Review: The Book of Lost Hours

The Book of Lost Hours by Hayley Gelfuso
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The problem with this one for me is that I like my speculative fiction to give me a thoroughly-worked-out, consistent premise and have the plot arise from it, and this is the other way around. It has the feel of a book where the author knew where they wanted the plot to go, and the worldbuilding had to fit around that, even if it made no sense whatsoever.

The premise here is that there's a "time dimension" which is accessible in various ways - most commonly (in the 20th century, at least) by magical watches - where human memory is stored like a library. One of the main characters is Lisavet Levy, who, at the age of 11, is shoved into this dimension by her father - one of the few people who knows how to make the watches - for safety on what turns out to be Kristallnacht, while he goes off to get her brother so they can all escape to the US through the time dimension.

Her father never returns, and Lisavet grows up in the time dimension and learns from the ghostlike people there - the ones who haven't yet been put into books - and from her own experimentation how to visit the memories, where she learns languages and other useful skills. After a while, she's able to take objects from the memories for her own use, and they remain real when she brings them out, except they don't remain real to other people, except when they do.

Yes, there are other people who can enter the time dimension, known as "timekeepers," which is ironic because most of them are there to destroy books - which contain people's memories - thus destroying the memory other people have of the person, and their impact on history. Or something. It's not particularly clear or consistent, and it becomes obvious that the so-called "memories" are not just the memories individuals have (or had); Lisavet goes into one of her father's "memories," and it's not the way he always told the story, suggesting that the "memories" are in fact objective records of events, and that when someone messes with the "memories," they are changing history. Or are they just changing the perception people have of it? No; Lisavet leaves something in a "memory" which is then there in the real world, so these aren't actually memories at all. It's time travel. Which raises the question: Why are they associated with a specific person, when you can go into a room that the person whose "memory" it supposedly is hasn't been into and can't see into? Or go into their room, and another room in the same building that they probably haven't visited, while they're unconscious?

This is another part of what I mean by the plot driving the worldbuilding, even when it makes no sense: Lisavet doesn't have to eat and drink in the time dimension, presumably because if she did, the author would have to explain where the food and drink came from. (Why not the "memories," since she can take things from them? Yes, it takes her a while to gain that skill, but she could gain it sooner.) But she has to grow and age, because she starts out 11 years old, and she has to be older for key parts of the plot to happen, so her body gets bigger despite taking no nourishment. She doesn't excrete or sleep in the time dimension either. What's more, (view spoiler)[she doesn't menstruate - she says this specifically - and yet she gets pregnant, to an American man who comes into the time dimension on behalf of the CIA. While they are making love for the first time, the memory they are in "comes to an end" (whatever that means; isn't memory continuous while awake?), and she shifts them seamlessly into another one without using a book, but not long after this scene she's said to develop the ability to go into memories without using a book, and to keep this from her lover so that he won't freak out. (hide spoiler)]

Interwoven with Lisavet's story - going back and forth in time, as is appropriate for what is, let's be honest, a time travel novel - are several other characters: Amelia, a sullen teenager; her Uncle Ernest, a timekeeper; Moira, Ernest's boss in the secret agency that works with the time dimension from the US end; and Jack, head of the CIA, who's Moira's boss, and thoroughly despicable in every possible way. All of these people have complicated interrelationships which evolve or are revealed throughout the book.

I could probably have forgiven the... let's say rather improvised worldbuilding if the emotional beats had been sound, if I'd been moved and surprised and excited. But (and this may just be me) I wasn't. The twists didn't surprise me; one I saw coming from a little way off, and while I didn't see the other big one coming, when it arrived I thought it was a conventional choice. Big spoilers here: (view spoiler)[Lisavet and Moira are the same person, but they come across quite differently from each other. One is vulnerable, gentle, and innocent; the other is hard and dangerous and ends up killing two men who she knows well with no hesitation. Yes, there was a traumatic transition from one identity to the other, and a powerful motivation for the killing, but I still didn't completely buy it. Also, the scene where she picks the name "Moira". Moira is a very Irish name, and goes extremely well with "Donnelley", her assigned surname, but her explanation for choosing it - that it was her (Swiss) mother's name - struck me as implausible. As did the idea of a German Jewish woman who has carefully avoided finding out anything about the world since she was aged 11 convincingly portraying an American of Irish Catholic background who has grown up in that world. It feels to me - and I'm very likely wrong - that the decision that Moira was actually Lisavet came relatively late in the development of the book, when Moira's quite different personality was already established, and, once again, the backstory was forced in order to fit. Which, for me, it didn't. (hide spoiler)]

