Review: Saved by the Spell

Saved by the Spell by Tanya Huff
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The premise was immediately appealing to me: What if Harry Potter, but Canadian, from the perspective of the teachers, and the teachers are genre-savvy?

Realistically overworked and underpaid English teacher Abby Bellman has some extra headaches to contend with: the school she works at is a magic school, where kids learn to handle their powers, which can mean things like fireballs and sudden plant growth. That's bad enough, but she's just figured out that one of her new class of 14-year-olds is a Hero. Which means that somewhere there's a Villain, and Abby is the Mentor.

This isn't a world where magic is hidden. The school is a government school, and there are plenty of others throughout the world (this is the only one in Canada). The existence of magic has changed a few things, though not enough for my full suspension of disbelief, compared with our world. The same authors exist, for example. For reasons not gone into, various forms of paganism have survived into the equivalent of the 21st century, but this is completely not reflected in people's names, many of which (including Abby's, a nominal Druid) come from the Bible, as they would in our world. There are religiously bigoted protestors - with mispunctuated signs - outside the school, and they are never specifically identified as Christians, but they clearly are meant to be. Put this alongside the fact that almost everyone who has a relationship is queer in some way, and you'll know whether you are or are not the audience Huff is aiming for.

My parents were both teachers, and the way they complained about their jobs put me off the profession, so that was a touchpoint for me. I wasn't fully convinced by some aspects of Abby being an English teacher; do real English teachers try to enforce the completely made-up and only-observed-by-total-pedants rule that a preposition is something you shouldn't end a sentence with? Also, despite mentioning misplaced modifiers as something she battles against in her students' work, she commits one. In the pre-publication version I had via Netgalley, there were also a good few sentences with missing, inserted or jumbled words, one misplaced apostrophe and a few other punctuation glitches, and some vocabulary errors. They may be fixed by publication.

I did have some difficulty keeping track of all the minor characters; there are quite a few staff and students, naturally, and because the staff are known by their first names when Abby is talking to them or thinking about them and by their surnames when she's talking about them in the presence of students, and they were mostly introduced in the same scene and not all that well differentiated from each other, it becomes a bit confusing at times.

I've read a couple of Huff's books before, one of which I liked and the other I didn't, so picking up this one was a calculated gamble. I'm glad I did; leaving aside the worldbuilding weaknesses and occasional mechanical issues, it's well told, amusing in a wry way, and shows us a world-weary (and just outright weary) person who, nevertheless, will persevere in doing the right thing regardless of what it costs her, because she does actually care about the kids entrusted to her. It reminded me of Jim C. Hines' Slayers of Old , which I highly recommend, in the way it took familiar genre tropes to the next level of seriousness and asked what would really happen, while keeping an ironic detachment from the essential silliness of them and also telling a good story.

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Review: The Paradise Mystery

The Paradise Mystery by J.S. Fletcher
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In a different approach to the mystery genre, we (mostly) follow the perspective not of a detective, but of a skeevy young doctor who wants blackmail material that he can leverage. He has just been sacked by the doctor he was assisting because he refused to stop asking the doctor's ward to marry him, something she absolutely will not do - both she and her guardian have a sense that he's not a good guy, even though they have nothing specific against him, and indeed we learn that he is an amoral schemer. When a murder is committed and it looks to the younger doctor as if the older doctor may have committed it in order to keep a secret about his beautiful ward and her younger brother, the younger doctor starts poking around for evidence, and uncovers a sordid story from a couple of decades earlier involving bank embezzlement.

There's a police investigation going on at the same time, though, and the police are suspicious of the younger doctor, who was one of the first people on the murder scene, so they keep half an eye on him.

It turns out that a number of people who knew each other long ago have, by complete coincidence, converged on a small, sleepy cathedral city (modelled, I think, on Winchester, though called Wrychester) and encountered each other, with tragic results. Several of them are now living under different names, and untangling the whole thing takes hard detective work from multiple parties and involves several more deaths (and a couple of complete red herrings: (view spoiler)[it's never explained why the younger doctor drew 50 gold sovereigns out of the bank the day before a witness was bribed with 50 gold sovereigns by someone else, and we also never learn why the retired detective never let on to the local police that that had been his occupation and why the Scotland Yard man had never heard of him (hide spoiler)]). Also, (view spoiler)[there's a Chekov's well that I was sure was going to be the young doctor's grave, but wasn't, though I did accurately predict that he would be killed - having him still around would have been slightly inconvenient to the happy ending, and besides, he deserved it (hide spoiler)].

