Review: Theodora’s Tea Shop

Theodora’s Tea Shop by Christy Anne Jones
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

First off, despite having "Tea Shop" in the title and a somewhat cozyesque cover, and claiming to be cozy in the blurb, this book is not (in my opinion) remotely cozy. It's too dark for that. Yes, it also says "dark" in the blurb, and I should have picked up on those mixed signals and avoided it.

Taking place largely in a city doesn't disqualify it from being cozy, per se, though it doesn't help, especially since the city is grimy and dystopian in places and the seat of a corrupt, hypocritical government; also not helping is the fact that the small town where the main character starts out, rather than being an idealised rural cottagecore fantasy, is claustrophobic and small-minded and depressing in the style of a fishing village in the north of England. There's one fairly minor character who's warm and helpful (which is how the majority of people in a cozy usually are), and pretty much everyone else is either a damaged person making bad decisions that have tragic consequences or a cruel exploiter murdering innocents as a means to power. The "found family" is less dysfunctional than the characters' families of origin, but only because that's an incredibly low bar.

The closest thing to a cute familiar is a sinister raven, which plays a more minor role than the cover would suggest (as far as I read, at least); and far from a supportive and wholesome love interest, the protagonist falls, against her better judgement, for someone with more red flags than a May Day parade, who's still hung up on his first love and barely knows the protagonist is alive. Nobody has a functional romantic relationship, nobody has a functional family relationship, and there's barely even a functional friendship to be seen (while there are at least two very dysfunctional friendships). Add to that: body horror.

It's just not what people who read the cozy genre are typically looking for, and marketing it to them feels like a bait-and-switch, an instance of picking something currently popular and claiming your thing is that, even though it isn't. I'd expect this strategy to backfire. It certainly did with me.

At its heart (and not mentioned in the blurb) is a version of the Oppressed Mages trope, which I consider seriously overused, implausible and potentially harmful. People are only allowed to practice magic if they can afford to go to the Royal Institute, which few can, and if you practice without a license you can be maimed or killed. Now, fine, that's about elite access to/control of power, and one reason that the law's in place is that a foreign power has defeated the country in war (though they kept a previously existing law imposed for a less credible reason), but... read the article I linked to, it explains far better than I can why "oppressed mages" is still not a great trope.

The worldbuilding is certainly richer than practically any cozy fantasy I've read, and although that's also an extremely low bar, this book clears it comfortably; at the same time, the magic system isn't particularly well defined in terms of what it can and can't do or how it operates.

The witch Theodora (not her real name) runs a tea shop as a front for distributing illegal magic, even though she says in as many words that she hates tea. She somehow manages to keep up seven different false identities, including ones that you would think would require some qualifications and background, such as a professor at the Royal Institute, the king's personal sorcerer and a Member of Parliament, and nobody seems to notice that each of these well-known people is only ever around for an average of a day a week. (They don't notice that they're all the same person because of magic.)

So: very not cozy, characters and events practically bordering on grimdark, implausible elements, toxic trope. Was there anything about it I thought was good?

It is well written. People who like dark fantasy, unlike me, will probably enjoy it considerably. Sure, there are some vocabulary issues (which I'll mention to the publisher; I had a pre-publication version via Netgalley, so there's still the chance of fixing those), and the extremely common issue of excess commas between pairs of adjectives, but hardly anyone notices those things. The plot is adequately complex, as are the characters, as is the world. It falls firmly into my "good, but not for me" category.

By 66%, no coziness had eventuated, and I had to ask myself: Do I want to spend another two hours with these characters just to say that I've finished it, and find out what Theodora's plan to fix everything is and how it works, when nobody's plan has ever done anything but make things worse up to this point? I decided I did not want to spend more time with the characters, and in fact I disliked it enough that I'm giving it two stars.

It will have an audience, but that isn't me.

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Review: The Case of the Late Pig

The Case of the Late Pig by Margery Allingham
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A novella, narrated in first person by Campion himself. It's full of "had I but known" foreshadowing, and the odd events eventually explained which are often a trademark of the series.

