Sunday 24 March 2024

Review: Unnatural Magic

Unnatural Magic Unnatural Magic by C.M. Waggoner
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read the (at time of writing) two books in this series in the wrong order, and it was interesting to compare the two of them. The worldbuilding definitely feels a level deeper in the second one ( The Ruthless Lady's Guide to Wizardry ), though it's not shallow here by any means, and the meaning of a lot of cultural ideas, like being "householded" (something between concubinage and adoption, depending) and the "releft" (apparently a holding place for souls awaiting reincarnation), are both clearer and made clear sooner in the second book. This one is still good, though, with engaging and varied characters, a compelling mystery to unravel, and plenty of magic to enjoy.

The characters range from the young and rather Regency-missish Onna, who is much better at magic than her culture is prepared to accept, to the pragmatic and foul-mouthed troll Tsira, along the way taking in an impoverished gentleman who (for excellent reasons) deserts from the army, where he's a junior officer; the greatest wizard in the world, who was raised in the theatre and is, consequently, extremely theatrical; and a number of minor characters met along the way, most of whom have something unusual about them to make them individual rather than a face in the crowd. Two groups of characters are separate for slightly more than half the book, and at first aren't even pursuing a common goal, but when they come together, both now investigating who is murdering trolls and cutting them up, they mesh well, and everything building up to that point is fully justified and important.

One thing I noticed about the other book, but didn't mention in my review, is that the majority of characters seem to be bisexual. We get more of a view of troll culture in this one, and it appears that gender and sexuality are a lot more optional for trolls than humans, though - possibly under the influence of the culturally dominant trolls - they're also more optional for humans as an accepted part of their culture than in the approximate equivalent time and place in our world (early-19th-century Europe).

I spotted the villain relatively early, not because they looked at all likely in the world of the story, but just because I know how stories work, and they were the person who would be the most dramatic choice. The pursuit of the solution to the mystery was interesting to follow anyway, and the villain's motivation was surprisingly relatable.

(view spoiler) However, this was a minor flaw.

Speaking of minor flaws, there were a few small glitches: a word repeated at the end of a sentence, the typo "string" for "sting," "lead" for "led," "laid" for "lay" and vice versa, an excess comma in the phrase "Of course I do," "straights" for "straits," and misplaced apostrophes in what should be the trolls' quarter and the wizards' club. I still give it my "well-edited" tag, because in a book this long that's a small number of mostly subtle errors.

Though at times more bloody and frequently raunchier than I usually prefer, these are excellently written books by a skilled author, and I enjoy them even when they're in territory I usually avoid.

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Friday 22 March 2024

Review: The Knife and the Serpent

The Knife and the Serpent The Knife and the Serpent by Tim Pratt
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There is an intersection on my Venn diagram of books between "well written" and "not for me," and this book is in it.

Why did I pick it up? Especially considering that the premise of "relative dies suddenly, young woman goes to deal with the estate and discovers she's Special" is a) not a great premise in itself and b) the basis of many, many badly-written books?

Well, it was because this author has used that exact premise before, and elevated it into something wonderful, namely Heirs of Grace . That book has what I call the Glorious Ending, where someone makes a generous choice out of love that averts what has, up to that point, looked like inevitable tragedy.

The problem is, as I said in my review of his short story collection Hart and Boot and Other Stories , "Tim Pratt is an author of two very different aspects. The aspect I encountered first was in his Marla Mason stories (as T.A. Pratt), in which unpleasant people do unpleasant things to other unpleasant people, with a good deal of meaningless and often kinky sex, graphic violence, and occasional drug use." And that is the Pratt of this book, more so than the other, kinder, more joyful and hopeful Pratt that I was looking for. It isn't all the way up against the stop at the dark end of the spectrum; Glenn, though he clearly has issues, isn't a bad person, and Vivy's main issue is that she doubts everything about herself except her ideology, which is the thing she actually should be doubting (in my opinion), and their relationship, while kinky, is loving, but Tamsin is a straight-up Marla Mason character. She's a Hidden Princess, a type of character I'm particularly allergic to, and the only reason that she might look slightly like possibly a bit of a decent character if you stand a long way away and squint in a bad light is because she spends a lot of time standing next to a psychotic murderer, who is much worse. The murderer who killed her grandmother, who raised her. The murderer who she then hired to get revenge on the people who (she is just now learning) wiped out the rest of her family, who she doesn't remember; why she wants revenge on the people she hasn't met who killed her family members that she didn't know, but not, apparently, on the guy who's right there who killed the one family member she did know, may have something to do with the fact that her revenge would also make her rich and powerful. As far as I read, which is a little over halfway, she doesn't spare a single thought for the collateral damage that would be involved on innocent wage slaves who just happen to be in the way.

