Review: Oops! I Broke the Wizard's Android!

Oops! I Broke the Wizard's Android! by Royce Roeswood
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A mostly successful blend of SF (of the space-opera variety) and fantasy, as the title suggests.

That title refers to an event that occurs more than halfway through and isn't, perhaps, as crucial as its place in the title implies. The fix for the problem sets up for a "twist" that I knew was coming the moment the fix happened, and that I didn't believe would never have come up for anyone previously; but I read a lot of books, so I often see plot twists coming a long way off.

Something else I see a lot of is poor mechanics (punctuation, grammar, usage, vocabulary errors), and this book has many of the usual ones. (Disclaimer as always: I read a pre-publication version via Netgalley, and it is possible, though not highly likely, that there will be another edit before publication.) Excess commas between adjectives, of course, because nobody seems to know the coordinate comma rule; incorrect punctuation of dialog (a capital when the sentence resumes after a mid-dialog tag); apostrophes in the wrong place for things like the Lamplighters' Guild (which presumably has more than one lamplighter in it, so the apostrophe should go after, not before, the S); simple mistypings that happen to be valid words spellcheck doesn't catch, even though they're not the word intended, like "try" for "tray," "It" for "I," "add" for "and," "of" for "on," "she" for "see"; basic homonym errors like "diffuse" for "defuse," "horde" for "hoard," "loathe" for "loath" and (only once) "it's" for "its"; lack of the mandatory comma before a term of address; occasional lack of the past perfect tense where it belongs; and a number of other small issues, like grammatically distorted sentences, unusual word choices and hyphenation issues. It's about average for an indie book (trad-pub books sometimes have just as many errors, but typically different ones), but unfortunately, average means scruffy and, to me, at least, distracting.

What about the story? It's a simple enough plot. This is a universe in which high-ranking wizards are placed in charge of planets, moons, space stations and what have you, and aspiring wizards, after their university training, are sent for a year's apprenticeship - basically an internship - with a master wizard, doing their mundane chores in return for instruction in advanced magic. The protagonist, Ninienne, is such an apprentice, and her master wizard is incredibly old, not entirely compos mentis, and obsessed with portal magic (now mostly obsolete), whereas Ninienne intends to be a researcher in the field of creature healing - magical veterinary science. The creatures, by the way, are often a combination of a couple of Earth-type animals, like Ninienne's frogdog familiar, or the crowhorses that are used for farm work, or even of animal and plant.

There's an odd mix of eras in the worldbuilding; there are interstellar spaceships and androids, but the farming feels 19th- or early-20th-century, and rather than electric lights, the wizard's tower is lit with flame spells. In 1950s space opera style, all the inhabited worlds appear to have entirely Earth-compatible biomes, with no difficulties about being able to eat the local life or farm crops from other planets. Intelligent aliens in the SF sense don't seem to be a thing, but there are dryads and demons and such. It's basically a fantasy universe with a bit of light SF grafted on.

As the story progresses, Ninienne struggles more and more with her mentor, and he looks more and more sinister. Where is his previous apprentice? What about his wife and daughter? Why is he so obsessed with portal magic? Will he near-arbitrarily decide to fail her, in which case her magic will potentially be bound and she will be left in desperate straits? Meanwhile, her closest friend is having a great time in her apprenticeship (a long way away) and isn't much help, the android Ninienne tricks her mentor into buying to do the scut work is, perforce, on the mentor's side because of its programming (even if odd things are happening with it), and there's a guy from a nearby farm who seems to want to be the romantic interest, but Ninienne can do without the complication, given everything else that's going on.

As far as storytelling is concerned, while there's nothing amazing, it's all sound, solid stuff, entertaining, with a decent arc and good emotional beats. The worldbuilding isn't particularly in depth, but it does its job. The characters have believable motivations. It's a good first effort, and although of course I wish the author, like nearly every author I read, could level up his game when it comes to writing mechanics, I've read plenty of books that are far worse in that regard (I'm reading one at the moment, in fact). It earns a spot in the Bronze tier of my annual recommendation list, which is still a recommendation, even if not a high one.