Although parts of the mystery are a bit of a cheat, the unusual point of view worked well for me, and the whole thing was entertaining.

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Review: The Valley of Ghosts

The Valley of Ghosts by Edgar Wallace
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Read as a distraction while bored by a more worthy book, and I don't regret it, even though the ending is a bit weak.

It almost got my "not-solved-by-detective" tag, though it doesn't quite qualify because the detective does solve the case, albeit by lying in wait for the criminal and watching as he re-enacts the crime while sleepwalking. It also almost qualifies for my "thin-romance" tag, because the detective falls in love with a woman and is prepared to compromise his professional integrity to help her escape when he thinks she's the murderer, even though (as she herself explicitly notes) they have only met three times and exchanged about a dozen words. I keep "thin-romance" for cases where the couple get married after about that much interaction, though, and they do get to know each other over time after that first ridiculous declaration.

The characters are, as usual with Wallace, interesting and not purely stock. There's the reforming jewel thief, the man with a mysterious occupation who turns out to be (view spoiler)[a maker of women's hats - which reminded me of "Madame Eulalie" in P.G. Wodehouse (hide spoiler)], the detective himself who is a pathologist who's somehow ended up becoming an investigator, and his love interest, the daughter of an alcoholic artist who has, in the way of children of alcoholics, learned to cope with unpredictability and the cycle of bad behaviour and seemingly-sincere penitence that just keeps on repeating. The suspect for the murder is a mysterious moneylender, a type of person Wallace probably had unpleasant experience of, since he was often in debt because of gambling. This particular one is remarkable for never being seen and doing all of his business (which seems to involve blackmail as well) via letter.

There's a brief mention of "Reeder," and if, as seems probable, this is J.G. Reeder, one of Wallace's few recurring characters, this places the book within a wider Edgar Wallace Universe.

It's suitably mysterious and complicated, only has one significant coincidence which speeds up part of the plot rather than completely enabling it, and is in general a fun time.

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Review: Mr. Mendlebee's Pandimensional Literary Repository [and Yarn]

Mr. Mendlebee's Pandimensional Literary Repository [and Yarn] by Rebecca McKee
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I picked this up (pre-publication, via Netgalley) largely because the title reminded me of Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore , for which I have a fondness despite its imperfections. It doesn't have many other similarities to Penumbra apart from the title (and, obviously, a wondrous bookstore); this bookstore is somehow holding the universe together, is located in a small coastal town in New England rather than in Northern California, and is only visible to people who need something from it.

We start out being told that something is awry in the state of the universe that the bookstore holds together, and then we get a long sequence of different points of view from the people who work there, a customer, and the roommate of one of the workers, all of whom are sensing some sort of wrongness they can't put their finger on and are usually doing their best to ignore, and most of whom have (it is hinted, and gradually revealed) secrets they are ashamed of. It has the feel of something that could turn much more horror than cozy. Spoiler in case you need to know which in order to decide whether to read it: (view spoiler)[it's OK in the end. It's not horror. But the journey does get harrowing. (hide spoiler)]

This long middle section takes up most of the book, and for me moved too slowly. Just past half-way, I got bored enough with it, and uncomfortable enough with the constant hints of something wrong that wasn't yet being revealed, that I went off and read another book. But I did come back and finish it, and I'm glad I did, because the ending is compelling and pulls together the carefully-set-up backstories of the characters, all of whom needed to learn something and some of whom also needed to teach something to one or more of the others. My five-star rating is because it has a degree of psychological depth and (like one of the characters in the story) adeptly weaves together a number of threads. It's not, as I've mentioned, without its flaws - the tell-don't-show prologue, the slow-moving middle, and also a character, Violet, who I didn't feel was sufficiently developed for the weight she bears in the plot to hit as hard as it could have. But even if Goodreads would let me drop my pre-publication five-star rating to four - which it won't - I might leave it at five anyway, though it's only just in that zone. Call it a strong four-and-a-half.

The copy editing is good; I could quibble about the instances of "may" that should be "might" and the occasional missing past perfect where I personally would include one, but hardly anyone writing these days doesn't make those mistakes, and most people don't seem to notice.

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Review: The Crime Code

The Crime Code by William Le Queux
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I read this author's first novel, Guilty Bonds , and found it absurd and inept. I said in part in my review: "It's melodramatic. It's implausible. It's rife with coincidence. It's heavily dependent on bad decisions by the main character. And the final explanation doesn't stack up."

Still, a lot of people who write bad first novels improve as they get more practice. How was he doing more than 35 years and roughly 150 books later (he wrote a lot of books, very quickly)?