The first odd event is that Campion receives an anonymous letter, well typed and literate, which helps to draw his attention to a funeral announcement for an old schoolmate, "Pig" Peters. When bullied to the point of significant injury by "Pig" at school, Campion had tearfully and angrily promised to attend his funeral, and he now fulfils that promise. Only, six months later, he's called in on a mysterious death, and when he sees the body, immediately recognises "Pig" - freshly dead.

The rest of the book deals with Campion's efforts to unravel the whole thing, helped and hindered and distracted by various characters: the bluff Chief Constable; the rural but efficient Inspector Pussey; the Chief Constable's attractive daughter, who Campion knows and is somewhat in love with, but who is angry at him because a very common person is representing herself as Campion's intimate friend; the very common person; another old schoolmate; the local doctor, who's just happy that something is happening in this dull rural backwater; the humourless vicar, who takes immediate exception to Campion; the hostess at the local country club, a former actress who calls Campion "duck"; the mysterious Mr Hayhoe, who claims to be the dead man's uncle; and, of course, Campion's manservant Lugg, with whom he has a contentious relationship founded on unspoken mutual devotion.

It's a lot of characters for a novella, and in fact it's so full of character there isn't room for a whole lot of plot, but the plot that there is is a twisty and surprising thing that I had to just sit back and observe rather than try to understand for most of its length. It's set in rural Southern England, like most of Campion's adventures up to this point, and as always the setting is beautifully rendered, though with a light touch.

Not, perhaps, as good as the full-length novels, where everything has more space in which to breathe, but certainly an enjoyable read.

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Review: Half-Elven Thief: Omnibus One

Half-Elven Thief: Omnibus One by Jonathan Moeller
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An entertaining sword-and-sorcery series with likeable characters, let down a bit by typos.

Rivah is the daughter of a cruel, arrogant elven lord and one of his human concubines, who escaped at the age of 13 when her mother died and her father was about to sell her to one of his friends. She's ended up, some years later, as a master thief in the Court of the Masked King, the thieves' guild of the city where she lives. She pulls what are basically heists, but the heists are more incidents within the story than they are the story itself, so I haven't given the book my "heist" tag. In doing so, she discovers that multiple powerful people in the city are getting into the dark magic of the Shadow Elves and summoning things that definitely ought not to be summoned. Fortunately, she has a conscience (even though she denies it), and is friends with a powerful cleric who is living as a humble monk and a powerful wizard who is pretending to be an old street person, both of whom help her to defend the city from outbreaks of necromancy. In the third book, a half-orc paladin eventuates and also gets involved.

There are some good action sequences, some believable character interactions, and Rivah herself is a character with some depth and dimension to her which rises naturally out of her backstory.

Setting-wise, this is a world based largely on the Roman Empire; slavery is common, most people (other than Rivah, who understandably hates it since it was almost her fate) accept it as just how things are done, and the military and governmental titles and the money are also based on Roman models. The religion is monotheistic, but not Christianity. At the same time, it's also a D&D-adjacent sword-and-sorcery world, with mages, clerics, rogues, bards and paladins. The magic system is not exactly D&D (or, if it is, comes from one of the versions I'm not familiar with, or maybe it's based on a similar system like Pathfinder), but it has a strong kinship. The spells sometimes have different names - Feather Fall, for example, is called Drift - but the inspiration is usually obvious. Rivah starts out knowing three spells, which her mother taught her before she died, but her first heist yields, among other loot, a basic spell book, unexplainedly present in the room where the powerful wizard was attempting a summons he ought not have, and she gets a few more from sympathetic wizards she encounters. There are enough spells in the spell book which haven't been mentioned yet that the author can pull out any one that happens to be convenient in the future.

Despite being based on some well-worn tropes, the world feels lived-in, partly because the author has taken the trouble to map out a city with its districts and neighbourhoods and put some thought into how it would operate. Cozy fantasy authors, whose settings often feel like they've been unconvincingly painted on old dropcloths and hung in the background of the scenes on obvious ropes, could take a lesson. It's a dark world, but with some good people in it.

