Review: Brief Cases

Brief Cases by Jim Butcher
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Harry Dresden has a highly distinctive voice, and the challenge for the author in many of these stories - those which are told from a non-Dresden character POV - is to have them sound like themselves, and not like Dresden. He does a good, though not quite perfect, job of it.

He also tells some terrific side-stories in the Dresden universe. I'd read a number of them before in other collections, but they rewarded rereading.

The last story, which only appears in this volume, is a particularly good one. Harry takes his daughter Maggie and their dog Mouse to the zoo, and each of the three gets a turn to narrate an adventure in which they deal with threats that only they can deal with (or, in some cases, perceive). And all three of the adventures are going on at the same time, so we get overlap where each of the three tells us about the same events from a different point of view. It's well done and enjoyable, and shows us that the next generation of Dresden hasn't fallen far from the tree at all.

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Review: The Best Thing You Can Steal

The Best Thing You Can Steal by Simon R. Green
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The words "Simon R. Green" on the cover led me to expect that there would be disturbing amounts of violence and other disturbing things within, and also that it would be a well-written story with a heroic arc. All of this was, in fact, the case.

An optimistic thief and con-man who has recently taken on the pre-existing identity of Gideon Sable recruits a largely supernatural heist crew to rip off the worst man in the world. I have to say, a heist doesn't have to have a victim who deserves to lose, but it certainly helps.

It's a quick read, pacey, but not just unreflective action, and the heist is extremely clever, as heists ought to be. The supernatural background is based in Catholic Christianity - there are saints, relics, angels, demons, and so forth - but none of the characters is devout. The trip is often horrific, but the ending is heroic.

I love a good heist, and this is one. Recommended.

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Review: Peace Talks

Peace Talks by Jim Butcher
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Even though this isn't as complete a story in itself as most of the series (the conclusion is in the next book), Jim Butcher is smart, and still manages to write a book that has a plot question that's resolved by the end. There are huge, cosmic events happening, and Harry needs to help deal with them, but he also has family stuff to take care of - primarily, helping his brother Thomas (which is the plot question that resolves by the end), though he's also started to try to be a father to Maggie, and finally moved his relationship with Murphy forward, and he's clashing a lot with his grandfather.

The first few chapters, in signature Dresden style, are spent getting Harry further and further into the cactus, to the point where I was wondering how on earth the author was going to get him out of the hole he'd dug for him. The eventual (partial) extraction from the hole is accompanied along the way with plenty of self-deprecating snark, a small amount of new maturity, and the usual mix of cleverness, courage, determination, judicious use of allies, well-prepped skills, absolute commitment to doing the right thing even when that's very difficult to identify, and reflections on life that have a bit of depth to them.

It all reminded me why this is one of my favourite series. While it's not the best of the series so far for me, it is highly skilled and powerfully written in the way I've come to expect from Butcher, and there's no question about putting it on my Best of 2020 list.

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Review: The Iron Will of Genie Lo

The Iron Will of Genie Lo by F.C. Yee
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The protagonist here is a young Asian American woman, and while I'm sure that it will have immense appeal to people who share one or more of those characteristics, I share none of them, and I thought it was terrific.

It's firmly grounded not only in Chinese mythology but in Chinese identity, in a way that's self-reflective without being self-indulgent, precious, or brittle, and that does an excellent job of conveying to an outsider the emotional dynamics involved. I particularly liked the part where Genie explained her (dysfunctional) family in a way that made it clear that, whatever their faults, they were hers and she loved them passionately. Also, the part where she explained to the clueless privileged Silicon Valley boy how people like her didn't get multiple chances to fail like he did. And the part where she gave Guanyin, the Chinese goddess of compassion, a sister power pep talk.

But also the parts where she bested multiple legendary beings through cleverness, determination, and just being an outright badass, all of which are very on-brand for a series based in the story of the Monkey King.

For me, just the right blend of action and depth, with characters who are flawed but full of heart; a suspenseful battle against a powerful existential threat; and a young woman coming to terms with life in an inspiring way.

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Review: Spellmaker

Spellmaker by Charlie N. Holmberg
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A strong continuation of the enjoyable first book (it's definitely a continuation, too, with minimal "previously-on"; don't start here). The romance is clean, sweet, and involves two likeable people. The mystery... progress on it stalls for a while, and when it restarts it's helped along by a slight bit of coincidence (or authorial meddling), and the team gain a new ally or two in a way that I felt was too easy and convenient. But I've seen it done a lot worse, and mostly the plot progresses through protagonism. There are some suspenseful scenes, and the climactic confrontation shows the heroine at her best, capable and intelligent.

The author really doesn't have that strong a grasp on the Victorian era, particularly class and gender relations; it's something I've noted before about her other books. But if you can overlook that, these are enjoyable stories, well written, well edited, with sound structure and a positive feel to them.

I received a copy from Netgalley for review.