Well, this novel is melodramatic. It's implausible. It's rife with coincidence. It's heavily dependent on bad decisions by the main character. And the final resolution is remarkably similar to the one in Guilty Bonds that didn't stack up.

I think this is my last Le Queux.

Some spoilers follow in this plot summary; without them, you wouldn't be able to tell how ridiculous it is.

Hipwell, the protagonist (if you can call him that; he's more reactive than proactive, and often more passive than active) goes to the defence of a woman who's being mistreated by a man late at night in London, on his way back from a gambling house. In the subsequent scuffle, the man draws a pistol, which goes off, killing him. The woman then shows her ingratitude by accusing Hipwell of murdering him and saying she'll set the police on him, so, to avoid scandal (his father is a prominent MP, and he also has political ambitions), he flees the scene and goes into hiding, disguised as a working-class journalist. As you do.

He happens to take lodgings in the same house as someone who later turns out, by complete coincidence, to be in the same gang of jewel thieves as the two people he encountered earlier, and what's more, making his way home through one of London's legendary fogs, he accidentally goes into the wrong house and finds the gang, including his fellow lodger, dividing up the spoils. They think he's a police spy, and, desperate, he tells them the truth, that he's hiding from the police, and why. But the woman he quixotically rescued turns up later too, and explicitly states that he was not the man who killed her lover. His fellow lodger, a young woman, says, "Let's blind him so he can't testify to our identity" (how would that even work, given that he can describe them and knows where she lives, and they've mentioned someone's first name and that he's a medical student at Guy's Hospital?) But what she actually does is inject him with a drug that makes him compliant to them and "not himself," until two years later he accidentally hits his head and snaps out of it, but can't remember those two years. Meanwhile, it later emerges, he has learned to be a jewel thief and is good at it; he has also been appointed to the responsible post of King's Messenger, or diplomatic courier, which conveniently means that his bags won't be searched during his many travels around Europe with dispatches. The gang makes no use of this as far as is ever mentioned.

Sometime during his time of "unconsciousness" he has married one of the gang, for reasons never explained, despite being in love with and engaged to a lovely girl who's the daughter of a prominent lawyer. When his wife eventually turns up, she explains a lot of stuff to him that he should already know and shows him the code of the title, which is based on musical notation.

Around this time his fiancee is abducted and disappears.

He goes to the head of the gang (taking with him a stolen necklace in his diplomatic baggage) to plead to be released from his service to the gang on his word of honour that he won't tell, honest he won't. The chief refuses, and gives him a message in the musical code for his wife, who's setting out to harm him; Hipwell has the key and could decode it, but doesn't, even though for all he knows it says "Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern this idiot." He also doesn't use the code to warn his wife about a police raid, even though he's afraid she'll shop him if she's arrested. This is what I mean about him being passive and making obviously bad decisions.

The raid indirectly leads to his fiancee being recovered, and then (as was obviously going to happen) his wife conveniently dies, freeing him to marry again; he tells his prospective father-in-law the whole story, and of course is advised that it's fine, he wasn't responsible for his actions (obviously apart from smuggling the necklace that he knew to be stolen, though that isn't mentioned), no consequences need ensue. He begs the chief of the gang to be released again, and this time it's granted, following which the chief also conveniently dies - but not before restoring the necklace to its owner. The help given to Hipwell earlier, the release, and the return of the necklace are all thoroughly out of character for this ruthless individual, who's never called an anarchist but probably is one, as was the case with the plotters in the author's first novel. He's Russian, but steals from the Soviet authorities, committing several murders without hesitation in the process.

It's basically a very similar story to the first book, with all the same flaws, except the author has apparently learned not to dangle his modifiers or miss out the past perfect tense somewhere in there. He does still hyphenate things he shouldn't and put a good many commas in the wrong places, though.

I should probably give it two stars, but I did enjoy some of the action bits towards the end enough that it just barely squeaks three. Still, Hipwell is too stupid to live.

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Review: Tea With an Outlaw

Tea With an Outlaw by R.R. Orange
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is the third book I've read recently from Netgalley with "tea" in the title, none of which were all that cozy, and none of which I thought were particularly good, though this is the best of the three for my taste. It's more YA than I was expecting, in the sense of being quite simplistic and also focusing on the concerns of young adults, and the narrative arc seemed off even for that.

The protagonist is a young woman who's about to turn 18. She lives in a society where parents typically make decisions like who their offspring will marry, but rebels against this and wants to make her own decisions, like not marrying at all and becoming a flower mage instead. The problem is, she isn't as good at making decisions as she thinks she is, though the ones she makes are, it turns out, often better than if she had obediently gone along with her parents. She flip-flops around on some of her decisions, too, right up to the end of the book.

