Review: The Forbidden Stars

The Forbidden Stars by Tim Pratt
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A space opera heist caper, where the target is an entire solar system, and the mark is a group of fascist aliens (servants of Mythos-esque, godlike, ancient malevolent aliens, who are sleeping but not dead).

Because it was structured as a heist, and because it was so enjoyable, I forgave the ease with which the tiny crew achieved everything they set out to do. The third time the main progagonist went in alone into a facility full of enemies, this time almost literally with her hands tied behind her back, rather than being put off by the over-the-top unlikeliness I just thought, "Oh, it's like when Miles Vorkosigan goes into the prison camp, naked and alone, and you know that it's everyone else that's in trouble. This will be cool to watch play out."

The banter and snark are fun, the stakes are high enough to keep up some tension without ever dragging the story into the dark, and overall it's a good ride.

I've read the first of the trilogy, but not the second; I didn't find that caused me any confusion, but I will go back and read the second one, because I enjoy these books so much.

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Review: Ivory Apples

Ivory Apples by Lisa Goldstein
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

Jo Walton says of this book, "I loved it. You'll love it too."

She really should know better than to say things like that.

I tried hard. I came back to it twice after going off and reading other things that appealed to me more. But in the end I DNFed at 47%.

Why? Not because it isn't well-written; it is. But because, despite a fantasy premise that (as far as I read) was more background than foreground, what this mainly reminded me of was those grim-and-gritty, real-life-sucks YA novels that I avoided as a teenager, because frankly I'd rather read something escapist.

It's very good - for me, too good - at portraying an abusive adult in charge of children, and the desperate lengths one of the children goes to in response. But that isn't what I want to read.

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Review: The Return of the Incredible Exploding Man

The Return of the Incredible Exploding Man by Dave Hutchinson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Here's what I'd tell this author if I was his editor. Obviously, I'm not.

Your prose is well above average. That's what kept me reading through the very slow first quarter; I don't know that it would do as much for most readers. Your structure, on the other hand, needs a lot of work.

The first quarter consists entirely of a sad loser (one of my least favourite kinds of character, speaking for myself) resisting a decision that it's clear he will end up making. What's not clear is why he's resisting it. Is he fiercely independent and doesn't like being railroaded? If so, you need to show that more obviously, and also make it a trait that carries through into the rest of the book. Likewise if he's just self-sabotaging. I couldn't figure out which one it was, or if it was something else, and it never ended up mattering anyway.

The middle half is stronger, but at the three-quarter mark it takes a sharp left turn, and practically all the plot lines and characters that have been gradually developing through the middle are thrown away, never to be resolved. Your title promises, and the blurb hints, that this is a supers book. It isn't for the first three-quarters, and the last quarter is only a supers book if you're extremely generous with the definition. Then the ending is a complete damp fizzle.

Here's what I suggest you do. Cut two-thirds of the first 75%, including most of the first 25%. Get rid of all the plotlines that go nowhere and the characters that disappear at the three-quarter mark for no particular reason except that the book has suddenly changed what it's about. If possible, bring in at least two of the three new characters you introduce in the last quarter (the Polish scientist and the two government agents); don't introduce significant new characters after the first act if you can help it.

Develop the relationships with Wendy, the scientist from the early part, and if possible Rob Chen. They're underutilised. The relationship with Wendy doesn't have to be a romance (you briefly hint at the possibility, but never follow through), but it should be more than it is. Chen is a throwaway at the moment. You developed the relationship with Ralph, the old man next door, well; I want to see you do the same with other characters that last until the end of the book.

And definitely develop the relationship with the villain. Perhaps you could toss in the theory that the reason Alex and he were the only ones who were able to leave after the accident was that they were having a confrontation at the time; either the emotional heightening or the physical proximity could provide an explanation for what is, at the moment, unexplained. It's fine if that's just a theory that never gets confirmed, but humans come up with theories to explain things. At the moment, no explanation is even attempted. Have the scientists at least figure something out, and show us a bit of their process, and their personal process around the scientific process. That's your chance to give the female characters, particularly Wendy, more to do; at the moment, they're tokens. "Look, my book has women scientists! Two of them!" Yes, well, good for you, but they don't play that much role in the plot, especially not as scientists, and not as fully realised people either.

Instead of just having the agents tell Alex about the damage the villain's doing, have him go and see and feel the devastation it's causing for himself. Have him try to help the victims with his new powers, which are seriously underutilized; there's not even a suggestion that he should be considering the good he can do on a large scale. He barely does much on a small scale.

The whole new middle should be about him trying to come to terms with his new powers, trying to use them in a way that matters, hitting limitations, discovering that helping people isn't simple, opening out beyond his self-absorption, differentiating himself from the villain, and becoming more determined to stop the villain. Give me a reason to be emotionally invested. Lead up to the second confrontation with the villain, and make it the turning point of Act 3, not just an inconclusive thing that happened without much foreshadowing or emotional weight. Then show us how things resolve for the characters we've now come to care about. Not everything needs to wrap up in a neat bow, but something needs to resolve. At the moment, the ending is nothing. It has no thematic resonance (in part because the book is so disjointed), it has no sense of a plot coming to a conclusion, it's just a place where you stop writing. Everything has changed for Alex, but nothing has changed for him. Give him an internal journey to match his external one.

