Review: Royal Tea Service

Royal Tea Service by Casey Blair
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

First of all, this is not really a cozy fantasy, in the sense that it doesn't have low stakes. The protagonist is setting out to save the world, which is as high as stakes can get. But it has a lot of the furniture of cozy: a tea shop, a sweet romance, a lot of page space dedicated to the personal and interpersonal development of the characters rather than to the world-saving.

Don't start with this book, by the way. The books are based on a continuous web series, and so when a character from a previous book reappears there isn't the slightest attempt to recap who they are, what they do, or what their relationship to the protagonist is; you need to remember from having read the previous volumes relatively recently. And there are a lot of these characters, too.

I was pleased to note that one of my criticisms of the previous book is starting to be addressed in this one. Miyara the Tea Princess has been making everything about her, doing all the protagonism, and treating her friends and acquaintances largely as a little court who she orders about as extensions of herself. In this book, she's become aware of that and is trying to work on it, delegate more, trust them to do what they're good at in their own way without her direct supervision, and have their own development and growth. Because it's still narrated in her voice, inevitably everything still filters through her perspective, but at least she's encouraging more agency in the other characters, and they're taking it on.

One thing hasn't changed. One of her sisters says at one point, "I was under the impression that defeat by graciousness was your primary mode of operating." I have never been under that impression; to me, it seems that Miyara's primary mode of operating is to berate people with harsh truths and ultimatums until they fold and do what she wants, inexplicably without resenting her manner in most cases.

In terms of language, the sentences sometimes wander so much that they get lost and fall apart grammatically; there was one I couldn't parse at all, I assume because at least one of the words had the wrong part of speech. There are numerous missing words, repeated words, transposed words, and other errors and typos (including "knew" for "new," twice, and "their" for "there"; maybe the author uses dictation software and doesn't clean up the output properly?). A couple of times, Miyara claims to be the "fourth youngest" princess; she's actually fourth oldest, and therefore second youngest, of the five.

All up, I noted about twice as many errors as I'd expect to see in a book this length (it's long), which earned it my "seriously-needs-editing" tag. The author is being ambitious with the prose, attempting sentences that are long and complicated and profound, but doesn't have the chops to pull it off consistently. Apparently, the books were funded by a Kickstarter following success as a web series; more of the proceeds needed to be dedicated to competent professional editing.

In my reviews of the previous two books, I mentioned that the worldbuilding felt like scenery flats. Here, it feels a little more filled in, especially the magic systems. We do still get the occasional ritual recitation of 2020s US progressive orthodox doctrine on oppressive systems, with no attempt to make it feel like an organic part of the setting or something Miyara, with her background, would realistically think, but most of the thoughts that are actually integrated into the story are not so rote or simplistic and most of them make some sense. (I will note that ambassadors are not usually empowered to change the laws of their countries by making a treaty with other countries; their government still needs to ratify the treaty and make the changes to the law by their normal process.)

I'm being harsh on it, despite rating it highly, because it's a fresh and (from a story point of view) mostly well-executed premise that I felt was badly let down by lack of attention to detail. I would normally place a book with this amount of depth and character development in at least the Gold tier of my Best of the Year list, if not the Platinum tier, but as it is, it only merits Silver.

There's a sentence in there somewhere that I didn't highlight from Deniel, Miyara's love interest, about putting effort into your art to make it the best it can be. I feel like the author needs to put that sentence up on the wall and reflect on it deeply. This whole series shows a lot of promise that, for me, is not fully realized because of poor mechanics, mental blind spots and ignorance about how a world works. If the author (who is young and early-career) works hard on these things, rather than coasting on the popularity the good storytelling and strong characters deservedly attract, future books could be extraordinarily good, rather than a mixture of excellence and profound flaws.

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Review: Battle's Legacy

Battle's Legacy by Darian Smith
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a tough one to review. I've met Darian Smith a couple of times in person, and he's a great guy. I've also enjoyed the previous books in the series (with a couple of reservations), and included them on my Best of the Year lists. And from a storytelling point of view, it works: the characters have arcs, they struggle, they use their alliances and their skills and their history and determination and courage to persevere and succeed, they're determined to do the right thing even if it costs them. All of this is good, and would normally get it an automatic spot on my Best of the Year for 2023, with no hesitation.

