Review: The Early Worm

The Early Worm by Robert Benchley
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Absurdist humour, which I found oddly readable for no reason I could put my finger on. Very much embedded in its time (1927), with a lot of references to contemporary people who I had to look up on Wikipedia, because in the ensuing 100 years they've dropped out of the popular consciousness.

Several of the pieces form a series, originally published in Life magazine, in which a fictionalised version of the author leads an expedition, supposedly sponsored by Life, to the North Pole by bicycle. This was the time of Byrd and Peary, and the North Pole was topical. They end up making it as far as upstate New York.

A surprisingly pleasant distraction for a quiet afternoon, but no classic.

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Review: Cream of the Jug: An Anthology of Humorous Stories

Cream of the Jug: An Anthology of Humorous Stories by Grant Martin Overton
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

As even the editor admits in his introduction, this is a mixed bag. Some stories are by well-known authors still known today like P.G. Wodehouse or F. Scott Fitzgerald, others by authors well known at the time but now obscure, and a couple by authors who weren't even that well known when the book came out. As in any anthology, I enjoyed some more than others.

The Wodehouse I'd read in another collection somewhere. It's the Earl of Emsworth competing against Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe in the agricultural show, this time with a giant pumpkin - before the days of the pig Empress of Blandings, and indeed before Parsloe lived at Matchingham Hall. There's not a lot of protagonism on display from Lord Emsworth, who's the recipient of a good amount of luck in order for everything to work out for him, and it's not a top-flight Blandings story; nobody even goes to Blandings under a false name.

A lot of the stories have soft endings, and several of them rely on dialect (black dialect in one, Jewish dialect in another) for some, although by no means all, of their humour. The "negro" story is, at least, about a black film company from the US South shooting in Algeria, so it's not a stereotypical situation, and would still work if you took the dialect out or, for that matter, if you told it about white people. There's a third dialect story, too, told by a New York blue-collar boxer. That was one of the ways humour was done 100 years ago (think about Damon Runyon). But in all three cases, the situations provide a lot of the humour as well, and the dialect is just spice.

Overall, it's the definition of three stars for me: good enough to recommend, with some caveats.

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Review: The Feywild Job

The Feywild Job by C.L. Polk
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This isn't just better than most licensed fiction; it's better than most fiction I come across.

The thing with licensed fiction is that it's often just officially sanctioned fanfic, and while there is some excellent fanfic here and there, it's not common. Usually, you're going to see a better result from an author who has come up with an original world, situation, and characters, because if they can do that, they're probably talented enough to also tell a good story. (Lots of exceptions in all directions, of course, but that's the way to bet.)

But the thing with D&D licensed fiction is that, while the author is handed a detailed and complex world, they do generally come up with an original situation and characters, and that's what this book is.

A further advantage is that modern D&D is built for creating storytelling potential. Take the idea of a warlock. Here's someone who has made a deal with a powerful otherworldly being in order to get power for themselves. That's just bristling with possible stories. Firstly, it's a relationship that involves a power differential, so you know there's going to be some exploitation happening. Secondly, the warlock has to have had a reason they wanted that power and were prepared to trade for it; what part of them is broken that caused that to be true, and how will that continue to play out? And thirdly, they're now more powerful than the ordinary people around them; how are they going to abuse that?

The central character of this novel (and it deserves to be called a novel) is a warlock, Saeldian, who serves an archfey patron and has made a career out of con games. When Saeldian's old partner, the bard Kell, is forced into doing another job with Saeldian - who left Kell after their last big score in circumstances that looked like a horrible betrayal - we have motivated protagonists in a dynamic situation, and that's always an excellent story engine.

Alongside Saeldian and Kell we have the rogue Jubilee, who's Saeldian's new partner, and the druid Lorzok, who's Kell's new partner. Jubilee needs money to help her parents, former adventurers who have been "gifted" a dilapidated manor; Lorzok is seeking a place where he belongs. They're tasked with a heist, and told that the job is reclaiming a stolen gem with minor magical powers from someone who has bought it from a thief without knowing its provenance, and returning it to its rightful owner in the Feywild without them finding out.

The heist is tricky, but not, perhaps, as tricky as it ought to be; they're given no time to prepare, yet manage to pull off something that ought to be impossible. This eventually turns out to be down to complex machinations.

Along the way, though, the true story unfolds: the relationship between Kell and Saeldian. Is it retrievable? Can they ever be honest with one another? What really caused Saeldian to leave ten years ago? And this is where the book really shines. There's a gradual but completely believable unfolding of the truth and progression of the relationship, and it flows naturally out of the specifics of how the world works, which I always appreciate in a speculative fiction work.