It is, with the occasional glitch, at least well edited. But the worldbuilding made no sense to me, and I never really came to care about the characters, to the point that I stopped reading at 75%, so it only gets three stars and no recommendation from me. Once again, claims in the blurb that something is for fans of something else prove hollow; I thought the The Ministry of Time was amazing, but this is no Ministry of Time.

I received a review copy via Netgalley.

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Review: The Duke in the Suburbs

The Duke in the Suburbs by Edgar Wallace
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Not a typical Edgar Wallace. He mostly wrote mysteries and thrillers, and while there are some moments of action, this is mostly a comedy. For me, quite a successful comedy, too.

For reasons that are never explained, presumably because it makes no sense at all, the Duc de Montvilliers has decided to rent a suburban villa in a quiet middle-class neighbourhood in London. He's not an English duke, but a (presumably purely nominal) French duke, descendant of refugees from the Terror, born and raised in England. He has plenty of money, because he's been to the US and struck silver, along with his American friend Hank, who's also living with him in the suburban house (no, not like that, this is 1909). While in America, he lived a rough-and-tumble life and was the cause of a ruffian being jailed, and this ruffian, having by some pull and corruption got out of jail, is now trying to hunt him down.

Meanwhile, by coincidence, the uncle of his neighbour (a young woman who he falls in love with and proposes to almost immediately on meeting her), a schemer named Sir Harry Tanneur, is trying, by completely dodgy means, to wrest the silver mine from him in a US court. Sir Harry's lawyer there cunningly fulfils the letter of the law by advertising the action in three small local newspapers, but then has an agent buy up the entire run of all three papers so the duke has no chance of finding out in practice, since if he defends the claim he will definitely win. However, the lawyer sends the clippings to Sir Harry, and by a series of highly unlikely coincidences one of them ends up being read out at a parish concert, alerting the duke, who rushes to the US and crushes the fraudulent claim.

This annoys Sir Harry significantly. His family were actually tanners, surnamed Tanner, but when they made a lot of money in the 19th century changed it to Tanneur, presumably to rhyme with "poseur," which is what Sir Harry is. He's busily engaged in producing false documentation of ancient and exalted genealogy. He deeply resents the duke legally asserting his right to his own property and scotching Sir Harry's attempt to pinch it, and considers it cause for a vendetta.

The two men then buy newspapers in order to campaign against one another, and the suburbanites, who are amusingly characterized, divide into factions. The characters are wonderful in general: the urbane duke, a mixture of Eton old boy and Wild West adventurer; his phlegmatic buddy Hank, who shows a lot more sophistication than the usual stock American character; the permanently broke but always genial Lord Tupping, known to one and all as "Tuppy"; the self-deceiving and bitter Sir Harry; the absurd would-be detective. It's unfortunate, though, that the love interest doesn't have a lot of personality, which is a flaw in an otherwise strong and amusing book.

I think this must have been one of the books Wallace dictated, and whoever transcribed and/or edited it was weak on punctuation. The comma usage is erratic and frequently incorrect, apostrophes are missing, closing quotation marks get missed (or put where they don't belong), and the duke's American nickname is spelled "Dukey" or "Jukey" seemingly at random. It's the kind of book that makes me want to produce my own edition, so that it can shine as it deserves.