View all my reviews

Review: The Book of Atrix Wolfe

The Book of Atrix Wolfe by Patricia A. McKillip
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

Time to admit that I'm not going to finish this; I've finished 14 other books since I started it, and about 10 of those since I stalled at not quite halfway through, and I don't feel any pull to go back to it.

It's not because it's not a good book. It is a good book. It's just not the kind of book I enjoy anymore; it's epic and persistently serious and has a strong tragic undercurrent, and all of the characters are stoic under terrible events, beautifully narrated. It's not grimdark - the characters are not irredeemable people of bad will - but it's grimdark's slightly more humane cousin. Maybe there's a wonderful turn late in the book, but I wasn't enjoying it enough to stick around and find out.

The 30th anniversary edition which I got from Netgalley contains a few telltale signs of having been scanned from an earlier edition and has not had all the OCR errors edited out. I don't know if they'll be there in the published version or not; watch out for the error "fanner" as a misreading for "farmer," and em dashes rendered as hyphens, and that will tell you whether or not it got another pass after I saw it.

View all my reviews

Review: Minor Mage

Minor Mage by T. Kingfisher
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A classic underdog kid story; the publisher's editors insisted it wasn't for kids, just about them, but there's a lot more darkness in a lot of kids' stories than in this one, often without a happy ending, and if I had kids aged between, say, nine and about 14, I'd certainly encourage them to read it. It's enjoyable for adults, too.

It's also a classic "incompetent mage" (or rather "barely-competent mage") story; the 12-year-old protagonist, Oliver, only knows three spells (though he does, it turns out, know quite a few charms that don't count as spells within the meaning of the Act, so this is a slight cheat to make him sound less competent than he is). He uses two of them to excellent effect in some tense moments; the other one deals with his allergies, so it doesn't really count.

It's a classic trope of YA that the kid is sent off to do something dangerous because the adults are incompetent or incapable or uncaring, and in this case it's the incapable one. Oliver is the only mage the village has, his very elderly and not particularly compos-mentis mentor having died, so (while his mother is helping her daughter with a new baby in another village), he gets sent off by a slightly apologetic mob to do something about the drought that is threatening everyone. It's vaguely known that there are Cloud Shepherds off in the mountains, and that a mage can go there and bring back rain, so that's his mission.

It's a dangerous road, so it's just as well that he's inventive and courageous, though he does have a realistic reaction to the various trials he encounters; he's not one of those stoic heroes of Very Serious Fantasy. This isn't Very Serious Fantasy, by the way; it has more than a hint of Terry Pratchett, not least in the apt observations about life that are dropped in occasionally ("If humans don't let things out, they get weird," says Oliver's armadillo familiar, for example).

The snide familiar is great, Oliver is appealing and feels real, and all in all it's a fun ride. There are certainly dark moments, but there are some hilarious moments and touching moments and moments of great kindness and humanity generously sprinkled in as well, and ultimately it's that side that wins out.

The editing is decent, but not perfect; the three copy editors have missed the author's persistent bad habit of putting the apostrophe in the wrong place when the noun is plural, and three or four places where she's missed a word out of a sentence, and a couple of places where there's a comma after "Sure" or "Of course" in a context where it shouldn't have a comma, because it's just agreeing with an earlier statement. Generally, though, it's clean.

View all my reviews

Review: The Crack in the Crystal

The Crack in the Crystal by Barak Engel
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

D&D-inspired (the characters are based on the party in a game that the author runs), but not simply D&D; there's no question of copyright issues. While the characters' classes are recognizable - sorcerer, rogue, ranger/druid, bard - their abilities aren't from a template common in their world, but are unusual and specific to them.

Because it doesn't simply follow a D&D game, but is a story created from scratch, it has more depth and coherence than you might otherwise expect, and the twist ending adequately accounts for the coincidences that are needed to make it work. The characters grow and change at least a little, their relationships develop, and the plot makes for a satisfying arc.

