Review: The Serpent's Egg

The Serpent's Egg by Caroline Stevermer
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This one left me vaguely disappointed, and the reason is, I think, that the characters lack competence, with the exception of one or two minor characters who are almost completely undeveloped. (Not that any of the characters are developed all that much.)

I like to see not only protagonists, but also antagonists, being competent, and here neither of them are. The protagonists succeed in part through good luck and in part because the supposedly formidable antagonist makes several stupid mistakes and is seldom able to execute any of his plans successfully. (view spoiler)[He even makes the obviously boneheaded error of writing a note in his own handwriting, with his signature, unambiguously ordering a hit on the queen, and sending it to someone who he should have realized would be captured; it's largely the fact that the queen is high-handed and imperious and it's hard to get a private audience with her to tell her that her favourite is plotting to assassinate her that keeps the novel's plot from resolving halfway through. Yes, the queen is also not competent, despite having been seemingly modelled on the very canny and intelligent Elizabeth I.

Another example: The rogue/spy character is recognized while in disguise and nearly killed, rescued only by the fact that one of his colleagues happens to be in the right place at the right time (very close to a house where several other allies also, conveniently, are) and also instantly recognizes him in his disguise.
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There's what is, I think, supposed to be a romance subplot, but it's so stripped back that it barely exists; the two characters don't meet through most of the book, their written communications are pragmatic and plot-related, and at the end, when they do get together in the same place, it's very adversarial and not at all romantic.

On top of this, the version I read was from Open Road (which I didn't check when I bought it), and is at their usual low level of professionalism and polish. By which I mean that, after the OCR scan, they clearly didn't bother even to run spellcheck, let alone paste it into Google Docs and spend half an hour locating the places where the scan had got the sentence punctuation wrong. I'm going to start avoiding their books; they're almost without exception as poorly edited as this, and there's no excuse for putting in so little effort to improve the reader's experience.

This was a book that had some strengths - the low-magic quasi-Elizabethan setting, the noblebright characters conspiring to protect the queen - but with nobody (including, notably, the publisher) being competent, it ended up falling short of its potential. Given that the other book I've read by this author ( The Glass Magician ) was also disappointing for reasons that aren't completely dissimilar, I don't think I'll pick up any more of her books in future.

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