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Review: The Geomagician

The Geomagician by Jennifer Mandula
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I very nearly didn't pick this up, because practically all of the existing reviews were about how excited the reviewer felt, more than about the book itself, and that's usually a sign that it's not for me. But I took the risk, and I'm glad of it. It has sound emotional beats, and more thought has gone into it than is often the case with period fantasy, particularly about the social impact of technology - a huge factor in the real 19th century - and the role of religion, which also features in a way largely realistic for the period. (Taking into account that this isn't exactly our world, where nobody would have been under threat of execution for heresy in early 19th century Britain.) It isn't just set in a scenery-flats-and-costumes version of 19th-century Britain for the sake of the aesthetic; it uses real concerns of the period, and the speculative element, to drive the plot, which is what worldbuilding should do.

It's set in 1829, which in our world was after the former Prince Regent had succeeded his father as king, but before Victoria. The name of the monarch isn't mentioned, but it's a queen, not a king. I'm choosing to believe that this isn't the author starting the Victorian era eight years earlier by accident, but instead part of the difference from our version of history. This England does have a similar technology level and a similar society to the England of our 1829.

The fantasy element is that everyone has at least a small amount of magic, which can be concentrated into "reliqs" and then used by someone else to do useful things, like create light or heat, or clean things, or separate different substances, or heal. Fossils, for some reason, make particularly good reliqs, and the main character and narrator, Mary Anning, is a fossil hunter from Lyme Regis (based on an actual historical figure, I was surprised to discover in the afterword, as are several other characters). She has, through the support of a "geomagician" named Buckland - who studies fossils, and buys them from her - received some informal training in paleontology, taught herself a lot more, and become very knowledgeable, and she now wants to become the first female member of the Society of Geomagicians. To do this, though, will involve a lot of politics, complicated by the fact that her mentor and her ex-sweetheart are rivals for the presidency of the Society.

The ex-sweetheart, Henry, who gradually and quietly ghosted her while he was away being educated, is wealthy and initially comes off as arrogant and untrustworthy, seen through Mary's eyes at least. They were both friends as teenagers with a brother and sister, of whom the brother, Edgar, is now a viscount and in the House of Lords, while the sister, Lucy, is a witch (someone who can work magic without a reliq), also living in Lyme Regis; Mary's best friend; and heavily involved in the Prometheans, who oppose the whole system of people selling their magic for others' use as being contrary to human dignity. The four are still friends and allies to varying degrees, apart from the fact that Mary now can't stand Henry.

All of this supplies plenty of potential for conflict, and when Mary, on one of her fossil expeditions, brings a pterodactyl egg to life and it hatches, it precipitates a sequence of events starting with Mary's mentor and Henry coming on behalf of the Society to buy the creature. Mary demands nomination to the Society as part of the price, and they all head to London, where there are political, scientific, religious and social conflicts aplenty. Not to mention that Henry takes Mary on as his assistant, and they start secretly studying her ability to bring fossils to life - secretly, because it's theologically fraught, and she could, at least in theory, be executed if things turn the wrong way.

The book raises some important questions. If the system works in a way that disadvantages you and people like you, is it better to try to force your way into it - and end up beholden to people who benefit from it and who you had to ally with in order to get in, and benefiting from it yourself - or to work against it from outside, perhaps having to ally with people who want to tear it down, have nothing to put in its place, and are fully prepared to do harm, even to the people they supposedly support, in order to bring about change? What's more, should you sacrifice a place you've earned in order to open the way in the future for others like yourself? Is it right to suppress the truth or actively mislead others in the cause of self-preservation or a greater good? There are no easy answers given here; it's not setting out to resolve those questions, but to explore them, and show how struggling with them impacts people, especially people who respect or love each other but disagree on important points.

On the downside, it has the usual level of Americanisms (such as "fall" for "autumn" or "a few blocks away"), anachronisms ("boycott" - the term originated in 1880; "psychological break"; "workstation"), and malapropisms (most frequently "clamored" for "clambered," but also "toothsome" to mean "toothy" when it actually means "appetizing") that I generally see in books by 21st-century Americans set in 19th-century Britain. Also several of the other common mistakes that practically everyone makes, like frequently putting commas between adjectives that aren't coordinate, putting the apostrophe in the wrong place when referring to a family's home by the name of the family ("the Buckland's" where it should be "Bucklands'"), and sometimes (though not nearly as often as many writers) writing in the simple past tense when it should be past perfect. Also, practically every hyphen in the book is between an adjective and the noun it modifies, which is a place no hyphen should be.