In the current version, the book Alex is writing never comes together and ends up just being lost, uncompleted. I assume that's not intended as a metaphor for this book, but it certainly could be.

If you wrote the book I describe above, or anything close to it, it could be a five-star book for me. You're a clever writer. You could make it not cliched, you could have things that are left unsettled, you could avoid turning it into a Hollywood cookie-cutter plot. Yes, it's more conventional than what you've done, but classics are classics because they work. As it stands, your version only makes it to three stars because of the quality of the prose; structurally and in terms of pacing, it doesn't work for me at all, and I think there are serious missteps. It's certainly not the "thrilling science fiction masterwork" that the blurb promises.

(I received a review copy via Netgalley.)

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Review: This Is How You Lose the Time War

This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I don't know about the time war, but this is how you win a bunch of awards, or it ought to be.

Red and Blue are time agents, on opposite sides of a war to manipulate events towards their respective futures. That's not an original premise, but what these two authors do with it is.

I'm not familiar with much of Amar El-Mohtar's work, but I've read enough Max Gladstone to know that for me, he can be hit and miss. "A Kiss, With Teeth" is one of the best stories I've ever read; parts of his Craft Sequence, the series with the lawyer/sorcerers, are excellent, but parts, for me, were deeply disappointing (not least because the other parts were so good). I also knew he didn't shy away from the dark and gruesome, so I went into this book with trepidation.

There is dark, and there is gruesome; there is a lot of death, and the cotagonists are usually its instigators, which doesn't help me to identify with them. But the only slight disappointment in terms of writing craft, for me, was perhaps an inevitable one: even though these agents range across multiple timelines and planets in the course of the book, all of the references they use are to our particular timeline (just as, in Gladstone's Craft Sequence, he occasionally drops an undigested piece of this world into his very different setting, and it jars me).

Apart from that, it's frankly amazing. I stopped about halfway through and went and read some other things, mainly because I was afraid it had got as good as it was going to, and the last half was going to just fall apart. But no. It got better.

Red and Blue begin as enemies, but they become first rivals, then friends, of a sort, and then.... it just keeps getting more intense. They write to each other secretly, using their considerable powers and ingenuity to encode messages in everyday objects that fall into the other's hands. If either of their factions finds out, they're both dead. But their lives are inextricably entangled, and perhaps nobody else in all of time and space can understand them except each other.

The prose is beautiful, and well edited; it's powerfully poetic, full of heavily weighted imagery. The plot is complex (as time travel plots tend to be) and compelling. The characters themselves - I wouldn't want to meet them; I wouldn't want to be them; but their intensity and passion drew me in regardless.

This is, in short, a very fine book that richly deserves the many accolades that will be heaped upon it. It's something quite unusual in the realm of speculative fiction, something that very few authors could pull off anything like this well. As a reviewer, I read a lot of mediocre or by-the-numbers books; this is not, by any stretch, one of them. It's excellent.

I received a review copy via Netgalley.

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Review: Gods of Jade and Shadow

Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I don't usually pick up books with "dark" in the blurb, but for this one I made an exception, because of the author. I'm glad I did.

I recently read a set of guidelines for a short story market that said "Don't send me X unless you're Silvia Moreno-Garcia," so I'm not the only one who thinks about her this way. I'd previously read her novel The Beautiful Ones, which is so full of potential to be a horrible tragedy, but instead pulls off what I've come to call the Glorious Ending: a character rises above themselves, above what any ordinary person would do, and does something that is so much the right thing, so much an act of love in the face of a dark world, that everything is changed.

Well, at the risk of a vague spoiler (because I don't think you'll guess exactly how it comes off), she's done it again.

The protagonist, Casiopea, a young Mexican woman whose native (late) father is used by her family as an excuse to make her their domestic servant, is fully believable as a naive young woman who hasn't ever left her small town, but has read widely and has big dreams. Or, actually, relatively small and conventional dreams, which end up being rendered irrelevant by the actual adventure that finds her: the lord of the (Mayan) underworld needs her help to regain his throne from his usurping brother. She continues to be believable, and becomes increasingly rounded as a character, as she copes with this bizarre and unwanted situation, confronting sorcerers and gods and other supernatural beings, plus her spoiled and hapless cousin (who also gets a bit of a growth arc).

Early on, the story starts looking like Cinderella, and the narration specifically averts that conclusion; nor does it work out remotely like Cinderella, because if anyone is rescuing anyone, it's the young woman rescuing the prince. And herself, and indeed everyone, in the end. It's magnificent.

The omniscient narrator is unusual these days, but it works; it gives us extra insight into the protagonist when she doesn't have insight into herself yet, without becoming an intrusive character voice in its own right.