On the other hand, it could do with a lot more polish, which was one of the reservations I mentioned regarding the earlier books. This one is even worse than the others, though. The whole ebook is formatted as one long "chapter," so the "time left in chapter" and "time left in book" numbers are the same, and what should be em dashes are all hyphens, inconsistently spaced. There are a number of small words missing out of sentences (a hard error to spot) and occasionally added to sentences, "let's eat Grandma" errors (missing comma before term of address), missing question marks, and a remarkably complete collection of other common errors, over 100 of them, which is more than I spotted in the other two books put together (see my highlights and notes). Towards the end, the continuity gets a little suspect, as well, and at least one person misses something that should be completely obvious to him so that an enemy's move can succeed.

My other big reservation about the earlier books was that they are darker than I prefer, with a lot of death, tragedy, pain, and overall angst. That's a personal taste thing; other people will find that a feature, but I don't, and that's the main reason (along with the low standard of editing) that I won't be getting the fourth book when it comes out. I'm pretty confident I can see some of where that book will be going, and I have no desire to experience it.

So where do I land in terms of a score and a recommendation? I've been privately judgmental in the past of authors who are, I think, too kind when they review books by their fellow authors who they like as people, and I don't want to fall into the same behaviour. On the other hand, I have allowed some books onto the bottom tier of my Best of the Year list this year that, while they have terrible mechanics and/or are darker than I prefer, are well-told stories, and this is one of those.

In the end, because I know that there are people who will enjoy this more than I did (not noticing the many errors and not minding the death and dismemberment), it just barely squeaks into the very bottom of the Bronze tier of my 2023 list, and I still feel conflicted about letting it on there. In a year where I was judging more harshly, it would get three stars.

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Review: The King of Faerie

The King of Faerie by A.J. Lancaster
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a consistently excellent series (start at the beginning; it's a continuous story, though each book has its own resolution). Well edited, apart from the occasional unnecessary "!?" and a few very minor glitches; full of vivid characters, some of whom are wonderfully determined to do the right thing; with a marvelous and fresh-feeling setting that nevertheless evokes both Fae lore and British tradition.

I do have a minor quibble, which I've mentioned in reviews of earlier books: this is a Britain (or Prydain) where the religion is Celtic paganism, and yet several characters (Jonathan, John, and James) unaccountably have biblical names. Apart from that, the worldbuilding is excellent. A lot of books that present a society that goes back for centuries don't give me the feel of antiquity that, say, a British book set in the real world does, with its odd traditions that make no sense but are kept up because that's the way things have always been. This book does give me that. It's a parallel-world Britain where the details are all different, but the overall feel of it is the same.

There's an old family manor. It's dilapidated in parts, it's been renovated and built onto and rooms repurposed dozens of times, the rooms have names that no doubt all have histories behind them, a big extended family lives there (and argues constantly, but ultimately pulls together in the face of an external threat), and it's completely wonderful and evocative.

The fae are unpredictable and alluring and dangerous, sometimes cruel, always fascinating. But Wyn, the fae prince who is one of the central characters, is a kind and good-hearted man who's lived as a human for years and is only just now returning to reluctantly embrace his fae side. That's a theme: if you don't acknowledge who you are and live that out, you're buying yourself a world of trouble and weakening yourself as well. (A book having that kind of a theme, and working it out successfully, is one of my criteria for a five-star rating.)

And then there's Hetta. The book would be worth reading for Hetta alone; she's determined, steadfast, forthright (which both the fae and her fellow humans tend to find some combination of amusing and offensive), and takes no crap from anyone, no matter how powerful, even though she's only the lord of a small faeland that's also an estate in the human world. She's pregnant, to her fiancé Wyn, which in her society is scandalous; she has no time for people's moral panic about it when there's a ticking clock to resolve a series of difficult problems in order to save everything that matters to her. She's not perfect or flawless or overpowered; she struggles both internally and externally throughout the book, but, as she says at one point, "Monsters first; self-doubt later." I love how pragmatic and sensible she is. (It's a characteristic that New Zealand women often have, in my experience, and the author is a fellow New Zealander.) She and Wyn form a powerful team; both racked by self-doubt but with full confidence in each other, she pragmatic and blunt, he organized and diplomatic, both thrown into a sea of chaos mostly not of their own making, and swimming strongly for an at first invisible shore.

