid Lorzok, who's Kell's new partner. Jubilee needs money to help her parents, former adventurers who have been "gifted" a dilapidated manor; Lorzok is seeking a place where he belongs. They're tasked with a heist, and told that the job is reclaiming a stolen gem with minor magical powers from someone who has bought it from a thief without knowing its provenance, and returning it to its rightful owner in the Feywild without them finding out.

The heist is tricky, but not, perhaps, as tricky as it ought to be; they're given no time to prepare, yet manage to pull off something that ought to be impossible. This eventually turns out to be down to complex machinations.

Along the way, though, the true story unfolds: the relationship between Kell and Saeldian. Is it retrievable? Can they ever be honest with one another? What really caused Saeldian to leave ten years ago? And this is where the book really shines. There's a gradual but completely believable unfolding of the truth and progression of the relationship, and it flows naturally out of the specifics of how the world works, which I always appreciate in a speculative fiction work.

The rich culture of the Forgotten Realms forms a great backdrop to the early part of the book, and the wonderful and terrifying, ever-shifting Feywild is an equally effective setting for the later part. The author does an excellent job of evoking these settings without ever making them the focus; that stays firmly on the characters and their relationships, plus the twisty and surprising plot. Also, you don't need to be familiar with these settings, or with D&D in general, in order to understand what's going on.

I knew C.L. Polk was a good writer, because I'd read The Midnight Bargain and rated it five stars. This book only confirms my opinion. Personally, I would use the past perfect tense more often than it's used here (that's a general trend I've noticed in the books I read), but otherwise I have little to complain of in the copy editing either.

Strongly recommended.

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Review: Entwined Dimensions A Metaphysical Cozy Portal Fantasy with Kiwi Humor: Book 1 of the Eura Trilogy

Entwined Dimensions A Metaphysical Cozy Portal Fantasy with Kiwi Humor: Book 1 of the Eura Trilogy by Ariel Grace
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The point of this book (I think) is that love is more important than tidiness, which I agree with, incidentally. It certainly backs up this content with its form.

If ADHD was a book, this would be that book. The prose is all over the place, rich with imagery that frequently doesn't make much, or any, sense ("a belch of fire blurred up like an alibi"), or even says the opposite of what it is trying to say. ("Zipping along like rush hour traffic on an Auckland motorway" - so, extremely slowly?) It's more often correctly punctuated than not, but the punctuation (and grammar) can also get a bit random at times, and someone needs at absolute minimum to run a spell check before publication. (I had a pre-release copy for review via Netgalley.)

It's set in New Zealand, but frequently says things that are true in the USA but not really in New Zealand (like healthcare being primarily about profit), or that are otherwise coded American (an apartment on 3rd Street - in a town, Kaitaia, which has no 3rd/Third Street). The NZ geography feels a little off all over. It's several times implied that Kaitaia is closer to the sea than is in fact the case (it's several km away). The trip from Kaitaia to Wellington, nearly 1000km, takes place in the break between two paragraphs. Two characters walk (even though they're capable of flying) from the ferry terminal at Blenheim to Motueka, a distance of over 160km/100 miles in a direct line, entirely through forest - which would require you to walk not in a direct line - in what seems to be a few hours.

There is some dimension-hopping going on, so perhaps that's part of the explanation. But things being in a different dimension or timeline doesn't seem to prevent them being findable or usable, nor does it interfere with cell service.

There are multiple first-person viewpoint characters, and since their names are not given at the chapter headers, it sometimes takes a few paragraphs to figure out whose head we're in. Sometimes, when we're in the POV of the guy from the fae realm, he uses expressions and imagery that comes from the human world. (Though there is some kind of connection he has to the human world, I honestly lost track of what it was exactly.) Several characters, from the human and fae worlds, speak in NZ slang, but that also sometimes feels slightly off, like it's being used by someone who's heard it but doesn't speak it, and there are Americanisms like "elementary school" instead of "primary school" that make me suspect the author is a transplanted American. There's a mention of one NZ bird and a couple of NZ trees, but the most frequently mentioned birds are hummingbirds (which supposedly can carry you across to the fae realm if you're small enough) and crows (which can talk, and are convenient helpers a couple of times), and neither of those are found in NZ.

