Review: The Mage War

The Mage War by Ben S. Dobson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A strong finish to a series that also had a strong start, though for me one or two of the middle books seemed like they were mainly there to get the plot from situation A to situation B, without a lot of tension or development. That's not a problem in this book whatsoever.

There's plenty of tension and action; most of the second half of the book is an extended struggle by the now-ensemble cast against difficult odds, using varied skills and approaches to meet a variety of challenges. In the course of those struggles, they grow and develop as characters and some of their relationships also develop or change. The emotional beats are more than solid - in fact, I was moved at multiple points by the bravery and dedication of the characters and the losses they sustained during their fight for what they believed in. This is a true noblebright book, in which the line between good and evil is the line between people who will accept suffering and loss for the benefit of others, and people who will push suffering and loss onto others for their own benefit.

The worldbuilding, and the way in which the author has conveyed that worldbuilding, is good enough that I predicted multiple times how the characters would solve a problem right before they did so. This is a strength, not a weakness; it shows that the world makes sense and the magic system conforms to Sanderson's First Law.

The characters themselves are distinct and memorable. I read the previous book four years ago, but it didn't take long for me to remember who they all were and how they were connected, a mark of an author who has made his characters feel like people, rather than stereotypes who have roles in a plot. I'm sure the fact that I was listening to the audiobook helped, since the narrator did a good job of distinguishing the voices. His voice for the villain hit just the right note of arrogant, condescending smugness, and the characters who had accents had consistent-sounding accents that were not just Earth accents taken over into a fantasy world; I appreciated that.

Because I listened to the audiobook, I can't comment on the copy editing, though it's been mostly good in the previous books. I did wonder a couple of times if the author was writing "hurtling" when he meant "hurling".

There's very little to criticize here, and plenty to praise. The final book definitely brings a lot of things full circle from the first book, including the original premise of the Magebreakers: that the biggest flaw in magic is the mage, and if you can exploit that, you can defeat an enemy who has magic without having it yourself. I was glad to see it come back, after dropping somewhat out of sight in the middle books while they set things up for this rousing conclusion.

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Review: Murder in the Maze

Murder in the Maze by J.J. Connington
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A reasonably promising series starter, with an unusual detective - unusual in that he's the Chief Constable of the county where the murders occur, which is not often a post that involves detective work. The author was a chemist by profession and wrote on the side, and his chemical knowledge comes through in several places.

The title is slightly misleading in suggesting that there was one murder in the maze; in fact, there were two, twin brothers who looked similar (it's never clarified whether they're identical, but people who know them well distinguish them easily) and habitually dressed in similar clothes. There are clear motives for murdering either of them, and no shortage of suspects, so... did the murderer aim to kill one of them, discover that the first victim was in fact the other, and rectify the mistake? After all, what could be the motive for killing both?

Well, that was extremely obvious to me, though not to the Watson figure in the story: (view spoiler)[a family member who stood to inherit would have a motive for killing them both, and making it look like one had been killed for an external reason and the other by mistake. I didn't guess which family member, though, and for a while thought that the detective's eventual fixing on a particular one was poorly justified, though he made it work in the end, based on knowledge the murderer had that, by their own statements, they shouldn't have possessed. I also guessed that the "death" of the third victim was faked. (hide spoiler)]

It doesn't really stand out above the pack of Golden-Age mysteries for me. The detective, although not someone you'd expect, doesn't have much distinctiveness and has a rather high-handed attitude to determining who should face the process of the law, given that he holds a high position as a law-enforcement official. The Watson, though said to be smarter than he looks, is not at all smart. The detective's process is largely hidden from the reader until the end, though at least the clues are not. The suspects are the usual country-house lot. It's OK, but it isn't one of the greats. I might give the series another go eventually - the third one is also on Project Gutenberg - in case the author's skills improved as he went along.

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Review: The Viaduct Murder

The Viaduct Murder by Ronald Knox
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Clever, but disappointing. The exact reason needs to be in spoiler tags, but, being as vague as possible: it frustrates the usual expectations of the genre. I think it's still worth reading, if you're interested in how genre books, and particularly mystery books, work (or potentially fail to work), but if you're wanting entertainment only, I don't recommend it.

Also, there's an intrusive omniscient narrator who has Opinions about how all of the characters are some sort of inadequate human being, about Society, and (at some length through the mouth of one of the characters, in a chapter that's marked as optional) about various issues of the day. These are the opinions of quite a conservative Catholic priest in 1925, so... be advised.

