Review: The Daughter of Time

The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Definitely unusual. Tey's detective, laid up in hospital after being injured in pursuit of a suspect, gets interested in history, and applies his police methods to the (then) 400-year-old mystery of what happened to the Princes in the Tower, the two young sons of Edward IV. Did their uncle Richard III have them murdered, as the Tudors and their sponsored authors claimed and as history books have taught ever since, or was that a complete frame-up?

The case comes across as compelling, though apparently Tey left a few things out, and it's not as cut-and-dried as she paints it. Historians certainly object to her approach, perhaps partly because she has some harsh words for historians who draw conclusions completely at odds with the facts they present. She touches on other historical rewrites along the way, again not always completely accurately. For example, she mentions the riots at Tonypandy in Wales in 1910, and the detective and his historical researcher adopt "Tonypandy" as a shorthand for an exaggerated story that's widely believed - in this case, that troops fired on the rioters; but she elides a few of the details, including the fact that one person did die in the riots (though whether as a result of police action or not has never been definitively settled).

Still, while it's possible to quibble over details, this book takes the detective story to a new and unusual place, and manages to make an interesting novel out of a man in a hospital bed reading books and talking to a young researcher about events of four centuries previously, which itself is no mean feat. I found it very educational about a time in English history I was only passingly familiar with, the end and aftermath of the Wars of the Roses, and it also has some things to say about how history is written by the victors and/or the popular imagination, and the difference between what people say happened and what the day-to-day records of ordinary actions show.

Setting aside whether or not its conclusions are as justified as they're made to seem, or whether Tey herself is committing Tonypandy, it's a masterful piece of writing that deserves five stars just for the degree of difficulty, and I also found it entertaining.

Sadly, the HarperCollins ebook edition belies its own claim that they "uphold the highest standards of ebook production" with numerous missing punctuation marks, the obvious result of their usual lack of attention to detail and lack of editorial effort. This book deserves better.

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Review: The Dragon Has Some Complaints

The Dragon Has Some Complaints by John Wiswell
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I also have some complaints.

tl;dr: This book was not for me. I mean that both in the sense that I didn't like it much, and also in the sense that it wasn't intended for the kind of person I am.

If you're the kind of person who will love this book, or have already read it and loved it, reading this review may only annoy you, and you may be better off skipping it and reading one that will reinforce your views instead. I always implicitly write my reviews for people who value the things I value (writing craft, especially) and enjoy the things I enjoy. I write positive reviews to direct them towards books I think they would like, and negative reviews to direct them away from books that are probably not going to be to their taste. If you have different priorities and enjoy different things, what I have to say will not be of much interest to you.

This review is going to be as much an expression of concerns I have about the current cozy fantasy genre in general as it is about this book in particular, though starting from thoughts I had while reading this specific book.

The first thing that bothered me about this book is that it feels like one long point-of-view violation. The viewpoint character is the relatively sane and sensible central head of a three-headed dragon; the other two heads have issues. Upperhead has the delusion that he's human, and Lowerhead has become almost animalistic. All three, including Centerhead, have lost memories because of the trauma of the loss of Lefty, the fourth head, who was favourable towards humans and worked with them. That obscured backstory may partially explain why this supposedly wild dragon not only understands but freely uses so many human concepts, including trans men and women (who he identifies instantly as such), cathedrals, apothecaries and vacations -this last itself being an anachronistic concept for the setting. However, while he recognizes ink and paper, he doesn't understand what writing is - but uses the verb "read" in a metaphorical sense multiple times.

How this came across to me is that the author wasn't putting in the effort, or maybe didn't even think about the need, to characterize someone based on what that sort of character is familiar with and would know and value. Reading some of the reviews of one of his other books reinforces this idea; multiple reviewers mentioned how a solitary swamp monster who had previously had limited and brief interactions with humans seemed to have a complete and instant grasp of how abusive human relationships work, as seen through a this-worldly current-state-of-psychology lens. To me, this is a basic craft issue.

And this is a problem I have with the cozy genre in general. Not only is the worldbuilding often thin, little more than generic sword & sorcery scenery flats, but those scenery flats stand behind people who are, in their attitudes and ways of thinking, completely indistinguishable from mid-2020s US people of a particular type (to which the authors belong). My suspicion is that they are so embedded in a filter bubble that emphasizes doctrinal purity that they are almost unable to conceive of people who might think differently from them, except as othered and villainized; that they have no functional sense of history; and that they believe implicitly that everything they think, and the way they behave, cannot be improved upon and therefore should be universalized. As a young person, I was in a community like this myself, and even though the content of the beliefs could hardly have been more different, I recognize the patterns.

