Review: Way of the Wolf

Way of the Wolf by Lindsay Buroker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I had this in my TBR folder for a while before starting it, because I assumed it would be very similar to every other Buroker, and I'm not always in that mood.

The characters do feel very familiar. As I've said before, it's like the author has a small number of actors who play all her characters, and while they bring something new to each role, you can recognize the similarities. The (tentative) love interest this time is played by the wacky, self-regarding guy, and the narrator and protagonist is the competent, snarky but slightly insecure woman.

Considered on its own merits, it's a solid piece of work. There's a strong setup: the middle-aged protagonist, Luna, was born a werewolf, left her pack after killing her lover while shifted, and has been taking potions to suppress her change for more than half her life, but now various events are pushing her towards returning to the pack. Her mother is ill, her cousins appear to want to kill her, and there's a mysterious box with a wolf carved on it that she wants to know more about. Her potion supplier has suddenly disappeared, and a lone werewolf (the wacky self-regarding one) has turned up and is poking around for who-knows-what. Machinating somewhere in the background is her creep of an ex-husband. Their two sons, who have left home, are mentioned but play no direct role in the plot. Luna just wants to work quietly at her job managing an apartment complex and save some money for her retirement, but the dynamic situation won't let her do that.

As usual for Lindsay Buroker, there are very few editing errors, just the odd hyphen where it shouldn't be and "palette" for "palate". The characters, while very reminiscent of all her other characters, are engaging, the banter (though, again, familiar) is good as always, the setup is original, and the pacing worked well for me. I'd probably read the whole series if I could get it as a bundle and was in the right mood.

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Review: Six Against the Yard

Six Against the Yard by The Detection Club
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Something unusual: a themed anthology contributed to by some of the best-known detective writers of the early 20th century: Margery Allingham, Ronald Knox, Anthony Berkeley, Dorothy L. Sayers, Freeman Wills Crofts, and Russell Thorndyke. There's also an article by Agatha Christie, not part of the original volume but published around the same time, about a real-life unsolved murder.

The theme is "the perfect murder," and in between the stories, George W. Cornish, a retired Scotland Yard detective, analyzes the crimes and talks about how they aren't perfect murders at all, and how detectives would go about solving them if they happened in real life. The one that he does concede is probably not soluble is the Sayers, but he manages to pull off a move of "even when I lose, I win" by claiming that it isn't actually a murder.

While Cornish's commentary is interesting, it does go a bit against the grain of the detective genre, which we all secretly know doesn't reflect real life. It's as if a relationship counsellor commented on a book of romance stories, or a Western historian on a book of cowboy stories, or an actual undercover agent on a book of spy stories. It takes the air out of them a bit.

The stories are mostly enjoyable, though. I'd read the Sayers before, in one of her collections, but the others were new to me, and they're varied and interesting - some told in first person, some in third. As with any anthology, some are better than others, but all of them, I thought, were at least competent. The Sayers was the best written, to my mind, though in terms of the actual crime story I most enjoyed Anthony Berkeley's venture into American-style hard-boiled meeting British matter-of-fact domestic crime.

The proofreading of what I assume is a scanned and OCR-interpreted text is, as usual, rough in spots.

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Review: Brigands & Breadknives

Brigands & Breadknives by Travis Baldree
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Travis Baldree is one of the best writers of cozy fantasy out there, and here he has produced a book that is pushing the boundaries of how much action you can put into a cozy, while absolutely writing a cozy book. It's not about the fighting. It's about the character growth.

Fern, the rattkin bookseller we met in Bookshops & Bonedust , comes to join Viv, the orc who has, until now, been the protagonist of the series, in the town where she's founded her successful coffee shop (see Legends & Lattes ). The idea is that she will set up her bookshop opposite the coffee shop and there will be retail synergy.

But if anyone has earned the right to be a cozy fantasy heretic, it's Baldree, and, as he says in his acknowledgements, “I don't want to pretend that fantasy small-business ownership is the answer to all of life's woes.” Despite a successful launch and the fact that everything's going fine, Fern discovers that her mid-life crisis has not been averted by her move to a different town and reconnecting with her old friend Viv. She gets very drunk, and, happening to spot Astryx, a famous thousand-year-old elf warrior, on the street, on a whim hides in the back of her cart, thus involving herself in adventure. Astryx is on her way to collect a bounty on a chaos-agent goblin she has in custody, and other people want the goblin too - some for the bounty, others for revenge.

Neither Fern nor the ancient elf comes out of the experience unchanged. Along the way, they encounter a sentient ancient blade reforged (as a punishment) into a breadknife. His name is Bradlee, but, given his form, he gets the nickname Breadlee, which he objects to strenuously.

Fern continuing to use a nickname he hates is kind of bullying, or at least rude, but then, Fern is rude. Not just because she swears a lot, though she does, but because she's often blunt and tactless in her interactions with others. It's a wonder she survived in retail for so long, honestly.

