Review: The Magic Series: Box Set 1 of the Calliope Jones Novels

The Magic Series: Box Set 1 of the Calliope Jones Novels by Coralie Moss
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I'm going to be the dissenting voice among all the praise.

It started out well, with an appealing main character, a woman in her 40s (rather than the usual teen or twenty-something), a mystery plot, a romance plot (the two favourite plots), and editing looking fairly clean. Somewhere along the way, though, I spotted about 150 editing errors, the middle-aged woman fell into the tropes of the foolish young woman, the mystery got muddled, and I didn't understand the anticlimactic resolution to it at all.

I was glad that I had the collected one-volume edition, because the first book is essentially Act 1: get everyone on stage, set up the situation, everything is now prepped for development in book 2, which continues immediately from where book 1 stops. Reading it in one volume, I didn't feel too disappointed in the lack of resolution at the end of book 1, but I think if I'd bought the first volume separately I would have hesitated to carry on.

Because it takes so long on the setup, it does get a little bloated, especially with the size of the cast. I felt that it wasn't necessary to have three almost indistinguishable druid sidekicks for the love interest; they could all turn into otters, they all started relationships with local witches, and there wasn't a lot else to help me tell them apart other than initial (quickly forgotten) physical descriptions. They could easily have been compressed into one character, probably River, who is the brother of another significant secondary character. Likewise, several plot threads started in book 1 don't really end up going anywhere, just muddying the main plot.

Lack of clarity is the big problem that starts to creep into volumes 2 and 3. Things happen that obviously are clear in the author's head, but were not, to me, clear on the page. In particular, the final denoument, which I'll put in spoiler tags:

(view spoiler)[There's a Bigger Bad who, in book 3, is revealed to have been behind the Big Bad who we've seen (mostly from a distance) in the first two books; he's been pulling the strings, unsuspected, in the background. Some pains are taken to depict him as a ruthless, wealthy, powerful, implacable foe, capable of stranding Calliope on an island overnight dressed only in her cocktail dress and a light shawl, as a pressure tactic to get her to cave to his demands. The next day, she defeats him with her magical dress, brings the teenagers to see him at his office, tells him that the Big Bads from books 1 and 2 have been doing stuff behind his back, and... for no reason I could understand, he has a complete change of heart, gives in to all her demands, and turns out to be not that bad a guy and almost an ally. (hide spoiler)]

That moment, to me, was what decided me to label Calliope as a spoiled protagonist (which is my technical term for someone who gets handed help and victories they haven't earned in order to move the plot along). I could kind of accept that her numerous allies were loading her up with magical gifts and making their witchy celebrations all about her, because she had powers that would be useful in resolving a situation of concern to all of them, and because they were nice, generous people. It still took us kind of into spoiled protagonist territory, though. Add to this that Calliope is a Very Special Witch with powers beyond ordinary witchkind (that have been undeveloped and suppressed up until the story starts, when she's 41), and that she has a superhero job (supposedly demanding, but actually able to be abandoned indefinitely while she participates in the plot), and it's getting harder to resist the spoiled protagonist label. That climax finally took it over the top.

Her job, by the way, is working for the government. She doesn't seem to report to anyone; she's the senior person on the island (with an assistant), but she must presumably have a boss on the mainland. No such person is ever mentioned, though, and she doesn't seem to need to account for her time. She's a middle-aged civil servant and a single mother of two teenagers, but she doesn't worry about the financial impact of taking an extended leave of absence from her job, even though her ex-husband is always claiming he's cash-strapped and isn't contributing much towards the kids, and as the plot progresses she's adding on to the house and feeding half an army. I didn't buy it.

She caps off the spoiled protagonist act by going off on her own without telling anyone and getting into trouble and having to be rescued, like every dumb female protagonist ever. It was disappointing.

The author did do decent work on the character side; those characters who were developed (0ut of an outsize cast) were interesting, likable people with relatable problems. The plot, though, suffered from the lack of clarity and the spoiled-protagonist issue that I've already discussed, and the blurb frankly oversells it in terms of how much tension there is.

The copy editors missed some apostrophe placement issues; quite a few coordinate commas between non-coordinate adjectives; a few commas before main verbs; hyphens joining things that, in context, are not compound adjectives; a small collection of dangling modifiers; simple past used instead of past perfect tense; vocabulary issues; missing words in sentences; number disagreements; and several continuity errors. I suspect it started out a lot worse. There was a different copy editor for book 1, and she seems to have picked up the missing words in sentences but missed several apostrophe problems; the other editor, other way around.

Overall, then, it had potential, and the trip was fairly enjoyable, but it ended up having some significant issues that left me less than satisfied. I could probably have coped with the borderline spoiled protagonist with a superhero job if the climax hadn't let all the air out of the plot, or even if it had been sold to me in a way that made sense of what had happened. That's what took it down from a low four stars to a mid three stars for me.

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