Review: Seraphina

Seraphina by Rachel Hartman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



Early on, I thought this could be a 5-star book. It almost missed out on the fifth star, barely, because it somehow wasn't as compelling as I felt it could have been, but on balance I awarded the extra star for beautiful writing, an admirable protagonist, good worldbuilding and a well-constructed plot.

It's certainly a well-edited book. I spotted five errors: two sentences joined by a comma-splice; an excess closing quotation mark partway through a speech; the use of the word "palpated" in place of "palpitated"; a missing comma before a term of address; and a missing apostrophe in the phrase "goat's beard". If you follow my reviews, you'll know that it's usual for me to find a number of errors in double figures even in books that have been professionally edited, so this is a mark of an author who makes few errors, an editor who catches many, or some combination.

In addition, the language is often beautiful, going beyond efficient prose to something more literary. There's even one of my personal favourite things, a made-up phrase that is clearly a cliche in the setting, though it isn't one in our world: "Don't pay Pau-Henoa until he gets you to the other side," which in context means "don't count your chickens before they're hatched" or "don't jinx it".

The voice of the first-person protagonist, wry, even sarcastic, is wonderfully done. She's a pragmatic person who doesn't take herself too seriously; when she falls off her bed while ill and wakes up on the floor, the first thing she notices is that she needs to clean under the bed more often. She's decisive, practical and courageous, and I never felt that other people's admiration for her was forced by the author (as is far too often the case). She merited admiration.

She has a secret, the kind of thing that you have to conceal from everyone lest they despise you, and the author does a fine job of putting us in the head of someone in that situation: the constant vigilance, the threat of exposure, the self-doubt shading to self-hatred, the lack of trust in others. "I couldn't tell her that lying wasn't so much something I did as something I was," she says. The story isn't just an adventure, it's a story with meaning beyond itself, a story about the human condition as well as about these particular people.

That brings me, indirectly, to what I thought was weakest in the book, which very nearly lost it the fifth star. Even though the plot involved plenty of conflict and threat and taking action to avert bad consequences (sometimes unsuccessfully), I felt it lacked a sense of urgency somehow. I can't put my finger on exactly why. Clearly, a book can't simultaneously have literary depth and be a fast-paced thriller (at least, I've never seen this done, and I can't imagine how it would be), but the pacing, or the emotional tone, or something seemed a bit languid to me, despite the high stakes (personal and political). Maybe the wry, pragmatic tone of the narration works against the urgency that a more self-dramatising narrator would convey.

The worldbuilding is interesting. Even though a lot of elements clearly come from Renaissance Europe, they're given sufficient twists that it's not just cultural copypasta; it's "inspired by" rather than "based on". There are hints that the dragons have a high level of technology, beyond what the humans are equipped to understand. (I didn't mention the dragons? There are dragons. They're magnificent, even when taking human shape, and they struggle with the relative value of rationality and emotion.)

The ending, while a resolution, isn't a neat, everything-tied-up resolution. It has dimensions and layers and possibilities and built-in conflict for the next book - which I will definitely be looking for.

"We were all monsters and bastards, and we were all beautiful," says Seraphina, near the end. That's the book in a sentence. Read it, and find out why.



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Review: Clean Sweep

Clean Sweep by Ilona Andrews

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



When I started this, I'd forgotten that I'd previously read some of the same author team's urban fantasy series, the Kate Daniels books. While they aren't my favourite urban fantasies, that's more because I dislike post-apocalyptic than because of any particular flaw in the books.

This was also good, something a bit fresh and different. Like [a:Lindsay Buroker|4512224|Lindsay Buroker|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/authors/1292869920p2/4512224.jpg] and [a:Brian Rush|3467706|Brian Rush|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/authors/1343946964p2/3467706.jpg], these authors are putting aliens in their urban fantasy; the werewolves and vampires come from other planets, and the Innkeepers are powerful magic users (or have sufficiently advanced technology that they seem to be) who keep refuges where alien travellers can enjoy safety in a kind of Accorded Neutral Ground.

One of the fresh aspects was that the first-person female main character, though attracted to both the werewolf and the vampire, not only knows that getting involved with them wouldn't be smart, she actually does the smart thing. She's competent and capable, chooses her allies carefully, struggles against the odds, chooses to get involved in a problem even though she's not supposed to because she has regard for her community and its people, and in general ticks all the boxes as a hero I will cheer for. As you'd expect from such experienced writers, the plot flows smoothly and doesn't rely on coincidence.