What it isn't is a heist. It starts out looking as if the characters are being assembled as a heist crew, but... they're not, and the heistlike parts at the beginning are rudimentary, and we're soon on to something else. I like heists, so this was a bit of a disappointment, but it's not like the quest/investigation plot that it turned into wasn't enjoyable.

Much of the prose is well edited; the author avoids several common mistakes, in fact. The main exception is that the past perfect tense is frequently missing. This was a constant irritation to me, because of the temporal whiplash of the narrative in simple past tense continuing to use simple past tense when it referred to events earlier in the past (prior to the narrative moment). I read a pre-publication version via Netgalley, so there is some chance that a good editor will fix this before publication, though honestly I would be a bit surprised if that happens. That's a big part of what kept the story from rising to the Silver tier of my annual recommendation list, though it's solidly in Bronze. This is a promising author, and I hope he learns to use the past perfect more consistently before writing a sequel, because I'd like to read it.

View all my reviews

Review: Dressed to Kill

Dressed to Kill by Crown Fall
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It's an odd fact that certain genres - notably steampunk, superhero prose and this book's genre, LitRPG - seem to attract authors who have very little idea of basic writing mechanics (commas, apostrophes, how to punctuate dialog, how to use the past perfect tense) and also have much smaller vocabularies than they think they have, so they write things like "disbursed" for "dispersed," "alight" for "light" (as in "light a fire"), "astride" for "alongside," "singular" for "single," "taught" for "taut," "wretched" for "retched," "seems" for "seams," "capitol" for "capital," "adorning" for "donning," "sheering" for "shearing," "sheathe" for "sheath," "wailed" for "whaled" (as in "whaled on"), "affixed" for "fixed," "pouring" for "poring," "shuttered" for "shuddered," "incidence" for "incident". All of those examples are from this book.

It's a pity, because this is a well-told and engaging story, if you don't mind the usual LitRPG business of the status screen with its stats and the absurd game logic. It's a fresh concept, too: the local Noble deliberately isn't clearing a dungeon, knowing that this will cause the safe space around the dungeon to contract, ultimately destroying the town there and forcing the townspeople out, whereupon he can take advantage of their lack of options (at least, so they believe). So two young women in the town with crafting classes are creatively misapplying them to clear the dungeon instead. One of them, the narrator, has been reincarnated after a life in our world, which doesn't make much difference - her otherworldly knowledge is useless in a setting where all the rules are completely different, not to mention that I got the impression that neither she nor the author has much useful knowledge about, say, engineering, farming, or medicine in any case - but it does provide an anchor for the reader and lets the author make comparisons to things in our world without it seeming out of place. (Except that it does seem out of place to some of my fellow reviewers, who have missed the fact that the character is a transmigrator.)

Even though there are three late-teenage characters, two female and one male, there's not the slightest hint of romance in any of the possible combinations; it's all about the dungeon-clearing. The guy is a blacksmith, and something of a coward (he makes himself impregnable armour and a huge shield but doesn't carry a weapon, and refuses to participate in clearing the dungeon). The two young women are a butcher and a seamstress, the seamstress, Gwen, being the narrator; as well as using her skills directly to kill monsters, she crafts gear out of monster parts to help them fight future monsters.

Unfortunately, as well as the all-too-common poor mechanics and vocabulary issues, this book has an issue I've never encountered before: the author has often copied and pasted, instead of cut and pasted, entire sentences or paragraphs in the course of revision, and the result is that the same words or a minor variation on them appear in two different places in the same scene. The continuity is also janky; for example, at one point Gwen's mother tells her explicitly what skill a piece of gear has attached to it, but in a later scene Gwen says that her mother didn't tell her, and they have to find out for themselves. Add to that the very common LitRPG fault that the numbers (for the levels of stats, amount of XP, and so forth) often aren't kept consistent between mentions - to the point that I suspect the author doesn't have a functional system to keep track of them, and I know that they haven't done a final consistency check - and this is a book that needs several more careful editing passes to bring it up to the standard that its storytelling deserves. Although I enjoyed it, I can't put it higher than the Bronze tier (the lowest tier) of my annual recommendation list; the execution is just too lacking in polish. But I would read a sequel, so that's something.

