Review: Much Obliged, Jeeves

Much Obliged, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Poor Bertie - he seems to spend about half his time avoiding getting engaged to the weird Gawd-help-us Madeline Bassett, who formed the very mistaken impression that he loved her when he was attempting to plead the case of his friend Gussie Fink-Nottle. Even though she's now engaged to the brutish Lord Sidcup, aka Roderick Spode, there's always the risk of a rift in that relationship. On the plus-ish side of the ledger, at least as far as avoiding marrying her goes, is Bertie's not entirely deserved reputation as a thief, which is mostly a case of misinterpretation (apart from the silver cow-creamer, which he did in fact steal, though nobody can prove anything).

A good bit of the rest of Bertie's time is spent avoiding getting engaged to Lady Florence Craye, who is also lurking about in this book, oppressing her current fiancé in her usual imperious manner. Said fiancé is (at Florence's insistence) standing for Parliament, and Bertie attempts to help, since he's an old friend and Bertie will always help old friends at any cost; his first attempt at canvassing, though, goes so hilariously badly that he withdraws in confusion.

Brinkley, Bertie's (and seemingly practically everyone else's) former manservant, is also in the vicinity, making dastardly use of the Junior Ganymede club book, which records the peccadilloes of club members' employers. All in all, it makes for a complex and satisfying plot in which Bertie once more struggles entertainingly, before eventually being rescued by the phlegmatic Jeeves.

View all my reviews

Review: Aunts Aren't Gentlemen

Aunts Aren't Gentlemen by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The final Jeeves and Wooster book, and while not the best of them, certainly well up to standard.

Admittedly, the formidable woman that Bertie has to struggle not to marry might as well be Florence Craye, and her jealous, thuggish fiancé might as well be "Stilton" Cheesewright, except that both of them are out of circulation following events in a previous book, so these are new characters (or, at least, have new names). Wodehouse's socialists and Communists always seem to be hypocrites, in it for what they can get (ever since Psmith), and these two are no exception.

Major Plank returns from another previous book; he was always a stock character (the colonial military man/intrepid explorer), and remains one, but he does provide some tension as Bertie wonders whether he will remember their previous encounter accurately (to Bertie's detriment).

The author doesn't seem to have re-read previous books before writing this one, which he wrote late in life and many years after some of the earlier entries in the series, and gets several details from them wrong; the cosh is the property of the wrong cousin (Aunt Dahlia's Bonzo instead of Aunt Agatha's Thos), for example, and the wrong location is given for the fight between Spode and Gussie in which Gussie hits Spode over the head with a painting. This makes no difference, but it is a bit jarring.

The title (and the alternate title, The Catnappers) refers to Aunt Dahlia's scheme to nobble a racehorse by stealing a cat that it's fond of in order to send it into a decline. This is achieved with the help of the local poacher, Harold "Billy" Graham. The reference to the American evangelist (who became known internationally in the 1940s) is one of the occasional anachronisms in the series. Wikipedia claims that the Jeeves and Wooster books have a floating timeline, that they are always set in the present day as at publication date. The technological and sociological milieu, though, is always that of the 1920s or 1930s, so my theory is that they are always set then, but Wodehouse occasionally dropped in an anachronistic reference because he wanted to evoke a particular image in the minds of his audience, and one that would have been correct for that increasingly distant time period wouldn't have cut it because it wouldn't have been familiar enough.

The cat subplot supplies freshness to the formula, and all in all this is a successful Jeeves and Wooster for my money.

View all my reviews

Review: Time Traitors

Time Traitors by Eli Donovan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Disclaimers first: I got a review copy from Netgalley, and then another (more up-to-date) review copy directly from the author, who is on the same writers' forum as me.

This is a solid SF thriller in the manner of Michael Crichton (who gets name-checked at one point), combining time travel and dinosaurs, two of his best-known premises. It starts out an unspecified period into the future, but quickly moves to 70 million years ago, where one of the viewpoint characters is studying dinosaurs and the other is poaching them. The two stories converge after a while, and it turns out that the two women have a pre-existing relationship, which adds to the already high tension.

It's a pacey story, with a high body count among the secondary characters, but it doesn't skimp on relevant characterization, relationship development, or setting details (while avoiding infodumps and long scenes about the characters' inner struggles). There were a few moments when I felt a bit of a strain on the suspension of disbelief, but not too badly so.

Time travel is hard to write well, in part because it's easy to get snarled up in crisscrossing alternate timelines that make less and less sense the more they play out, and the author has cleverly avoided this by setting a "the timeline doesn't change" rule. Which is then broken late in the book, but in a way that adds rather than detracting.

Overall, this is a soundly written book that will satisfy readers who like a bit of SF content in their thriller or vice-versa. Personally, I'm more of a cosy fantasy fan, but I enjoyed it nonetheless, and it enters my Best of the Year list with no difficulty.