The amateur detective is a man who during World War I wasn't fit for active service, and instead got a minor clerical job in Military Intelligence, which he habitually overplays to imply he was some sort of operative. He conceived a contempt for the police, because they seldom followed up on the matters he passed on to them, so he thinks he can do better than the police at solving a murder that has occurred on the grounds of the golf club where he lives. He has no particular occupation; his friends are a vicar who thinks more about golf than faith (to the overt disapproval of the narrator, naturally), a retired professor who's an ever-flowing font of useless information and whom his friends mostly ignore, and a third man who's on a golfing holiday, is an old friend of the would-be detective's, and slips into the role of Watson.

The following really is a spoiler: (view spoiler)[We're reminded several times that the amateurs shouldn't be doing what they're doing, but should leave the catching of criminals to the police, and that's reinforced in a particularly obvious way when the amateur detective, Reeves, gets absolutely everything wrong, including setting out to exonerate the murderer in the belief that he's innocent; the police, who are barely characters in the book, solve the case abruptly offstage; and Gordon, the Watson, writes a summary for Reeves at the end which explains all of the odd features that seemed like vital clues as just meaningless coincidences. The author effectively red-herrings the reader a couple of times; I was convinced that the murderer and the victim were the same man, since they were never seen together, and was surprised at how early the retired academic came to the same conclusion, but it was a mistake. I was also convinced at one point that the victim's ex-wife was the murderer and her admirer was covering for her, but apparently not. (hide spoiler)]

The process is the familiar process of a detective novel: gathering clues, forming theories, laying traps for the murderer. There's even a chase after a fleeing suspect. It has all of the machinery of a classic detective story, right up to the end, but then that machinery slips a gear and grinds to a disappointing halt. It reminds me of a science-fiction story I read in which the characters are working desperately throughout to avert a planetary disaster, and then they... don't.

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Review: Tress of the Emerald Sea

Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I'm not sure precisely what I was expecting from this, but it wasn't exactly what I got. What I got was better, though.

It's told deceptively simply, and has a 17-year-old protagonist, so is it YA? The author says in his afterword that it was aimed at adults (and I enjoyed it, but then I do enjoy YA from time to time). He also says that his influences included Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch , which I can totally see. I kept getting a welcome Terry Pratchett vibe off the absurdities, wordplay, and pithy wisdom about the human condition that the narrator provides us with.

The narrator is Hoid, a trickster figure who appears in various books set in Sanderson's Cosmere universe; I didn't remember him from any of his appearances, which are generally on the periphery of events, but then I don't have an encyclopedic grasp of the Cosmere (far from it). In this book, he's been cursed to absurdity by the Sorceress, who is a traditional-feeling sorceress with impressively fairy-taleish powers of cursing, despite her interplanetary origins and the general science-fictional feel that Sandersonian fantasy often has.

Yes, there is, of course, completely original worldbuilding. Sanderson is the exact opposite of the all-too-common author who effectively grabs a few left-over scenery flats from an old production of some other sword-and-sorcery novel (or rather, almost any other sword-and-sorcery novel) to serve as a mostly non-functional backdrop to their also-not-original plot and characters. Every world he creates has some clever, innovative, meticulously worked out point of difference (or, usually, several of them) which the characters exploit creatively to progress and resolve the plot.

This one has spore seas. The planet is surrounded by twelve moons, tidally locked and geostationary, each of which pours down a different kind of spore, forming twelve connected seas. Air bubbling up from underneath makes them behave like water, but they're not water; water, in fact, makes the spores sprout, explosively and dangerously, and, of course, each one has a different effect, whether it's growing sudden vines, burning fiercely, exploding in a puff of air, growing a crystal, creating sharp, dangerous shards, or even forming into creatures that can be controlled as familiars. (That's six; we don't get to hear about the other six, which presumably are on the other side of the planet.)

Our hero, Tress, lives on a small island in the Emerald Sea, the one whose spores grow into vines. She's shyly in love with the son of the local duke, who pretends to be the duke's gardener so they can meet on a more equal basis, even though he's no good at lying and both of them know that both of them know it's a polite fiction. When he gets captured by the Sorceress, Tress decides that nobody else is going to rescue him, so she has to (this idea came from Sanderson's wife wondering aloud to him what would have happened if Buttercup had gone after Westley instead of becoming the Princess Bride, a very fair question which addresses the biggest flaw of that wonderful film).