Her imperfection, though, is part of what makes this book so good. She isn't brave, in any way; she can't talk to her old friend Viv about the fact that the bookshop isn't working out as she'd hoped, for example. But over the course of the story, she comes to care enough about the people she's with to develop a degree of courage, though, realistically, she's still incapable of fighting effectively. Both she and Astryx find new meaning through their journey together, and new honesty with themselves, and that, to me, is the real story (and the real strength) of the book. It's also part of what makes it cozy, even though it has more fighting than a cozy normally would.

There's not a lot to criticise for me here. It's all minor stuff: Fern gets drunk on whisky at the start of the book, but by the end of the book it's become brandy. There are some commas after adjectives that shouldn't have them, including a couple that come between the adjective and its noun. There's one misplaced apostrophe ("Warden's barracks" when there's more than one warden). The distances shown on the map and the distances described in the narrative don't seem to match up well, in that places that seem the same distance apart on the map can require very different lengths of time to travel between them, not obviously connected to the difficulty of the terrain. Astryx has an elder blade named Nigel, which she makes no attempt to conceal, but which somehow is not part of her legend.

The flaws are so minor, and the strengths so well handled, that I had to give it the full five stars, which I don't hand out particularly often. Not only is it sound in its craft, it has a deeper layer of meaning that is what I look for in a five-star book, and relationships and personal growth are at the heart of that depth. It's cozy in that it doesn't have epic scope - the things that matter in it matter mostly to the people directly involved - but they matter deeply to those people, and that makes for a compelling story.

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Review: A Knack for Metal and Bone

A Knack for Metal and Bone by Kim McDougall
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I don't see nearly as much steampunk fiction these days as I used to a decade ago; the tide seems to have ebbed on it. I enjoy it when it's done well, though - which it rarely is, though this one, I'm glad to say, is largely an exception.

We're on a future post-apocalyptic Earth, it turns out through bits and pieces of backstory doled out in relevant moments rather than in infodumps (good). The eruption of magic six centuries ago filled the world with dangerous monsters. This apparently happened in the 21st century, based on how long ago Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is said to have been written. Much technology was lost, but some of it is now being reconstructed in a new way, using magical power sources. I love a good alternative tech tree based on magic, and this was a big plus for me. I'll note that I wouldn't have picked the book up if I'd known it was post-apocalyptic, since I don't usually enjoy that genre. However, it was far enough post-apocalyptic that it was effectively a secondary world in most respects.

The characters are a bunch of military misfits on a suspicious mission to investigate why a science station out in the Meadows (where the monsters are) has suddenly stopped communicating. There's a princess, which almost put me off - I can't stand princesses as a rule - but she's not at all princessy; she's a mechanic with a magical-technology arm and a mech familiar that turns from a bird into a mouse, all of which is cool. She's not a kid, either. She's 28. And there's a werewolf, also not one of my favourite tropes, but he also has an interesting backstory: he killed his incompetent general to keep his whole unit from being killed. Shifters are discriminated against, so he's in more trouble for being one than for killing the general.

Even though there's a large group of characters in the troop and most of them are introduced at once, I quickly got to be able to distinguish them, which is well done by the author. Most of the minor characters don't have much more than a couple of quirks and a role, but that's fine. The two main characters, who have a relatively slow-burn romantic attraction, have some depth to them, some of which is given in backstory references and flashbacks.

It's relatively well edited for a steampunk book, which are usually awful and full of vocabulary issues. There are a few notable glitches, though. The most common is the good old "let's eat Grandma" error (missing commas around terms of address), but there are a couple of misplaced apostrophes for plural nouns, missing question marks, and a few instances of sloppy typing around the end of a sentence (double period, no period, missing closing quotation mark). Numbers that are not between twenty-one and ninety-nine get hyphens they shouldn't have. There are a couple of vocab errors, but they're not frequent. I marked about 70 issues, which is two or three times the average for most books, but for a steampunk book is not terrible.

The most obvious worldbuilding mistake, which doesn't actually affect anything, is that the author seems unclear on how midnight works. Even in the far north (this appears to be former Canada, based on the wildlife, but a globally warmed version), even in the middle of summer, no matter how short the day is, the sun will never set after midnight. Midnight is the midpoint of the night - you know, the dark bit. It comes after sunset and before sunrise, roughly halfway between the two.

I did also wonder, though, how the city fed itself, given that the river and the plains were both full of monsters, and so not conducive to farming or fishing. Also, how an artificial limb fitted the princess both when she was a child and when she was an adult. And why so many contemporary references (like "didn't get the memo" or "harlequin" or the way people were named) had survived six hundred years of disruption and change. And why, now they had a magical power source which would be capable of driving it, nobody had brought back flight technology.

It's hovering on the border of the Bronze (lowest) and Silver (solid) tier of my annual recommendation list, but I think on balance it falls into high Bronze. Definite issues, both with the editing and the worldbuilding, but some good bones, strong character work and a compelling story.