I'm not clear where on the publishing spectrum this book falls. The couple who write as Ilona Andrews are traditionally published, but this was a hobby project originally written on their website. They credit a copy editor, whose work is decent but not flawless; I noted nine errors, ranging from a minor character's name being spelled two different ways, through some missing minor words in sentences, to a couple of misspellings and two incorrectly placed apostrophes. Since these apparently also escaped sixteen beta readers and the fans who watched the story unfold episode by episode on the website, most readers probably won't notice them.



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Review: Almost Adept

Almost Adept by Olga Godim

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



This book's title describes it well: it's almost adept, apart from a few significant stumbles.

Firstly, I get the impression that the author's first language may not be English, and some odd phrasings have survived the editing process. "It's only a day ride" (instead of "day's ride"), "in a nearest town", "on the Varelia's side of the mountains", "every each way" (instead of "every which way"; this appears twice), "she was in such a shock", "only in extreme condition", "could I have some snack before dinner?", and "after the injuries like yours" are all phrases that I noticed as being odd. Some of them may simply be incompletely revised sentences.

There are a few words that aren't quite the right word choice: "depravations" instead of "depravities", "occupants" instead of "occupiers", "largess" used to mean "riches one owns" instead of, as it should mean, "riches one distributes", "forerunner" instead of "progenitor", and "wilted" used of fruit, when it's a word that normally applies to leaves.

There are a couple of anachronistic word choices: "decibels", "dating", "megaton". The language, too, wobbles between relatively formal English and modern American informal, which I found occasionally distracting.

There are a few outright misspellings: "puss" for "pus" (though it's correctly spelled in another place), the obvious typo "fiend" for "friend", "pour" for "poor" and a "you" for "your" (another common typo).

I only noticed one comma error, though. That's something.

So it could have done with another edit. The story itself is satisfying enough, for the most part, though I did think that several of the events and character choices seemed driven by what would work for the plot rather than what was sensible or realistic. For example, the main character, for reasons that are never fully explained, needs to lose her virginity before she can become a fully recognised Adept, and this is a plot driver. She lets herself be arrested and taken to jail, not because she doesn't have a number of other options (which are helpfully listed), but because she's curious about the experience, and this places her where she can conveniently rescue someone else. When the governor's wife is kidnapped, by a startlingly convenient coincidence she's the main male character's former sweetheart (never previously mentioned), and he has a locket with her hair (never previously mentioned), and this enables her to be tracked magically. The magic itself is all kinds of convenient, and apparently capable of doing anything.

Even with these flaws, though, I enjoyed the journey. There was genuine tension, despite the all-powerful magic, which isn't easy to achieve. The young female protagonist is brave and determined, although she's remarkably resilient in the face of bad experiences. When horrifying things happen to children right next to her (and I could have done with a warning about that, by the way, along with the extended torture scene), she is shocked in the moment, but next day she seems cheerful and almost carefree and the incident is hardly referred to again. Apparently it was mainly there to emphasise how very bad a man the villain is.

Still, with another round of edits, less reliance on coincidence, and more care to ensure that story elements aren't just there to drive the plot, arise more naturally and have more realistic consequences, this would be a very fine book. I enjoyed it enough that I could largely overlook the flaws I've mentioned, so it gets four stars. On my subscale within four stars, ranging from 0 (barely above mediocre) to 9 (just short of amazing), it scores a 2, mainly because I liked the characters.

I received a copy of this book from the author for purposes of review.



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Review: The Machine God

The Machine God by MeiLin Miranda

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



I dithered between three and four stars for this. I think it's on the low end of four.

On the upside, this is much better than the usual steampunk mess. There's a complete absence of silly romance, nothing is unnecessarily or unrealistically made of brass, nobody wears a corset, and there's at least one character with depth. It's not a 1930s pulp in a bad Jules Verne costume, either, and it isn't littered with basic editing errors.

Having said that, there are a few issues. Firstly, while obviously steampunk, by definition, isn't about real technology, if you have a steam-powered technology and you somehow supercharge it by using a magical fuel, you don't use that fuel to replace the water in the boiler. This suggests a lack of grasp of the basics of how steam engines work.