She also receives a bit of plot help, in the form of a necklace she accidentally finds that enables her to access her family's hidden caches of weapons and wealth.

Glenn and Tamsin are the two first-person viewpoint characters. Glenn often finds it necessary to talk about his and Vivy's BDSM relationship, which is something that I neither grok nor want to grok, and Tamsin is just stone cold. There's also a highly annoying AI called Eddie, balanced to some degree by a more jovial (but still murderous) AI named Swarm.

It's possible, even likely, that this book also has a Glorious Ending in which Glenn (I would bet) does something generous and loving that averts tragedy, but honestly, I don't want to spend the time with these characters that I would have to go through in order to get to that ending, if indeed it is there.

I received a pre-publication version via Netgalley for review.

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Tuesday 19 March 2024

Review: Inspector French and the Cheyne Mystery

Inspector French and the Cheyne Mystery Inspector French and the Cheyne Mystery by Freeman Wills Crofts
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A classic detective story which can be regarded as a pioneer of the "police procedural" type, though Inspector French, the Scotland Yard detective, doesn't appear until about the 60% mark. The Cheyne of the title is a remarkably gullible man, who's fooled twice by essentially the same scheme and then continues to believe the criminals when they tell him several more ridiculous stories. Still, I found the various adventurous shenanigans entertaining while waiting for him to figure out that he needs to involve the police.

Once French is on the case, he approaches it methodically and makes progress through sound detective work. I wasn't surprised to discover that the author was an engineer; French is, in a way, an engineer of a detective, working steadily and solidly and without much drama. Unlike most fictional detectives, he has no personal peculiarities to speak of, and is happily married (though his wife is only briefly mentioned). He's almost more a plot device than he is a character, at least in this book.

While the plot doesn't constantly rely on coincidence, there are a few lucky chances that keep the dull-witted Cheyne alive despite himself, one of which (a woman happens to find him after he's been injured, and gets help) is never explained; the woman subsequently becomes involved in the case, helping him to investigate, and eventually and inevitably becomes his love interest (view spoiler), but we never find out why she was in that part of town (which wasn't her neighbourhood or anywhere close to it) late at night in the first place. (view spoiler)

The conclusion of the book, once French figures out the puzzle, is rather anticlimactic. (view spoiler)

It's a curate's egg of a book; parts of it are excellent, mainly the parts where Cheyne is, somewhat ineptly, trying to solve the case himself and doing all kinds of daring, or rather incautious, things in pursuit of that goal. Once French arrives, it becomes less an adventure and more of a puzzle, and after French solves the puzzle, it wraps up rapidly, with any further excitement occurring off-screen and being reported after the fact. I enjoyed it despite its unevenness and the things that didn't make much sense, and would consider reading other books by the author if I was in the right mood, but it's not up to the standard of other classic books of the time.

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Monday 18 March 2024

Review: The Secret of Sarek

The Secret of Sarek The Secret of Sarek by Maurice Leblanc
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Every one of the Lupin books I've read so far has been different, and this one is a bloody melodrama, in which Lupin isn't even mentioned until 39% of the way through the book. The overall tone is highly sensational, and very early on there's a harrowing description of a mass murder, made worse in that the viewpoint character believes one of the murderers to be her long-lost son. No fewer than five characters are, at some point, believed to be dead but actually turn out to be alive.

Lupin's contribution is his classic "manipulate people's perception to pull off a seemingly impossible illusion," some elements of which are not especially convincing. (view spoiler) Another key feature of the plot is based on contemporary misunderstandings of the properties of a then-little-understood substance. (view spoiler) And the whole plot, we're asked to believe, is constructed largely upon (view spoiler)

It was gripping, though, and even though the amount of suffering and death was wildly excessive for my taste (my taste being for very little of either), and even though I set it aside for some time to read other things, I still found it compelling to read when I went back to it; there are weaknesses in the plot, for sure, but this is still a highly skilled writer, and I have to give it a (low) spot in my Best of the Year list just based on how well it's done.

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Thursday 14 March 2024

Review: Emissary

Emissary Emissary by Melissa McShane
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was surprised to discover (from the author's husband's review) that this was Melissa McShane's first book. Right out of the gate, she's demonstrating the strengths that make her one of my favourite authors.

