Review: Super Santa

Super Santa by Kristen Pham
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Well-intentioned, but not a success for me.

I saw it on Netgalley and requested it because I enjoy superhero novels, and hadn't seen one in a while. They used to be very common a few years ago, but they've fallen out of fashion; now, the kind of people who were writing them mostly seem to be writing LitRPG instead. They also used to be horribly edited, and this one (even in the pre-publication version I had via Netgalley) is not, so that's good. It does have a lot of excess commas between adjectives (including after "single" and "one," which are adjectives that should never get a comma because their order is fixed), and a couple of other glitches I'll mention to the publisher in the hope that they're corrected.

It's not right in the centre of the superhero novel genre. There are elements, but it's primarily a magical Christmas story along the lines of the movie Elf, say. In fact, it's very like a typical Christmas movie, and I was utterly unsurprised when the author's acknowledgements in the back mentioned that it started life as a screenplay. That inevitably means that large swathes of it don't make a lick of sense, but as well as the bits that didn't make sense because magical Christmas story, there were some bits that didn't make sense just in general.

For example, a reasonably important plot point depends on the fact that the author apparently doesn't know that charcoal and coal are different substances, only one of which is used to grill burgers over. A scene with the reindeer outdoors in which the protagonist, Kris, starts out not knowing the reindeer's names and then, without transition, begins using them, is suddenly and also without transition apparently inside their barn. The Christmas hyena (a commendably original and fairly funny character) is not only mentally and physically capable of sending an email from an unattended computer, which I could have just barely swallowed, but knows Kris's email address without apparently ever having been told it, and what's more has an email address of his own, in the domain of the lab where he's an experimental subject, and sends from it with no apparent setup or login.

The elephant in the room, as with any Christmas story, is that secular Christmas in real life involves exactly the corporate, capitalistic, cynical exploitation that the wholesome characters are theoretically fighting against with the power of Christmas Spirit. (Said Spirit is described in exactly the words of the Force from Star Wars, which I found amusing, as I was clearly intended to.)

The characters are deeply wholesome, except of course for the cartoonishly evil villains. Kris starts out as a sad and cynical Goth girl with not much ability at anything, but is transformed by a swift training montage into a gung-ho warrior of the Christmas Spirit. Her nonbinary best friend, whose personality mainly consists of averagely gibberish technobabble, is supportive and... supportive. Nobody has much depth, not even the main character, who has the backstory for it but ducks most of the inner conflicts, and overcomes the obstacles with relative ease. The plot twists are extremely predictable, and it takes even the very intelligent character far too long to tumble to the glaringly obvious.

Kris is a Chosen One destined by blood, which is one of my all-time least favourite tropes. In fact, when I saw "zero toxic tropes" in the blurb, I thought, "that probably depends on your definition," and I was right - destiny-by-blood is a toxic trope in my book, not only because it perpetuates a myth that's been used to oppress people for centuries (by claiming that people's position in society, up or down, is justified based on inherent qualities obtained solely through their ancestry), but also because it takes away agency, and is often used as a shortcut to avoid requiring the character put in much work to become capable. I usually avoid Chosen One books, not only because I consider it an awful trope but because I consider it badly overused and without any freshness left in it, but I didn't know this was one when I picked it up.

It's not without its strengths; it's genuinely amusing at times, and it has a good heart, though the message is well worn and taken from basically every Christmas kids' movie ever. But for me, the execution was lacking.

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Review: A Riddle in Bronze

A Riddle in Bronze by Simon Haynes
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a rarity: a steampunk book that isn't crammed full of vocabulary errors - though there are one or two, and it has problems with missing vocative commas (the ones that make the difference between "I don't know Jack" and "I don't know, Jack") and makes most of the common apostrophe errors. The main character is kind of an idiot, but manages to stumble his way to heroism somehow, and overall it was an enjoyable ride.

It's amusing. There's a running gag, for example, where the narrator/protagonist forms a mental image of someone before meeting them and is completely and utterly wrong. The professor is pompous, headstrong and given to calling out faults in others that he possesses himself; for some reason his housekeeper is nevertheless in love with him.

"For some reason" does a bit of heavy lifting at several points in the plot, and there were several moments that unsuspended my disbelief, like tiles on the walls of an uncompleted tunnel and a mysterious supply of faceless sacrificial victims that apparently come from nowhere. There's a strong horror element - ghosts and demons - but it's in the comic mode of Ghostbusters, and despite not liking horror I didn't find it a problem. Some of the plot twists were a bit predictable, but from a relatively short distance away.

I don't know that I'd read another in the series. It was enjoyable enough, but the romance seemed a touch forced, there were continuity issues, and it lacked that final polish that I look for. It was on the good side of OK.