I always enjoy it when I find an author who can set up a series of problems that I can't see a solution to, and I look forward to seeing how they resolve them. This book is particularly successful in that regard, and (vaguely to avoid spoilers) involves plenty of agency from the key characters and zero fortunate coincidences in the actual resolution, too. It manages to pull off "surprising but inevitable," and that's hard.

I pick up a lot of bad books in my search for books like this, so I know what the average writer is capable of. This is the work of a writer who is well above average. It fully deserves a high spot on my Best of the Year list for 2023.

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Review: The First Law of Cultivation

The First Law of Cultivation by KrazeKode
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

I almost need another tag stronger than "seriously needs editing" for this one.

Look, I can put up with some errors for the sake of a good story. If I couldn't, I wouldn't enjoy reading much; most authors these days make the same ten types of errors at least occasionally, because they haven't been taught not to. But by the time I abandoned this at 4% I'd marked about 40 issues, most of them to do with the fact that the author has no clue, absolutely none, about how to write a narrative in the past tense. I'm used to the occasional missing past perfect tense when referring to something happening before the narrative moment, and the occasional "may" when it should be "might," and even the odd slip into present tense, but this book makes those errors constantly, on practically every Kindle page (which is smaller than a print page). Not to mention frequently writing something as two words where it should be one, and occasionally the other way round, and the usual excess coordinate commas between adjectives that don't need them, and some sentences that are phrased so awkwardly it's hard to figure out what they mean, and most of the other common errors. It's a constant barrage of bad mechanics, which distracted me so much that I couldn't get into the story and see if it was any good.

The opening is extremely reminiscent of Beware of Chicken Volume 1 : person from our world is suddenly dropped into the body of a young cultivator in a xanxia world who has just been beaten to death by more senior cultivators, who use "sparring" as an excuse to bully the weak. (I'm not sure if it's directly ripping off BoC or drawing on a widespread trope of the genre, because BoC is the only other such novel I've read.) But where the protagonist of BoC was a farmer and wants to be one again, this protagonist definitely does not want to farm; he was a chemistry student, and takes up the study of alchemy (or Alchemy, since it's capitalized for some reason). He apprentices himself to an old alchemy master with that goal in mind.

That's as far as I got before the terrible mechanics drove me away. Reading other reviews convinces me that I made the right choice. The quality of the mechanics doesn't absolutely predict the quality of the story, but there is a strong correlation.

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Review: Beware of Chicken 2

Beware of Chicken 2 by CasualFarmer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

CasualFarmer can write a cozy, humourous cultivation novel, for sure, even if the editing does need another pass and the pacing at the beginning and end could do with some adjustment.

This is a big book, and it needs to be in order to fit all the viewpoints from the ever-multiplying cast. An ensemble cast with multiple viewpoints is hard to do, and the author manages it well, although having so many different storylines to wrap up does land him with the Return of the King problem: too many endings that seem to go on just a bit too long. I also felt that the potential conflict of the senior cultivator looking for Jin Rou, the central character in the ensemble cast, could have been introduced slightly earlier - say, by 25% rather than 30% of the way through. The first 30% is an ambling slice-of-life, which is fine, but not as interesting as it becomes once there's a threat (which the main characters are unaware of) to worry about. Apart from that, I felt the plot was well handled; it's not a highly plotty book, being more about the development of the characters, but you need a certain minimum amount of plot to show that development, and what plot there is unfolds at the pace it needs to.

