Review: The Slow Spell: A Cozy Fantasy

The Slow Spell: A Cozy Fantasy by Briana Snow
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The author isn't kidding about the slow. It takes the first 4% of the (relatively short) book for the main character to come into a room and make a cup of tea. That's OK, though, because every sentence of that 4% is building character or the world or both.

But I have to say, by the time some conflict finally appeared almost halfway through, I had been ready for it for a while. I'd had to stop reading because I was falling asleep (on a sunny afternoon, on the couch with my cat). It's maybe just a tiny bit too cosy unless you're really, really into that slow life vibe. That conflict, by the way, is relatively easily resolved and has no long-term negative consequences.

I mentioned worldbuilding above. I often criticize the worldbuilding of cosy books for being thin - slapdash scenery flats placed behind 2020s people in cosplay. This one has more worldbuilding than that, but it's a bit incoherent.

Firstly, there's a reference (to Blackpool in 1987, in a context that signals this was many years ago) that places it probably in contemporary England, but nothing in the story really requires it to be, and no details back that up. The English is American, and with the exception of a single toaster, nothing seems to be powered by electricity or manufactured. It's very much the pre-industrial cosy setting I was expecting from the cover and blurb, and it could easily be secondary-world without affecting the story whatsoever.

Secondly, there are random bits (and one non-random bit) of the Harry Potter Wizarding World scattered throughout, with references to silver sickles (the currency, though there is also a literal sickle made of silver), the Minister of Magic, and, above all, house elves. A house elf is central to the story, and it's clear that house elves are effectively slaves or a close equivalent, as in HP - but he's wearing ordinary clothes, which goes against HP lore. The title "warlock" is used for his master, which isn't in HP as far as I remember. There's a point mentioned about house elves having wandless magic, but the witch who's the main character does various magical things without her wand as well as with it. There's no apparent magical/non-magical person divide or secrecy about magic in the village. It's all a bit of a muddle, and could easily have been de-HPed, whether or not it was originally fanfic, just by using, say, "brownie" instead of "house elf."

On the upside, it is about as cozy as it's possible for a book to get, the editing is far better than I usually see, and its faults are all minor ones. If you're a habitual cozy reader, by now you've probably trained yourself to ignore worldbuilding oddities anyway, and you're likely to enjoy this very much.

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Review: Lateral Cooking

Lateral Cooking by Niki Segnit
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

This book has an interesting premise which attracted me immediately. Rather than thinking of world food as discrete points, it looks at it as a giant possibility space in which multiple recipes are connected by what they have in common, but distinguished by slight differences in ingredients or techniques. So, for example, there's a basic bread recipe that more or less applies everywhere, but you can vary the flour, vary the hydrating ingredient, add different kinds of rising agents, take different approaches to how it's proofed, and cook it different ways, and this gives you everything from flatbreads and crackers through soda bread to yeasted bread all the way to babas.

It's an ambitious approach, and unfortunately the execution, for me, didn't quite support its usefulness as well as I would have liked. It really needs to be an app, rather than a book. If it's going to be a book, it needs to not require quite so much flipping back and forth between the base recipe and the variations; for example, if you're telling me that you can "use a 50/50 mix of warmed plain yogurt and milk for the liquid," it would be nice not to have to find my way back to the base recipe (especially in a Kindle edition that isn't as easy as it might be to navigate) to remind myself how much liquid that is. I resorted in the end to writing everything out by hand in a notebook. (I then decided to stick with my simpler, tried-and-true no-knead bread recipe, but that's another matter.)

Definitely an interesting idea, and I will dip into it again, I think, but not the perfect execution.

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Review: Radical Magic

Radical Magic by Kate Macdonald
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

For an otherwise mostly well-edited book, this has a surprising number of places where the "let's eat Grandma" issue occurs (lack of a comma before a term of address). Note that I read a pre-publication version via Netgalley, and this (and the places where the present tense drops into past or otherwise glitches, and the occasional missing punctuation, and the less occasional missing words in sentences) may be fixed by time of publication.