The rich culture of the Forgotten Realms forms a great backdrop to the early part of the book, and the wonderful and terrifying, ever-shifting Feywild is an equally effective setting for the later part. The author does an excellent job of evoking these settings without ever making them the focus; that stays firmly on the characters and their relationships, plus the twisty and surprising plot. Also, you don't need to be familiar with these settings, or with D&D in general, in order to understand what's going on.

I knew C.L. Polk was a good writer, because I'd read The Midnight Bargain and rated it five stars. This book only confirms my opinion. Personally, I would use the past perfect tense more often than it's used here (that's a general trend I've noticed in the books I read), but otherwise I have little to complain of in the copy editing either.

Strongly recommended.

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Review: Entwined Dimensions A Metaphysical Cozy Portal Fantasy with Kiwi Humor: Book 1 of the Eura Trilogy

Entwined Dimensions A Metaphysical Cozy Portal Fantasy with Kiwi Humor: Book 1 of the Eura Trilogy by Ariel Grace
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The point of this book (I think) is that love is more important than tidiness, which I agree with, incidentally. It certainly backs up this content with its form.

If ADHD was a book, this would be that book. The prose is all over the place, rich with imagery that frequently doesn't make much, or any, sense ("a belch of fire blurred up like an alibi"), or even says the opposite of what it is trying to say. ("Zipping along like rush hour traffic on an Auckland motorway" - so, extremely slowly?) It's more often correctly punctuated than not, but the punctuation (and grammar) can also get a bit random at times, and someone needs at absolute minimum to run a spell check before publication. (I had a pre-release copy for review via Netgalley.)

It's set in New Zealand, but frequently says things that are true in the USA but not really in New Zealand (like healthcare being primarily about profit), or that are otherwise coded American (an apartment on 3rd Street - in a town, Kaitaia, which has no 3rd/Third Street). The NZ geography feels a little off all over. It's several times implied that Kaitaia is closer to the sea than is in fact the case (it's several km away). The trip from Kaitaia to Wellington, nearly 1000km, takes place in the break between two paragraphs. Two characters walk (even though they're capable of flying) from the ferry terminal at Blenheim to Motueka, a distance of over 160km/100 miles in a direct line, entirely through forest - which would require you to walk not in a direct line - in what seems to be a few hours.

There is some dimension-hopping going on, so perhaps that's part of the explanation. But things being in a different dimension or timeline doesn't seem to prevent them being findable or usable, nor does it interfere with cell service.

There are multiple first-person viewpoint characters, and since their names are not given at the chapter headers, it sometimes takes a few paragraphs to figure out whose head we're in. Sometimes, when we're in the POV of the guy from the fae realm, he uses expressions and imagery that comes from the human world. (Though there is some kind of connection he has to the human world, I honestly lost track of what it was exactly.) Several characters, from the human and fae worlds, speak in NZ slang, but that also sometimes feels slightly off, like it's being used by someone who's heard it but doesn't speak it, and there are Americanisms like "elementary school" instead of "primary school" that make me suspect the author is a transplanted American. There's a mention of one NZ bird and a couple of NZ trees, but the most frequently mentioned birds are hummingbirds (which supposedly can carry you across to the fae realm if you're small enough) and crows (which can talk, and are convenient helpers a couple of times), and neither of those are found in NZ.

One of the characters is ostensibly a scientist as her day job, but we never see her actually working at this job, and she doesn't seem to need to tell anyone there that she's going to disappear from it indefinitely to deal with the plot - something I call a "superhero job". Her being a scientist is presumably how she manages to invent a badly-sciencebabbled device which is supposed to make her capable of getting to the fae realm, but actually does something completely different that kicks off the whole plot, though it's really more of a series of episodes than a plot. This is almost the last proactive thing she does, certainly the last thing she does without a whole lot of help, but she's apparently the Chosen One and keeps getting commended for doing so well, even though, every time she faces the slightest difficulty, a new character will turn up suddenly (the word "suddenly" appears 20 times) to help or rescue her, or to tell her the power was in her all along, or she'll remember a completely unforeshadowed useful thing she has or knows about that solves the problem.

That was one of my biggest problems with the book: it has almost no conflict that lasts for more than a single scene, and solving cosmic problems that have been in existence for an inconsistent number of years is always super easy, barely an inconvenience. The antagonists are intergalactic bureaucrats that don't trust people to love and think that rules are more important, and when they were referred to as "auditors" at one point I immediately thought of Terry Pratchett's Auditors, those faceless, nameless, unindividualized figures that think life is a mistake. These bureaucrats are not as scary as that, though.

The other big problem I had is that the problem and its solutions are so abstractly described with such a wealth of paradoxical imagery that I found it extremely difficult to follow what was going on, not helped by the bouncing around between characters. It also doesn't help that concrete things are seldom described much, including the NZ landscape, which I think was a missed opportunity. And the word "somehow" is doing some heavy lifting at a couple of points.

