Review: Sojourn

Sojourn by Jana Oliver
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

While it has a degree of freshness and is not badly executed on the whole, if this won seven awards I don't imagine the other candidates for those awards were up to much. It's above average, but it's not a long way above quite a low average, and there are enough issues that I can't in good conscience give four stars. It's a high three.

The two completely separate speculative elements (time travel and shapeshifting) are more plot devices than they are fully worked out setting elements, and there's a bit of a tonal clash between the high technology of one and the scientifically inexplicable, quasi-supernatural nature of the other (not that either one is really explained).

The editing errors (including a number of dangling modifiers and some missing words, plus a few vocabulary glitches) are not constant, but they are numerous - see my notes and highlights. They include the common errors of inserting a comma between non-coordinate adjectives and omitting a comma after a term of address. There's a scene in which the point of view jumps between two characters over the course of three sentences, which is generally considered a craft error. The author does get a point for (I'm reasonably sure) using the word "sojourn" correctly, to mean a period of time spent in a place, rather than a journey, as I often see it incorrectly used. However, there are a number of other homonym and vocabulary errors.

The 19th-century-London vibe feels just a little off; I'm fairly sure 19th-century British police didn't talk about someone "fitting the profile," for example, and that few people referred to them as "cops".

The characters are appealing enough, and have some depth, but could have more. There's a love triangle (or square, or something), because the heroine is one of those Everyone Wants Her heroines; to be fair, she is a capable character, though rather given to running around at night unarmed and unaccompanied in a bad part of Victorian London. This makes her previous survival as a Time Rover in various historical periods seem less plausible. The fact that everyone notices her makes her unlikely as an agent, too (real-life agents are mostly unremarkable), but that's a genre trope, so I'll give it a pass.

One of the characters is a shifter who refuses to shift, giving no reason much beyond that he doesn't want to, even though he knows it's dangerous for him not to (he eventually does when the situation gets dire enough). It felt like that was more of a plot device than anything, used to build tension, and I felt the same about the heroine's "time lag"; it was supposed to mean she had to stop time travelling, but after it was used for some initial tension-building it stopped being treated as a serious problem, so that the plot could continue to happen.

The future world she comes from is a lightly sketched, prefabricated cyberpunkish dystopia dominated by corrupt corporates, and neither the business model for time travel nor the way it's conducted (drop academics in the past to do research; send experts to retrieve them if they overstay) make a whole lot of sense. The worldbuilding in general is undercooked.

On the upside, it's a longish book, but I was entertained enough to keep reading to the end. There are plenty of worse books, but there are also a lot of better ones.

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