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Review: The Expedition of Humphry Clinker

The Expedition of Humphry Clinker by Tobias Smollett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When I studied English literature at university, I deliberately stopped at the 17th century. The more 18th-century novels I read now, the more I realize what I was missing out on, though I might not have appreciated them as much back then. Yes, they're rambling and wordy, both in their individual sentences and overall, and I wouldn't put up with that style in a 21st-century novel, but I make allowances for the period. It still meant that I wasn't always in the mood to read this one, which is why it took me nearly two months to finish.

This is a comedy of characters. Told via letters, which have distinct voices for the different authors and often give markedly different perspectives on the same events, it chronicles the doings of a Welsh squire's family on a journey around Britain. It's also a travelogue, with reflections by the various characters (mainly Squire Bramble) on the good and bad aspects of the places they visit, to the point of satire sometimes on the more fashionable ones like Bath. If there's an overall theme, it's the difference between balanced and healthy prosperity, which increases and spreads through wise management and sensible development, and extravagance, which exhausts and finally consumes itself and leads to ruin and poverty, not only in money but also in character.

As well as being a comedy in the "intended to be funny" sense, it's also a comedy in the sense that it ends with marriages rather than deaths. There are several slowly unwinding plot threads that come together relatively quickly at the end.

The head of the family, Squire Bramble himself, is a querulous hypochondriac who comes off as a misanthrope, until you dig beneath the surface and discover that he's a kind and generous man with a short temper because of his real and imagined illnesses. His health improves towards the end of the book, on his visit to Scotland, about which he enthuses (the author was born there, by what I'm sure is no coincidence). Bramble's unmarried sister Tabitha is a type of 18th-century literature (or perhaps of English literature), the wrong-headed woman who can't be reasoned with. Their nephew is superficially a young coxcomb, but again has more depth to him once you get to know him. Their niece is a naive young woman who has fallen in love with an actor - who may actually be a gentleman going under a false name. Partway through, we get the advent of the title character, Humphrey Clinker (eventually revealed not to be his real name), an honest young man who the squire engages as a servant at a low point in his life. This kind act turns out well for everyone, particularly Clinker and the squire. A coincidence eventually comes to light which connects Clinker to the family in a different way.

Clinker becomes involved in the Methodist movement - then an evangelical awakening within the Anglican church, which appealed strongly to the poor - and his honest piety, leavened occasionally with credulous superstition, is a major feature of his character, treated sympathetically for the most part.

If the book has a fault, it's that there are too many characters to easily keep straight at first, some of whom are written to and others written about, and that you sometimes have to check the end of the chapter to see who's writing, though often you can tell from the voice or from the recipient. As I went on with the book, I became more orientated. The stage machinery is visible occasionally, when one letter-writer avoids retelling a good story that has been told by the previous one, saying "I'll tell you that story when I see you."

The Project Gutenberg version has occasional OCR/scan errors, where words have been mistaken for other legitimate words. Because a couple of the letter-writers provide amusement through their misspellings and malapropisms (to a degree that stretches disbelief sometimes, particularly when it's bawdy through no intent of the letter-writer), and because 18th-century English was often spelled (and punctuated) differently from modern English anyway, and had a lot of vocabulary that we've since lost, it's a pardonable fault. I will send them an email about the obvious substitutions I noticed, though. I know I will have missed some through not recognizing the original word.

Overall, though for modern taste it needs a bit of compression and streamlining, this is an enjoyable look at Britain of the later 18th century, its places, people, and social movements and conditions, and a mostly gently satiric comedy full of memorable characters and absurd incidents. If you enjoy, say, The Pickwick Papers or even Three Men in a Boat , you will probably enjoy this literary predecessor of both of them.

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Review: Inspector French and Sir John Magill’s Last Journey

Inspector French and Sir John Magill’s Last Journey by Freeman Wills Crofts
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Crofts always writes a clever, twisty plot, and French is a solid toiler with flashes of brilliance who has just enough personality to qualify as a character, rather than the crime-solving plot device he was in the first couple of books. Mrs French is mentioned a couple of times in this book, but never appears.

At the 13% mark, I already had a theory about who had committed the crime and how. That theory proved to be correct as far as it went, though very incomplete, and I didn't know why they'd committed it. Watching French unravel the complicated plot in his dogged way was mostly enjoyable, though occasionally I felt some of the tedium that he himself was feeling. Mostly, the author skips over the tedious police-procedure parts with summary, and only gives us fully developed scenes when French's perseverance (or a credible stroke of luck favouring the prepared mind) yields progress. As always, the sense of place is well conveyed, particularly since many of the scenes are in Northern Ireland, which is where the author grew up. And, as is the tradition with the French books, there's a tense scene at the end when French and his colleagues make the arrest and are vigorously resisted.

The HarperCollins edition is a typical low-effort production that's been run through scanning and OCR and then pushed out without adequate (or, perhaps, any) proofreading for scan errors. There are multiple missing, inserted, misplaced or substituted punctuation marks, and a couple of typos that, if someone had bothered to run a spell check, would have been caught. I read the ebook from my library, but I assume the paperback is just as bad. If you have the option, don't buy this edition; it will only encourage the publisher in their lack of professionalism, plus it's annoying to read.

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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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