Review: Tea & Wizardry: A Novel

Tea & Wizardry: A Novel by Joanna Ruth Meyer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This almost got five stars from me, but just missed out. I'll explain why in a minute, first saying that I had a pre-publication version via Netgalley for review, and it doesn't necessarily represent the final published version that's scheduled to come out six months from when I read it.

I've read a few books this year (mostly with "tea" in the title) that I've tagged as "dark-marketed-as-cozy." In other words, someone wanted to write a dark fantasy, but with cozy being the current hotness, they or their publisher decided to slap a cozy-style cover on it, put "tea" in the title and use the word "cozy" in the blurb, while keeping the violence, cruelty and horror. This is not one of those, but the author's background as an epic fantasy author becomes more and more obvious as the book goes on, and the stakes escalate from the typical cozy level (my niece is being bullied at school, the local magical creature rescue charity keeps dumping sick creatures on me to care for) to cosmic in scope. However, even while this happens, the small and the local retain their centrality and critical emotional importance to the characters, which to me is part of the heart of the cozy genre.

The other unusual thing about this one is that, unlike almost every other cozy book about a small business, it actually brings in aspects that a real business has to deal with, like debt and cash flow. Part of the setup is that the cafe at the centre of the story is mortgaged, and the owner Faedra (the central character) hasn't been paying the mortgage since accepting responsibility for her infant niece from her selfish sister thirteen years previously, and so the new owner of the mortgage - a wizard who has inherited it from his father, also a wizard - turns up and forecloses.

That's an important plot driver, and you'd think it would make the business more plausible. But to me, it made it less so. Firstly, we're never told why a 300-year-old business was mortgaged in the first place. I thought it might have been to fund the expensive magical treatments for Faedra when she was younger, but that's never given as the reason, and nor is anything else. Secondly, the business seems busy; they're sometimes swamped with customers, and it's not obviously being mismanaged, and apparently before Faedra took on her niece, she was able to pay the mortgage, but somehow she stopped being able to. Babies are expensive, yes, and later on there are private school fees, but it didn't ring true to me. There's even a full-time accountant - which, again, to me was implausible for a business this size, which would be more likely to have a part-time bookkeeper who also helped out waiting tables and/or looking after the magical creatures; and if there's a full-time accountant, why isn't he making sure the mortgage gets paid? He never says a single word about the subject - and doesn't do anything else in the plot important enough to justify his presence in the cast, either. Not that I disliked him, he just seemed not to have much purpose, either as an accountant or as a person.

So the introduction of real-world elements that are usually glossed over in cozy fantasy made it, for me, actually less plausible. Also, the characters keep standing up to unjust and arbitrary authority and not apparently experiencing any consequences for doing so, though this is far from the first book where that happens. Other than that, though, it had sound emotional beats; appealing characters who grow and change in relationship to each other and through the events of the plot; and well-sustained tension that escalated throughout, to an unexpectedly high but not unwelcome maximum by the end.

The copy editing, even in a pre-publication version, is unusually good, though there are a few vocabulary choices I'll question when I give feedback to the publisher via Netgalley (like Faedra staying on as the "proprietor" of the cafe when she's explicitly no longer the owner - which is what "proprietor" usually means).

To me, it was very strong, knocking on the door of five stars, but not quite there because there were elements that prevented me from fully suspending my disbelief. I'm sure it will gain a wide and enthusiastic readership, and it deserves to.

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Review: Eternity's Tomb

Eternity's Tomb by Dan Moren
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A fun heist (of sorts) space opera comedy that also has a character arc for the protagonist and narrator, known only as Z.

A floating brain in a jar (this is just one of the alien species in the Thousand Stars) who's an archaeologist commissions Z to assist with locating and entering the legendary space tomb of an ancient king, whose entire planet was wiped out after his time by an asteroid. The tomb is, and has for a long time been, hurtling towards the supermassive black hole at the centre of the galaxy, where the ancient king's people believed their gods resided.

Z is just out of jail, and his former associates are not greatly keen on the job at first, especially his ex, a pilot now bonded at a quantum level with her ship. Z left her when she decided to get this procedure done, rather than supporting her when she needed it. The rest of the crew consists of a bearlike alien engineer named (for no reason that is ever explained) Graham, and his friend, a nonverbal genetically engineered avian assassin, for whom Graham has assumed responsibility since finding him in a lab surrounded by dead unethical scientists.

