Review: The Secret Library

The Secret Library by Amanda James
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A celebration of the power of fiction to inspire and uplift people, in the form of a magical-realist novel in which characters from books literally come alive through the work of authors, editors, and readers.

Lucy is introduced to us first as a 10-year-old girl looking forward to staying with her editor grandmother at her beautiful house in Cornwall. Inspired by her grandmother, she herself becomes an editor - but by the age of 30 is becoming disillusioned with the sameness (and darkness) of the fiction that's submitted to her company. She's an acquiring editor and a developmental editor, so she chooses which books to move forward with and then helps the authors make them as good as they can be. And she's finding it hard to come up with "diamonds"; everyone is writing the same book, and not doing a great job of it. I definitely empathise, because it's hard these days to find books to read that aren't just a rehash of the same few premises, most of them dark and depressing. Even in the positive speculative fiction subgenres - noblebright, cozy fantasy, solarpunk, hopepunk - there's a lot of mediocre or poorly crafted work that's just repeating the same ideas.

In light of the theme of books that stand out from the norm, it's a... bold move to invoke one of the most overused tropes of contemporary fantasy fiction: an inheritance from a relative that introduces a woman to her magical heritage. There's also instalove, not just one but two instances, and despite all of the lampshade hanging about how that's unrealistic, there it is at the heart of the story.

Lucy starts meeting characters from books, which isn't new to her, since she talked and played with Bilbo Baggins, Christopher Robin and Mary Poppins as a child. What is new is that, by editing unfinished manuscripts that her grandmother has left to her along with the house, and writing the authors, who had given up, encouraging notes, she reaches across the decades and causes the books to have been finished, and successful, and inspirational for readers. Their key characters emerge into the real world and start to play a role in the plot.

The book has ambitions to be one of those wonderful, inspirational books that lifts people up and influences them in the direction of kindness and generosity. I think it gets partway there. The reason that, for me, it doesn't get all the way there is that it's competent rather than brilliant in its execution, and overt and obvious in its message, which is sometimes more told than shown. The characters are well drawn, but they don't come alive and step off the page like the ones we're told about from the previously-unfinished novels within the novel; they feel generic to me. The hot fisherman with the sensitive soul, the disillusioned 30-year-old editor, her bouncy best friend... none of them have that extra spark of uniqueness. For that matter, the fictional characters who are so vivid to the readers that they enter the real world are not, in this novel, that vivid. The book's reach exceeds its grasp.

It's a commendable reach, though, and a good message, and an enjoyable book. I do recommend it for lovers of positive fiction and people who are thinking about giving up on their dreams.

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Review: Sorcery on the Sunset Express

Sorcery on the Sunset Express by Ronald D. Ferguson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Disclaimer: I requested and received a copy from the author prior to publication. We are members of the same writers' forum, where the author posted asking for readers for his upcoming book. The author explicitly stated that there was no expectation or obligation for a review.

This is a solid, enjoyable story set in an alternate North America (mainly Texas, but also Louisiana and New Mexico) in 1907. The background is that Southern wizards managed to stalemate the American Civil War and (in some way that isn't explored) transform the Confederacy into the Southern Alliance Monarchy; Texas and California are independent republics, and there is still a USA, just a smaller one. The alternate-world setting isn't just decoration. It introduces rich and powerful people who are also foreign nobility, warranting an extra layer of caution in dealing with them, and it enables the author to have both the technology of 1907 (telephones and cars - the latter more plentiful, if anything, than in our 1907) in the cities, and a version of Texas that's more like the untamed West of much earlier times in its outlying districts.

The status of slavery in the Southern Alliance Monarchy wasn't clear to me, but it's illegal in Texas, and the main characters are careful to treat the black people they encounter (serving as stewards in Pullman cars - there's a lot of train travel, as the title implies) with respect. I did find it slightly unlikely that, in the first decade of the 20th century, a young woman of respectable background would routinely travel in the same sleeper compartment as her male colleague; people do assume they're an unmarried couple, which they're not (though there are plenty of hints that he admires her considerably), but nobody acts as if it's scandalous or tries to stop them, even though there are mentions of a strong influence of Baptist morality in the Republic of Texas. Both the characters have a Baptist background, too.

Their background, in fact, is strong overall. Brandi, the female partner, has ended up as a consulting detective in part because, when she tried to study advanced physics at a university, she was told that there was no place for a woman to do so, and found herself pushed into a job as a second-grade teacher. Her father is a doctor, and she's learned some things from him. She's capable, highly intelligent, and definitely the Holmes of the pair. Unfortunately, she's also very sharp-tongued, given to lecturing her unfortunate partner Jerry not only about things he's ignorant of but also about his behaviour, which is that of a working-class Texan from a difficult family background who had to drop out of college when he was injured and lost his football scholarship. His father was a drunkard, a womaniser and a wife-abuser who pretended to be a preacher in order to get money for his other activities, meaning the family moved around a lot until he finally left his wife and son; the mother, abandoned not only by her husband but by a self-righteous congregation, struggled for a while and then died while Jerry was still a teenager. He's since been a Texas Ranger, a job he was thrown out of for taking a principled stand that wasn't politically acceptable to his bosses, and came very near to getting him lynched in the prologue.

