Review: Wildflower: A Novel

Wildflower: A Novel by Becky Jenkinson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The worldbuilding is not a strength in this one, which isn't unusual in its particular type of current fantasy, but I felt the story was solid.

The character names are a classic "Aerith and Bob" situation, some of them botanical or otherwise nature-related, some of them from various origins in our world (including several from the Bible, in a setting where religion is conspicuous by its almost total absence and where the two brief passing references are to Standard Fantasy Paganism), and some completely made-up fantasy names, with no obvious schema to account for the mixture. The characters themselves mostly feel like mid-2020s people cosplaying (or, in at least one scene, just wearing modern clothing) in a generic ren-faire setting, and the setting itself feels too small, with places that seem like they ought to be a long way off instead being in easy walking distance. The review copy I had didn't have the map yet, but based on the travel times mentioned, the whole kingdom is about the size of the six boroughs of New York City (roughly 35 miles across). And yet a character who has long wished to visit a wonderful library just to the north has never found time to make the two-hour journey by horse (meaning about 10 or at the most 15 miles), and an afternoon's walk from the citadel, which occasionally gets snow flurries, takes you not only to but also up a mountain with a permanent snowcap and blizzard weather. The small size of the kingdom presumably accounts for the fact that, although there's a royal family (consisting of a king, a queen, and two princes), there doesn't appear to be an aristocracy, and both the queen and the older prince's fiancé are commoners.

The flower lore is interesting, though it has an obvious real-world model in the Victorian "language of flowers". It's the most original part of the worldbuilding.

The magic system is largely undefined, and what it can and can't do appears to be driven entirely by what the plot requires.

On the upside, even the pre-publication copy I received via Netgalley for review was well edited, apart from the occasional dangling modifier, fumbled idiom or clumsy phrasing, and a few cases where two words that are not synonyms are used as if they are. The emotional beats are sound. The plot is a proper plot, not just a slice of life, and it's driven by the decisions of the characters, some of which are bad ones such as real people make, and they make them for believable reasons. It's cozy in its presentation (after all, it's about a magical florist), but it has stakes and tension and losses and tragic backstory and desperate struggles and a strong climax.

The main character, Felicity, was born with a curse which prevents her from saying anything that isn't the truth. The rules seem to change a bit during the book; at one point she can say something that is her opinion, even if it's not commonly shared, but later on it's as if the very fact that she can say something means it's definitely true. Can't she be mistaken? Of course, this is also the point at which people stop believing her, because she's saying things they don't want to believe.

The queen has been using her as a snitch, which has made her unpopular, but when we see her being interviewed by the queen she's perfectly capable of concealing a lot of information, so that's a tell-versus-show mismatch, what I sometimes call a decal.

Perhaps the biggest strength of the book is that it depicts Felicity's inner life so well. Because she's unpopular for her truth-telling, she tries to be reliable and compliant and trustworthy and non-confrontational and a people-pleaser, and stuffs her feelings down and lets people walk all over her (like her only friend, a rather self-involved extravert who strongly reads "bard," though I don't think he has an occupation other than "prince's fiancé"). All of this starts coming apart quite early in the book, so we're, again, more told about her people-pleasing than we are shown, but it is emotionally accurate to someone who is this way. There are some highly emotional scenes, for Felicity and her love interest both, but they're justified by events and not just the characters being over-dramatic.

Emotionally sound writing balanced by basic and unconvincing worldbuilding and some elements that didn't ring quite true brings this in at three stars. A lot of people who don't demand much from worldbuilding will love it unreservedly, I'm sure.

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Review: Model Actress Whatever

Model Actress Whatever by Kim Newman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is one of those books like A Clockwork Orange - not, fortunately, in the sense of the old ultraviolence, though there is some non-ultra violence, but in the sense that it's thick with its own jargon that takes a bit of getting used to. I did get used to it after a while, but it made for heavy going at first, and contributed to a sense that everything was happening at a manic pace while there was also not much plot per thousand words. It contributed to a sense of alienation and confusion, which may have been deliberate, because that's where the characters were emotionally a lot of the time. It's set in an alternate present-day Britain, with that underlying sense of hopelessness in the face of ineluctable corporate evil that a lot of modern British writing has, but it keeps a kind of dark sense of humour through it all. Some of the jargon and cultural references would be immediately understood by British people, but not by non-British people, of whom I am one, and I wasn't always sure what was a real British thing and what was part of the alternate world until I looked something up that had a Wikipedia entry and discovered it was a real British thing. The relative seamlessness between the real and made-up ones is a strength, I suppose.

