Review: Super Humans

Super Humans by T.M. Franklin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was competently written (including good copy editing, which is rarer than it should be). I'm only giving it three stars, though, because there's nothing much else outstanding about it, and it's not a complete, satisfying story in itself.

I wondered why a new viewpoint character got introduced at the 60% mark, when normally you would introduce all your key characters and their conflicts by 25% through the book. When I got to the end, I realized that this is the setup for a series, and is essentially Act I of the story that is (presumably) told in that series. The whole book is the first 25% (or so) of a complete story, and it's clear by the end that we have several more characters to come yet, so maybe it's not even all of Act I.

The characters were OK, but didn't have an outstanding amount of depth to them. The threat they faced was mostly vague and generic. In general, it needed to grab me a lot harder in order to keep me reading, if it wasn't going to give me the satisfaction of a fully resolved plot arc.

It was OK. But I wanted something more than that.

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Review: Windsinger

Windsinger by A.F.E. Smith
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The third Darkhaven novel keeps up the standard of the previous two, and also keeps up the level of tension, conflict, and really bad things happening. The central characters are thoroughly decent people in a world where that is not particularly the norm, making it easy to cheer for them. Although they're dedicated, skilled, and in one case extraordinarily powerful, they're not always able to protect those they care about, particularly against the cynical manipulation of antagonists who will use people's love for others as a way to threaten them into compliance and complicity with their schemes.

It's an interesting world, the stories are well told, the prose is good, the tone is (overall) hopeful, and all these things mean I can stand a bit more darkness in the plot than is usually to my taste.

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Review: Liberty Justice for All: A Marvel: Xavier's Institute Novel

Liberty Justice for All: A Marvel: Xavier's Institute Novel by Carrie Harris
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Tie-in novels, novelizations of movies, and so forth are all too often hack-work, poorly edited and relying on coincidence, cliche, and the popularity of the franchise to carry off a mediocre story. Happily, this X-Men novel does not fit any of those stereotypes. While strongly tied into the lore of the long-running Marvel franchise, it's mostly fresh, well executed, and gives some depth to the characters and their relationships. There are some gaping plot holes, but for me they didn't spoil my enjoyment too much.

The protagonists are two new recruits to the New Xavier School, run by Cyclops in the wilds of Canada. We first get some scenes with their roommates and other classmates and teachers that establish not only their powers, but that they are emotionally intelligent, keen to help others, able to take effective action, and more sensible and mature than some of their peers. They're college age, but read more YA than new adult.

Sent off on a training exercise in the X-Copter, they pick up a distress call from the infamous mercenary Sabretooth, and decide to help him. This was the weakest part of the story for me. Not only is there never any explanation of how Sabretooth was able to radio them, but the stupid decision they make to ditch their training mission, not tell their seniors, and help someone untrustworthy with an unknown danger is distinctly out of character for them. Unfortunately, it's also necessary in order for the plot to exist.

Bad decision made, the action moves swiftly, and they encounter hostile police (until they inexplicably stop encountering police where I would have expected them); Sentinels; a dangerous magical artefact reminiscent of Night at the Museum which can kill the living and resurrect the dead (including, apparently, models of the dead such as Neanderthals, who are stereotypically dumb cavemen communicating in grunts); and a powerful enemy they've previously encountered in backstory, who they're terrified of. Throughout, they manage to be courageous, mostly effective, clever, and committed to doing the right thing, and it was this, and the well-handled dynamics between and within the characters, that kept the book its fourth star for me despite the handwaving of some key plot points. All the characters, even a couple of the minor ones, come across as complex people, not flat stereotypes, and the main characters experience satisfying development throughout.

It's a pleasure, too, to get a book from Netgalley that isn't full of basic editing issues. Kudos to the author and copy editor.

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Review: Corpselight

Corpselight by Angela Slatter
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I gave 5 stars to Vigil, the first in this series, because I felt it took the "kickass supernatural PI" genre into a higher key with its focus on family and relationships (of widely varying types).

This book has many of the same strengths, but also at least one of the same weaknesses and a couple of (I think) new ones, so it didn't quite make it to 5 stars - though it still makes my 2020 Best Of shelf.

Finding myself short of good books, I decided to look for sequels to books I'd enjoyed in previous years, and was glad to find this one. There's plenty of action and plenty of heart, and it's delivered in sound prose - but with a few minor typos that I don't recall seeing in the first book. That's weakness number 1.

Weakness number 2 is, for me, the big one. It's the way in which the main character's male partner - who I characterised as a genderflipped damsel in distress in my review of the first book - is now a genderflip of the wife who has no role other than to be supportive to the hero. He doesn't pass a reverse Mako Mori test; he has no arc of his own, no agenda of his own, even. He's there to look after the baby and do emotional work on behalf of the protagonist so that she can go out and kick ass, and he embraces this fate with barely a complaint. He's a solution, never a problem (though, of course, he's also a vulnerability, at risk of refrigeration). I don't like this when the genders are the other way round, so I don't see why I should approve of it in this instance.