This is a lot more character development, and a lot more worldbuilding, than I often see, though admittedly I've been reading cozy fantasy lately, which is notably weak on both of those things. Still, it means that there's some heft to the events the characters get caught up in. There are a number of violent deaths, some of innocents; serious threats and tension; and a twisty mystery to unravel.

The main mystery involves the theft of payrolls being securely (or so one would think) transported by train, watched constantly by guards, but when the train arrives at its destination the money has somehow vanished from the locked safe - not once, but multiple times, despite elaborate precautions being taken. There are also secondary mysteries, including a couple of murders.

The method of the heists is clever, and the process of solving the case entertaining, and the action scenes well described. The time and place are competently evoked, and the characters are memorable and have dimension. I recommend it.

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Review: Beware of Chicken 3

Beware of Chicken 3 by CasualFarmer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Much the same strengths, and faults, as the earlier books in the series. Fortunately, for me at least, the strengths predominate.

Before I get going on the review itself, I will have a quick rant about the DRM. I got this book from the library via Overdrive, and because it has Adobe Digital Editions DRM on it, instead of just checking it out of the library with an app on my phone and synching my e-reader over wifi, I had to check it out, download some software to my computer, sign in with an Adobe id, go to the Overdrive website, sign in with my library card, download the epub, import it to ADE, plug in my e-reader to my computer with a cable like some sort of medieval peasant, and transfer it. It's a lot of unnecessary friction that adds no value for anyone, and I wish publishers would stop using it.

Anyway - review. The pacing at the beginning and end continues to be an issue. Slow start, banging middle, slow wind-down with too many endings. There's a big "tournament arc" section, and while it's well enough described, the big problem is that nothing really hinges on who wins, and it's pretty obvious who that's going to be, and she doesn't even seem to care all that much about the win anymore either. The aftermath of the tournament, though, with a battle against an actual adversary where there are high stakes and it's not at all clear who's going to win and we're afraid it isn't the heroes, is much more gripping. Of course, for this part to work as it does, we need to have had the earlier events to set up alliances and introduce characters, but still, the contrast between the fairly meaningless fights of the tournament with the truly tense ones of the aftermath struck me as an excellent illustration of the writing maxim, "Don't write action scenes, write scenes that require action to resolve them."

There are, as other reviewers have noted, too many characters, many of whom get a viewpoint (even minor ones that we never see again). But at least the character voices are distinct, and what they do and say is often interesting. There are also too many subplots, and since it's two and a half years since I read the previous book and there is absolutely zero time spent on reorienting the reader to what has happened previously, some of them didn't mean as much as they otherwise would have. This is one of the issues with books originally published as long-running serials, though it could be fixed easily enough with a quick "previously on..." at the front that you could skip if you were reading right through.

The copy editing seems to be getting better each time. There are now fewer instances of the same issues: apostrophe in the wrong place when the noun is plural, dialog punctuation, "may" where it should be "might," a dangling modifier, disagreement in number between noun and verb, some cases in which the pronoun reference was ambiguous because who "he" or "she" referred to had changed without notice, and a few vocabulary errors: pendants/pennants, singular/single, namesake/name, the eggcorn "another thing coming" instead of "think," observance/observation, brought/bought, filed/filled, aides/aids, "brace" when it doesn't mean "two," borne/born, even/ever, decreed/declared - some of which are confusions and some of which are likely typos.

What makes these books good, though, is the warm and generous tone, set by the central character, the "hidden master" known as Jun. He's been drawn into the world of cultivation from Canada, and it shows; he's polite and kind and generous to everyone, and his priorities are for everyone to get along and be happy and prosperous, which I personally think are great priorities, and ones we could stand to see more widespread in this or any other world. In this case, he has stumbled into having the power to spread his values, though he does so by influence rather than force; it's just that he does have the option of force to prevent people with different values from wrecking things, and to get other people with power (but less power than he has) to listen to him seriously.

Partly so that everything is fresh in my mind, but also because I enjoyed it, I'm moving straight on to the next volume without reading something else in between. Once I do the stupid multiple-step Adobe dance, that is.