In the typical cozy book, basically every single character (who isn't a villain or at least an opponent) is queer in some way, and most of them are at least one of neurodivergent, disabled, or struggling with anxiety or depression. In these days of self-selecting groups ("found family"), this may be the lived experience of the author; everyone they know is like this. But it's like the famous example of the journalist who, when a political candidate won an election, protested that nobody he knew had voted for him. It says more about the narrowness of the person's experience than the actual constitution of the world at large. I should note that I don't have a problem with people being queer, neurodivergent and etc. These are ways that real people are. But it isn't how everyone is, and universalizing it places me and people like me, who don't have those characteristics (except that I am arguably slightly disabled and occasionally anxious), in an outgroup, just as much as earlier literature placed people who did have them in an outgroup. It's not true inclusiveness if there's still an outgroup, even if that is the people who were traditionally the ingroup. It's still not fully honouring our shared humanity.

In this particular book, the pervasiveness of these types of characters is more or less its only claim to belong to the cozy genre, since it's about a war between diverse refugees from a lightly sketched fascist-imperialist country and that country's military. Nobody here is living the equivalent of a Japanese "slow life." It's more like the demimonde of the Weimar Republic left Germany (though the names are mostly Eastern European), found an uninhabited island, tamed some dragons, created a flying city using the antigravity magic of the dragons, and held out against a much-less-efficient Nazi regime, with Britain pretending to help, but actually out to take half their land and half their dragons in return for minimal assistance. (That is, at least, slightly more worldbuilding than cozy authors often bother with.)

The other thing that annoyed me about this book, and the main reason I gave it up in the middle, is the character Raina, who becomes the rider of the dragon central character. She is the complete opposite of the kind of character I like to read about. She's outwardly naive and optimistic to the point of getting on people's nerves, while on the inside she's a complete emotional bombsite who uses alcohol and casual sex as forms of maladaptive coping. And what escalated her from "annoying character" to "reason to put the book down and not pick it up again" was that the dragon declares to Raina that she is everything a human should want to be, which is a statement I couldn't disagree with more strongly. To me, that's not unconditional acceptance; it's enabling.

If you don't care about the POV issues and can cope with Raina, this is a competently written book with the right emotional beats to appeal to plenty of readers. In the author's afterword, he mentions that the copy editor remarked on how clean it was, and I agree that it has fewer issues than average, but there are some words used in odd senses, and a few small words like "to" and "the" dropped out of the occasional sentence in the pre-publication version I had from Netgalley. (Missing words are a hard thing to spot unless you have the knack of it.)

It's not a terrible book. It just very much is not for me.

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Review: Murder on the Airship

Murder on the Airship by Victoria Bergman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've been reading a lot of classic mystery books lately, largely because a lot of the new fantasy books coming out now are not to my taste. So I was pleased to find that this book combined the two: a mystery with a limited pool of suspects (but there are seven of them, so it takes some work), set in a fantasy world. I also enjoyed the fact that the detective wasn't a brilliant savant but an ordinary guard, thrust into the position of having to solve the crime because her boss has been (non-fatally) poisoned in the course of events, who takes a doggedly persistent approach to interviewing the suspects and figuring out the course of events. It's much more Freeman Wills Crofts than Austin W. Freeman, in other words, and if you're also a fan of hundred-year-old mystery books you'll probably know what that means. Also, there's no romance, indeed no romantic or sexual relationships, whatsoever, and while I don't object to those, it is refreshing to have a book that just focuses on the mystery.

The course of events is complicated, meaning that it's far from clear for a long time who has committed what crime, and specifically who has committed the murder. It's well orchestrated and cleverly done, though, like the protagonist, I wondered how all these people hadn't stumbled across each other while nefariously wandering the ship late at night.

It's usually a pretty sound rule of thumb that if there's an airship in a book, there are also multiple vocabulary errors. I don't know why this is. Fortunately, in this book I only spotted one such error, a common one which I will mention to the publisher and which may well be gone by publication. (I had a pre-publication version via Netgalley for review.)

The editing is generally OK, though there are a few common issues - occasional missing past perfect tense, "may" in past tense narration where it should be "might" - and a slight oddity in the punctuation of some dialog. Again, I'll mention these to the publisher, and some of them may well be fixed by publication.

This is a sound piece of mystery writing, and an appealing fantasy world, two things I enjoy separately which it turns out I also enjoy together. I'll be looking out for more from this author.

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Review: Joan & Co.

Joan & Co. by Frederick Orin Bartlett
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Pig-in-a-poke book, picked up from the Project Gutenberg feed without knowing anything about it, or the author, not even the genre. It turned out to be a good find.

It's a romance, of sorts, but it's more than that; there's a theme, too. It's a very character-driven book, so let's start with the characters.