There are a couple of outright cultural errors, too, like treating "pence" as if it was singular and referring to a member of the House of Lords as a "Member of Parliament," a term that only applies to the Commons. It needs another go-through by a really good copy editor, in other words, and perhaps, given that I saw a pre-publication version via Netgalley and this is a major publisher (Penguin Random House), it will get one - though that's never guaranteed. Also, the author gives a long list of people who I take to be beta readers at the end, and thanks two editors (though they might not be copy editors), and it has got this far with these issues uncorrected.

While all of that annoyed me, it was still better edited than average (the average is quite low), and the story itself was a big step above that again. If you enjoy period fantasy set in Britain, and can set aside, or don't notice, the occasional anachronism or Americanism, and especially if you appreciate a narrative that takes actual concerns of the period and makes them central to the plot, this is probably for you. I hovered between assigning it to the Gold or Silver tier of my annual Best of the Year, because of the editing; in the end, I gave it the benefit of the doubt that the more significant errors would be fixed by publication, and, considering the depth and complexity of the story and its relationship to the premise and setting, put it in Gold.

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Review: Some Honeymoon!

Some Honeymoon! by Charles Everett Hall
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An implausible but still enjoyable romantic comedy. It would have filmed well, especially during the era of the Hays Code, because it's completely clean. The hero even thinks with satisfaction, when he first kisses his new wife, that he's glad he has lived a clean life and has no regrets caused by previous relationships.

Here's the first implausible bit, which comes right at the start, so it doesn't need spoiler tags. John Ryder is a hard-driving 35-year-old businessman who has made a lot of money by being hard-nosed and unsentimental, and has "never looked twice at a woman". But the moment he gets on the ship to return from a vacation in England to his native New York, and bumps into Miss Mont, who is emigrating to the US in the hope of going on the stage, he falls instantly in love with her. By the time they get to New York, he has proposed (as was the style at the time - this is from 1918).

The next bit needs spoiler tags, because although I worked it out before Ryder did, it does drive the plot for a good while before it gets revealed. (view spoiler)[When they get to New York, there are two cases of mistaken identity. A woman who turns out to be Miss Mont's long-lost sister (their family was scattered when the parents died) is waiting for a man on the same boat, John B. White, and when Ryder mistakes this Miss Mont (Ruth) for the other Miss Mont (Rose), she also, implausibly, mistakes this John (Ryder) for the other John (White), and agrees to marry him. White and she had known each other some years before, and had been corresponding, and he was keen to marry but she wasn't, until she saw Ryder - who is not a handsome man - and the two instantly loved one another. (hide spoiler)]

They go straight from the docks and get married ASAP, and then go to a hotel for their honeymoon. Then the trials start. The bridge which is the only road access to the hotel is broken, and causes the bus to break down. The manager of the hotel is in a fight with the owner, and has decided to close the hotel out of spite and throw all the people out, even though there's nowhere for them to go and it's cold. Ryder organizes things - coal, lamps, oil, candles; electricity is provided by the hotel's own coal-fired dynamos - which keeps him from his new bride. So does a hysterical widow in the hotel, who has a breakdown and has to be looked after by the bride. Meanwhile, a Mr. John B. White has turned up, and seems to know the new Mrs. Ryder, though she says not; and notes between Ryder and his wife keep going astray for some reason. (view spoiler)[She's under the impression that she's Mrs. White, and, having implausibly mistaken Ryder for White at the docks, doesn't seem to recognize the actual White at all. (hide spoiler)] Cue suspicion and misunderstanding, all while Ryder clashes with some and becomes a hero to others of the people at the hotel, and incurs the suspicion of the (female) house detective.

It's all amusingly farcical, though more for us than poor John Ryder, who hasn't had a chance to be alone with his new wife.