The Mexican setting, one I'm not very familiar with, is beautifully and richly portrayed; there's a strong sense of place and of culture. The language, vocabulary, and writing mechanics are at a level I see all too seldom from native English speakers. (I assume, from the authentic feel of the Mexican setting, that the author has English as a second language, but I could be wrong there.) There's a thread, evolving ever so slowly and subtly but clearly, of romance, but it doesn't follow a conventional path; nothing in this book does.

I've been through a spell of reading not-very-good books for a while, and this was a welcome breaking of the drought. It's going near the top of my Best of 2019 list, both because it's extremely well done and also because it's exactly the kind of book I most enjoy.

I received a review copy via Netgalley.

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Review: Fatechanger: Penny Lost

Fatechanger: Penny Lost by L.M. Poplin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I took a long break from reading this to read something else, and only barely decided to come back and finish it.

The first few chapters are unpromising (hence the break and reluctant return). Far from being any kind of "fatechanger," as per the title, the main character, Penn, lacks much agency. She's thrown unexpectedly through time, in what at first seems like it's a contrived mechanism for the sake of the plot with no real explanation behind it (though later on it turns out that the explanation is... pretty much exactly what I thought it would be if there was an explanation). Once back in 1915, she takes, without much resistance, the first and seemingly only option open to her: she becomes a pickpocket in an Oliver-Twist-like gang of youths (disguised as a boy). She doesn't seem to suffer much in the way of moral angst about this, though we have been shown, prior to her trip through time, that she wasn't above a bit of stealing here and there.

Things pick up a bit once she manages to buy her way out of debt to the Fagin of the thieves (who runs a remarkably fair and unrigged system that allows her to do so), and instead chooses to be a newsboy - though she's not welcomed by the other newsboys, and has to prove herself again. She does this, as she did among the thieves, by being much better than them at what they do (and have been doing for a long time). Her foreknowledge of the significance of the newspaper headlines plays some role, but basically she's just that talented at selling newspapers, somewhat inexplicably given what else we see of her.

There's a marked dichotomy in Penn all the way through, in fact. On the one hand, she's helpless and lacking in options, stranded in another time without the medical treatment she needs for her heart condition, with no idea of even where to begin to look to find her way back to her own time. She has absolutely no knack of making friends, and gets herself resented by both groups she joins. On the other hand, she's incredibly good at everything she tries, ends up with a bunch of friends and allies despite herself, and eventually gets handed the way back without having had to work for it in any way (and without even attempting to do so).

This feels to me like double deprotagonization, both through lack of agency in the situation and also through being handed things she either doesn't earn or earns too easily through excessive natural ability. This, combined with some very basic, though not too frequent, copy editing issues, combined to lower my rating to three stars.

I received a review copy via Netgalley. I assume the errors I noticed are in the published version, since the publication date is in the past.

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Review: Knightmare Arcanist

Knightmare Arcanist by Shami Stovall
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

YA fantasy with a fresh premise - at least, fresh to me: people bond to any of a wide variety of mystical creatures and become arcanists, their powers differing based on the creature they are bonded to. Also, there's a magical plague which drives the creatures mad and corrupts the humans who are bonded to them, and pirates are deliberately spreading it as a terror tactic (and because it can make their creatures' magic more powerful).

It's a premise that's well thought through and well sustained. There's a contained cast - six young people, newly bonded, coming to an arcanists' guild as apprentices, all of whom were easy to tell apart, and most of whom played clear and necessary roles; and no more than four more senior guildspeople, of whom two featured heavily.

There's also a positive adoptive father-figure, who isn't on stage much but is very much present in recollection for the main character. That character is motivated to prove to everyone that he isn't a criminal like his parents, but a noble and good person like his adoptive father, and it's a strong motivation, well handled. He wants to do right, but because of everyone's expectations about him and the way the situation is set up, often ends up breaking the rules in order to do what he thinks ought to be done.

The kids' conflicts are believable and not just cliches, and their characters at least begin to flesh out during the story, in ways that make sense. While there are hints of early attraction that will no doubt cause trouble between them in the future, nothing becomes overt in this book as far as romance between the cast is concerned.

There is the usual hard-to-swallow YA trope of inexperienced apprentices being able to do anything whatsoever against a more powerful and mature foe (and I did spot the roles of "unexpected" villain and unlikely ally coming several miles off), but I think the author pulls it off in the end.

The worldbuilding is fairly light, and mostly centred on the magical creatures (who have their own personalities, particularly the ferretlike rizzel, who's consistently amusing). There are two or three familiar names from the real world, mixed with a lot of made-up names, which was a touch odd; I thought "at least the author doesn't make the common mistake of using biblical names in a setting where Christianity doesn't exist," but then late in the piece there was a cathedral, so perhaps Christianity, or something like it, does exist.

I had a pre-release copy from Netgalley, and the very common issue of missing past perfect tense when referring to earlier events in past tense narration was frequent; it may be reduced (but, given how frequent it is, probably won't be eliminated) by thorough copy editing before publication.

Overall, with those few caveats, this is a sound and entertaining piece of storytelling, and I would happily read more in the series.

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