Mr Burnett has built up his business (manufacturing patent leather) over 30 years, and is doing well. He would love to hand it over to his son Dickie, recently graduated from college, but Dickie isn't very interested in the business. In fact, the only thing Dickie is interested in is Joan, the beautiful daughter of a wealthy family (wealthier than the Burnetts, though not so much so that they're in different social strata). Joan has also recently graduated, but unlike Dickie, she is discontented with the shallow and narrow life of her social circle and wants to do something that matters.

Her eyes have been opened to this shallowness and narrowness by befriending Mildred, a woman who had scrimped and saved and come out from Montana to attend college (the same one as Joan) and better herself - only to starve and work herself to death. Through Mildred, Joan briefly met Devons, Mildred's cousin, who comes from a similar hardscrabble background (his father's a small farmer), and has managed to get educated and come up with a revolutionary new process to produce patent leather. But nobody will stake him to compete with the Burnetts, and the vice-president of Burnett's, a scheming fellow named Forsythe, offers him a pittance to buy it outright, and no other deal.

Devons has run out of money to live on, and goes out in bad weather, undernourished, to ask an old friend for a job, but is fortunate enough to be run down by Joan's car before he dies of exposure. Recognising him as Mildred's cousin, she takes him home and ensures he's nursed back to health, getting to know him in the process. She wants to invest in his process so he can start his business, but has no money she controls of her own. However, Dickie, whose proposal she recently turned down, said that regardless, she could always ask anything of him, and what she asks is for him to fund the business.

With his usual lack of interest in anything other than Joan, Dickie makes no inquiries as to what the business is, and Joan is unaware of where Dickie's family get their money (it's apparently not something you talk about in their circles). She also doesn't mention Dickie's surname to Devons. So Dickie is funding not only his rival in love (because Devons has fallen for Joan too), but, unbeknown to any of them, his father's rival in business.

There's a certain amount of coincidence involved in setting this up, of course, but I didn't mind it, because it was in the interests of causing conflict, not resolving it, or removing character agency.

Complications, of course, ensue, not least because of the scheming of Forsythe, which ends up blowing up in his face. Along the way, the author contrasts two kinds of people: those who have too little money and must struggle to get ahead, sacrificing their health and wellbeing to do so, and those who have too much obtained too easily, who live a pointless existence with nothing to strive for. The two generations of the Burnetts represent the two situations, but so do Devons and Joan, in a different way. Joan, at least, is trying to involve herself, to do something that matters to someone, even if - raised to be unworldly and naive - she doesn't know how to go about it.

Both of the young men try to put Joan on a pedestal as a princess and do everything for her, but she doesn't want that; she wants to serve, to do something that matters, even if only to one person. The gendered work assumptions of the time do come in here, but not so blatantly that they became a big problem for me. Joan has been deliberately raised to be ornamental rather than useful, and her rebellion against this is consequently somewhat ineffectual, but at least she does rebel.

There is a happy ending in which everyone gets at least a form of what they wanted (except for Forsythe, who's the designated villain), but the form of what they wanted is generally not what they thought they wanted, and not what I was expecting. This is a good thing.

Because it's not formulaic, and because it does have, and competently develop, a thought-provoking and well-thought-through theme, and because it's well edited and in general soundly written without being overwritten, it gets five stars from me. It's a buried gem from more than 100 years ago, and I'm glad I uncovered it and took a chance on it.

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Review: Library of the Unbound

Library of the Unbound by Tuuli Tolmov
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I somehow missed the "YA" part in the blurb, so I got more teen angst and love triangle than I was looking for (I wasn't looking for any). My fault, not the author's.

Leaving that aside, this is an enjoyable adventure with an appealing main character. She has poor judgement, but at least she knows that, and tries not to make it worse by drinking alcohol. Though tempted to nope out from the whole mess she's got involved in, she reluctantly - but bravely and effectively - does the right thing.

She's a booktamer, who takes magical books that have gained sentience and turns them back into ordinary books again - meaning that people can use the magical rituals in them, which turns out to be a problem.

The worldbuilding is mixed. It's an alternate history, in which there was a religious revolution 600 years ago that suppressed magic and installed a theocratic government. For some reason, the names of places are mostly either their Roman names (Londinium, Lutetia, Hispania, Brittania) or medieval (the kingdom of the Franks, Saracenia). There's a continuing war - a crusade, basically - against Saracenia, in which the Church Knights, who are the elite, are fighting, but that doesn't come into the main story. There's also either a geographical difference or the author has made a mistake, because Lutetia (Paris) is apparently on the coast.

On the other side of the worldbuilding coin, technology is basically what anyone born in the past 30 years would be used to as the norm: cellphones, laptops, tablets (though those last are supposed to be reserved to the elite).

The main character has trust issues, which are fully justified throughout the book, but there are well-intentioned people too. The plot has a few twists in it, and plenty of suspense.