It's extremely messy, very metaphysical, cozy only if by cozy you mean "almost everyone is nice," a portal fantasy for sure, and with a small amount of Kiwiness that feels a bit off-brand and some extremely mild humour. I finished it largely because I wanted to see whether the author pulled it all together in some way towards the end, but for me, that didn't really happen.

I've started being harsher with my star ratings this year, so this one gets two stars, meaning that while it has some strengths and isn't a complete disaster, it has enough issues (from my perspective) that it doesn't get onto my annual recommendation list. I don't think I was the right audience for it, and if you are, you should ignore my opinion and go ahead and enjoy it.

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Review: The Daughter of Time

The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Definitely unusual. Tey's detective, laid up in hospital after being injured in pursuit of a suspect, gets interested in history, and applies his police methods to the (then) 400-year-old mystery of what happened to the Princes in the Tower, the two young sons of Edward IV. Did their uncle Richard III have them murdered, as the Tudors and their sponsored authors claimed and as history books have taught ever since, or was that a complete frame-up?

The case comes across as compelling, though apparently Tey left a few things out, and it's not as cut-and-dried as she paints it. Historians certainly object to her approach, perhaps partly because she has some harsh words for historians who draw conclusions completely at odds with the facts they present. She touches on other historical rewrites along the way, again not always completely accurately. For example, she mentions the riots at Tonypandy in Wales in 1910, and the detective and his historical researcher adopt "Tonypandy" as a shorthand for an exaggerated story that's widely believed - in this case, that troops fired on the rioters; but she elides a few of the details, including the fact that one person did die in the riots (though whether as a result of police action or not has never been definitively settled).

Still, while it's possible to quibble over details, this book takes the detective story to a new and unusual place, and manages to make an interesting novel out of a man in a hospital bed reading books and talking to a young researcher about events of four centuries previously, which itself is no mean feat. I found it very educational about a time in English history I was only passingly familiar with, the end and aftermath of the Wars of the Roses, and it also has some things to say about how history is written by the victors and/or the popular imagination, and the difference between what people say happened and what the day-to-day records of ordinary actions show.

Setting aside whether or not its conclusions are as justified as they're made to seem, or whether Tey herself is committing Tonypandy, it's a masterful piece of writing that deserves five stars just for the degree of difficulty, and I also found it entertaining.

Sadly, the HarperCollins ebook edition belies its own claim that they "uphold the highest standards of ebook production" with numerous missing punctuation marks, the obvious result of their usual lack of attention to detail and lack of editorial effort. This book deserves better.

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Review: The Dragon Has Some Complaints

The Dragon Has Some Complaints by John Wiswell
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I also have some complaints.

tl;dr: This book was not for me. I mean that both in the sense that I didn't like it much, and also in the sense that it wasn't intended for the kind of person I am.

If you're the kind of person who will love this book, or have already read it and loved it, reading this review may only annoy you, and you may be better off skipping it and reading one that will reinforce your views instead. I always implicitly write my reviews for people who value the things I value (writing craft, especially) and enjoy the things I enjoy. I write positive reviews to direct them towards books I think they would like, and negative reviews to direct them away from books that are probably not going to be to their taste. If you have different priorities and enjoy different things, what I have to say will not be of much interest to you.

This review is going to be as much an expression of concerns I have about the current cozy fantasy genre in general as it is about this book in particular, though starting from thoughts I had while reading this specific book.

The first thing that bothered me about this book is that it feels like one long point-of-view violation. The viewpoint character is the relatively sane and sensible central head of a three-headed dragon; the other two heads have issues. Upperhead has the delusion that he's human, and Lowerhead has become almost animalistic. All three, including Centerhead, have lost memories because of the trauma of the loss of Lefty, the fourth head, who was favourable towards humans and worked with them. That obscured backstory may partially explain why this supposedly wild dragon not only understands but freely uses so many human concepts, including trans men and women (who he identifies instantly as such), cathedrals, apothecaries and vacations -this last itself being an anachronistic concept for the setting. However, while he recognizes ink and paper, he doesn't understand what writing is - but uses the verb "read" in a metaphorical sense multiple times.

How this came across to me is that the author wasn't putting in the effort, or maybe didn't even think about the need, to characterize someone based on what that sort of character is familiar with and would know and value. Reading some of the reviews of one of his other books reinforces this idea; multiple reviewers mentioned how a solitary swamp monster who had previously had limited and brief interactions with humans seemed to have a complete and instant grasp of how abusive human relationships work, as seen through a this-worldly current-state-of-psychology lens. To me, this is a basic craft issue.