There's always a tension, sometimes amounting to a contradiction, between what Z tells us and shows us. He tells us he's a screwup, and indeed shows us that sometimes as well, but his friends still follow him when that isn't the most sensible option. He tells us he's abrasive and an awful person, yet not only do his friends follow him as if he's charismatic, but he genuinely cares about them and, in the course of the book, shows them. He's a rogue, no question, but he does have an ethical code and ends up doing the right thing at his own expense.

The action is cinematic, with unexplained cool tech (including (view spoiler)[the murderbird being able to hijack and direct one of the automated sentries in the tomb by stabbing his knives into its head and moving them around, in a move reminiscent of the movie Ratatouille (hide spoiler)]), last-second escapes perfectly timed to several ticking clocks, and the whole crew going for an entire day with little food or rest and no sleep. If you put your mind into the right mode for the genre and don't think about it too hard, it's enjoyable and exciting, with plenty of tension and good emotional beats. There's technobabbled FTL and a universal translator.

I did see a couple of the twists coming, but they're clever for all that, and overall I found it a satisfying read.

At this point, I would normally talk about the editing and give specific examples, but Angry Robot (who supplied me with a review copy via Netgalley) have specifically asked me not to mention errors, so I'll just say it's not terrible and I'll be letting them know the issues I did spot, which are subtle ones.

The ending sets up for a sequel, which I would love to read. Recommended.

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Review: The Ministry and the San Francisco Magical Incident: A Cozy Fantasy Novel of Mystery

The Ministry and the San Francisco Magical Incident: A Cozy Fantasy Novel of Mystery by Dael Astra
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I enjoyed the first book in the series, but I also had some issues with it, namely that its worldbuilding took too much too directly from the Harry Potter universe; that it was wordy and full of double and triple adjectives, which all had commas between them that they often should not have had; and that I sometimes didn't believe the emotional beats.

I'm delighted to report that this second book avoids all of those issues. No unnecessary Potter; it's tightly written and sparing in its adjectives, and when there are two of them there's only a comma if it needs one; and the emotional beats are sound and, to me, fully plausible, not to mention moving (which is where the fifth star comes in).

It isn't perfect. The author doesn't observe the convention that when the same speaker carries on from one paragraph to the next, you don't close the quotation marks in the first paragraph. A number of sentences phrased as questions don't have question marks. And there's a complete lack of recap; if you started with this book, rather than reading from the beginning of the series, you wouldn't know who the protagonist is, why she's in charge, how she's grown and changed from who she was previously (which is important), who her sidekick is and what their relationship is (it doesn't really progress in the course of the book), who the people she talks to back in New York are, the significance of the cat, or anything about how this universe works. All these things are alluded to rather than explained, and even though I read the first book last year, I didn't remember all of the events as clearly as I needed to in order to get the full context for this one. A little more "previously-on", delivered like backstory, would have gone a long way. Also, we never do get an explanation for what has kicked off the underlying crisis, but that's less important than that it exists and what the characters do in response to it.

It's a book that involves a lot of magical problem-solving, in an engineering sort of way, which I personally enjoy. Again, the rules of what everything does are not recapped, if they were even given in the first book, which I don't remember, but an experienced SFF reader should be able to follow it in general, and the important bit is the significance of what's happening, not the details of how it's done. The San Francisco magical office, which is based in three Victorian-style houses joined together, is under mysterious attack; things are going wrong in a way that implies sabotage, and it takes expertise and teamwork to fix them.

The teamwork is great. All of the characters are very mature; they can talk about their feelings, they can set their feelings aside and do the right thing rather than the thing they prefer, they support each other, they're honest with each other even when that shows them in a negative light.

The plot gives a sense of urgency and momentum even before the ticking clock starts, in contrast to the wordy languor of Book 1, while keeping away from the thriller trap of action that means nothing. Every action has emotional weight, because people's wellbeing is at stake.

The self-important cat is wonderful, especially in the part where the characters go to an alternate San Francisco where cats and dogs are in charge and humans are their staff - not just in the joking way we sometimes say that, but for real.

I enjoyed it very much, and it's good to see growth not only in the characters but in the skill of the author. I look forward to the next instalment.