Then there are a few Inigo Montoya words scattered here and there. "A pastiche of stone and bricks" used to mean, by the context, a patchwork. "Ascribe" used to mean "subscribe". "Betook" used as an archaic word for "took", which it isn't; it has its own meaning, which makes no sense in the sentence where it's used.

There's also the Whole Culture Used Only as Flavouring Problem, in which a culture from our world with complex historical origins is grabbed and used more or less to provide a bit of colour, without much in-depth understanding. In this case, it's the German culture, which provides mainly names (or the general shape of names; I don't think most of them are actual German names or mean anything in German). One of those names, von Sülzle, in our world would indicate aristocratic descent (because of the "von"), but it's given to someone who's very much a commoner - and talks like a modern American, in contrast to the more formal speech of the rest of the characters. If MeiLin Miranda is, as her name suggests, of Asian origin, then this is payback, I suppose, for every half-baked piece of orientalism in genre fiction, going back at least to the 19th century. On the other hand, if it's a bad practice in one direction, it's a bad practice in both directions.

So much for the language and setting. I'll note again that this is still much better than the average steampunk work I've read.

As far as the characters go, I liked the protagonist, a gentle scholar from another, ancient city, mourning his little sister, excited to be a part of rediscovering history, missing his cultural food and drink. He had depth and dimension and remained consistent throughout. The antagonist, by contrast, seemed to become the antagonist out of nowhere, without adequate foreshadowing, and I found that offputting.

It's always revealing, to me, when I set a book aside for a while and read something else instead, or entertain myself in other ways rather than read it, and this was such a book. Partly that was because, having hit some of the flaws mentioned above, I was dreading it getting worse (it didn't). Partly, it was because it got dark in places, and that's not the kind of book I prefer. Mainly, though, I think it was the lack of something: a vivid and compelling story problem presented early that would grab me and not let me go. There definitely is a story problem, but I felt it came too late in the book to really seize my interest.



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Review: Under the Skin

Under the Skin by E.E. Richardson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Fluently and competently written, but darker than I usually go for, and with that weary British sense of hopelessness against the system. That doesn't, fortunately, stop the protagonist from doing the right thing despite considerable cost and opposition, which is largely why it got a fourth star from me.

It's shorter than I expected, and finishes abruptly with several things unresolved and on a worrying note. I can see why the author left it that way, though, since tying everything up neatly would have been difficult to pull off believably and also anticlimactic.

Because it's darker than my usual taste, I probably won't look for other books by this author, but if that doesn't bother you, it's well-written and I recommend it.



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Review: The Sorcerer's Daughter

The Sorcerer's Daughter by Larry Kollar

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



A brisk and fun continuation of the Accidental Sorcerers series. In the previous volume, Mik, the boy of the teenage pair of apprentice sorcerers, went off on a solo adventure, and in this one it's the turn of Sura, the girl. There's some good setup at the start to show how they learn the magic that they'll need, and to reinforce the closeness of their bond, which is also significant.

Although the story is quite short, it's complete and satisfying, something I don't often say about shorter works. I think it's because of the good setup followed by a clear, strong arc for the main character.

The final revelation about Sura's parentage did seem to me to contradict something stated earlier in the series, and indeed an earlier scene in this story, but it was the right answer in an emotional sense, so I give it a pass, just.

I'm glad the series will be continuing, and look forward to the next volume.



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Review: Water and Chaos

Water and Chaos by Larry Kollar

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



It's a relief to have a well-edited indie book that isn't constantly distracting me from the story because the author doesn't know where to put the apostrophes, and it's also a pleasure to have a good story, likeable and believable characters and a well-thought-out world.

In this second volume of the Accidental Sorcerers series, teenage apprentice sorcerers Mik and Sura have a romantic misunderstanding that, for me, skirted but didn't cross the line of being unbelievable. I think the key word in that last sentence is "teenage".

Mik is everything I like in a main character: loyal, honest, brave, resourceful and talented. Cheering for him is easy.

I did wonder how the economics worked of one person working for a few days being able to feed an entire school for, presumably, a similar period, but other than that I thought the worldbuilding was well done and plausible.

I already have the sequel on my Kindle and will be reading it forthwith.



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