Review: False Security

False Security by Lindsay Buroker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Prime Buroker, meaning that just about everyone is snarky (in more or less the same way), the plot moves along briskly, the romance moves very slowly, a lot of things blow up, and the main character is a badass on the outside but secretly full of self-doubt.

I spotted five very small copy editing issues, mostly typos.

It just falls into that narrow gap between "I enjoy it" and "it's good enough to go on my Best of the Year list".

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Review: Salvage

Salvage by R.J. Theodore
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I found this one confusing and not always engaging. I read the previous book in the series about five years ago, and remembered very little of it; while there were eventually enough reminders of the key elements of backstory, I was at sea for a while. Looking back on my review of the previous volume (which I put on my Best of the Year list for 2017), I was also confused while reading that one, so it may be a fault of this author.

The worldbuilding, in particular, made no sense to me then and makes even less now. The cosmological setup is that five ancient alchemists (alchemists = wizards differently named; there doesn't seem to be any good reason for terming what they do alchemy specifically) destroyed the planet of Peridot in order to get enough power to make them gods, and then rearranged the pieces and each created a sentient race to follow them, plus various other species as they saw fit. The world now consists of a ball of energy called Nexus which somehow (apparently not by gravity as we know it) holds a number of floating islands in place around it, mostly in the same plane. They don't appear to rotate around it. There is gravity; things other than the islands (and airships which, improbably, pump steam into rigid wooden balloons in order to create lift) fall, not towards Nexus but in a direction perpendicular to Nexus, until they reach the flotsam layer at the "bottom of the gravity well," but nothing appears to be causing this gravity. It's just magic (sorry, "alchemy"). Also, weirdly, the air is thinner at the bottom of the gravity well. So physics as we know it is completely out to lunch. There's a passing mention of sunrise or sunshine at one point, which may be an error, as the lighting seems mostly to consist of bioluminescent pumpkins producing a day/night cycle. This leaves two alternative questions: If there's a sun, how is it producing day and night when the planet is no longer blocking it half the time? And if there isn't a sun, where did it go, since presumably there was one prior to the cataclysm? (And if there isn't a sun, where is the energy coming from to light the glow pumpkins and produce food and do all the other things that sunshine is needed for? Though I suspect the answer to that one is "alchemy".)

This wasn't the only thing that made me think that the author was doing something because it would be cool or serve the plot, at the expense of suspension of disbelief. Nor was it the only thing that confused me or left me unclear on how things worked. The five races, and the characters, are all described in an extensive glossary/gazetteer at the end of the book, but I didn't get enough in the text itself to get much idea of how most of the characters appeared, or to get straight for a long time what their membership in the different races meant for their appearance (or even which race they belonged to, sometimes).

The narrative is close third person, mostly but not exclusively following the viewpoint of the ship captain who was the main character of the first book also. She's an interesting character, and we get some interiority from her and, to a lesser extent, from the other viewpoint characters, but the characters around her are much more two-dimensional, including her beloved and loyal crew. I never really got much sense of Tisker or Dug's personalities, in particular. They exist almost entirely in relation to Talis, the protagonist.

She is a protagonist, not merely a main character; she's constantly striving to prevent worse things happening to the world, and reverse some of the bad things that have happened already. The thing is, she's not all that effective at it, and partway through we get a major tragedy of the type that I personally dislike in my fiction.

Early on we're promised a heist, but this is one of the many plot directions that Talis ends up abandoning because of external factors. I'm all for a good try-fail cycle, but the thing about try-fail cycles is that they should generally complicate the protagonist's attempts to achieve their goals, not derail them entirely. Also, I wanted to see the heist, and I wanted to see Talis succeed in preventing disaster; I got neither.

I received a copy via Netgalley for review, which is labelled as the second edition and apparently will come out in July 2022 (the book has been published for a couple of years). Accordingly, I won't go into too much detail on the state of the copy editing except to say that it needs some more, including a spellcheck, a lot of work on misused vocabulary, and the insertion of some missed-out words in sentences. Not sure why almost all books with airships in them display poor writing mechanics and a lot of vocabulary problems, but that does seem to be the case. My review of the first book gave good marks for the copy editing, so I'm not sure what's going on there; maybe a different and less capable editor for the second one. If so, I hope they can get the original one, or someone else as good, to go over this one between now and July.