The main "alternate" part is that there are superheroes (known as "capes") and supervillains ("cutthroats") in this version of history, especially since the Beatles did a psychoactive album in the 70s that awakened a lot of people to their powers, although there were some prior to that as well. Queen Victoria II is on the throne.

The heroine of the title, Chrissie, loses her job as a supporting cast member on a long-running TV crime drama, because she's getting too popular and threatening the fragile ego of the star, and when she breaks her long-time starvation diet of celery and distilled water and gets some actual calories in her, her powers come online for the first time. She's inherited a family tendency to shadow-based superpowers - one of her non-superpowered ancestors was Dr Shade, and powers seem to follow a law of nominative determinism, like someone with the surname Wax being able to manipulate wax figures. This is on brand for superhero fiction, of course. (Actually, as the book went on I concluded that the author was just using silly names as part of the comedy, which is one of my least favourite comedy tricks.)

Anyway, it turns out Chrissie's really good at using the powers, and her close friend also has abilities she hadn't ever found the right moment to talk about. They help to contain a breakout in a secure psychiatric facility for criminally insane - or at least psychologically troubled - powered people, and then get involved with a reality TV show that's supposed to be selecting a replacement for a recently-retired member of an elite superhero team. But there are wheels within wheels, a conspiracy that's manipulating events, including a team of villains being set up as the opposition for the hero candidates on the show, and it's not clear for a long time whether the motive is corporate greed, sheer insane evil or a combination. We get a recurring viewpoint from the sanest of the villain team, as well as from Chrissie and her friend Loulee, and from the lead on Chrissie's old show who also becomes the host of the reality show. There are a few guest viewpoints too, some of them in "debrief" or confessional-to-camera mode that give hints of what's coming up or going on behind the scenes.

There are a few too many characters to keep track of easily, especially since, like in a Russian novel, most of them are known by more than one name (their real name and their superhero "trade name"). Most of them are distinctive enough as characters that I didn't often get confused, but along with the jargon blizzard it made for a book that isn't easy to read.

The writing mechanics are reasonably good, just the odd hyphen where it shouldn't be and a large number of sentences in the simple past tense that should be past perfect (because they refer back to a time prior to the narrative moment). There are a couple of homonym errors, which is not many for a supers novel, though it's more than I would have hoped for from an experienced author and a major publisher. There is one extended dialog exchange where two people are talking, with no tags, and if you count the alternations to figure out who's saying what - which you shouldn't have to do - it comes out wrong, as if even the author has lost track, or else the author or editor has mispunctuated some of the dialog so that two consecutive paragraphs from the same speaker seem to be from different speakers. There are sentences with words missing, something that's hard to spot unless you have the knack. Note that I read a pre-publication copy via Netgalley, and there may be further editing yet to come, though it's unlikelyto resolve all the issues, especially the past perfect tense issue, the most prevalentand to me most annoying one.

Overall, what with one thing and another I didn't love it, though I certainly didn't hate it either. It's a bit darker than I prefer, and was hard work to follow because of the jargon, cultural references, large cast, and tense issues (which kept whiplashing me between the narrative moment and an earlier moment without signalling). It also felt wordy, and therefore slow-moving overall, even though it was describing a lot of fast-moving action at times and many of the chapters are short. While I was sympathetic with several of the characters in their predicament, they didn't ever get much depth, and Chrissy sometimes seemed competent when that felt unlikely. The humour was less funny to me than it sometimes seemed to think it was, and on the dark side. The vicious satire on the TV industry made me wonder just how that industry had hurt the author.

Going in, I thought it might not be for me at all, partly because I know the author writes horror, and partly because the main character was clearly going to be from a milieu where people are encouraged to be shallow and artificial. Coming out, I'd say it's not my ideal book, but I can see its strengths: imagination, consistent worldbuilding, good action set-pieces, a cast tied together by believable though simple relationships, a relatively complex plot with multiple strands woven skillfully. It was interesting enough for me to want to finish, rather than abandon in the middle.

In summary, then, I wouldn't recommend it to my earlier self if I could time travel, but it might be a good fit for you, depending on your taste. Even though at least one minor mystery (why the Deputy Prime Minister seems to be in charge, and what happened to the PM) remains unelucidated in this book, I won't be reading the author's other books in hopes of an answer.

