Review: Nautilus Legends, Books 1-3

Nautilus Legends, Books 1-3 by Emma Shelford
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Competently written, for the most part; the characters have believable motivations and aren't just cardboard cut-outs, there are some tense moments in which they battle credible evildoers (with about as much competence as you'd expect from highly motivated amateurs, rather than action heroes), and the stakes are personal for them. I'm struggling to define why I didn't like it more than I did.

Sure, despite crediting two editors the text needs another (relatively light) edit, most notably for cases where the author has broken a sentence in half with a tag in the middle and hasn't punctuated it correctly, though there are also a few common homonym errors, comma mistakes and idiom fumbles. It's better than a lot of books I read in this regard, though.

Contemporary SF (which I'm counting this as, because one of the main characters is a scientist, and there's never any suggestion that the cryptids are magical) isn't a favourite subgenre for me, mostly because the characters are often aimless. These characters are not aimless. They all (initially or eventually) have things they want, which conflict sometimes, as they ought. The pace does drag occasionally for my taste, when they're not sure what to do; I felt there could have been a stronger drive towards a more defined story goal. Again, it's better than others I've read in the subgenre.

I think part of what reduced my enthusiasm is that I never really believed that all these oceanic cryptids could be swimming about without anyone ever noticing them before the story started. There were a couple of attempts to hang a lampshade on this and explain it away, but I just never found it credible, and without buying into that premise the story doesn't work.

I wish I could be more enthusiastic about it, because considered objectively it's a decent piece of work, but it just didn't click for me. I'm giving it four stars for quality, but it doesn't get onto my Best of the Year list.

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