All in all, I was disappointed and confused and at times found it a slog. There's good potential here, but it needs a lot of polishing, and I don't think I'll bother with the third book when it comes out.

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Review: The Talking Beasts A Book of Fable Wisdom

The Talking Beasts A Book of Fable Wisdom by Kate Douglas Wiggin
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

A mixed bag, mostly not my bag.

It opens with the familiar Aesop's Fables, which most of us, I think, heard as children and which have given us a number of familiar expressions such as "sour grapes" and "dog in the manger". One of the fables includes a reference to spectacles, something that definitely didn't exist in the sixth century BC; apparently, fables continue to be added to the Aesop corpus even into modern times. A number of them are quite subversive, when you look at them closely, the kind of things you would expect a slave to come up with about villainous use of power by the powerful and its clever undermining by the supposedly powerless.

After that, things go downhill. The fables of Bidpai, which follow, are mostly rather contrived stories to make a predetermined moral, rather than being observations of semi-realistic and relatable behaviour and situations that generate their own insight, like Aesop's; and one of them literally has the moral "Don't associate with people of other races." Bidpai gets to this moral through a highly unlikely setup involving a frog and a mouse who tie a thread between them so that they can easily let each other know when they want to chat, and that results in both of them being caught when a predator grabs one of them. A number of them are the standard injunctions to keep to your place in life, though there are also a couple about oppressors getting their comeuppance in unlikely ways, the kind of thing that would keep an oppressed population compliant in the hope that external forces would deal with the oppressors, rather than encouraging them to take matters into their own hands.

Many of the subsequent fables appear to not have much point, or make a generic point quite weakly; some of them are trickster stories about a creature (like the mouse-deer that is the protagonist in many of the Malayan fables) who fools other creatures, without really making a point at all; some are overly wordy and repetitious. There's a lot of use of archaic language, for some reason; why would you publish a book for children in 1922 that has lines like "if thou wilt take it I will show it to thee that thou mayest do so"? It detracts rather than adds.

The Russian fables are most like Aesop's, in that they present a clear, applicable lesson that arises naturally out of the story, without pounding it into the ground.

I ran out of momentum when I hit the French fables of La Fontaine, translated into bad verse, and never made it all the way to the end.

Overall, the Aesop part is the best part (at least, as far as I read), and there are plenty of other places you can get that material. I'd hoped that a collection of fables drawn from all over the world would be like Aesop, but varied with some fresh new perspectives; it's mostly not like that, and there are some bad editorial decisions (like the archaic language). Not recommended.

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Review: Locklands

Locklands by Robert Jackson Bennett
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A powerful conclusion to an excellent trilogy.

This is high-concept fantasy, different from anything you'll see elsewhere. The characters are living in a universe which allows certain skilled people to "scrive" it, to magically convince parts of the universe that they are somewhere different, or the same as another thing (allowing something like the Law of Contagion to operate, where something done to one of the pair happens also to the other), or denser, or affected by gravity in a different way, or changed in various other ways. The author takes this promising premise and thoroughly delivers on it, coming up with remarkably clever uses for his unique magic system.

On the one hand, there's a powerful thread of action, in which the ensemble cast struggle desperately against a vastly powerful being which arose in the previous books and is dominating thousands of people, turning them into, effectively, its drones, and sacrificing their lives to power "edits" to reality. Its mad goal is to find an entrance to a place where it can access the laws of the universe directly and... they're not initially sure what it will do then, but it won't be good. There are frantic and suspenseful battles using unique magical technology and clever strategy, causing destruction on a vast scale, and there are cunning infiltrations and heists using other imaginative applications of the magical tech.