The story has several different viewpoints that slowly draw together, although none of the viewpoint characters have the full story of anything, and they don't know until nearly the end that they are connected. Viewpoint one is Conny, whose husband foolishly tried to excavate a fairy mound and was taken as a result. Viewpoint two is her husband Edward, enslaved and abused by the fae (known as elfin to themselves and fairies to humans, but I'll just say fae to make it less complicated). Viewpoint three is Auberon, the fae gentleman who owns the mound in question, who is moving around undetected in human society, learning ideas about liberty while seducing various humans, and decides that he will free his slaves. Unfortunately, his malevolent steward takes advantage of the unspecific nature of the command he's given, and releases Edward not back into 1807, where he came from, but into an unspecified year in the 20th century. Fortunately, one of Auberon's former (male) human lovers has been gifted with the ability to travel through time on being sent away, and has set up a cross-time guest house to help unfortunates like Edward.

The other key characters are Pertinacity, a researcher into the fae, who meets Conny by chance at the Royal Society and forms a friendship and alliance with her, and Princess Amelia, the youngest daughter of George III (an actual historical character, though somewhat changed for purposes of the story), who is dying of TB. The author takes as established historical fact the rumours that her elder sister Sophia had a child out of wedlock, and Amelia in her turn starts an affair with Auberon.

All of this is very promising. I enjoy Regency fantasy (not that this is quite Regency, technically speaking; the Regency began in 1811), and the author does a decent job of using a few turns of phrase and some historical and cultural references to evoke a feel of the period. Most of the book, too, is satisfyingly stitched together, with these people who have multiple points of connection (unknown to them) striving for their various goals in ways that will bring them into conflict or alliance.

Unfortunately, I felt that some of the plot problems were solved rather too easily by helpful characters or coincidence, rather than the decisions and actions of the protagonists, and the ending, rather than tying up all the threads, left several dangling unresolved. This is the main reason I've dropped it to three stars (from my normal starting point of four).

A bit of softness in the plot and some mechanical issues that may be fixed by publication don't add up to a bad book, and I can see a lot of potential here and would consider reading another book by this author.

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Review: In Her Exquisite Clutches

In Her Exquisite Clutches by Auston Habershaw
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'll start this review with the disclaimer that I got a pre-publication copy via Netgalley for review, and there's a long time to go until it's published. That means that hopefully most of the errors I spotted will be corrected, most notably spelling a dragon's treasure as "horde" rather than "hoard" and saying that she "horded" it (the latter of which spell check should have caught). That's not the only vocabulary error either, by a long way, and the author also apparently doesn't know, or at least consistently doesn't follow, the conventions for how dialog should be punctuated (with the tag as part of the same sentence as the dialog, not a separate sentence). Even if they do get fixed by publication, these are disappointingly basic errors to still be in place at the time the book is sent out for review. This is presumably why so may authors make the same few simple mistakes: their teachers (like this author, who teaches composition) don't know the rules either.

Setting all that aside, the actual story is well told, and is a clever unravelling of a heist, loosely based on an actual (still unsolved) art heist in real-world Boston. This one, however, takes place in a world where thought-to-be-mythical beings have reemerged into the world a few years before the main action, which takes place in the 2020s, and several years after the heist in the early 2000s. Among them is a dragon, who hoards (she does not horde) art.

It's explicitly inspired by Nero Wolfe, whose detective was split into two distinct people: the one who stayed inside and admired his collection and did the brain work, and the one who went out and did the leg work (and got beaten up while doing it). The latter, in this version, is a human, and our narrator, employed by the dragon as an investigator and her eyes on the street. The dragon is infuriatingly high-handed, which completely works, and the investigator is reasonably smart - but not dragon-level smart - and streetwise enough to get the upper hand over the criminals, at least sometimes.

There's a decent amount of character backstory for the investigator, too; he has history with several of the people who are suspected of having been somehow involved in the heist, and I did suspect that this was one reason the dragon employed him specifically, perhaps even the main reason. Yes, he's been working for her for a while at this point, but she's a long-term thinker, being more than a thousand years old.