And this is a problem I have with the cozy genre in general. Not only is the worldbuilding often thin, little more than generic sword & sorcery scenery flats, but those scenery flats stand behind people who are, in their attitudes and ways of thinking, completely indistinguishable from mid-2020s US people of a particular type (to which the authors belong). My suspicion is that they are so embedded in a filter bubble that emphasizes doctrinal purity that they are almost unable to conceive of people who might think differently from them, except as othered and villainized; that they have no functional sense of history; and that they believe implicitly that everything they think, and the way they behave, cannot be improved upon and therefore should be universalized. As a young person, I was in a community like this myself, and even though the content of the beliefs could hardly have been more different, I recognize the patterns.

In the typical cozy book, basically every single character (who isn't a villain or at least an opponent) is queer in some way, and most of them are at least one of neurodivergent, disabled, or struggling with anxiety or depression. In these days of self-selecting groups ("found family"), this may be the lived experience of the author; everyone they know is like this. But it's like the famous example of the journalist who, when a political candidate won an election, protested that nobody he knew had voted for him. It says more about the narrowness of the person's experience than the actual constitution of the world at large. I should note that I don't have a problem with people being queer, neurodivergent and etc. These are ways that real people are. But it isn't how everyone is, and universalizing it places me and people like me, who don't have those characteristics (except that I am arguably slightly disabled and occasionally anxious), in an outgroup, just as much as earlier literature placed people who did have them in an outgroup. It's not true inclusiveness if there's still an outgroup, even if that is the people who were traditionally the ingroup. It's still not fully honouring our shared humanity.

In this particular book, the pervasiveness of these types of characters is more or less its only claim to belong to the cozy genre, since it's about a war between diverse refugees from a lightly sketched fascist-imperialist country and that country's military. Nobody here is living the equivalent of a Japanese "slow life." It's more like the demimonde of the Weimar Republic left Germany (though the names are mostly Eastern European), found an uninhabited island, tamed some dragons, created a flying city using the antigravity magic of the dragons, and held out against a much-less-efficient Nazi regime, with Britain pretending to help, but actually out to take half their land and half their dragons in return for minimal assistance. (That is, at least, slightly more worldbuilding than cozy authors often bother with.)

The other thing that annoyed me about this book, and the main reason I gave it up in the middle, is the character Raina, who becomes the rider of the dragon central character. She is the complete opposite of the kind of character I like to read about. She's outwardly naive and optimistic to the point of getting on people's nerves, while on the inside she's a complete emotional bombsite who uses alcohol and casual sex as forms of maladaptive coping. And what escalated her from "annoying character" to "reason to put the book down and not pick it up again" was that the dragon declares to Raina that she is everything a human should want to be, which is a statement I couldn't disagree with more strongly. To me, that's not unconditional acceptance; it's enabling.

If you don't care about the POV issues and can cope with Raina, this is a competently written book with the right emotional beats to appeal to plenty of readers. In the author's afterword, he mentions that the copy editor remarked on how clean it was, and I agree that it has fewer issues than average, but there are some words used in odd senses, and a few small words like "to" and "the" dropped out of the occasional sentence in the pre-publication version I had from Netgalley. (Missing words are a hard thing to spot unless you have the knack of it.)

It's not a terrible book. It just very much is not for me.

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Review: Murder on the Airship

Murder on the Airship by Victoria Bergman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've been reading a lot of classic mystery books lately, largely because a lot of the new fantasy books coming out now are not to my taste. So I was pleased to find that this book combined the two: a mystery with a limited pool of suspects (but there are seven of them, so it takes some work), set in a fantasy world. I also enjoyed the fact that the detective wasn't a brilliant savant but an ordinary guard, thrust into the position of having to solve the crime because her boss has been (non-fatally) poisoned in the course of events, who takes a doggedly persistent approach to interviewing the suspects and figuring out the course of events. It's much more Freeman Wills Crofts than Austin W. Freeman, in other words, and if you're also a fan of hundred-year-old mystery books you'll probably know what that means. Also, there's no romance, indeed no romantic or sexual relationships, whatsoever, and while I don't object to those, it is refreshing to have a book that just focuses on the mystery.

The course of events is complicated, meaning that it's far from clear for a long time who has committed what crime, and specifically who has committed the murder. It's well orchestrated and cleverly done, though, like the protagonist, I wondered how all these people hadn't stumbled across each other while nefariously wandering the ship late at night.

It's usually a pretty sound rule of thumb that if there's an airship in a book, there are also multiple vocabulary errors. I don't know why this is. Fortunately, in this book I only spotted one such error, a common one which I will mention to the publisher and which may well be gone by publication. (I had a pre-publication version via Netgalley for review.)

The editing is generally OK, though there are a few common issues - occasional missing past perfect tense, "may" in past tense narration where it should be "might" - and a slight oddity in the punctuation of some dialog. Again, I'll mention these to the publisher, and some of them may well be fixed by publication.

This is a sound piece of mystery writing, and an appealing fantasy world, two things I enjoy separately which it turns out I also enjoy together. I'll be looking out for more from this author.

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