There were some moments that stretched my suspension of disbelief by being plot-convenient rather than inherently plausible. One I've mentioned already - the presence of a magical "primer" in the room where an advanced wizard was operating. The other occurs in the third book, where Rivah takes the McGuffin with her in a way that we just know will end up with it falling into the hands of the antagonist, even though there's no convincing reason why she shouldn't just leave it in a safe place.

The copy editing side is unusual. Nearly every contemporary author I read makes the same few basic errors, but this one mostly doesn't make them. The commas and apostrophes are nearly all in the right place; there are no hyphens where they shouldn't be; tense is used correctly, which is sadly rare; there are very few vocabulary errors, and some words that are often bungled are used correctly. But the author is apparently a sloppy typist, who leaves words out of sentences, types the wrong word occasionally, and sometimes, when editing, leaves in a word or phrase instead of deleting it when replacing it with another, and ends up with both versions sitting in the sentence together. Either this is an author who knows the rules but occasionally stumbles over the keyboard, or it's been past a good copy editor who hasn't quite learned the trick of seeing what is actually there rather than what should be there. (It's a double-edged sword, that trick. I learned it when I worked as an editor more than 30 years ago, and now I can't turn it off.)

Overall, it's solid, enjoyable stuff, marred only by the occasional plot-convenient thing that doesn't make sense and by the slightly scruffy typesetting. Those factors mean that I'm not about to pay $5 a book for the rest of the series, but I will look out for them on sale and through my library.

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Review: Flowers for the Judge

Flowers for the Judge by Margery Allingham
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Dorothy L. Sayers was perhaps as accomplished a writer as Margery Allingham, but Allingham is both more accessible to someone who hasn't had Sayers' education and also more consistently good (there are one or two dud Wimseys, but so far I haven't been disappointed by a Campion, and in fact all but the first one have been five-star reads for me).

Campion is clever, despite his frequent pose of upper-class British idiocy, and this is the second instance in which he works out who the murderer is but is faced with the difficulty of proving it - the previous book, Death of a Ghost , confronts him with the same problem, though the solution is quite different.

The books aren't written much to a formula, in fact. Here we're in the world of London publishing, in the century-old house of Barnabas, headquartered in an old and quirky building and run by eccentric partners. (When none of the three partners are available, it seems to run quite adequately, helmed by the invaluable "secretary" who clearly is the actual manager.) We get that sense that no modern pastiche I've read so far has managed to capture, of a claustrophobic, ramshackle 1930s London where the buildings are often dilapidated, dirty, cramped, chilly and impractical, the fog is yellow with sulphur from the burning of coal, and the people are mostly too stuck in their ways of thinking to recognise the truth when it's in front of them. Actually, the old building full of random bric-a-brac reminded me of a brilliant but eccentric and outright dodgy publisher I worked for in the 1990s, but I have the impression that this was the norm in the 1930s as it would not be today.

One of the partners, Paul, who is in a loveless marriage, has gone off somewhere on a Thursday and not been heard of by Sunday. His wife Gina, who is used to him being erratic but generally does at least hear news of him if he disappears for a while, is concerned enough to call in Campion, who she knows, to quietly check into things. One of the other partners, Mike, Paul's cousin, is sent down to the "vault" at the bottom of the office building to get something and comes back with it. He is in love with Gina, but hasn't done anything about it. But a day or two later, Paul's body is discovered in the vault, having apparently been there since Thursday, in a position which suggests that Mike couldn't have possibly missed seeing him on the Sunday. Mike is, naturally, arrested and put on trial for the crime.

Campion (and everyone else who knows him) is convinced he's innocent, but things look bad for him, and locating the actual murderer is complicated by the fact that the scene was hopelessly compromised before the police were called in. Campion does figure it out, though, and it puts him in deadly danger, before a resolution that I absolutely did not see coming. One of the things I like about these books is that if I work something out from the clues the author has given, so does the detective, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they can wrap up the case as a result.