In just the first two chapters, we have a motivated protagonist in a dynamic situation, plenty of worldbuilding without infodumping, the protagonist's character and powers shown rather than told, a setting that already feels solid and lived-in rather than a bunch of scenery flats, and two important relationships set up: the solid, capable support of the protagonist's friend/companion/sidekick/bodyguard, and the believable opposition of a minor antagonist. Also, it's not made from box mix; it's a fresh concept in a secondary world, though not so fresh as to be hard to relate to.

We soon get a number of well-motivated political complications; the protagonist, a priest of the god of death, has a mission (to investigate a number of apparitions of dead people, which are not like the ghosts she usually deals with, in an important city), and a number of highly-placed people have various agendas that conflict with that mission or want to use her for their own purposes. I did have slight trouble keeping track of who was who sometimes, but only occasionally, and as soon as I searched their name in my e-reader and saw the context where they'd first appeared, I knew exactly who they were and what their role was. Nobody acted out of character or was just inexplicably evil; they all had good reasons for doing what they did, even the gods, several of whom appear as characters late in the book.

The other thing I like about Melissa McShane books, including this one, is that, apart from the occasional small glitch ("X hill" should probably be "X Hill"; "councilor Y" should definitely be "Councilor Y"; typo "food" for "foot"), it's smoothly edited, so I'm not constantly distracted by basic mechanical errors.

More than solid, this is a fine debut novel, at least as good as most of the author's other excellent books. (My absolute favourite, The Smoke-Scented Girl , is also an early work.) It's a firm recommendation from me, and it makes the Gold tier of my Best of the Year list for 2024.

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Monday 11 March 2024

Review: Journey to Everland Bay

Journey to Everland Bay Journey to Everland Bay by Lynne Shaner
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

A lack of contractions leads to stiff dialog, and a frequent absence of the past perfect tense makes for temporal whiplash. And then we get the worn-out and, if you think about it much at all, unlikely trope of "magic is (about to be) forbidden," and this was a DNF for me quite early on.

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Review: The Ruthless Lady's Guide to Wizardry

The Ruthless Lady's Guide to Wizardry The Ruthless Lady's Guide to Wizardry by C.M. Waggoner
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In theory, I shouldn't have enjoyed this book.

The protagonist smokes, drinks too much, swears, has casual sex (even while pursuing a relationship with someone else), steals, and runs minor cons. Her brilliant plan to resolve the story problem involves cooking what is essentially magical meth (so as to get in with the villain, who is running a magical-meth operation). She has some reasons for all this, in that her mother was an addict, her father apparently absent, and she was brung up any old how in extreme poverty. One of the things that makes her likeable despite it all is that she doesn't use this as an excuse; she's aware that she makes bad decisions and takes responsibility for the consequences, and in the course of the book, though she still makes a number of bad decisions, she does start to make better ones. She's also not nearly as awful as she thinks she is; she has very low self-esteem. For example, she thinks she's unattractive, but that's clearly not the case, since multiple other characters are attracted to her in the course of the book.

The other thing that saved it for me was the voice. It's quirky, individual, and frequently hilarious, and it's delivered with very few flaws. Alarm bells tend to ring for me when I read that an author has a creative writing degree; whatever they're teaching in those classes, it's not basic mechanics or, as far as I can make out, much in the way of craft, and books from creative writing grads are often awful. In this case, either the author went to a particularly fine program, or she learned how to write independently of it, or she had an especially talented editor, or some combination of the three, because apart from a few missing capitals and a typo or two, the copy editing is excellent. There's nothing wrong with the structure, the emotional arc, the characterization or the worldbuilding, either. (I did spot one minor worldbuilding inconsistency; the small denomination of currency is the "sen," but at one point the characters pay for something with pennies.)

I did think for a while that the many dire warnings of how bad Delly's decisions were meant that this was going to turn into a tragedy, but happily it did not, allowing me to rank it in the Silver tier of my Best of the Year list. It's knocking insistently on the door of Gold, but the negatives I listed at the start of the review mean I can't quite bring myself to let it into that exclusive company. They also led me to wonder, as I was reading, whether I would read another book by the author, even though I was enjoying the voice of this one so much; by the end, I'd decided that I do want to read the previous book in the (apparently loose) series, which sounds like it's about how the parents of one of the characters in this book get together.

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