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Review: The Eyes of Max Carrados

The Eyes of Max Carrados by Ernest Bramah
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A low four stars, but it has nothing specifically wrong with it to take it down to three - except that the mysteries feel a bit soft. Most of them turn out not to be crimes at all, even the ones that start out looking as if they are. You could look at this as creativity and not being bound by the usual conventions of the genre.

They're not "fair play" stories, either, which the reader could work out from the information given. The blind detective has developed his other senses to a hard-to-believe degree, making him basically Daredevil, though in this volume he doesn't have to use his abilities to fight as he did in the first collection. He's also highly intelligent, so the entertainment is that you get to watch someone very clever solve unusual puzzles in an unusual way.

The last story, uncharacteristically, introduces a supernatural element. I didn't feel it was particularly successful. Still, they're enjoyably told and out of the ordinary, and on balance I enjoyed them.

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Review: The Book Witch

The Book Witch by Meg Shaffer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I thought I didn't much care for metafiction. I'm glad I took a chance on this anyway; it changed my mind.

The problem I've had, I think, is that I'd never previously read a metafiction book that really worked for me as a novel, apart from the premise. Not that you could separate the premise from this one; it's thoroughly premise-driven, which is how I like my fiction. But more than that, it has the kind of reflection on the human condition, on finding meaning in life, and on human relationships that takes a book up to five stars for me. Not to mention reflection on the role of fiction and reading in the lives of book lovers, and how it can be more than just "escapism." (Tolkien's words in On Fairy-Stories are relevant here: "Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? ... In using escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter.")

The whole book is a love-letter to reading and stories, and to the way fictional characters can inspire us and teach us to be better, stronger people in our difficult moments, even in fiction that's usually thought of as juvenile and lacking in literary merit. (There's particular love here for Nancy Drew.) The villains - who are, honestly, a bit cartoonish - are the Burners, people who want to destroy books they think are in some way unworthy to exist, because they're unable to see the merit in them.

They do this by going into the books and wreaking destruction, opposed by the Book Witches, whose goal is to preserve fiction as it is. It's kind of the same dynamic you get in a lot of time-travel stories, where the heroes want to preserve the timeline and the villains want to disrupt it.

The struggle against the Burners, though, isn't the main plot. The main plot is that the particular Book Witch who's narrating most of this book, Rainy March (the absurdity of the name is acknowledged right upfront), has fallen in love with a fictional character, the noir detective known as the Duke of Chicago, and the rules don't let them be together. Also, she wants to solve several mysteries, such as what was up with her mother disappearing for a while, returning pregnant with Rainy, refusing to say who the father was, and dying shortly after Rainy's birth? Also, where has her grandfather, who raised her, disappeared to?

The meta gets multi-layered before the end, with at least four levels of fictionality/reality, and it all contributes to the plot and makes sense, which is a feat in itself.

What boosted it into the Platinum tier of my annual book recommendations was not the assured execution, the well-thought-out reflections, or the appealing characters, including a non-speaking but intelligent cat familiar. Those took it to five stars, but what catapulted it to the top was that it made me feel something genuine, not manipulatively but through depicting a human moment - a funeral of someone beloved for her work and its impact - with empathy and warmth. In fact, I had to read a bit further than I'd intended and delay going off and doing something adult that required me to be in control of my emotions because of that scene. (That's the opposite of a complaint.)

It's one of those books that you want to keep reading, but also want to save because it's so good and you can see that you're getting closer and closer to the point where it stops, and then you won't have that experience anymore.

If you love books because of the way they tell human stories that matter, this is a book you should definitely take a look at. It's a strong recommendation from me.

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Review: By the Pricking of My Thumbs

By the Pricking of My Thumbs by Agatha Christie
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

By the time Christie wrote this, she'd been writing for fifty years, and I'm glad to say she wasn't stuck in the style of the 19-teens; she'd learned, grown, taken on extra dimensions of psychology without making it obvious or all about her research, and was writing a deeper, more satisfying story than the rather silly (though entertaining) one that begins the series. This gets complex, and dark, and suspenseful.