I gather the author is not a native English speaker. This mostly shows in sentences that start out in the past tense and finish in the present tense, or nouns and verbs occasionally not agreeing in number, or idioms that are very slightly off, though there are also a few instances of dialog punctuation not following the conventions. Honestly, I've seen much worse from authors who are native English speakers, but (despite crediting plural editors and beta readers) it does need another round of editing to be really tidy. Since I had a pre-publication version via Netgalley for review, it may get one after the version that I saw.

It's an appealing book, and I enjoyed it even though I'm not much of a YA tropes fan.

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Review: Tea & Treachery at the Infinite Pantry

Tea & Treachery at the Infinite Pantry by Jo Miles
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Extremely earnest in a very specifically mid-2020s way that will date it quickly, but if you read a lot of cozy fantasy, you're either looking for that or at least don't mind too much.

It's an original concept, though. Instead of a library or a hospitality business, we have something that combines elements of both: a kind of museum of magically preserved food (which also has three libraries and a hospitality business attached). But something has started going wrong with the preservation magic, not to mention that a major funder has just been lost, and Glen, the recently appointed head of the institution, has to pull everyone together (and hold herself together) while they all try to solve the problems.

There's never any indication where Glen fitted into the picture before she was promoted, which to me was a notable omission. She shows no particular in-depth familiarity with any of the areas of work in the institution, the heads of the departments that play major roles in the crisis all seem to have had their positions for a while, and nobody acts like they recently reported to her specifically. She has long backstory (raised by a grandmother who emotionally abused her and made use of her while undermining her self-confidence), but no recent backstory that I could see.

I spotted the source of the issue at the 10% mark. (view spoiler)[It's the one guy who isn't perfectly lovely and fully on board at all times with the way things are done. (hide spoiler)] I didn't spot the mechanism, though I probably should have; there were plenty of clues. But this book isn't primarily about solving the mystery, but about the journey of the people who are trying to solve it, and their relationships, including a romance that emerges in the course of the story.

There's a nasty rich noble guy who's the main villain. The rich and the noble are overlapping groups, and apparently hold enough power that there's no suggestion that he face any consequences for (view spoiler)[arbitrarily ordering the death of one of the characters who learned too much about his plans, something he apparently has done on multiple previous occasions (hide spoiler)], though there are also no immediate consequences to the institution from defying and thwarting him. It was another pair of what struck me as odd omissions.

The editing, happily, is above average, with few and minor glitches, which helped it hold onto its fourth star, despite the fairly basic worldbuilding (usual in cozy fantasy) and the couple of holes I mentioned above. The other thing that got it four stars, though, was that I enjoyed visiting the place and following the people, most of whom are lovely. I will be watching out for a sequel.

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Review: We Solve Murders

We Solve Murders by Richard Osman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I liked it but didn't love it.

I liked the hapless ex-cop Steve, dragged willy-nilly into a round-the-world pursuit of clues to several murders that look like someone is trying to pin them on his beloved daughter-in-law Amy. He just wants a small, quiet life back in his village with his mates in the pub and his cat. I get it, and I don't think he's wrong to want that. I liked his mate Tony, an ordinary bloke with a garage, as well, for much the same reasons.

I didn't like Amy nearly as much. She is disengaged from her emotions because of a traumatic childhood, and scored high on her boss's homemade "psychopath test". She's not actually a psychopath; she knows right from wrong and which one she's pursuing, but she doesn't indulge in feelings about it. This leaves her a bit superficial as a character, especially since she's mostly reactive rather than proactive.

I didn't like her boss much either, for similar reasons.

I disliked the bestselling novelist, Rosie, considerably. She's so rich she's not even sure whether or not she owns a helicopter. She's still (in approximately her 70s, probably, but she refuses to say) living the same lifestyle of sex and drugs and private jets that she started on in the 1980s, and feels fine about it.

The other viewpoint characters I don't think I was meant to like, apart from the hapless and clueless would-be influencer Bonnie (just a young mother trying to do what she loves in a way that will help her kids have a better life) and the head-in-the-sand talent agent who is being used by the villains. There's a self-regarding action movie actor who's awful in various ways. The villains are obsessed with money and casual about ruining or ending people's lives, more so than I was expecting from a cozy author, though I haven't read contemporary cozy previously. Most of my mystery and thriller reading has been of books from a century or more ago.

The whole thing reminded me of one of Dave Barry's novels; general comedic/bantering tone, casually nasty criminals, hapless ordinary protagonists (apart from the ones who are basically superheroes). It didn't mesh well with my taste overall, but I appreciated that it was well executed and well edited.

I do still intend to try the Thursday Murder Club, which may be closer to my idea of cozy, but my hopes are lower for it now, and I won't be continuing with this series. Again, this is about my taste, not the quality of the work.

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