Tress is exactly the kind of protagonist I particularly love, and is about 50% responsible for the fifth star I'm giving this book; the other 50% is its depth of reflection on humanity. She's a deeply pragmatic, sensible young woman, unwaveringly courageous because she cares about her cause (rescuing Charlie), intelligent and creative in the solutions she comes up with, and wins practically everyone she meets to her cause because she's genuinely kind and decent without even thinking about it. I totally believed a duke's son would fall in love with her, if he had the basic sense to see what was right in front of him. She is, in a way, an "ordinary" hero - not powerful, not noble, not fated, not Chosen, which I always approve of in protagonists - and yet she's completely extraordinary. There's a lovely passage about how all the other girls she knew declared they weren't like everyone else, and she came to the conclusion that she (alone) must be "everyone else," in part because all the other girls were so good at being unique that they all did it in unison. In other words, she doesn't have a decal on her that says she's different, talented, intelligent and courageous; she actually is those things, but in a natural and unassuming way, and that makes her able to face her challenges without the author having to gift her any emergency last-minute powers that she hasn't worked for, like all those entitled Chosen One idiots.

The author does need to commit a couple of Fortunate Coincidences to get his cast together, but they're subtle enough - and troublesome enough for long enough - that I only spotted them when I thought about them afterwards, so I think he gets away with it by the Pixar Rules.

The minor characters all have things they want and pursue them in ways that make sense and, together with Tress protagonising away like mad, create the plot naturally. It's a strong plot, with sound emotional beats, dramatic moments, loss and perseverance, and character change that, again, feels organic.

As usual with Sanderson, who runs his books past a couple of dozen people at least before they're published, the editing is very clean. All I spotted was a page where the same word is spelled "eyedropper" twice and "eye dropper" once, and a dangling modifier which starts out talking about some golems in a sentence where the grammatical subject is not the golems, but Tress. It's a medium-large book, so this counts as practically impeccable.

I frequently give Sanderson's books five stars, more so than any other author, and it's not just because the characters he writes are exactly the kind of character I like to read about (though certainly that). It's because his craft is absolutely sound, and on that strong foundation he erects brilliant worlds that nobody else could think of, and that are absolutely integral to how the plot works out. There are other authors with sound craft, but without his wild creativity; sadly, there are a good many who have wild creativity, but without the proper foundation of craft (or basic writing mechanics) to live up to the potential of their ideas. Sanderson is a triple threat: he can tell an inspiring story with wonderful characters, can spell and punctuate, and can take you to a world of wonder you've never visited before.

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Review: The Mystery of the Yellow Room

The Mystery of the Yellow Room by Gaston Leroux
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The last time I saw something this French it had half a pound of butter in it.

French mysteries feel quite different from English mysteries. Where English mysteries are soaked in a consciousness of class and frequently proceed at a leisurely pace, with maybe a gentle and shy romance as a subplot that doesn't really affect the main plot, French mysteries are dramatic! and suspenseful!! and full of love affairs that are mostly unwise, unhappy, ill-advised, illicit, intense, and essential to the story.

This classic from the very early 20th century (set some years earlier, so there are no motorcars or telephones mentioned, and everything is still lit by gas or candles) feels very much like its close contemporary, Maurice Leblanc's stories of Arsene Lupin, and the respective authors probably read each other's books. I wonder if the young detective in one of the Lupin books, who Lupin mocks so mercilessly, was influenced by the young detective in Leroux?

The difference, of course, is that these Leroux books are from the point of view of the detective, not the criminal (though Lupin does eventually switch sides and become a detective). The detective in this case is an 18-year-old journalist, a brilliant youth who sets himself up to compete with a middle-aged professional detective from the Surete (please excuse my lack of accents). The criminal is eventually revealed as a Lupinesque swindler and master of disguise, who has hidden himself in plain sight in a very Purloined Letter way. The difference from Lupin is that Lupin would never assault a woman (or anyone else, usually, except in self-defence); he prefers to beat people in a battle of wits, where he is particularly well equipped.