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Review: Reflections of a Beginning Husband

Reflections of a Beginning Husband by Edward Sandford Martin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Reflections" is very much what this is. It's fiction, not the author's own story (he'd been married for a good many years by the time it came out, and while he and the narrator were both lawyers, the author started out as a writer and editor and became a lawyer later on). But the proportion of reflection to events is extremely high, so it's not a typical novel with a plot, more a slice-of-life book with a lot of musing.

If the musing hadn't been interesting, it would therefore have failed badly, but I did find it interesting. The setup is that the narrator, Peregrine Jesup, is in his early years of working as a lawyer, and isn't making much money, but convinces his beloved Cordelia French, the daughter of a wealthy man, to marry him anyway rather than waiting until he can keep her in the style to which she's accustomed. She's amenable, and they get on fine in a small apartment with simple food and not as much socialising as they have been used to. His parents are also well off, and both sets of parents approve of the match and are generally supportive, as are others like an older family friend who eventually takes Jesup into partnership at the end of the book. Meanwhile, the couple have a child.

That's pretty much it for events. The reflection on those events covers a number of topics. There's the relationship between men and women; Peregrine enjoys talking with Cordelia and respects her intelligence, and they have an alliance, not the War of the Sexes that's so common in American humour. There's the question of education for women. There's the question of women's suffrage, which had been around for a while (it's 1907) and would not be resolved in the US at a national level until 1920; Peregrine and Cordelia are dubious about how much difference it will really make to politics, and don't immediately buy the "natural justice" argument for it either, though they're far from settled in their minds. There's politics in general, in which Peregrine thinks he's a conservative, but not the kind that wants others to be ground under his heel; he's in favour of prosperity being more widely distributed, and is uncomfortable with the fact that, as a lawyer, he mostly works for wealthy people and their interests.

Prosperity, and what it means, is another theme (one that I'm interested in), and different attitudes to money - how much is enough, progress being driven by people wanting more of what it can buy, and the higher importance of non-material values. Peregrine and Cordelia are churchgoers, I think Methodists, though it's never made completely clear, and while it isn't a Christian book as such, Christian ideas do come in at various points.

I've given it my "comedy" tag, but it's more "humour" than "comedy," and even then pretty light. It's mainly the good-hearted tone and the wry observations about humanity that give it that feel.

It's very quotable, and I highlighted a lot of passages. I'll restrict myself to one:

"As things are, the country is run, after a fashion. The wheels do turn, and production and distribution are accomplished. To be sure, the wheels screech more or less, and the production is pretty wasteful compared with what the professional economists say it might be, and the stream of distribution runs so lumpy that it makes you laugh; but a fair proportion of the Lord’s will seems to be done, and hopeful people calculate that the proportion is increasing, though you might not always think so to read the progressive periodicals."

All of which is still true today.

While, naturally, I didn't agree with everything the author said in his reflections, he held his conclusions lightly and didn't insist on anything dogmatically, and it was interesting to get a window into the mind of one person (who represented, more or less, others of his type) at a historical moment when change was already rapid and the First World War hadn't yet hardened people.

Something I notice in a lot of the contemporary books I read is that the people who write them don't have much of a grasp on the idea that different times and places have held different ideas from theirs without being completely evil and wrong, and I wish more of them would read books like this and expand their perspectives. It's cozy and optimistic in tone, and for me the biggest fault is that it stops abruptly and without warning after the chapter in which Peregrine is given his partnership. Perhaps the author felt that this change was large enough, and disconnected enough from the domestic focus that he'd mostly been keeping, that it made a natural stopping place.

I probably mainly enjoyed it because it muses on topics that interest me too, but it's warm and easy-going and insightful, and if you don't mind it having very little plot per thousand words and find the thoughts of someone in 1907 worth thinking about, I recommend it to you.

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Review: Cat Dragon

Cat Dragon by Samantha Birch
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Cozy doesn't need to mean low stakes, and this is an, at times, extremely tense story of a witch who has never quite fitted in, doing her best with her companions to stave off disaster from her home. Cute familiars and other animal companions, a loyal best friend, a love interest with reluctance because reasons, a chance-met apparent-ally-but-can-we-trust-her, and a couple of other chance-met associates round out the main cast, and were easy to keep straight, though none of them developed great depth.

Worldbuilding is not a strength of the cozy genre, sadly, but this book at least has the third-lowest-effort approach to it. The lowest-effort approach is to take the author's familiar surroundings and change a few names of things and say there's magic, without it ever impacting anything even slightly. The second-lowest-effort approach is to take the author's culture and beliefs and place them in front of some generic sword & sorcery scenery flats, which is what most cozy books do. The third-lowest-effort approach, used here, is to take whole cultures and languages from our world and just import them into the secondary world with a vaguely new geography. Latin exists, for example, and is the language used for scientific naming; photography and the wireless are mentioned, but never seen, and the world feels like the usual generic fantasy world that's vaguely at a late-medieval/early-renaissance tech level, except where it isn't.