It all eventually gets sorted out when (view spoiler)[White heads back to New York, and Ryder's wife disappears, and, thinking she's gone with White, Ryder goes back to confront either or both of them, finds the original Miss Mont that he met on the boat, finds out there are actually two of them and that the one he loves is (fortunately) the one he married, tracks her down and talks it all through with her. (hide spoiler)]

The main premise doesn't make a lick of sense, but the whole thing is in every other way emotionally sound, and it's no worse than a lot of musical comedies or modern rom-coms, so... fun and amusing, and I recommend it.

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Review: Leveling With Liam

Leveling With Liam by G.W. Dursteler
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Upfront, let me say that I went into this expecting the editing to be scruffy. LitRPG is one of those genres (along with supers and steampunk) that for some reason attracts writers who don't have a strong grasp of basic prose mechanics. They will leave out the comma before a term of address ("I don't know Mia" means something different from "I don't know, Mia"), mispunctuate dialog (the tag is not a separate sentence, and if the same speaker continues in a new paragraph, there's no closing quotation mark in the first paragraph), make vocabulary errors either by mistyping or by confusing two different words (instance/instant, near-do-wells/ne'er-do-wells, anymore/any more, exaltation/exhortation, dias/dais, test/tent, grim/grime, fairing/faring, twice/probably a typo for twigs or twine, deferred/demurred), miss out the past perfect tense, perpetrate sloppy typos like double periods, double commas, or a comma and a period together, spell several character names two different ways on the same page, and occasionally miss closing quotation marks.

This one made all the above errors, and more, but I have seen far worse in the genre. It's about as bad as, say, Beware of Chicken , which isn't good, but isn't so bad that it's unreadable, like some I could mention. Disclaimer as always: I had a pre-publication version from Netgalley, and there may be more editing done before publication.

Again like others in the genre, continuity is not a strength. Both beaver mayors change gender in the course of the narrative, one of them twice, and a boat trip takes place both downstream and upstream while heading in the same direction. Though in that case I may have misunderstood how the streams related to each other; it wasn't very clearly explained.

Also, of course, part of the genre is that some things only make sense by game logic, like a legendary artefact being in an unlocked chest in a random room off a corridor that a passing adventurer can just loot with no consequences.

Setting all of that aside, though, this is a mostly genial LitRPG without too much of the game mechanics - the narrator shares his character sheet a few times, but not every second chapter, and there's more of a focus on the traits than the numbers - and with a genuinely decent, likeable main character. Liam is a natural-born paladin, who will look after his party member before himself.

His party member, Mia, is less appealing: a fire mage who is blasé about collateral damage. For me, the part I liked least, and the reason I say mostly genial, was (view spoiler)[the utter, violent destruction of a large industrial facility, along with hundreds of people of all races who were just doing a job and may not even have realized that the factory was polluting the environment. (hide spoiler)]

I did think that the leveling mentioned in the title happened a bit too often and too easily. Liam goes up by 15 levels in the course of three quests, sometimes as many as six levels at once, ending the book at level 18, and the level cap is 60. I'd like to spend a lot more time with Liam, but his rapid advancement means that I won't get that opportunity for as long as I'd like, especially given that this was a short book to start with. I'm not looking for a tedious grind, but something between that and this would be nice.

I will look out for the next book, because I enjoyed this and want to encourage LitRPG with a main character who isn't an egotistical tool. And I do recommend it, with the caveats above taking it to the Bronze tier of my Best of the Year for 2025.

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Review: Guilty Bonds

Guilty Bonds by William Le Queux
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

So, there are different levels of "plot relies on coincidence."

Often, when I tag a book that way, I'm referring to one or two coincidences. This book... this book has at least eight, without any one of which the plot would not work. In its defense, it's from 1891, and running your plot on coincidence was more acceptable then. Still, even if you call it "fate," it's pretty obviously the author putting his hand on the scale instead of having the main character drive the plot with protagonism.