This criminal murderously attacks the daughter and assistant of a prominent scientist, who, unusually for detective stories, survives, though badly wounded and traumatised. The interesting part is that, at the time the struggle was heard, she was in a locked room - that favourite of detective writers - and an assailant could not possibly have escaped unnoticed from it. Later, the same man disappears from the midst of several people who have him surrounded. Is this a case of the scientist's area of research, the discomposition of matter? (He's supposed to be a predecessor of the Curies; the science is all bunk, as was not uncommon in stories of the time, but it doesn't play any real role in the plot.)

People being unwilling to talk in order to protect their various secrets is a theme throughout, which hinders the resolution of the mystery. The narrator takes the Watson role, assisting the brilliant young detective without understanding anything he's doing until it's painstakingly explained to him. There's plenty of drama along the way, and the solution to the mystery is brilliant and, to me, not at all obvious; it's revealed in a courtroom scene that makes up in sensation what it probably lacks in realism. (I can't imagine even a late-19th-century French court that was trying a highly sensational case being so forgiving of shenanigans as this one.)

If the author has a fault, it's writing in long, complex sentences that take concentration to parse, but that's mainly a problem at the beginning; the prose settles down a bit more as it goes on. If you enjoy the Lupin stories, you will probably enjoy this, and vice versa.

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Review: The D'Arblay Mystery

The D'Arblay Mystery by R. Austin Freeman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

By this point in the series, Freeman is working a bit to a formula when it comes to setting up the story. There's a young doctor, a former student of the medico-legal detective Thorndyke, who comes across a mystery and takes it to his old mentor. There's a mysterious patient that the doctor is asked to see, who (at least not by coincidence this time) is at the heart of the plot. There's a young woman who's described as "attractive," but mostly not otherwise described, who the young doctor falls in love with inevitably and immediately, and who needs protection. (She is, at least, a competent woman who is supporting herself in a trade, but her competence doesn't extend to having any active impact on the plot; she's a purely passive character, like every other non-villainous woman in the Thorndyke stories.) Thorndyke plays his cards so close to his chest they're practically embedded in his ribs, but he needn't be so cagey, since the young doctor has taken the John Watson correspondence course and is as dense as a very dense thing, unable to figure out the most blindingly obvious clues. This is probably so the reader can feel superior to him.

All of these elements we've seen in the series before, some of them multiple times. The mystery itself, though, is a fresh one, and so is its complicated resolution. Thorndyke points out what I've often thought when reading mystery stories, that the failing of criminals is that they set out to make themselves safer after the initial crime and, in so doing, inevitably create more clues.

It's not the best of the series in my mind, partly because it's retreading a lot of ground in the setup if not the resolution, but if you don't mind the dated elements, it's a tricky and clever mystery with suspense and danger, and humane feeling towards the victims of crime.

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Review: Good Neighbors: The Full Collection

Good Neighbors: The Full Collection by Stephanie Burgis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I enjoy Stephanie Burgis; she somehow manages to keep things light and amusing and cozy, while also having just enough of an edge to keep you from feeling like you're drowning in pink bubble-bath. I'm subscribed to her newsletter, in fact, which is how I found out about a sale on this collection.

Mia, a mad-scientist-adjacent inventor with magical power over metals, moves in next to a necromancer. Hilarity ensues, but so do romance, suspense, and a battle for justice. Mia, while being (to me) relatably introverted, turns out to be capable of social interaction when it's for a purpose she cares about, and while at the outset she only cares about protecting her father - injured by a mob who burned down their previous house because of her "unnatural" abilities - by the end she's extended her umbrella of protection much more widely.

Because Mia has the viewpoint, we don't get as much of the hot necromancer Leander's inner life, and he does feel a bit too perfect, even though he was emotionally damaged by his awful parents and his first master. (Seriously, those parents....) But he's brave and loyal, and fully on board with Mia's desire to protect other "unnaturals" from the "Purifiers" who are rising in influence in wider society. There's a bit of dystopian in the middle of the book when the pair go to a city controlled by the Purifiers, where neighbours are denouncing each other in fear of the authorities; it's an effective setup for the later section where the Purifiers come to the closest town to Mia and Leander's homes and try to pull the same tricks. (The book is made up of three linked stories, each of which progresses the overall plot arc.)

In terms of editing, most of the issues are with extra commas between adjectives - a very common blind spot even for otherwise capable authors - and occasional over-hyphenation.

It's a solid, enjoyable piece that's simultaneously in a Gothic aesthetic and cheerfully noblebright, and it slips easily into the silver tier of my annual recommendation list.

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