Noticing this completely supportive character got me noticing how all the rest of the supporting cast are also so very supporting, how it's all about the protag, to the degree that she's almost (not quite) a Spoiled Protagonist. (That's my term for someone who gets handed help she hasn't earned just because she's the protagonist. In this case, she's arguably earned it, but it does seem like she gets an awful lot of it.) I love an ensemble cast, but this is not one; it's a hero and her support team, and because it's all about her, she's the only character who ends up with much depth.

Weakness number 3, which often goes along with a spoiled protagonist, is that there are a couple of convenient coincidences; the person being investigated has two other, apparently completely random, connections to the main character, and while this helps drive the plot and raise the stakes, I am never a fan of putting coincidence where protagonist effort should be.

Once again, though, the thematic subtext of the book saves it and propels it above the run of the mill. In book 1, it was all about family: good families, bad families, close families, families at war within themselves, found families, dysfunctional families. Here, the focus zooms in a bit; it's on motherhood specifically, and again, it looks at motherhood through many different lenses, good mothers, bad mothers, mothers who neglect or abandon their kids or worse, mothers who try to make up for mistakes of the past...

There's just more depth of humanity in this series than in the average urban fantasy, and even if most of it is in the hands of the protagonist, it still lifts the book. Verity has a great line of snark and is, at one and the same time, a coarse, rude, abrasive person and also deeply compassionate and dedicated to doing the right thing. That chimes with my (limited) experience of Queenslanders, though it may dial both tendencies up a bit for cinematic purposes.

Like its heroine, this series is certainly not perfect, but well worth following, and I look forward to reading book 3.

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Review: Newborn Pixie Cozy Mysteries - Books 1-3

Newborn Pixie Cozy Mysteries - Books 1-3 by Willow Mason
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Stop me if you've heard this one: (probably) twentysomething young woman whose life is a bit of a low-level disaster gets a mysterious inheritance from an elderly relative. It turns out she's magic, and the inheritance is magic, and other people want it, and there's an attractive policeman, and she can talk to her cat now, and there's a murder, and she helps to solve it.

Hundreds of people have written this story, to varying levels of quality. Tim Pratt, for example, has written it very well ( Heirs of Grace ), taking what's essentially fast food - made in bulk to a formula - and elevating it. This version by Willow Mason is appealing, with good-hearted, if not highly developed, characters and a New Zealand backdrop.

It sets out to do a particular thing, and it does that thing enjoyably enough that my first instinct was to give it four stars; but it's not really a four-star book, not for me. It follows a well-worn pattern without much deviation, and badly needs a copy editor.

At first, reading the sample, it seemed fairly smooth, with all the commas in the right place, so I bought it. I should have been warned, when I saw that the plural of Christmas was written as "Christmas's", that apostrophes were going to be a problem; almost all of them are either missing or in the wrong place, and that's true of a few commas as well. There are also vocabulary issues and a couple of dangling modifiers.

Overall, if this is the kind of thing you like, you will like this; it's typical of its genre in all the good ways as well as a couple of (for me) bad ways. As a bit of fun between more serious books, it worked OK for me. Bigger fans of the form will no doubt be more enthusiastic.

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Review: Miss Landon and Aubranael

Miss Landon and Aubranael by Charlotte E. English
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is quite a mild Regency romance combined with fairy tale, though it's not a retelling of any one tale in particular. The influence of Beauty and the Beast is there, and so is Alice in Wonderland in the mad tea party, but it's its own thing. It sits in a slightly odd place age-wise; the main character is 29, but it has the simplicity and the general feel of YA or even younger. Nothing steamier than an extended kiss occurs.

This is the second book I've read by the author, and as with the other one, the writing fault I noticed most is that she frequently uses "may" instead of "might" in past tense narration. She also confuses "principle" with "principal" a couple of times, and there are a good few simple typos of the kind that spellcheck doesn't catch but any reasonably alert reader should (such as "pull" for "full," "day" for "say," "about" for "out," "dead" for "head"). There's the odd missing or misplaced word, too, and a couple of excess coordinate commas between non-coordinate adjectives, but the punctuation is generally good.

The characters are pleasant enough, but don't have much depth to them, especially the secondaries. I did like the main pair and wanted them to succeed (not that I was ever in the slightest doubt that they would). The plot is straightforward, and, like the setting, is mostly assembled from prefabricated parts of Regency romance and fairy tale.

I appreciated that the female main character, while she is rescued by her friends at one point, then takes decisive action that makes a difference; she's not passive or helpless. She's clumsy, except for her one strong skill (sewing), which is a bit of a cliche for a heroine.

All in all, it's pleasant but bland; nothing (apart from the editing, and I've seen plenty worse) is badly done, but nothing is amazing either. I enjoyed it enough to let it keep its fourth star, though not enough that I'd bother with a sequel or seek out other works by the author.