As I noted, it's long, and so the fact that there are about 70 errors in it (that I noticed) makes it only average in terms of needing editing, proportionately. If anything, it's a bit better in this regard than the first book, though there are still a good few excess coordinate commas, occasional problems with dialog punctuation (especially at the end, when we get several instances of the issue that I saw a lot of in the first book, where the dialog tag is punctuated as a separate sentence), and a sample platter of other common issues: dangling modifiers, missing past perfect, noun/verb agreement, fumbled phrasing, homonym errors, apostrophe placement, and simple uncaught typos. Still, they're no more frequent than in a lot of other books these days, and from what I can tell, a good deal better than most other books in this genre, which are frankly inept.

What I liked a lot was that the characters are good-hearted people, including the ones who are animals, even the arrogant ones. They mostly have some kind of significant progression during the book, too, and that progression is different for each of them. The characters are distinct; they have different voices and different personalities and different conflicts and aspirations and abilities, and you'd never confuse one of them for another. I can think of at least one Hugo-winning author who could take lessons from this book in writing well-defined characters.

Also, the determined aversion of the harem trope is great; it always makes me happy to see a dedicated monogamist in fiction.

Overall, a satisfying experience, and I look forward to Book 3.

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Review: Queen Lucia

Queen Lucia by E.F. Benson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was hoping that this classic comic novel would be a warm comedy, like Wodehouse, Jerome K. Jerome, or England, Their England . In places, it is; there are certainly kind and well-intentioned people in it, and the title character is treated, if anything, more sympathetically than she deserves, but occasionally it feels catty.

Lucia, as she calls herself (real name Emmeline Lucas) is based in part on the novelist Marie Corelli, real name Minnie Mackay, who had some of the same affectations: pretending to speak Italian (and in her case to be Italian by descent, which at least Lucia doesn't claim), being devoted to Shakespeare and the Elizabethan era in general, and sometimes talking to her friends in baby talk. Lucia believes herself to be a great lover of music, so much so that she theatrically can't stand the sound of a gramophone, but on two separate occasions she demonstrates that she's not reacting to the actual music she's hearing but to what she assumes it to be, based on who she (incorrectly) believes to be performing it.

She's a more successful version of Margo Leadbetter (Penelope Keith's character in the classic 1970s comedy The Good Life): queen bee of her little village, where she controls her neighbours and is the arbiter of taste and the premier social hostess. But there are rumblings of rebellion. Some of these come from her sidekick Georgie (clearly presented as what we would recognize today as a "gay best friend," though he falls emotionally in love with a woman later in the book; the author was discreetly gay, and some of the cattier moments are descriptions of Georgie's small affectations and vanities). Also contemplating rebellion against the rule of Lucia is another of her neighbours who goes in for fads and is, in the course of the story, duped by not one, but two confidence tricksters posing as spiritual advisors (both of whom Lucia attempts to annex, the first one successfully and the second one unsuccessfully).

The other village characters at first look like the stock cast of any novel set in an English village of the time (1920): the retired military officer, the disabled widow in her bath-chair, the snooty lady of the hall with her put-upon companion and her pug, the deaf widow who is the only one with any offspring (young adult daughters who are known to everyone as Piggy and Goosie, apparently without malice). As the story progresses, though, some of them - notably the Colonel and the disabled widow - develop other dimensions.

A big driver of change in the book is Olga, the opera singer who has risen from an orphanage to fame and a degree of fortune, but remains straightforward, openhearted and genuine, all of which makes her a foil for Lucia. Olga, who has recently moved to the village, organizes an evening party spontaneously (Lucia's functions are, even when they're purportedly spontaneous, actually carefully rehearsed) and everyone has a great time, much more so than they do at Lucia's. Olga is, unintentionally, behind both of the occasions on which Lucia is revealed to not have much musical perception at all, as well as innocently exposing her pretensions to speak Italian as, to say the least, exaggerated. Olga never means to make Lucia look ridiculous; Lucia does that for herself, but Olga feels responsible, is sorry for Lucia, and sets out to make it up to her and put her back on her little throne, since after all she does no real harm there, and it makes her happy.

It's a character-driven rather than a plot-driven novel, though incidents do occur; the interactions of the characters in the context of those incidents are what is important, rather than the incidents themselves. And in terms of giving us memorable characters, it definitely succeeds.