Tommy and Tuppence have aged in something at least approximating real time - their exact age isn't specified, but they're roughly in their sixties, it seems, which is consistent with being in their early 20s at their first appearance in 1922. Their two children are married, with children of their own. (There's no mention of Betty, who they spoke of adopting at the end of N or M?, so presumably that didn't happen for some reason.) Tuppence continues to belie her real name, Prudence (as her daughter remarks, nobody would associate that name with her), going off investigating something that's pinged her remarkably accurate spidey-sense without leaving any record of where she's going, and this leads to some anxious moments for Tommy and Albert. (Albert is back to being their servant, having presumably given up the pub he owned in the previous book.)

There are a lot of threads in the book. An elderly woman who was in the same rest home as Tommy's aunt, who has been removed from there apparently without trace. An entirely legitimate-seeming lawyer who pings Tommy's also accurate spidey-sense, after which he sees the lawyer being followed by a detective he knows. A painting of a house that Tuppence thinks she's seen before, given to Tommy's aunt by the now-missing elderly woman. Garbled stories from the local gossip about who used to live in the house. A criminal gang who hide their loot in various places. A series of child murders which took place years before. A cadaverous knight with a woeful countenance. An elderly vicar. A woman who runs everything in his parish.

Eventually, they come together. Some turn out to be not especially important, while others go in a direction I absolutely had not expected. And Tuppence ends up in danger more than once, to Tommy's enduring frustration.

One thing I sometimes don't like about these books is how often the couple split up and follow separate investigations, when they're so good as a pair. We get to see them working together a lot in the short story collection, Partners in Crime, but in the other three books I've read so far (with one to go), they're often apart. It does give an opportunity to contrast Tuppence's erratic and intuitive brilliance with Tommy's dogged and systematic focus, though, which might be more obscured if they were always in the same scenes.

I'm looking forward to Postern of Fate.

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Review: The Man with the Club Foot

The Man with the Club Foot by Valentine Williams
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

There's "plot relies on coincidence" - often the case with early-20th-century books - and then there's whatever this is. Pantheon ex machina? Basically, the author keeps creating incredibly lucky encounters for his hero to get him into the next stage of the plot, though to be fair he does go through some suffering (mostly of the "have to endure discomfort" sort), and occasionally solves his own problems by taking courageous, though seldom particularly intelligent, action.

Spoilers below, which I haven't tagged. I'm not going to recommend reading it, and the spoilers reveal why. I was alerted to the book's existence by a mention in Agatha Christie's Partners in Crime , where her characters Tommy and Tuppence take on the methods of various fictional detectives of the time; I'm not sure why they bothered with this guy.

The protagonist and narrator, Desmond Okewood, has been put on medical leave from the army during World War I with a head injury and "shell shock" (what we would call PTSD). Neither of these seem to hinder him much in his adventures (like whatever Hastings' unspecified injury was in The Mysterious Affair at Styles ) - unless the head injury is why he's such an idiot - but they account for the fact that he is at a loose end and able to follow up a cryptic clue to the whereabouts of his brother, who is "in the intelligence" and seems to have vanished somewhere in Berlin.

Of course, a young English officer without intelligence training or support would have no chance of getting to Berlin during the First World War, right?

Except that in Rotterdam, where he's gone to follow up the clue and can't get a hotel room on a rainy night because he's bad at planning ahead, he speaks in German for no particular reason (he and his brother both happen to speak fluent German with no English accent) to a hotel porter. The porter, who happens to be German, thinks he's German too, and directs him to a hotel run by Germans. There, an American man who is also a member of the German secret police (with a badge in his effects to prove it) happens to die of natural causes right outside our hero's room, and conveniently happens to resemble Desmond closely enough that Desmond can use his papers to get to Berlin. The badge comes in handy too a couple of times, until he carelessly loses it. The American was also carrying half of a letter, which is the book's McGuffin.

He has to make a daring escape from the hotel to avoid an interview with someone who has met the man he's impersonating, and goes to the railway station. There, a British undercover agent conveniently happens to notice before any of the numerous German agents there that he's wearing a British regimental tie (because idiot), and helps him to avoid people searching for him by a mechanism I didn't quite follow, and get on the train to Berlin. Before he does so, he stashes the half of the McGuffin in left luggage and posts the ticket to a friend in England (showing some sense, at least).

In Berlin, he goes through a series of adventures, including meeting the Kaiser (whose many personal faults he enumerates, in the expected manner of a British person during WW I), slips out of the palace and goes to a hotel before anyone can tumble to the fact that he isn't who he says he is.