Meanwhile, the characters are torn between their duty to protect the world and their desire to live normal lives with the people they love. And everything is complicated and made more awesome by a technique they've discovered which enables people to be joined mentally in teams or larger groups, some of which have taken on collective personalities and important roles in the new society they're improvising. They don't have a single leader, which makes it very difficult - and that's how they know they're doing it right.

Between the high concept and the skilled execution, I had no hesitation in calling this a five-star book. It's not perfect - the author could use the verb "hurtle" about 60% less often, for example, though he does at least use it correctly and not confuse it with "hurl". And even though I read the previous book only about six months ago, I could have done with a bit more subtle reminder of some of the characters and their relationships; Claudia, in particular, was a bit of a cypher to me, since I'd forgotten her backstory and it didn't get much replay. It's still very, very good.

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Review: Nine Tenths

Nine Tenths by Jeff Macfee
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Hard-boiled, thoroughly so. In an alternate version of our world in which "augments" (superheroes) exist, the narrator ekes out a precarious living as a repo man, repossessing augmented technology from superheroes, supervillains, and people who just think the stuff is cool, but can't afford to keep up the payments on it. He himself is struggling to pay for his daughter's cancer treatment, which is his motivation throughout the plot. This drives him to conceal key information from his partner, to get himself into multiple dangerous situations (causing him to be beaten up and otherwise maimed), and eventually to (view spoiler)[give up his business and take a demeaning job working for someone he hates (hide spoiler)].

It's not a happy story, which made it less than completely to my taste and dropped it down to the bronze tier of my Best of the Year list. It is a well-told, well-written story, though, with a strong and believable set of motivations for a flawed yet relatable character to continue to struggle against the odds.

I never did figure out what the title refers to.

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Review: The Haunted High Series Complete Boxed Set: Books 1-5

The Haunted High Series Complete Boxed Set: Books 1-5 by Cheree Alsop
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

An adequately engaging and admirable protagonist kept me slogging through the seriously inept copy editing and occasional timeline, plot, and worldbuilding issues, but all of those did detract significantly, and took my rating down to three stars.

Not just another Potterclone, which is what got me to buy it. You could make a few parallels, but they're not close; more a matter of characters that are superficially similar in their role but are taken in a completely different direction. That's good. There are too many made-from-box-mix supernatural school stories and not enough original ones.

In the first couple of books, the MC skips an absurd number of meals and nights' sleep. He's a 16-year-old boy, an athlete, and a werewolf; you'd think he needed a lot of food and rest. Fortunately, that settles down a bit after a while. Also in the first book, (view spoiler)[the vampire coven beats the MC almost to death, and the headmistress is aware of this, but they face no consequences and it doesn't prevent the vampire coven's leader from eventually becoming the MC's best friend after he gets over his anti-werewolf prejudice. The MC holds no grudge. Later, several other people also make sudden and implausible heel face turns from implacable and cruel enemies to apparently reliable allies, just because the protagonist does something that challenges their prejudice. (hide spoiler)] The kids never seem to face any consequences from absenting themselves from school without permission to do things that adults couldn't do, either (though the question of "why can these kids do it if the adults can't?" is at least addressed).

The main character is a bit of a paragon, but not a complete Gary Stu; a lot of people dislike him (at least initially, though they do tend to become his allies too easily), he can't automatically do everything (though sometimes he, and other characters, suddenly develop previously unforeshadowed capabilities at convenient moments), and things often don't go his way, at least not without a lot of effort and suffering (though sometimes he comes up with solutions on the fly which work despite, again, no foreshadowing of how they would do so). There's an in-universe, plausible explanation for why he's always getting into the situations he gets into: (view spoiler)[he's an alpha werewolf, genetically programmed to protect those he cares for at the risk of his own life. Which is a bit of a loss of protagonist agency, and genetic determinism, neither of which I care for, but at least it explains things. (hide spoiler)]

The copy editing is woeful. Mostly homonym errors (including multiple instances of it's/its and you're/your), but all of the common issues turn up at one time or another. One of the teachers is named Briggs, and when his name is used in the possessive it's almost always punctuated as "Brigg's" instead of "Briggs'". A number of missing commas before terms of address, which to me always screams "amateur". Lots and lots of sloppy typos, too, and several fumbled idioms. I have definitely seen worse, but this is a shockingly low level of quality for an author who claims to be bestselling and award-winning. If it was copy edited at all, it was either by someone who wasn't good at their job, or else started out so incredibly awful that even after a lot of work it's still bad.