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Review: The Inn at the Foot of Mount Vengeance

The Inn at the Foot of Mount Vengeance by Chiara Bullen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A well-written cozy which shows us people changing for the better through each other's influence, which in my view is the best kind of cozy.

Ainsworth has risen, by hard work and ability, from being the son of a small tradesman to a well-regarded young research scholar at a prestigious institution. He's at about the equivalent of a postdoc or fellow, and has received generous research funding to go to a remote area where there's an inn at the foot of a reputedly dragon-haunted peak. His great-grandfather, according to letters preserved in the family, went there, but never apparently returned.

He'd originally planned on a different research project, but his mentor packed him off on this one - reading between the lines only very slightly - because his toxic boyfriend had been even more toxic than usual and this time had actually injured him physically as well as emotionally. The boyfriend goes off on what was going to be their joint project, and Ainsworth goes to the inn.

There, he meets a crew of characters who are recovering from their own difficult backstories in the low-pressure environment, under the leadership of the innkeeper, Honey. From an unpromising start, where he displays all the snobbishness he's learned in order to fit in at the snooty institution, he gradually reverts to the decent person he grew up as, and he and Honey become friends, with a side of attraction. But he still considers himself bound to the toxic boyfriend. (Both he and Honey are bisexual, in the usual way of 2020s fantasy romance.)

Ainsworth wants to interview adventurers about their experiences on the mountain, but the weird thing is that after a night at the inn, every single one of them decides that it's not worth risking their lives there, that there are more important things they could be doing, and they have nothing to prove. It's like overnight therapy.

Eventually, after Ainsworth has got his head together, we learn why this is (I guessed part of the big twist well in advance, but it was a good one). It's an emotionally satisfying journey and conclusion.

I always comment on the copy editing of books I read. This one isn't bad as such books go, only occasionally missing out the past perfect tense or inserting an unnecessary comma between non-coordinate adjectives. There are a couple of misplaced apostrophes, a few mangled idioms (and perhaps one or two of those are just different in Scotland, where the author's from?) and a dangling modifier, plus a few words used incorrectly. It's better than average.

Overall, capably written and enjoyable, and I'd read another from the author.

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Review: The Maze of Ortygia: A Disappearance at Hecate Station

The Maze of Ortygia: A Disappearance at Hecate Station by Robert Hildenbrand
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The most obvious problem with this one is that the dialog is so stilted, with very few contractions, and all the characters sound the same.

The lesser but still important problems include the fact that the author frequently tells us how a character is instead of showing us, and that a lot of important information seems to stay in the author's head and never make it to the page, or only make it there suddenly and with no preparation. For example, a character who has seemed up to that point to be human is abruptly announced to be a human-shaped cyborg (most cyborgs in this setting aren't human-shaped). This isn't something the other characters discover; it's just narrated.

There's a might-as-well-be-magical stuff called "ether," with abilities that are not at all defined to begin with (so it's not Sandersonian). We're just told it's useful, not how or why. Later on, it can apparently form complex illusory scenes, and convert other matter into itself (so it seems to be programmable matter, maybe). Conveniently, when a lot of it rushes out of a confined space, it only pushes named characters around a bit (and the one it bounces off the wall is enhanced to take it), but it kills an unspecified number of unnamed characters by tearing their ship apart and converting parts of the ship into more of itself, at just the point where its pressure ought to drop. It even luckily prevents a named character from being hit by laser fire at the same time. It might as well be called "makesnodamnsensium" or "plotconveniencium."

FTL isn't a thing, and we're told that backup will take an infeasibly long time to reach the system, but then we're also told in a different context that backup can be called and will arrive "soon". Ships can't operate without their transponders, but a number of duplicate ships are swapping around the same transponder, and radar doesn't seem to be picking up the discrepancy.

Add to this that the author doesn't always type the word he means ("forward" instead of "future," "would" instead of "wouldn't"), and often doesn't use the past perfect tense to position events comprehensibly in time relative to the narrative moment. In fact, it starts out in present tense for a short time, and then drops suddenly into past. There are missing commas around terms of address, fumbled idioms, and a plural conveyed by using an apostrophe after the "s". These problems aren't particularly frequent, and I saw a pre-publication version via Netgalley, so some of the more egregious errors might be corrected by publication - or they might not.