Meanwhile, we get some beautifully observed character work, including some comic scenes with Lugg, Campion's manservant, who has "bettered himself" and is trying to be posh, without notable success. He's developed an exaggerated consciousness of their social position, and opposes Campion being involved in anything relating to crime or scandal, especially since there's a chance Campion is going to inherit a ducal title from an unspecified relative. He has, in fact, ambitions to be Jeeves, which are destined to remain unfulfilled because of his essential Luggness.

Allingham is wonderful at the craft of writing, and without ever indulging in pretentious literary prose can place the reader completely in the scene and give a sense of depth to the characters that I don't often see in genre fiction. What a pity, then, that Random House's ebook edition is littered with uncorrected scan errors, such as missing or inserted punctuation or outright misread words (like "bang" for "hang"). This is a fine piece of writing that deserves more care from a publisher who is no doubt making a steady income from it. Get a different edition if you can (mine came via my library).

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Review: Gunman's Bluff

Gunman's Bluff by Edgar Wallace
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Another rip-roaring pulp story from Wallace. It's littered with moments where the author used pure coincidence to get characters together in the right place for the plot to happen, as was common at the time, but at the same time it has a bit more complexity than the typical thud-and-blunder thriller, and I'm inclined to almost forgive the coincidences as a result.

A young couple who have known each other most of their lives are engaged, in that rather passionless way that young couples from the wealthier echelons of British society seemed to get engaged between the wars. Her brother commits suicide in despair at his debts, and the note he leaves seems to implicate her wealthy fiancé as a contributing factor for giving him bad investment advice and then not helping him when he lost everything. This breaks up the relationship immediately after the wedding, much to the delight of the late brother's friend, a confidence trickster who has designs on the woman, and the groom disappears.

Meanwhile, the groom has helped - or attempted, ineffectually, to help - a criminal dobbed in by the con man, who's afraid of him and wants him out of circulation. The criminal, the gunman of the title, is grateful for the gesture, and goes out of his way to a tremendous extent to help in return when everything turns bad for his would-be rescuer.

It turns very bad indeed, and the poor fellow has a rough time of it, while we learn more about the criminal machinations that are going on and also see the young woman go through an emotional journey, the gunman attempting to reform, and a jovial middle-aged police detective keeping an eye on everything that's going on and dispensing keenly judged advice. Along the way there's plenty of varied action and suspense, thrillingly told in the Mighty Wallace Manner.

I think I'm safe in saying that if you enjoy Edgar Wallace at all, you'll enjoy this one.

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Review: The Carousel of Forgotten Places

The Carousel of Forgotten Places by S. Hati
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I picked this up because of the original premise, but ended up being disappointed with the execution.

The protagonist and narrator is Ryka, a woman of Indian heritage brought up in the US, who has spent almost five centuries as the Timekeeper in a magical pocket dimension created by a time god, from which she undertakes expeditions to repair timelines that have somehow become corrupted (exactly how or why this happens routinely is not explored in any detail). The founding time god's brother Everest is generally around and plays an important role in the time repairs. Despite being demisexual, or perhaps because of it, she is in lust with him, but doesn't want to mess up their working relationship by doing anything about it.

Ryka is self-pitying, emotionally immature despite her 500 years, and one of those people who make sure that everyone around them shares in their bad mood, and she makes some poor decisions even though she should have both the intelligence and the experience to know better. Everest is flaky, unreliable and lacking in empathy. That was never a ship I was going to be on board with; I have to like both members of a couple to care about whether they end up together, and I didn't like either of them.

Among a good few small imperfections, the most prominent one for me was the implausible reason for the MC to understand languages. Because she has been visiting various places and times for a little less than 500 years, she has "developed fluency in most languages" (according to her). There are about 7000 languages currently spoken in our world, and of course many more (and many mutually unintelligible earlier versions) throughout history, and this book has divergent timelines too, so... well over 10,000. And she later claims it is "thousands," so the "most" is probably not intended as a rhetorical flourish, or to refer only to languages with a large number of speakers.

Clearly nobody, no matter how good their memory, could become fluent in "most" of those 10,000 languages, even in 500 years. Even if we're very generous and say it's 4000 (most of 7000), that's a language every six weeks, and we know (because we're told) that her memory isn't supernaturally perfect. It's absurd.