The Kindle book is not formatted into chapters in a way that allows you to navigate between chapters or see how much reading time is left in the chapter you're reading.

A warning, too, that there's a great deal of suffering, violence, cruelty and torture in this one. There's a group setting out to destroy the "monsters," and I'll give you one guess as to who the true monsters are. I got a bit sick of all the cruelty after a while, and started to wonder how, given the death rate we're shown, the obviously large population of "mythics" manage to keep themselves hidden from modern society, especially when many of them can't pass as human. Also, why the school isn't bigger. Maybe there are several, but if so, wouldn't there be more separation of the different groups, since they supposedly can't work together at all? Even though going to school together (or anything that gets different groups interacting) is one of the strongest ways of breaking down exactly that kind of prejudice? There are several very large groups (and at least one individual) equipped with headquarters, vehicles, weapons, fancy and (presumably) expensive stun ammunition (necessary so that the protagonist is not a mass killer and can be shot repeatedly without dying, but not all that plausible otherwise), and no visible means of support. Are they dealing drugs? Knocking over banks? If so - or even if not - why do they not ping the radar of the mundane authorities? The worldbuilding doesn't bear close examination, in other words. In an action movie, you might get away with it by keeping the explosions and chases going as a distraction, but in book form it works less well, especially since the many prose errors kept throwing me out of my immersion, so the thinness of the logic in both the plot and the setting became especially noticeable.

Overall, it's a somewhat original and engaging story with a promising premise that unfortunately fails to reach a professional standard of quality in the execution. I won't be looking for more from this author.

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Movie Review: Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears

My wife and I have enjoyed the Miss Fisher mysteries (and the spinoff Ms Fisher mysteries, set 50 years later and involving a character who is somehow Miss Fisher's neice). They have excellent production values and are amusingly written and acted, but we weren't so enamoured of this one. 

It's not so much a Miss Fisher mystery as a piece of Miss Fisher fanfic, in which two of the established characters participate in rather a silly pulp adventure plot that's full of holes. I don't recall the supernatural being real in Miss Fisher prior to this, but this one has Indiana Jones-style mystic curses. Not to mention obviously misspelled Greek on a pillar that somehow always points to the same star even though the stars move around on a daily and annual basis and have shifted significantly since the time of Alexander the Great, when the pillar was supposedly set up; and an astrolabe from Alexander's time (the astrolabe was invented a century after Alexander's death) that somehow guides the characters to an exact place based on observations of the sun (I assume; it was being used during the day), even though there's no indication that they have anything to tell them what latitude they're looking for, and an astrolabe can't tell you longitude. There's even an occurrence of the hoary old trope of a fall into quicksand (popular as a hazard in adventure movies of the 1960s, but almost unheard of now, not least because humans can't actually sink all the way into quicksand), in the middle of the desert, where quicksand is unlikely. A character turns up, for dramatic purposes, near the end, even though there's really no plausible explanation for how that character could have followed the other characters and caught up to them. It's pretty dumb all the way around. 

Also, what is it with emeralds right now? There are two emeralds (including an implausibly large one, cut in an anachronistic manner) in this movie; there's another implausibly large one in Sonic 2, I believe; and they even came into the Agatha Raisin Christmas movie we watched yesterday. Has someone come up with a superior method of making prop emeralds or something? 

Anyway, it was amusing enough if you took it for what it was, but monumentally silly and not really a Miss Fisher story. I got the feeling that the writer wished she had the rights to Indiana Jones and made do with another property that was more accessible. Even the sets felt more like sets than the original series. 

Miss Fisher fans should probably avoid this one. Three stars, for being somewhat amusing.