It's part of a series, and I'm considering reading more of them, because even though it wasn't quite the kind of comedy I was hoping for, it's excellently done.

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Review: The Secret of Safe Passage

The Secret of Safe Passage by Martin Baynton
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I'm finding this a tricky one to rate.

I've read quite a few books lately where the emotional throughline, the story, is handled effectively, but there are significant mechanical issues (the things a copy editor looks after; mostly punctuation, but also things like grammar and tense) and underdeveloped worldbuilding. This is one of those, except that instead of the worldbuilding being undeveloped there are a large number of small errors of continuity and fact. The overall feel, then, is of a story lacking a lot of polish, so much so that I hesitate to add it even to the bottom tier of my recommendation list.

Now, I did get a pre-release version via Netgalley. It's possible - though, honestly, not highly likely - that a skilled copy editor will go through it between the version I saw and the version that's published in about two weeks from now, and fix the two it's/its errors, the many comma splices, the many places where a comma is missing before a term of address, the many places where a question is missing a question mark, the carelessly dropped quotation marks, and the small words from sentences that are missing or substituted for different words. They may even fix up the bits of dialog where the response doesn't match the previous line, like the glaring one where person A describes someone as a "zombie" with no indication of gender, and person B says "Woman?" as if that word had been used in the preceding sentence.

If they're extraordinarily good, they may even fix up the subtle errors, like describing "charm" as a subatomic particle (it's a flavour of quark, which isn't quite the same thing), or claiming that "faster" should be corrected to "more quickly" when both are acceptable, or Ali saying that she was a blood donor several years before, even though she's 15 and the minimum age for blood donation in the UK is 17.

What all of that wouldn't fix was the big swallow at the start - in the prologue, in fact - where we get a major revision to well-known history. In reality, Alice Pleasance Liddell was one of three sisters to whom Charles Lutwedge Dodgson, who transformed his first two names to the pseudonym Lewis Carroll via Latin, told the original Alice in Wonderland story, using her name for the protagonist. Alice was, at the time, 10 years old; she lived to the age of 80, marrying and having three children. Dodgson wrote several other works, none of which are as good (especially Sylvie and Bruno, which is awful) or as well known, but which are certainly in a similar style. In this version, Alice Carroll Grey, exact age unspecified, wrote both Alice books herself, filling them with secret messages about a real otherworld, and then disappeared into it after handing them over to Dodgson to be published as being written by him. She had to flee there because the White Rose, a sinister organization, was hunting her in order to get the secret of access to Wonderland (and safe return, which is harder, hence this novel's title). This organization has survived for 170 years since then without apparently achieving very much at all; the operatives are called Knaves and the head of it is Mrs King (i.e., obviously, the White Queen). The original Alice's great-niece (there are probably several more greats, but even if there are there seem to be too few generations mentioned to account for the 170-year gap), also named Alice but going by Ali, discovers and begins decoding the secret when she's manipulated into getting suspended from school and sent to relatives she's never previously heard of at an old country house that's been in the Grey family since her Great-Aunt Alice's time.

Ali is not a nice person. Her mother died on a humanitarian mission when Ali was quite young, her father is away a lot for work (he's a scientist studying gravity waves, which involves being incommunicado in a Faraday cage down a mine in Wales for days at a time), and she's now an angry, stubborn teenager, given to striking out in rage, actual tantrums, and, even when not specifically angry, weaponizing her intelligence to make cruel remarks. Her elderly relatives, who are lovely, do manage to tame her down a bit, and she eventually grows as a person and realizes how awful she's been, but she's still a piece of work. Still, her character and her arc of growth are the best thing about the book, which from my particular perspective is damning it with faint praise, because I prefer, as a matter of taste, to read about people who are actually well-intentioned from the start and not awful. The storytelling and the handling of Alice's character show the skill that is notably lacking in the mechanics, the background, the continuity, and the incidental facts.

So: a very rough piece of work with a main character that I didn't care for. I hovered between three and four stars, and finally landed on three, because I don't recommend it. That isn't to say that someone with different tastes, who doesn't notice the same kinds of issues that distracted me so frequently, won't enjoy it.

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