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Review: The Magic Series: Box Set 1 of the Calliope Jones Novels

The Magic Series: Box Set 1 of the Calliope Jones Novels by Coralie Moss
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I'm going to be the dissenting voice among all the praise.

It started out well, with an appealing main character, a woman in her 40s (rather than the usual teen or twenty-something), a mystery plot, a romance plot (the two favourite plots), and editing looking fairly clean. Somewhere along the way, though, I spotted about 150 editing errors, the middle-aged woman fell into the tropes of the foolish young woman, the mystery got muddled, and I didn't understand the anticlimactic resolution to it at all.

I was glad that I had the collected one-volume edition, because the first book is essentially Act 1: get everyone on stage, set up the situation, everything is now prepped for development in book 2, which continues immediately from where book 1 stops. Reading it in one volume, I didn't feel too disappointed in the lack of resolution at the end of book 1, but I think if I'd bought the first volume separately I would have hesitated to carry on.

Because it takes so long on the setup, it does get a little bloated, especially with the size of the cast. I felt that it wasn't necessary to have three almost indistinguishable druid sidekicks for the love interest; they could all turn into otters, they all started relationships with local witches, and there wasn't a lot else to help me tell them apart other than initial (quickly forgotten) physical descriptions. They could easily have been compressed into one character, probably River, who is the brother of another significant secondary character. Likewise, several plot threads started in book 1 don't really end up going anywhere, just muddying the main plot.

Lack of clarity is the big problem that starts to creep into volumes 2 and 3. Things happen that obviously are clear in the author's head, but were not, to me, clear on the page. In particular, the final denoument, which I'll put in spoiler tags:

(view spoiler)[There's a Bigger Bad who, in book 3, is revealed to have been behind the Big Bad who we've seen (mostly from a distance) in the first two books; he's been pulling the strings, unsuspected, in the background. Some pains are taken to depict him as a ruthless, wealthy, powerful, implacable foe, capable of stranding Calliope on an island overnight dressed only in her cocktail dress and a light shawl, as a pressure tactic to get her to cave to his demands. The next day, she defeats him with her magical dress, brings the teenagers to see him at his office, tells him that the Big Bads from books 1 and 2 have been doing stuff behind his back, and... for no reason I could understand, he has a complete change of heart, gives in to all her demands, and turns out to be not that bad a guy and almost an ally. (hide spoiler)]

That moment, to me, was what decided me to label Calliope as a spoiled protagonist (which is my technical term for someone who gets handed help and victories they haven't earned in order to move the plot along). I could kind of accept that her numerous allies were loading her up with magical gifts and making their witchy celebrations all about her, because she had powers that would be useful in resolving a situation of concern to all of them, and because they were nice, generous people. It still took us kind of into spoiled protagonist territory, though. Add to this that Calliope is a Very Special Witch with powers beyond ordinary witchkind (that have been undeveloped and suppressed up until the story starts, when she's 41), and that she has a superhero job (supposedly demanding, but actually able to be abandoned indefinitely while she participates in the plot), and it's getting harder to resist the spoiled protagonist label. That climax finally took it over the top.

Her job, by the way, is working for the government. She doesn't seem to report to anyone; she's the senior person on the island (with an assistant), but she must presumably have a boss on the mainland. No such person is ever mentioned, though, and she doesn't seem to need to account for her time. She's a middle-aged civil servant and a single mother of two teenagers, but she doesn't worry about the financial impact of taking an extended leave of absence from her job, even though her ex-husband is always claiming he's cash-strapped and isn't contributing much towards the kids, and as the plot progresses she's adding on to the house and feeding half an army. I didn't buy it.

She caps off the spoiled protagonist act by going off on her own without telling anyone and getting into trouble and having to be rescued, like every dumb female protagonist ever. It was disappointing.

The author did do decent work on the character side; those characters who were developed (0ut of an outsize cast) were interesting, likable people with relatable problems. The plot, though, suffered from the lack of clarity and the spoiled-protagonist issue that I've already discussed, and the blurb frankly oversells it in terms of how much tension there is.

The copy editors missed some apostrophe placement issues; quite a few coordinate commas between non-coordinate adjectives; a few commas before main verbs; hyphens joining things that, in context, are not compound adjectives; a small collection of dangling modifiers; simple past used instead of past perfect tense; vocabulary issues; missing words in sentences; number disagreements; and several continuity errors. I suspect it started out a lot worse. There was a different copy editor for book 1, and she seems to have picked up the missing words in sentences but missed several apostrophe problems; the other editor, other way around.

Overall, then, it had potential, and the trip was fairly enjoyable, but it ended up having some significant issues that left me less than satisfied. I could probably have coped with the borderline spoiled protagonist with a superhero job if the climax hadn't let all the air out of the plot, or even if it had been sold to me in a way that made sense of what had happened. That's what took it down from a low four stars to a mid three stars for me.

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