One of the characters is ostensibly a scientist as her day job, but we never see her actually working at this job, and she doesn't seem to need to tell anyone there that she's going to disappear from it indefinitely to deal with the plot - something I call a "superhero job". Her being a scientist is presumably how she manages to invent a badly-sciencebabbled device which is supposed to make her capable of getting to the fae realm, but actually does something completely different that kicks off the whole plot, though it's really more of a series of episodes than a plot. This is almost the last proactive thing she does, certainly the last thing she does without a whole lot of help, but she's apparently the Chosen One and keeps getting commended for doing so well, even though, every time she faces the slightest difficulty, a new character will turn up suddenly (the word "suddenly" appears 20 times) to help or rescue her, or to tell her the power was in her all along, or she'll remember a completely unforeshadowed useful thing she has or knows about that solves the problem.

That was one of my biggest problems with the book: it has almost no conflict that lasts for more than a single scene, and solving cosmic problems that have been in existence for an inconsistent number of years is always super easy, barely an inconvenience. The antagonists are intergalactic bureaucrats that don't trust people to love and think that rules are more important, and when they were referred to as "auditors" at one point I immediately thought of Terry Pratchett's Auditors, those faceless, nameless, unindividualized figures that think life is a mistake. These bureaucrats are not as scary as that, though.

The other big problem I had is that the problem and its solutions are so abstractly described with such a wealth of paradoxical imagery that I found it extremely difficult to follow what was going on, not helped by the bouncing around between characters. It also doesn't help that concrete things are seldom described much, including the NZ landscape, which I think was a missed opportunity. And the word "somehow" is doing some heavy lifting at a couple of points.

It's extremely messy, very metaphysical, cozy only if by cozy you mean "almost everyone is nice," a portal fantasy for sure, and with a small amount of Kiwiness that feels a bit off-brand and some extremely mild humour. I finished it largely because I wanted to see whether the author pulled it all together in some way towards the end, but for me, that didn't really happen.

I've started being harsher with my star ratings this year, so this one gets two stars, meaning that while it has some strengths and isn't a complete disaster, it has enough issues (from my perspective) that it doesn't get onto my annual recommendation list. I don't think I was the right audience for it, and if you are, you should ignore my opinion and go ahead and enjoy it.

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Review: The Daughter of Time

The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Definitely unusual. Tey's detective, laid up in hospital after being injured in pursuit of a suspect, gets interested in history, and applies his police methods to the (then) 400-year-old mystery of what happened to the Princes in the Tower, the two young sons of Edward IV. Did their uncle Richard III have them murdered, as the Tudors and their sponsored authors claimed and as history books have taught ever since, or was that a complete frame-up?

The case comes across as compelling, though apparently Tey left a few things out, and it's not as cut-and-dried as she paints it. Historians certainly object to her approach, perhaps partly because she has some harsh words for historians who draw conclusions completely at odds with the facts they present. She touches on other historical rewrites along the way, again not always completely accurately. For example, she mentions the riots at Tonypandy in Wales in 1910, and the detective and his historical researcher adopt "Tonypandy" as a shorthand for an exaggerated story that's widely believed - in this case, that troops fired on the rioters; but she elides a few of the details, including the fact that one person did die in the riots (though whether as a result of police action or not has never been definitively settled).

Still, while it's possible to quibble over details, this book takes the detective story to a new and unusual place, and manages to make an interesting novel out of a man in a hospital bed reading books and talking to a young researcher about events of four centuries previously, which itself is no mean feat. I found it very educational about a time in English history I was only passingly familiar with, the end and aftermath of the Wars of the Roses, and it also has some things to say about how history is written by the victors and/or the popular imagination, and the difference between what people say happened and what the day-to-day records of ordinary actions show.

Setting aside whether or not its conclusions are as justified as they're made to seem, or whether Tey herself is committing Tonypandy, it's a masterful piece of writing that deserves five stars just for the degree of difficulty, and I also found it entertaining.

Sadly, the HarperCollins ebook edition belies its own claim that they "uphold the highest standards of ebook production" with numerous missing punctuation marks, the obvious result of their usual lack of attention to detail and lack of editorial effort. This book deserves better.

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Review: The Dragon Has Some Complaints

The Dragon Has Some Complaints by John Wiswell
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I also have some complaints.

tl;dr: This book was not for me. I mean that both in the sense that I didn't like it much, and also in the sense that it wasn't intended for the kind of person I am.

If you're the kind of person who will love this book, or have already read it and loved it, reading this review may only annoy you, and you may be better off skipping it and reading one that will reinforce your views instead. I always implicitly write my reviews for people who value the things I value (writing craft, especially) and enjoy the things I enjoy. I write positive reviews to direct them towards books I think they would like, and negative reviews to direct them away from books that are probably not going to be to their taste. If you have different priorities and enjoy different things, what I have to say will not be of much interest to you.

