Review: Heart of Gold

Heart of Gold by Michael Pryor
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Sadly, I felt this book went downhill from the already imperfect first book, both in editing and also in plot. I still enjoyed it, but I was frustrated by the avoidable issues that made it less than it could have been.

The typesetting is very sloppy, with a lot of instances where there's a space before a quotation mark, for instance; there are words left out of sentences, words repeated, all the usual mess. There are also missing hyphens, multiple dangling modifiers, lots of "may" where it should be "might" in past tense, and two occasions where characters are given the wrong name (once a contorted misspelling, once the surname of a completely different character). As I remarked about the first book, this is why I don't buy trad-pub books but get them from the library; you never know when you're going to get a sub-par piece of work like this, and they cost a lot more than indie books which are sometimes better edited.

This time, we're in Not-France ("Gallia"), mostly Not-Paris ("Lutetia"), where Aubrey is theoretically on holiday. I say "theoretically" because, as well as trying to casually bump into his love interest, who's studying there, he's trying to fulfil commissions from his cousin the crown prince, his father the prime minister, his mother the naturalist, his grandmother the duchess, and the head of the magical secret service. Plus he needs to get a rest, because he's still suffering from his foolish experiment with death magic in the first book.

No chance of a rest, though, because (and this was one of the things that irked me) he is constantly happening to be in places where something plot-relevant is happening. I lost count of the number of times he was coincidentally right there at a key moment. For example, he happens to be taking a tour of Not-Notre-Dame at the exact time that the McGuffin of the title, a magical artifact that holds France together, is stolen from a chapel there. This is, in my view, no way to run a plot; if a protagonist is somewhere where an important event is happening, it ought to be because they are protagonizing, not by sheer lucky chance. Also, he's still improvising ridiculously powerful, unprecedented magic whenever there's a problem to solve.

Setting all that aside, it's action-packed and varied, and both the storytelling and emotional arc are sound. Aubrey makes just the kind of stupid, selfish decision a privileged, talented 17-year-old would make (notably without involving his sidekick George, which implies that he knows it's wrong and doesn't want to be told so), and he suffers consequences for it, which is good.

I like Caroline, the love interest, a lot, for much the same reasons as Aubrey does; she's extremely competent and intelligent, and acts like it (it's not just a decal stuck superficially onto a character who actually demonstrates ineptness and stupidity). And despite his shenanigans, I like Aubrey, too; he has a good heart, mostly, and wants to do the right thing, and knows he's driven by wanting his father's approval and to live up to his family tradition but doesn't know how to cope with that. His imperfections actually make him more appealing than a total Gary Stu, even though he's ridiculously talented.

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