View all my reviews

Review: Miss Percy's Pocket Guide to the Care and Feeding of British Dragons

Miss Percy's Pocket Guide to the Care and Feeding of British Dragons by Quenby Olson
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I saw a review of this somewhere, I can't remember now exactly where, and added it to my wishlist, then picked it up when it was on sale. I'm glad I didn't pay full price, because I gave up on it about halfway through.

I'd got not quite halfway and it was feeling a bit tedious, with a very socially constrained protagonist who was often passive, a large number of basic editing errors (including it's/its), and very little plot per thousand words. I can forgive a slow-moving plot if everything else is excellent, but this wasn't. So I set it aside, and went off and read four other complete books before grudgingly picking it up again.

And there was more wordiness (with a lot of parentheticals, in the voice of the author, not the character, which had worn thin quite early on), and another scene in which there was finally a bit of action but the main character didn't actually do anything, and a second it's/its error, and I decided to ditch it.

I liked the premise of a cosy fantasy about a middle-aged woman who deals with an unexpected dragon, but the execution just didn't work for me.

View all my reviews

Review: Tea Set and Match

Tea Set and Match by Casey Blair
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Here is, in part, what I wrote about the first book in this series:

"The setting, unfortunately, is of the scenery-flats variety. I felt it was only just barely worked out enough to enable the plot. For example, there's never any definition of what magic can and can't do or how it works, enabling it to do whatever it needs to, and to provide analogues of contemporary technology like fridges... There are occasional intrusions of right-now-this-minute US liberal concepts... without any attempt to make them feel organic to the setting. It feels like it's mashed up out of bits of traditional Japanese and contemporary American culture, with some on-the-fly fantasy elements papered hastily over the seams."

All of that very much still applies in this second book, and for me is by far its biggest flaw, though there are also a number of careless typos (like "wide" for "side") and consistent misspellings (like "borne" when it means "birthed" rather than "carried," and "leant" when it means "loaned" and not "leaned"). Also, some missing question marks, and hyphens where they shouldn't be.

This lack of attention to key elements of execution drags it down from the Gold tier of my Best of the Year list, where the originality and reflective depth would have placed it, to the Bronze tier, meaning only just a recommendation. But if you don't care about plausible worldbuilding and don't notice mechanical fumbles, this is a warm-hearted, sometimes profound and overall enjoyable book.

I have to say, though, I did grow a little tired of Miyara, the tea princess, tearing into someone in what seems like a highly judgmental and confrontational way (presumably mitigated by her always calm formal tone, but it was hard not to read it as bitter and accusing) and, rather than making an enemy for life, instead forcing them to confront their own issues and end up doing whatever it is she wants them to do so that she can continue to save all the less-powerful people from her position of privilege. She is a little too perfect and successful, and her role as a catalyst in bringing everyone together (which she several times remarks on) makes everything about her. So far, it's not quite so irritating that I don't want to read the third book in the series, because there are some definite strengths here that I don't often see, but I'm slowly cooling on it.

Because it started as a web series and is only now being reformatted as three books, there's a lack of what I call "previously-on" to reorient the reader to the events and people of the first book. I did manage to remember who everyone was relatively quickly, which is not so much a tribute to their characterization as to how strongly they are related to the main character; it was those relationships, not their personal qualities, that I mostly remembered. But if it had been longer since I'd read the previous book (I read it three months ago), I would have struggled.

In summary, then, a book with considerable strengths balanced by equally considerable flaws, with the potential to be much better given a bit of work.

View all my reviews

Review: Prince of Blue Flowers: Adventures of Takuan from Koto

Prince of Blue Flowers: Adventures of Takuan from Koto by Ryu Zhong
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I enjoy a good Asian fantasy, and a fun trickster tale, and this is both of those things. I initially put this on my "heist" shelf, but it's not really at the planning level of a heist; it's more the trickster character seizing his opportunities to put one over on the greedy people he encounters. The setting is mostly classical Chinese in feel, though most of the names (including the named gods) are Japanese.

I got a bit of a Monkey: The Journey to the West feel from it, not least because the trickster also has ambitions to fight demons as a monk, though he gets expelled from his monastery because of one trick too many.

There's a formula that ends each chapter, as in traditional tales.

Overall, it's a fun ride, and it's good to have a trickster character who isn't just motivated by greed or mischief but is directing his natural exuberance to a noble end.

View all my reviews

Review: Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves

Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Not a great entry in the series; a good few of the gags are recycled from earlier books, and while it uses most of the characters and the setting from the hilarious The Code of the Woosters , for me it didn't catch fire in the same way. Still enjoyable, to be sure, but feels formulaic in a way that other Wodehouse (even if it's written to a formula) doesn't.

View all my reviews