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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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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