The outlaw of the title is a young nobleman, loyal to the young queen, who is being pursued by the Queen's Guard on the orders of a royal advisor who is trying to kill the queen with surprisingly slow-acting flower magic.

I say "surprisingly slow-acting" partly because the flower magic is quite powerful - in fact, all the magic is quite powerful, but it isn't Sandersonian (the reader doesn't know in advance what it can and can't do, so there's always the possibility that it can be used to resolve a situation in a way that's unexpected and unforeshadowed, and therefore less satisfying to the reader). The setting is partially fantasy Italian, though among all the Italianate names there are a couple of minor characters called Edith and Brian for some reason, and several of the more major characters have what seem to be made-up fantasy names.

The protagonist helps the outlaw to escape and joins his quest, along with her best friend the 17-year-old highly-skilled alchemist, who at one point casually whips up a teleportation spell because, after all, how hard can it be? They (and a couple of other villagers, aided sometimes by a local witch and the protagonist's flower-mage mentor) run around on the advice of various creatures, picking up magic and using it. I'll put the disappointing part in spoiler tags, but it has to do with narrative expectation. (view spoiler)[The main part of the quest is to get a berry that appears once every thousand years in order to save the queen, and when they manage to do this, relatively easily in the end, the protagonist uses it to save her mentor instead. This totally doesn't matter; they go to the palace and the antagonist immediately backs down and disappears, and getting rid of her inimical plants and saving the queen is super easy, barely an inconvenience. The protagonist then flip-flops a bit on whether she is, after all, going to marry her fellow villager who she had been dead set against marrying, but ends up going off on another quest with the former outlaw, with whom she has a mutual attraction - but they have decided not to pursue it because he's a noble and she's a peasant and it just wouldn't work out. (hide spoiler)] I got strong "the real treasure was the friends we made along the way" vibes, and it just wasn't satisfying to me. What should have been difficult was easy, and what initially seemed important turned out to not be that important, and the protagonist didn't seem able to stick to a decision.

I gather that the author is not a native English speaker, but it doesn't show too much. There's the odd idiom that is slightly off, and some of the dialog punctuation doesn't quite follow convention, but I often see far worse from native speakers.

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Review: Calculated Whisk

Calculated Whisk by Lindsay Buroker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was just coming off several books that were particularly poorly edited, one of which was also dark and depressing while pretending to be a cozy for marketing purposes, and I wanted something that I could relax into, knowing it would be entertaining, well edited, and light.

Fortunately, I had recently bought this one off Bookbub. If there is anything that Lindsay Buroker reliably is, it's entertaining, well edited, and light, and indeed that was the case here. I spotted four very minor issues: a sentence that says the opposite of what it should because of a missing negative, an excess hyphen, and two vocabulary glitches, one of which is an overcorrection for a common mistake and the other of which is debatable.

She always has good banter, and the back-and-forth between the human ex-mercenary archer who wants to settle back down in her hometown as a bookkeeper and her elven assassin comrade is as amusing as ever. There's tragedy in people's backstories - after all, they've been in a war - but the story we're reading is pleasantly cozy, with no stakes higher than winning a cooking contest and making sure a small hospitality business makes a profit.

Cozy is, I think, a new genre for Buroker, who's written in a number of popular SFF genres, but she does it well, and without the usual feel I get from cozy of a world that's made of scenery flats not very convincingly painted. It's mostly a standard sword-and-sorcery world, but with enough tweaks to give it a degree of freshness, and it feels lived-in and as if there's actually a world outside the town that we see.

One of those tweaks is that the town is peaceful because the gnome peacekeepers make sure - using golems, magical detectors, peacebonds on people's weapons, and (in some unexplored way) the power of a new god - that people don't commit violent acts within it. This is a good way of creating a cozy, safe, peaceful enclave within a violent world, and at the same time provides a good source of conflict and even character growth: people who are used to solving their problems with violence have to figure out another way.

There's plenty of conflict set up, too. The dragon who owns the diner that the protagonist wants to work at is someone she shot during the war, humans and dragons having been on opposite sides, and she has to convince him that she doesn't intend to attack him again, plus there's one of the trademark Buroker slow-burn romances cooking between them. The protagonist's father is a distant, haughty aristocrat that she doesn't particularly want to reconcile with, and the man who her father wanted to arrange for her to marry before she left to become a mercenary is up to something, which no doubt will emerge more fully in the course of the series.

Overall, it's promising as a series and enjoyable as a complete book with its own resolution.

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