At the hotel, he's coincidentally discovered by someone he'd met before at a stop on the journey, who was already rightly suspicious (since when he speaks English he does so with an English accent, even though he's meant to be American). This man takes him to see the villain and title character, who has the other half of the McGuffin. Desmond knocks him out - fortunately the stone windowsill was loose and could be used as an improvised and unexpected weapon - and flees with McGuffin part 2, but how will he escape? Well, he very conveniently happens to bump into a woman who was his neighbour (and his brother's love interest) growing up, and is now married to, though living separately from, a senior German official - she's one of the very few people in the part of the hotel he flees to, where she happens to have left a party to visit a friend in the middle of the night, and has coincidentally just emerged into the corridor when he gets there - and she helps him get out of the hotel and gives him a place to stay.

At this point, I was still reading mainly because I wanted to see how much more ridiculous it could get. Actually, though, that was the peak of the silliness. The lady helps him escape, he has numerous vicissitudes, reconnects with his brother, re-encounters the man with the clubfoot, and (mainly through his brother's cleverness rather than his own) they manage to get away. There's really only one more fortunate coincidence, when they happen across an escaped British POW in the forest who can conveniently sacrifice himself as a distraction so that they can get across the German frontier. He's a lower-class man with a heavy regional accent, so this is his natural role, of course.

The whole thing is extremely silly and contrived, and although there are some decent scenes of suspense and conflict, they don't make up for the shonky way the plot has been knocked together to compensate for the fact that the protagonist couldn't plan a cat fight if you handed him two cats and a small sack. It's also, of course, heavy-handedly propagandistic in its condemnation of the faults of the awful Germans; living among them long enough to have learned their language fluently doesn't seem to have endeared them to him, and he depicts them as having no positive features whatsoever.

There were several sequels, but I don't think I'll bother with them. Of course, sometimes a first-time author manages to correct their faults in later books - I've seen it several times - but this is a terrible start, and given that the author now languishes in probably-deserved obscurity, I'm not eager to pick up the next volume.

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Review: Partners in Crime

Partners in Crime by Agatha Christie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a bit of fun, and not to be taken too seriously.

Following their success in the first book, Tommy and Tuppence, now married, apparently received a big whack of money as a reward for their help, because money no longer seems to be a consideration for them (and at one point one of them says they are "rich," though this seems to be an exaggeration). Tommy is able to quit his office job with the Secret Service and take on a detective agency with only occasional clients, which is a front for some kind of Russian spy operation that has been taken down. The Chief, their contact in the Secret Service, wants it kept running as a honey-trap and says they can run it how they like and take whatever cases they care to. Perhaps he's paying them, but if so it's never mentioned. They can clearly afford to employ Albert, the young lad who helped them in their previous case, as an office boy, as well as keep up their own establishment.

They then, basically, play at being detectives, inspired by various fictional sleuths, which is an occasion for gentle parody from Christie of her contemporaries (and herself; one of the models they select is Poirot). They have fake personas - Theodore Blunt (the name of the man who owned the front business) and his "confidential secretary" Miss Robinson - and their standard shtick when a client comes is to pretend that Mr Blunt is in conference with Scotland Yard and engaged on other important cases for important people, but can manage to spare the time for the new client somehow. The cases they take on are real, though, at least after the first publicity-stunt one, and they're mostly successful (with one embarrassing exception). They solve murders, thefts, a disappearance, and eventually - through a suspenseful struggle - foil the Russian spies they were put there to trap.

Some of the cases are clever, and others, to me, were painfully obvious before they solved them, like (view spoiler)[the one with the twins (hide spoiler)]. Coincidence plays an important role sometimes, though more in smoothing the story and making it more compact than in getting them out of trouble as such; for example, they are talking through a case in the newspapers in a cafe and their Scotland Yard contact happens to be sitting at the next table and overhears their solution, which, again, was pretty obvious to me but appears to be fresh to him.

I've read a few of the other classic detectives that are parodied, though most of them were new to me, and I've picked up one of them as a result of this book (it's extraordinarily far-fetched, and I can see why it fell into obscurity). Christie clearly read widely in her genre, as befits a popular genre writer; there are references to other well-known contemporary novelists in some of her other books, too, as there naturally would be when people are discussing crime in a time when crime fiction was so popular. This is a combination of parody and actual detective writing, varying in quality like most short story collections, but overall entertaining.

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