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Review: Magicians' Rivalry

Magicians' Rivalry by H.L. Burke
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A pleasant if somewhat brief and linear YA-shading-to-NA. The two title characters are in their early 20s, but the young woman who is the sister of one and the love interest of the other is 17, and I felt it was more aimed at that age.

The somewhat estranged heir to a rural magician starts out in conflict with his father's apprentice, hence the title, but they quickly (perhaps a little too quickly) learn to work together against a common threat and become solid allies. Fast friends, if you like. There's an existential threat behind the initial more personal threats, involving the fae realm (the source of magic power), and courage and intelligence and skill from all three young people are needed to resolve it.

The editing could use a touch more work; there are some important commas missing, and some vocabulary issues ("honorary" to describe a paid post, crumbled for crumpled, posed for poised, pence used as singular, sheath for sheaf). It's not too bad.

I'd had it on my TBR for a long time, and picked it up when it went on sale. It was enjoyable enough, but there isn't quite enough here for me to want to continue in the series.

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Review: The Rose-Garden Husband

The Rose-Garden Husband by Margaret Widdemer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A sweet romance from 1914. Not my usual fare, but I do like an occasional sentimental romance.

The backstory is tragic, but the present-day story is the opposite. Allan is a young man who, a few years ago, crashed his car, leading to the death of his fiancee (who was a lifelong friend) and injuring him so badly he can no longer walk or use one arm. His rather foolish mother has spent the subsequent years weeping over him, indulging him, and keeping him in a dark, quiet room. He is understandably depressed.

Now the mother is dying, and her brilliant solution is to get a wife for Allan who will look after him in her stead, because she doesn't trust his attendants to do so properly (even though his manservant is deeply loyal to him). She talks to an old school friend, who happens to know a candidate.

This candidate is our heroine, introduced at the beginning of the book as the "Liberry Teacher," which is what the children who come to the library where she works call her. Her given name is Phyllis. She's the orphaned daughter of a minister, left without much money when he died, and having to work long hours in not great conditions to scrape a living. She has no prospects of meeting anyone she'd want to marry, and she wants to escape her drudgery (even though she likes the children), so she agrees to marry Allan - a marriage of convenience, she thinks.

Of course this leads to mutual pining, misunderstandings, and an eventual happy-ever-after, because this is a romance, after all. It's well told, though, and I found it moving at times.

Certainly one could choose to disapprove of Phyllis. She's always a little conscious of being raised for better things and higher culture, and wishes that the poor immigrant children who use her library were cleaner and less... foreign. She uses a few terms about them and about the black servants she eventually has that wouldn't be used by someone like her today, though she's affectionate towards both groups. She's clearly in a wish-fulfillment fantasy along the lines of today's billionaire romances, though lower key (she just wants a rose garden and enough money to buy anything she wants, which turns out to be relatively minor extravagences). She's what the Regency would have called "missish" and this book calls "maidenly," which means she's very spooked by the idea of actually being married to a real man who she would have to... associate with. But she's unfailingly kind, naturally cheerful (even if some of her cheerfulness comes from a sense of obligation), and mostly sensible and capable, though naive and with a limited experience of life, and sometimes emotional for understandable reasons. I chose to go with how the author clearly wanted me to regard her, and enjoyed the book as a result.

I found the book through a description in the back of another book I read from the same early-20th-century publisher, and picked it up off Project Gutenberg.

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Review: The Curved Blades

The Curved Blades by Carolyn Wells
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I'm giving up on Carolyn Wells and her detective Fleming Stone after this one, though the others I've read in the series were probably not as good as this. It does present an apparently baffling murder: an ill-tempered, vain middle-aged heiress dies in the middle of the night, and is found the next morning strangely garbed and with all her jewelry on. The suspects include her much put-upon niece, social secretary and business manager, who all live with her and suffer the rough side of her tongue on a regular basis.

Fleming Stone is called in to investigate, and, uncharacteristically and rather foolishly, falls in love with the niece, who is beautiful and significantly younger than him. She's also ill-tempered and high-handed (not compared with her aunt, but compared with an average person), and not particularly sensible or capable, so I didn't care about the romance; I have to like both characters in a romance to have any investment in them getting together.

I figured out who was behind the murder about halfway through, and basically how it was done before the three-quarters mark, even though a key feature of it was not well prepared for in the description of the victim's character. There's a rescue late in the book that is set up to be almost impossible, but ends up being super easy, barely an inconvenience.

It's another one of those classic mystery books where the journey is better than the destination, but in this case the journey isn't amazing either.

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Review: Rogue by Design: A Department of Misconfigured Intelligence Mystery

Rogue by Design: A Department of Misconfigured Intelligence Mystery by Alex Ambler
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is really good, but probably has a limited audience (though one that's growing), and for me was brought down by some tricks of rhetoric used a few too many times for me to keep enjoying them.

