Review: Mary Bennet and the Beast of Rosings Park

Mary Bennet and the Beast of Rosings Park by Joyce Harmon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read this one out of series order, having picked it up on a BookBub sale after reading the first. I've been waiting to get the second book on sale, but, in the middle of a book drought, finally decided to just go ahead and read it. It sounds like the second book is quite an adventure, and I still do plan to get it at some point.

Here we see Mary Bennet (the middle sister from Pride and Prejudice) staying with her cousin Mr. Collins at his vicarage beside the great estate of Rosings, as she recuperates from magical exhaustion occasioned by the plot of the second book. This third one is a mystery, with sheep (and eventually a person) being killed and mutilated in the area, seemingly by something that may or may not be the legendary beast that inhabits the woods of Rosings Park. Mary uses her magical skills and, even more so, her intelligence and courage to eventually solve the mystery, and along the way we get quite a different perspective on young Anne de Bourgh, and even on prosy Mr Collins and his patroness, Anne's mother Lady Catherine. It's not a wild thrill ride of a plot; there's still a lot of Regency visiting and conversation and marital maneuvering, aimed presumably at the fans of the source material, and there's seldom any sense of urgency, but there are a couple of relatively tense scenes, especially the climax.

The copy editing issues are individually minor, but there are a lot of them (more than 50): mispunctuated dialog, missing quotation marks or (occasionally) periods, missing commas, misplaced apostrophes, small words accidentally substituted for other similar words, errors of tense and number, and a couple of homonyms. This is one reason I'm not prepared to pay $5.99 USD for these, the other reason being that, while they're enjoyable, they're not anything like twice as good as plenty of other books that cost half that much.

Overall, it earns four stars as a pleasant read, but doesn't make it onto my Best of the Year.

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Review: Joseph Andrews Vol 1

Joseph Andrews Vol 1 by Henry Fielding
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An amusing satire on 18th-century England that still manages to have some universality in the fun it pokes at the pretentious, small-minded, snobbish, and ill-tempered.

Though the author's better-known work The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling has all of the same virtues as a work of prose, only to a greater degree, I personally prefer the hero of this one. Where Tom Jones professes his love for Sophia but has no problem sleeping with any other woman who he encounters, Joseph Andrews, following the exhortations of his kindly mentor, the Reverend Adams, refuses a number of advances by assorted women because he is true to his beloved Fanny. This is partly in imitation of his sister Pamela, the same Pamela Andrews from the novel Pamela by Samuel Richardson, which Fielding had earlier satirized in An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews . So this book is a spin-off from a satire of a rival's work, but incorporates some of his values into it without apparent intent to satirize them. Joseph is sincere in his commitment, and it's clear that Adams is a devout and faithful clergyman (in contrast to every other clergyman they meet), even if he is a bit free with his fists at any provocation.

The story involves a good deal of travel (Joseph is trying to get back to his home area after losing his position in London because he wouldn't sleep with his recently-widowed employer), and it's clear that 18th-century travel was significantly dangerous. The characters are constantly encountering criminals of one sort or another. There appear to have been a great many inns and taverns, though, since they keep stumbling across them (and then having trouble paying the bill, because they've been robbed by the criminals).

I'm looking forward to reading the second volume next.

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Review: Our Lady of the Artilects

Our Lady of the Artilects by Andrew Gillsmith
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This one didn't really work for me, and I stopped at about the 48% mark.

Part of the problem was that I was reading an ARC from Netgalley, and the manuscript was very rough in such things as basic punctuation accuracy (questions missing their question marks; quotation marks missing at the beginning or end of dialog; quotation marks doubled up, single where they should be double or double where they should be single; missing periods at the ends of sentences; mispunctuated dialog tags). I'm sure at least most of this will be fixed before publication, though even a good proofreader will probably miss a few out of so many, but as is often the case, it broke my immersion so that I noticed how other things, story-level or craft things, weren't quite working either.

The setting is an unspecified (as far as I read) time in the future, but at least a couple of centuries away. Some time long past in the narrative, but in our future, civil war broke out in Nigeria between Christians and Muslims, and a couple of European countries came in on the Christians' side. This somehow led to the European Union failing and being replaced by a revived Holy Roman Empire, and the formation of an Islamic Caliphate across North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia, with a capital in Kashmir. But now, a couple of centuries (?) later, the Holy Roman Emperor (a Habsburg who is also Filipino) has the Caliph as his closest friend and ally - and the Christian part of Nigeria is one of several African provinces of the Holy Roman Empire, apparently having been recolonized.

None of this strikes me as particularly plausible. Sure, it's possible that the HRE and the Caliph become friends and allies; Britain and France were allies a century after Napoleon, and Germany and France are allies less than a century after WW II. But it doesn't seem highly likely, given the origin of their respective empires as it's described. And that origin itself seems to me highly unlikely. The Holy Roman Empire has been gone for over 200 years; I suspect most people today couldn't tell you what it was, that most of those who could nevertheless rarely think about it, and that practically nobody thinks that reviving it (and a monarchical/aristocratic system) would be a good idea. Even today's head of the House of Habsburg doesn't seem to think that.

Sure, this is science fiction, and contrafactuals are expected. But I also expect them to be made plausible, and for me this wasn't.

So, to the story. Essentially, androids (called "artilects") have attained humanlike consciousness, thanks to some new techniques which are well thought through and make sense. A number of artilects have experienced a vision which links up with the Fatima visions from the early 20th century (the content of which the author fudges a bit, not always consistently, to support the story). Also, now that they have souls, one artilect has been possessed by a demon; the Vatican has sent a priest who, conveniently, happens to be both an exorcist and an expert on AI to deal with this, and he becomes a main character in the story. This brings what might be called a cosmic dimension into the SF, which gave me strong That Hideous Strength vibes, not least because a shadowy, centuries-long conspiracy led by one of the key AI developers is attempting to do something involving the overthrow of conventional religion and morality using Trojans built into the technology which runs both the artilects and the technological enhancements used by about three-quarters of humans.

It's ambitious as a premise, and for me, at the point where I stopped reading, the author wasn't managing to pull it off. The several viewpoint characters hadn't achieved the depth I was looking for, and the whole conspiracy with its cosmic aspects and the philosophical/religious/moral/ethical arguments about that (involving Christians, Muslims, and characters who were neither) had too many moving parts that didn't quite come together. Nor am I a fan of sinister centuries-old conspiracies as a story element in the first place.

Overall, I felt the author's reach had exceeded his grasp; that he'd attempted something he didn't have the skill to achieve. Others may well feel differently.

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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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