Not that he really could, because he doesn't have a clue what's going on until people tell him at the end. Despite his vow to find the murderer of the woman who (in the first of those many coincidences) he discovered dead in a random house while walking home late at night from his club, he makes no real effort to do so; I've tagged it "not-solved-by-detective," but he isn't really a detective at all, and nor is anyone else who plays any significant role. That tag is mainly indicating that the solution is told to the main character, and the reader, at the end.

The plot is mostly just a series of things that happen to him. He makes very few decisions, and most of the decisions he does make are ill-considered and get him into more trouble.

For example. Say you've happened to meet a mysterious young Russian woman in Italy, and she won't tell you anything about her past, and you've only known her a few days, but you loooove her desperately. Do you:

a) Agree to smuggle a sealed box, which she says contains her jewels, into St Petersburg for her?
b) When mysteriously arrested, imprisoned without trial, exiled to Siberia, and barely rescued thanks to three more coincidences, go back to England, bump into her again at the theatre, and end up marrying her, despite your well-justified suspicion that she used you as a patsy at the risk of your life, and the fact that she says she's very sorry, but she can't explain?
c) Both of the above?

Yes, Frank (the MC) picks option c.

It's melodramatic. It's implausible. It's rife with coincidence. It's heavily dependent on bad decisions by the main character. And the final explanation doesn't stack up. (view spoiler)[Vera, the ironically named Russian woman who spends almost the whole book not telling Frank the truth, is seeking vengeance for her father, executed by the Czar after a rigged trial for something he didn't do; in pursuit of this goal, she has joined the Nihilists, and sworn to assist in three attempts on the tyrant's life. If she fails three times, she's released from her vow and can talk about it, even though the Nihilists eliminate anyone who talks about them with extreme prejudice, something that drives a significant portion of the plot. (This apparently doesn't apply once your vow is fulfilled and you leave the group, though.) When the third attempt fails, she expresses relief that it's failed, apparently having got over her anger about her father and just wanting to move on. (hide spoiler)]

The Project Gutenberg edition has a few errors in it, some of which may be scan issues (like the question marks that should be exclamation marks and vice versa), others of which, like the dangling modifiers and missing past perfect tense, are no doubt in the original. I thought missing past perfect was purely a modern issue, but apparently not.

All up, it falls short of the minimum standard for a recommendation from me, even a qualified one.

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Review: The Seventh Shot

The Seventh Shot by Harry Coverdale
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is one of those books that works reasonably well for most of its length and then fails to stick the landing.

What I mean is that, like a few classic mysteries I've read, it shows you the detective doing all the right things to solve the crime, and then the actual solution isn't revealed by the detective - though in this case, his investigation does indirectly cause the dénouement. Exact details in spoiler tags: (view spoiler)[The criminal, spooked by how close the detective is getting, decoys him with the old "telegram in a false name" trick into stupidly going off unarmed with no backup into an obvious trap, and nearly manages to kill him. Fortunately, he doesn't quite get totally fooled, and is able to capture, and therefore identify, the murderer as a result. Also, the victim wasn't the intended victim, which invalidates all of the speculation about motive - there was plenty, because nearly everyone hated him - and added to my sense of letdown, particularly since, again, the criminal had to confess this, rather than the detective figuring it out. (hide spoiler)]

The romance subplot is also barely worthy of the name, and the parties to it spend hardly any time together.

The detective is on the scene of the murder mainly because the play that's at the heart of the plot had a scene involving fingerprints, and they called him in to show them proper procedure, and then he got interested and hung around. But when the murder occurs, he picks up the weapon without taking any precautions to preserve fingerprints, and nobody seems to think to fingerprint the weapon; unless the murderer wore gloves, which they might or might not have, this could have solved the crime almost immediately and there would have been no story, but given that the reason the detective was there at all was because of the fingerprinting process, it seems odd that there's not even any discussion of its application to the actual crime, even just to say "we tried it, but found nothing."

What the book does do well is show us behind the scenes of a Broadway play, and set up a complex web of relationships (many of which are not in evidence until teased out by the detective) that tie multiple people together and provide the appearance of motive. That part, and the investigation, are good enough that it does make it into my annual Best of the Year list, but because of its other failings, it comes in at the lowest tier.

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