Review: Fool's Game

Fool's Game by R.M. Dorn
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

While the storytelling and overall entertainment factor definitely put this book into my Best of the Year list for 2022, the scruffy presentation and decal-style characterization drop it down to the bronze tier.

First, the good. This is a fresh-seeming take on both portal fantasy and the battle royale, with a sympathetic main character. The pacing is good, and the story kept my interest throughout; I never considered going off and reading something else instead.

Unfortunately, though, the polish wasn't there to make it a truly excellent book rather than just an entertaining one. Individually, the issues weren't enormous: the author apparently not knowing that the convention is to use single quotes inside double quotes, for example, or forgetting to type the word "a" in a few sentences, or putting in extra coordinate commas between non-coordinate adjectives. But there were a lot of them (about twice as many as I see in a book on average, and it's a short book), and some of them were easily avoidable, such as the typos that spellcheck should have caught, or the inconsistencies in the notes on the game.

This is a game world, though it's not precisely game-lit. The game (we know, but the characters don't) is being played by the daughters of Destiny, four deaf goddesses who play with cards and dice, but the cards are people and creatures who battle for the goddesses' amusement in a pocket-dimension arena. (The frame narrative of the goddesses is prominent early on, drops out for the entire middle of the book, and comes back briefly at the end.) The human Cards have been recruited from mostly the 17th century, and this is where my suspension of disbelief broke down a little; none of them ring true to me as people from that time period, and even though they've spent time in the real world in the interim, I just didn't believe that would have made them into the people we see. Their historical origin is what I call a decal - something that we're told about them, but that remains purely superficial and feels inauthentic. In a similar vein, one of them is Scots, but his accent comes and goes unpredictably. I think he's mainly Scots when he's saying things that the author knows how to put in Scots dialect, but when he's saying things that a modern person would say, he speaks in unmarked modern English.

It was also mightily convenient that the randomly selected team that included the audience proxy - the woman from our own time recruited as the wild-card Fool - included only nice people with cats, dogs, and owls as familiars, rather than the nasty, ruthless people with snakes and bats who were the opposition. There was a character whose status was indefinite, who had otters, but mainly in order to provide a romantic triangle and some extra tension. Clearly, the heroine is bad at choosing men, perhaps in part because she either takes relationships too seriously or not seriously enough; this doesn't cause as much trouble for her as it probably should.

Overall, the emotional arc was sound and satisfying, and it hit the beats well. The finer details, though, were not finessed enough to get more than a bronze-tier rating.

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