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Review: Questland

Questland by Carrie Vaughn
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The setting for this novel is a kind of updated Dream Park - an immersive LARPing environment constructed with sufficiently advanced technology (an unspecified number of years into the future) that it's at least difficult to distinguish from magic. Except an energy barrier has gone up and isolated the island where Questland is being developed by a corporation headed by the usual billionaire narcissist, and said narcissist has hired a team to go in and get it back for him.

Cue the trope of "very civilian female expert is called in to consult on a matter that's under military or paramilitary jurisdiction and is super secret, and she has to deal with the militariness of it all". (Really, it's a trope, though usually the matter under investigation is first contact, in my previous experience.) In this case, there are a couple of extra layers: the expert, as the survivor of a school shooting where her boyfriend and her best friend were killed in front of her, suffers from PTSD and is not at all comfortable around the military; and her expertise is not only as a comparative-lit professor who is also deeply into the kind of nerdy pursuits that form the basis of Questworld, but as the ex-girlfriend of the prime suspect for the activator of the barrier: the head of the design team.

Ironically enough, the problems I had with this one were all about suspension of disbelief. I didn't believe in the conveniently uninhabited, idyllic island some distance off the west coast of the US. I didn't believe that the ex-boyfriend believed he would somehow be able to get legal ownership of it for the developers. I didn't believe that after five months of the island being isolated, no friends or relatives on the mainland had raised any kind of public fuss, or that the supplies were holding out so well, or that the people on the island weren't bothered by the isolation, or that the US government hadn't done more to get in there - especially since a ten-person Coast Guard crew had been killed trying to breach the barrier - or that nobody had leaked anything to the media. I didn't believe that a designer (not an engineer) could come up with the energy barrier and construct it, apparently without the help of the engineering team, in the first place, or that there would be enough power to sustain it. I didn't initially believe that three project managers, after five months, hadn't apparently made any progress in solving the problem of accessing the central system, but then I thought about project managers I've known and believed it after all. I didn't, however, believe in the central system, which none of the people who had set up the entire island seemed to really understand or be in control of. It was as if the true antagonist was a system that everyone had contributed to but nobody understood or controlled, except maybe the tech billionaire; and then I wondered if this was a callback to the first scene, and the lit prof's student going on about rampant capitalism.

So anything in the physical and technical setup I pretty much didn't believe. What I did believe was the emotional and personal setup, which is where the book was strong. The post-traumatic professor, the attitude of the military people (who clearly had respect for what she was dealing with and how she was dealing with it, even if she wasn't aware of that respect), the self-absorbed and condescending ex, the ineffectual project manager, the angry engineer who was in it for the sense of wonder - all of these I believed. There was a strong human story being told, but for me, it didn't quite come completely together, not only because of my struggles to suspend belief about the setup and the setting, but also in that it felt just a little bit undercooked. There were the elements of an even stronger, and indeed very powerful, story, but whether from inadequate on-page reflection, a lack of clarity, or not enough development, they didn't add up to as much as they might have.

I find this author's books a mixed bag. When she's good, she's amazing, but when she's a bit off her game - and, for me, this is one of those books - it's disappointing, because I know she's capable of more. There was a lot of potential here that I felt remained unrealized.

I received a review copy via Netgalley.

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Review: Villains: Superpower Chronicles Book 4

Villains: Superpower Chronicles Book 4 by Arthur Mayor
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I think the copy editing, which was shockingly bad in the earlier books, actually got a bit better in this one - though neither the author nor the editor he credits have run spellcheck, still.

Setting that aside, I like these books, because Ryan/Raven is a classic underdog. He doesn't have much in the way of superpowers, though it seems like his powers have got a bit better in this book (I don't remember his super-healing, though maybe that's me). He can't fly, he's not super-strong or invulnerable or anything useful like that, he can't fire energy beams or set things on fire. He learns physical actions really easily, so he's a parkour expert and martial artist, and he can (sometimes, unreliably) go into a subjective "slow time" mode which gives him more time to react to what's going on. That's it - except it isn't. His real superpower is that he's good at recruiting allies, even from among the villains; and he's really, really determined to do the right thing (protect the city and the people who live there), at any cost to himself, despite being comprehensively outmatched at every turn. He's also a decent detective, though that's mainly down to the allies thing.

At one point, he has what could easily have been the stupid Convenient Eavesdrop trope, except the author makes him earn his eavesdrop by deliberately hiding in a precarious position to overhear what he knows will be an informative meeting (which in turn enables him to be at another meeting to eavesdrop and allows him to save someone and recruit another ally). There are one or two small coincidences to advance the plot, but nothing too convenient.

Superhero fights form a large proportion of the book, again, and it was almost a little too much, again, but not quite. The action is varied, there's always more at stake than just "do they win the fight," and watching Raven improvise his way to another narrow victory is always entertaining. The author knows how to write an action plot, and the snarky narration is genuinely amusing.

His mess of a personal/family/school life is more in the background for this volume, though it's getting more and more entangled with his superhero life.

I came out of this one wanting to read the next, but I will still wait for the price to drop a bit. The normal price of the books is too high for the poor standard of copy editing.

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