It pulls off the difficult feat of turning a bureaucratic investigation of something quite technical into an interesting and compelling plot. The Department of Misconfigured Intelligence is, in the 2050s, tasked with investigating AI that is not performing in the best interests of its users, and this book follows an unfolding investigation of intelligent homes that are starting to restrict the lives of their adult occupants in a paternalistic, infantilising, for-your-own-good kind of way. The burning question is who has told them to and why, and it gets answered in an intriguing and unexpected fashion.

I don't read a lot of SF anymore. I'm more of a fantasy reader, even though I work in technology. This, though, is about the world of technology that I work in; the narrator and lead investigator is a former systems architect whose previous commercial work is the foundation of the very system he's investigating, and the way he and his colleagues approach the investigation is the way I do troubleshooting (but with lawyers), and the values they hold are the very best version of engineering values. Also, the technology is both believable and kind of not the point; the point is that these are systems that interact closely with human beings every day, and that interaction is where the problem lies. And in our current world of rising AI usage, it's a very relevant story. It's a mystery, too, which is the other genre I read a lot.

One reason I don't read much SF anymore is that I look in my preferred fiction for what Dorothy's companions were looking for: a brain, a heart and some courage, and a lot of SF lacks at least one of those, usually the heart (though not infrequently the brain). This has plenty of heart; the narrator and his colleagues and family, and for that matter the complainants, are lovely people who care about doing the right thing. It has perhaps more than enough brain, since you need to be alert to follow it, and it gets pretty abstract at times. And it has the courage to attempt something difficult and timely and yet not merely zeitgeisty, and largely pulls it off.

I say "largely" because it does have its faults, which kept it from quite getting five stars from me. One of the biggest is that it has what I call Scalzi characters: barely or, mostly, not at all described, diverse only in their names and distinguishable largely by their plot roles, and all with the exact same voice. Some of them are not introduced before they start being talked about as if the reader knows who they are.

I mentioned above that there are certain rhetorical tics and tricks that get, to my mind, overused. "Weather," for example, is used as a metaphor so often it loses its meaning, which I think is probably something like "varying environmental conditions that you just have to work with," except that doesn't fit every usage. Everyone says sentences of the form, "An X with a Y isn't a Z; it's an A with opinions." There are four or five of these snowclones, and by the end I was finding them tedious and even a little pretentious, not to mention that they were obscuring the meaning of sentences by being clever instead of relevant. And the fact that so many of the characters (not just the investigator and his colleagues, who might have influenced each other, but some of the complainants, who hardly know them) use the same verbal tics is a fault in itself.

In the version I had from Netgalley for review, the copy editing is almost flawless, except for the consistent non-observance of a specific punctuation convention: when the person speaking carries on speaking in the next paragraph, the first paragraph should not close the quotation marks.

If you're interested in AI and where it might take us, work as or with an engineer, and/or want to follow a complex, compelling investigation of something quite abstract but with clearly shown impact on human beings and a strong emotional arc, this is a terrific book. The prose style could stand to be simpler, from my perspective, but that's partly a matter of taste. The points it's making about work and how it's performed or should be performed, about AI, about values, about freedom and control and how those get balanced, and about responsibility are clear, profound and thought-provoking, and I'll be recommending it to friends and colleagues.

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Review: The Markenmore Mystery

The Markenmore Mystery by J.S. Fletcher
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

When I first started reading Fletcher, I thought I'd found someone who didn't write to a formula. What I've discovered is that it's more the case that he doesn't write to the usual formula for a detective story of the period. He writes to a (loose) formula of his own, though, and I'm coming to not care for it.

This is because it relies heavily on coincidence, and the existence of witnesses to events that should have had no witnesses, and the detective, if any, generally doesn't solve the crime, at least in the way fictional detectives of the time usually solved crimes. In this one, for instance, the police detective does eventually come to understand what happened, but only thanks to a Convenient Eavesdrop (in a remote place, late at night, by total coincidence, by a character who withholds the information until late in the book); a complete accident; and a curious dog belonging to one of the minor characters happening to be in the right place. He works hard throughout, following up clues and eliminating red herrings (one of which had me completely convinced it was the solution), but all of that is rendered irrelevant by the let-down of an ending.

There's a hint of a possibility of a romance that's so underdeveloped it looks like Charles Atlas's Before picture. And (like most police detectives of the period, to be fair) the police detective has almost no personality; he's a machine for solving crimes, but in the end he doesn't actually do that in this case.

The pattern I'm seeing in most of the Fletchers I've read recently is that the journey is good, but the destination disappointing. I think I'm going to either stop reading them or at least look for the best-reviewed ones only.

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