I read it on my Kobo from the library, so I'll have to mention the specifics of the copy editing here rather than linking to Kindle notes and highlights. It's mostly good, but there are enough minor glitches that it didn't get my "well-edited" tag. There are a couple of vocab issues ("alike" for "like", "foreman" for "footman" - clearly a mistyping - and the overcorrection of "laid" to "lay"), a few missing or mistyped words ("on top everything else," "precious else left," "had been a kind a", "coming into land" where it should be "in to" - the "to" is not a preposition but part of the verb), the use of "may" instead of "might" in the past tense sometimes (but not often), the occasional dangling modifier, and of course a lot of commas between adjectives which don't need them - it's almost more common for authors to make that mistake than to not make it. It's better than average.

Like other reviewers, I did feel confused about what was happening at a few points. The author, I'm sure, had a clear idea in her head about what the events meant and how the viewpoint character understood them, but she sometimes needed to get more of it on the page for the reader to share in that understanding.

All of those minor flaws aside - and they were minor - I enjoyed it, it had a genuinely cozy feel while still being about something happening, the main character was a believable mix of self-doubt and competence, and I will happily read the sequel once it's available.

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Review: Spooky Hollow

Spooky Hollow by Carolyn Wells
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Occasionally wordy and florid, never suspenseful, and I spotted the murderer very early on and never doubted my choice.

A mysterious stranger visits a wealthy eccentric's country mansion in Vermont. By next morning, the sister of the owner has been murdered, apparently stabbed inside a locked room; the stranger has vanished, leaving behind his hat and coat (both new, along with all his other clothing); and the sister's large, valuable ruby has also vanished. Suspicion falls in the obvious place, but this Henry Johnson doesn't appear to exist, and efforts to trace him fail.

Meanwhile, there are disturbing revelations about the wealthy eccentric's niece's family background - disturbing, that is, in a time when the elites mostly believed in eugenics, and the possibility that she might be the illegitimate child of an unknown mother rendered her basically a leper. Her suitor, to his great credit, sticks by her regardless, and spends his own money on investigating both her origins and the death of her aunt, to which end he calls in a famous detective (of whose series this book is part). The detective finds the criminal, and it's... exactly who I thought it was all along. I didn't figure out how the locked-room part was done, but I probably should have.

Not a great mystery story, but I've read worse.

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Review: The Locked Room

The Locked Room by Holly Hepburn
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Picked this up on BookBub, and I was glad I did. It's a solid cozy mystery.

The heroine, Harriet/Harry, works for the bank that sits in the part of Baker Street that includes number 221, and it is actually true that there was someone employed there for a while to answer letters addressed to Sherlock Holmes, which is Harry's job. Her job doesn't really play much into this book, and indeed she spends hardly any time at work, instead investigating several mysteries that turn out to be connected, based on a notice in the Times personals signed "Moriarty".

It's the third book in the series, and I haven't read the first two, but now I want to. There's clever investigation, daring action, disguise, and a variety of crime, just as in the Holmes stories. In fact, it feels so Holmesian that, despite the cars, telephones and jazz bands, I felt more as if I was in the 1890s (Holmes' heyday) than in the 1930s, when the book is actually set. This is probably partly because, as the granddaughter of a baron whose father is the heir, Harry is still under the same old-fashioned expectations about protecting her reputation and the kind of person she will marry that would have been the case 40 years previously. There's a slow-burn romance that's clearly been under way across all three books, with a worthy fellow, and also (sigh) a bad boy who's clearly wrong for her but thrills her.

It helps that the author is British, which saves us from the Americanisms that inevitably creep in when an American author sets their book in Britain. I didn't spot any obvious anachronisms either, though, having read a lot of fiction written in the period, I didn't get quite the same subtle sense off it of a dark, claustrophobic, rigid and hidebound Britain (where everyone constantly smokes) in the background of the events. I think I would have spotted it as a modern book even if I hadn't known, and even without the scene in which homophobia is brought up and briefly spoken against. Still, a truly authentic 1930s feel is hard to achieve, and maybe not even worth shooting for.

The copy editing is generally good, with just a few minor continuity glitches (such as which of two neighbouring houses is referred to, and briefly the gender of a street urchin), a couple of sentences where the grammar has got slightly mangled, and a single homonym error: loathe for loath, which is an easy mistake for an author to make and an editor to miss.

The characters don't have the depth of Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham or even Josephine Tey, but they're adequate for their roles, and there were plenty of early-20th-century mystery books in which the characters were thinner than this. The plot is relatively simple but well handled. All in all, it's competent rather than amazing, but sometimes that's all I'm looking for, and next time I want a pleasant, competent, fun cozy read, Holly Hepburn will be on my list of authors to consider.

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