The journey to the conclusion and the conclusion itself were both satisfying and both full of surprises, and despite the basic mechanical issues, I enjoyed the book and would look for another (but would hope that it had had more editorial attention before I read it).

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Review: Mercy Allcutt Mysteries Box Set (Books 1 to 3): Historical Cozy Mystery | Meet Mercy Allcutt in Her First Three Adventures—Where Manners Meet Murder!

Mercy Allcutt Mysteries Box Set (Books 1 to 3): Historical Cozy Mystery | Meet Mercy Allcutt in Her First Three Adventures—Where Manners Meet Murder! by Alice Duncan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

An often enjoyable light read set in 1920s Los Angeles, with a 21-year-old heroine who's a stuffy Boston Brahmin trying to get life experience so she can write. She does this by taking a secretarial job with a private investigator, and quickly becomes involved in his cases, showing a quick wit, determination and bravery, though she's also too naive to live at times, which became annoying to me. Also, she doesn't so much solve the mysteries as persist in poking around until the murderer becomes fed up with her and tries to kill her, which honestly is understandable.

It's told in her voice, which is amusing; she knows she's lived a sheltered and privileged life, but doesn't always know in exactly what way she's naive, and sometimes her naivety becomes a touch overdone (as when she consistently fails to see an obvious source of danger, or can't figure out that if she's talking to an adult man on the phone, the 30-year-old woman who's just died must be his stepmother, not his mother). It's also amusing to see the clash between her upper-class East Coast upbringing and low life in California.

To someone who reads a lot of fiction from the era, it had the clear feel of a modern reproduction rather than a genuine antique. It was given away by little tricks of phrasing, the way the world felt only lightly sketched as a background rather than truly lived-in, and of course the fact that homosexuality was acknowledged to exist (even if Mercy is too naive to understand the slurs applied by her boss to her beautifully dressed male friend who's a costumier for the movies), and the main character wasn't even a little bit racist. I didn't spot any actual glaring anachronisms, though.

There's a little Easter egg for fans of the era in the mention of Earl Derr Biggers' The House Without a Key in Book 1. This is the first novel in which Charlie Chan appeared, and the main character is a Boston Brahmin like Mercy. Also, she visits Chinatown in the course of the investigation. She hasn't read the book, though - someone else is reading it. She reads Agatha Christie.

The editing issues are relatively few and widely scattered, and consist mostly of excess commas (such as after "of course" when it's only agreeing with the previous statement - something word processing programs are not sophisticated enough to get correct), and words missing or inserted in sentences. At least once, though, the dialog alternation is messed up, and there's a continuity error where Mercy presents something as her speculation from limited information given by a witness when it's almost a direct quote from that witness, giving the detail Mercy says the witness didn't go into. Also, spell check should have caught "indiscretely," since there's no such word in English, and corrected it to "indiscreetly." It could do with another quick polish.

I enjoyed each book slightly less than the one before, because Mercy keeps insisting on putting herself in danger when she doesn't have the common sense of a gerbil, and (so that the author can have her rescue herself) her boss doesn't do anything so sensible as going with her to protect her, just turns up after she has already been attacked. Her voice is consistently amusing, and the historical aspects are OK, but it's pretty light fare, and Mercy, while she is a decent investigator in the sense that she has good instincts where to look for clues and is capable at unearthing them, often can't come to a correct conclusion to save her life. The "save her life" part is sometimes literal. One of the less plausible aspects was how (view spoiler)[despite having no self-defence training of any kind, she not once, but twice manages to push a crazed, murderous attacker off a high place. (hide spoiler)]

The mix of enjoyable aspects and weaknesses is such that it falls naturally into the three-star category for me, and I'm not going to be looking for more in the series or from the author. But if you can have more patience with Mercy than I do and don't notice the occasional editing glitch, it may be just the cozy mystery you're looking for.