This review is going to be as much an expression of concerns I have about the current cozy fantasy genre in general as it is about this book in particular, though starting from thoughts I had while reading this specific book.

The first thing that bothered me about this book is that it feels like one long point-of-view violation. The viewpoint character is the relatively sane and sensible central head of a three-headed dragon; the other two heads have issues. Upperhead has the delusion that he's human, and Lowerhead has become almost animalistic. All three, including Centerhead, have lost memories because of the trauma of the loss of Lefty, the fourth head, who was favourable towards humans and worked with them. That obscured backstory may partially explain why this supposedly wild dragon not only understands but freely uses so many human concepts, including trans men and women (who he identifies instantly as such), cathedrals, apothecaries and vacations -this last itself being an anachronistic concept for the setting. However, while he recognizes ink and paper, he doesn't understand what writing is - but uses the verb "read" in a metaphorical sense multiple times.

How this came across to me is that the author wasn't putting in the effort, or maybe didn't even think about the need, to characterize someone based on what that sort of character is familiar with and would know and value. Reading some of the reviews of one of his other books reinforces this idea; multiple reviewers mentioned how a solitary swamp monster who had previously had limited and brief interactions with humans seemed to have a complete and instant grasp of how abusive human relationships work, as seen through a this-worldly current-state-of-psychology lens. To me, this is a basic craft issue.

And this is a problem I have with the cozy genre in general. Not only is the worldbuilding often thin, little more than generic sword & sorcery scenery flats, but those scenery flats stand behind people who are, in their attitudes and ways of thinking, completely indistinguishable from mid-2020s US people of a particular type (to which the authors belong). My suspicion is that they are so embedded in a filter bubble that emphasizes doctrinal purity that they are almost unable to conceive of people who might think differently from them, except as othered and villainized; that they have no functional sense of history; and that they believe implicitly that everything they think, and the way they behave, cannot be improved upon and therefore should be universalized. As a young person, I was in a community like this myself, and even though the content of the beliefs could hardly have been more different, I recognize the patterns.

In the typical cozy book, basically every single character (who isn't a villain or at least an opponent) is queer in some way, and most of them are at least one of neurodivergent, disabled, or struggling with anxiety or depression. In these days of self-selecting groups ("found family"), this may be the lived experience of the author; everyone they know is like this. But it's like the famous example of the journalist who, when a political candidate won an election, protested that nobody he knew had voted for him. It says more about the narrowness of the person's experience than the actual constitution of the world at large. I should note that I don't have a problem with people being queer, neurodivergent and etc. These are ways that real people are. But it isn't how everyone is, and universalizing it places me and people like me, who don't have those characteristics (except that I am arguably slightly disabled and occasionally anxious), in an outgroup, just as much as earlier literature placed people who did have them in an outgroup. It's not true inclusiveness if there's still an outgroup, even if that is the people who were traditionally the ingroup. It's still not fully honouring our shared humanity.

In this particular book, the pervasiveness of these types of characters is more or less its only claim to belong to the cozy genre, since it's about a war between diverse refugees from a lightly sketched fascist-imperialist country and that country's military. Nobody here is living the equivalent of a Japanese "slow life." It's more like the demimonde of the Weimar Republic left Germany (though the names are mostly Eastern European), found an uninhabited island, tamed some dragons, created a flying city using the antigravity magic of the dragons, and held out against a much-less-efficient Nazi regime, with Britain pretending to help, but actually out to take half their land and half their dragons in return for minimal assistance. (That is, at least, slightly more worldbuilding than cozy authors often bother with.)

The other thing that annoyed me about this book, and the main reason I gave it up in the middle, is the character Raina, who becomes the rider of the dragon central character. She is the complete opposite of the kind of character I like to read about. She's outwardly naive and optimistic to the point of getting on people's nerves, while on the inside she's a complete emotional bombsite who uses alcohol and casual sex as forms of maladaptive coping. And what escalated her from "annoying character" to "reason to put the book down and not pick it up again" was that the dragon declares to Raina that she is everything a human should want to be, which is a statement I couldn't disagree with more strongly. To me, that's not unconditional acceptance; it's enabling.

If you don't care about the POV issues and can cope with Raina, this is a competently written book with the right emotional beats to appeal to plenty of readers. In the author's afterword, he mentions that the copy editor remarked on how clean it was, and I agree that it has fewer issues than average, but there are some words used in odd senses, and a few small words like "to" and "the" dropped out of the occasional sentence in the pre-publication version I had from Netgalley. (Missing words are a hard thing to spot unless you have the knack of it.)

It's not a terrible book. It just very much is not for me.

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