I got about halfway through and wasn't much gripped by the several mysteries, particularly since I suspected they would be solved by the use of plotconveniencium, so I started reading something else to see if I cared enough to come back to this. I concluded that I didn't.

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Review: The Curry Bible: The Ultimate Indian Cookbook Featuring 100 Classic Recipes

The Curry Bible: The Ultimate Indian Cookbook Featuring 100 Classic Recipes by Nisha Katona
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The strength of this book is that the recipes are quite simple.

This is also its weakness, in that the detail they leave out is probably the difference between an OK recipe and a good recipe. Also, some of them just don't seem quite right to me.

I made the aubergine and potato curry. Most of the vegetarian recipes feature potatoes, not my favourite vegetable, but I suppose I can substitute. I didn't substitute, though, and made it basically as written, except that my "large" 500g aubergine/eggplant was almost twice as large as the "large" 300g one the recipe specifies, and the recipe says to cut it into 8 pieces, which I thought would be too big (even if I went for 16 pieces to allow for the difference), so I cut it about the size specified for the potatoes, 3cm. This gives a very rustic result, and it's difficult to get the potatoes cooked through. I happened to have more potatoes than called for, too, in about the same proportion as the eggplant, so I increased the spices slightly to compensate. I didn't double them, and was glad I hadn't; I think that would have been too strong for me. As it was, it made a pleasant curry, with slightly undercooked potatoes even though I gave them extra cooking time. I will probably make it again, but substitute carrots for the potatoes and cut everything smaller.

To accompany the curry, I made the roti recipe. The texture came out a bit cardboardy, which didn't surprise me much, since, comparing with other recipes, 10 minutes is a very short time to rest the dough after kneading, and a lot of the recipes call for resting it again after rolling into balls. Coating the dough ball in plenty of oil worked well for cooking them on the griddle without creating burned-on carbon, though, so I will take that approach with other flatbreads in future. They tasted OK, but with so few ingredients that also wasn't surprising.

The spice mix section at the front is probably the best thing in the book from my perspective, and I will be using it. I made one of the mixes as part of the curry recipe, and it was good, though, again, I probably wouldn't have enjoyed it as much if I'd used more of it.

Not a complete fail, but not one of the great cookbooks either.

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Review: Legendary: Help Unwanted

Legendary: Help Unwanted by A.M. Mirabella
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The story of a diligent Hero (paladin-adjacent, but not religious) and a fairy who offers to help in the Hero's latest quest: retrieving the ingredients for a potion to save her prince yet again. The prince has magical blood, and everyone literally wants a piece of him, so her task of protecting him is challenging and never-ending. There are multiple references to her previous adventures protecting him, starting six years earlier, when (aged 12) she cut off the head of a sorcerer who was after his blood.

From a storytelling angle, it's strong, with plenty of good emotional beats as the hero and the fairy work together and attempt to deal with their respective trauma. Plenty of plot twists and reverses, a villain you love to boo, and encounters with interesting minor characters, who don't feel as flat as such characters often do in books like this. It's a world that's had a degree of thought put into it, with an entire kingdom that flies, plenty of legendary creatures, and magic in all directions. The sensawunda is strong with this one. At the same time, the inner and outer conflicts are believable and engaging. Some of the concerns, and proposed solutions (like taking a vacation as a way of relieving the pressure from constant stressful work), are modern rather than of the equivalent historical period, but that helps them work for a contemporary audience.

Like practically every new book I read, whether from Netgalley pre-publication like this one or from Bookbub after publication, it could do with a bit more editing, and quite a bit more past perfect tense. There are a couple of apostrophe glitches, a dangling modifier, some ambiguous pronoun usage, a few excess hyphens and an outright misspelling, as well as a continuity error. I'll point all of these out to the publisher in the hope that they get corrected.

The hero works in what's described as a kingdom, but it appears to be ruled by a prince and princess with the support of a council of sages, which would normally make it a principality (a word that does get used in another context). Also, the prince and princess are addressed as "Your Majesty" rather than the more usual form for princes and princesses, "Your Highness," though if they're the rulers this is more justifiable.

These are relatively minor issues, and there aren't a great many of most of them (apart from the missing past perfect). Overall, it's a capably told, enjoyable fantasy, and I'll be watching out for more in the series.

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