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Review: The Revolution of Small Things: A Tale of Dungeons & Dysfunction

The Revolution of Small Things: A Tale of Dungeons & Dysfunction by J.L. Butterworth
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

This book is trying to be several things at once: a Dungeons & Dragons-style adventure, a "funny" fantasy, and a left-wing political fantasy. I don't think it succeeds particularly well at any of them, though I didn't read beyond 17%.

In no small part this is because the basic mechanics are extremely rough. I had a pre-publication version via Netgalley, and as always I must note that there may be more copy editing to come between the version I saw and the version that's published, but in this case there's so much work to do that I can't imagine it getting done by... (checks publication date)... yesterday. Yesterday (as I write) was the publication date. No, that's not happening, is it?

There's a comprehensive collection of nearly every common issue, in fact. Vocabulary errors - though not many, at least. Frequent missing or misplaced commas, especially the "let's eat Grandma" error. Misplaced apostrophes. Dialog tags punctuated as separate sentences from the dialog. Dangling modifiers. Two different spellings for one character's name, used more or less alternately. Tense that veers erratically between past and present. Awful attempts at "period" language, which might be deliberate characterisation (the character using it is an idiot), but, given all the other issues, is more likely a reflection of the fact that the author, like most modern people, doesn't know how Renaissance-era English worked.

Not only are there a lot of different types of error, there are a lot of instances of them, too, usually at least one and often two on a Kindle page, which (at the font size I use) is smaller than a printed page.

The setting is standard D&D, including tieflings and dragonborn, which I'm not sure are permitted for use in not-officially-licensed novels as opposed to games; I'm not a lawyer and haven't read all of the Wizards of the Coast license verbiage, though. However, it's a rather depressing version of a D&D setting, full of racist guards who harass an orc just because he's an orc, literally hellish bureaucracy, and corrupt wealthy rent-seekers who think they're untouchable. It's not a tone I enjoy, and along with the constant mechanical issues it was the reason I stopped reading.

The "funny fantasy" part is in the Robert Aspirin mode, which I've never personally found funny: mostly silly names, exaggerated tropes and people behaving like jerks. The locations, for example, are all named after food with some ending tacked on to make them sound like a placename.

It falls both into the "not for me" and "not well executed" buckets, hence my DNF.

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Review: The Facilite Con

The Facilite Con by Dick Wybrow
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was an entertaining space-opera heist with a few flaws, including what seemed to me to be a huge plot hole.

A magistrate on a former convict planet has left the planet to avoid the insurrection that's currently going on, and wants someone to "steal" his prized collection of gems and get them off the planet for him, while apparently leaving them in place. The heist crew's plan is to duplicate the gems and give him the fakes, leaving with both his payment and the real gems.

And here the issues start. The gems, which only come from this planet, are essentially magic; whatever something does, they make it do it more so. Heaters heat better, lights light better, anti-gravity shields shield better. That in itself is nonsense. Even more so is the plan: they are going to quantum entangle the real gems and the fake gems so that the fake gems, when tested, will appear to be real. Which is absolutely not how quantum entanglement works; first of all, it's between fundamental particles, not macroscopic objects, and secondly it's between particles that are essentially identical in the first place, not between magic gems and fake gems made from a completely different substance.

Finally (and this is the plot hole), there are a certain number of these gems, and even though, for the purposes of her complicated plan, the heist mastermind uses two of them, there are still the original number left. Which, obviously, is not how mathematics works.

If you can ignore all of that - and I couldn't, which is why I dropped it to three stars - it is an entertaining story, with strong emotional beats, a complex heist plot that (apart from the big issues I've already mentioned) makes sense and features plenty of dramatic reveals, an appealing main character and many amusing turns of phrase.

In terms of editing, it's largely clean, except that the past perfect tense is missing a few times when the past-tense narration covers something that happened further in the past, prior to the narrative moment. This is a common issue with current books. Apparently schools have stopped teaching the past perfect at some point.

I received a pre-publication copy via Netgalley for review; further changes may or may not be made before publication.

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