It would be absurd even if she was immersed in each language continuously for the whole six weeks, doing nothing but learning it by constantly interacting with native speakers. But she's not. She undertakes very short missions about once a week, each one to a random place and time and never to the same place and time on two consecutive occasions, and actively avoids engaging with anyone if she can help it. The languages claim is, honestly, less plausible than if you just say that her supernatural role as the Keeper of Time gives her fluency in all languages. Sure, she also has a magical library which can presumably produce books from which she could learn languages, but that's not the claim she's making.

If we set that nonsense aside, though, and assume that the excess hyphens and vocabulary glitches will be fixed between the pre-publication version I had via Netgalley and when the book comes out, and ignore the fact that the romance is between two people I don't much care for or about, the book is... OK. Fairly simple plot (Ryka messes up and has to fix it, and this helps her somehow to get over herself at last), interesting and whimsical world, secondary characters that are adequate for their roles.

I didn't love it. That's probably just me; other people seem to like it fine. Perhaps you will too.

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Review: A Particular Boy Among Air Particles

A Particular Boy Among Air Particles by Irvin Embalsado
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

The author has set out, I think, to produce a book in somewhat the style of Brandon Sanderson. The difference is that while Sanderson's worldbuilding always has some off-the-wall aspect to it, he always manages to make that difference, and the rest of their world, feel plausible, while this one never achieved that as far as I was concerned.

It's set on a very small world. There are six landmasses, described as "continents," but the smallest of them can be seen all at once from a hot air balloon, and they're no more than a day's boat journey apart, so to my mind they would be better described as an archipelago of islands. (I live on a moderately large island. You can't remotely see all of it at once even from a high-flying aeroplane.) The boat in which Cielo, the protagonist, tours this world is a lifeboat from a larger vessel, but carries enough fuel to get to all the "continents." Why would this be, when nobody ever visits another "continent" because each society has everything it needs locally, and a lifeboat would only ever need to get back the short distance to its home "continent," and for that matter there are never incidents at sea that would even require a lifeboat? The only answer I can think of is "so the story can happen," which is never a good answer.

What's more, those societies themselves make little sense. One, for example, has a decaying punk-rock city in which people seem to spend most of their time high and either listening to music or driving round in "smoke-belchers." There's no indication of how food, or drugs, or smoke-belchers, or amplifiers, or electric guitars, or lights are produced, or by whom, but maybe it just all happens offstage (literally). Oh, there is an indication of how some food is obtained: they eat rats. On skewers.

All of the societies seem cartoonish and incomplete, despite the assertion that all of them have everything they need without each other. This assertion, by the way, is delivered in infodump by an intrusive narrator who sometimes speaks directly to the reader, but who then mostly takes a step back for the rest of the book. The bulk of the narrative is indistinguishable from close third person following Cielo, except when it suddenly hops into the head of his friend O.G. briefly. There are a number of instances of what would, in close third person, be POV violations, such as casually naming cultural features that the writer and the readers would recognise but Cielo should not, or naming characters he meets before they introduce themselves.

The worldbuilding wasn't the only part that didn't make sense to me, either. There were multiple moments when I thought there was an obvious action for Cielo to take - such as (view spoiler)[teaching his parents to heal so that the whole weight didn't fall on his shoulders (hide spoiler)] - but he doesn't, I assume because the predetermined plot and the idea of him as a lone hero took precedence.

We do eventually learn why this world is like it is, and it then kind of makes sense, but it's still pretty fanciful, and I didn't buy in. Still, the characters are just appealing enough, and the emotional beats strong enough, that the story held together and kept my interest, even if it reminded me more of Alice in Wonderland or the Phantom Tollbooth than Tress of the Emerald Sea.

The Netgalley pre-publication version I had was also reasonably well edited, apart from missing the past perfect tense occasionally when talking about something that had happened before the narrative moment.

It does have strengths, but for me they're outweighed by the inconsistent POV and the implausible worldbuilding, and it ends up at three stars.

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