It's set up for a sequel - which looks like it will be an academy arc - by the ending, which unfortunately lets all the air out of the main antagonist and is a bit of a letdown in a way. It's an enjoyable journey to that point, though, so I still give it a positive rating.

View all my reviews

Review: Gaudy Night

Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It was clear from reading Murder Must Advertise that Sayers hated her time working in advertising; it's equally clear from reading this book that she loved her time at Oxford. In it, Harriet Vane, Lord Peter's love interest, returns to her old college and becomes involved in solving a mystery (not a murder mystery; there's someone sending unhinged and abusive notes and committing minor vandalism), at the same time wrestling with her own existential questions. Could she, even part-time, be a scholar as well as or instead of a mystery writer? Could she, can anyone, balance being a female academic and a wife, or is it one or the other? How does she feel about, and what should she do about, the fact that Lord Peter Wimsey loves her and has asked her several times a year for the past five years to marry him? Can a man and a woman be equal partners, or would she inevitably have to give up part of herself? Is the pursuit of truth the highest value, even above humane considerations? What is the responsibility of someone who unknowingly does harm with good intentions? The answers are complicated, and at least some of the questions seem to have been questions the author had as well; she is now known not only for her mystery novels but for her translation of Dante, for example.

Harriet Vane has an odd place in the Wimsey novels. She was introduced in Strong Poison , in which she was on trial for murdering her lover and in which Peter fell in love with her (for, as far as I'm concerned, inadequately justified reasons, though they receive some shoring up in this book), and also cleared her by discovering the actual murderer. In Have His Carcase , she discovers a murder (that may not even be a murder, but a suicide) by chance, and Peter takes advantage of the fact that she calls him in to help investigate by asking her repeatedly to marry him, which she repeatedly refuses to do. She's not mentioned at all in The Five Red Herrings (which comes between Strong Poison and Have His Carcase); she's mentioned only briefly, indirectly, and not by name in Murder Must Advertise , next after Carcase, and not at all again in The Nine Tailors , which comes between Advertise and this book. But here she's the viewpoint character most of the time.

The introduction to the edition I read was by the actress who played her in a TV series originally to be titled Harriet Vane, and covering Strong Poison, Have His Carcase and Gaudy Night, which became the inaccurately titled A Dorothy L. Sayers Mystery and then, for American broadcast, was renamed Lord Peter Wimsey, ironically in view of its original working title. So this adaptation of books by a woman, with a woman as a key unifying character, in which the man goes out of his way to give her independence and dignity, still ends up being named after him.

The book itself is complex, more of a true novel than a detective story, though it has both the good old standby subplots of mystery and romance going on (albeit not in a conventional way in either case). There's a lot of jargon and reference to features of life in academic Oxford, and English and Latin literature of the kind that one is presumably introduced to at Oxford, or was in the 1930s, at least, all of which requires annotations to make complete sense of; this site does a good job of providing such annotations, particularly necessary for the final scene, which contains a good deal of nuance that is lost if you don't know the background (and what the Latin means that Peter and Harriet speak in it). For me, it was a bit too much inside its milieu, like the earlier Murder Must Advertise with advertising and The Nine Tailors with campanology, awash in jargon that someone from outside that milieu would just find incomprehensible, even though it was never key to following the plot. Like both of those books and The Five Red Herrings, it also had a few too many minor characters who weren't adequately distinguished from one another and were hard to keep straight, in the absence of a dramatis personae page giving both their name and their role or occupation; this was especially the case in Gaudy Night, since sometimes a character would be referred to as "the Dean" or "the Warden" or "the Bursar" and sometimes by their name. These two factors (the overabundance of jargon and the large and inadequately distinguishable chorus) kept it out of the Gold tier of my annual recommendation list, despite the fact that it has exactly the kind of depth and reflection on the human condition that would normally put it there; it sits in Silver, with works that are solid but not brilliant, because the way in which it's brilliant wasn't particularly accessible to me and, therefore, not as enjoyable as it might have been. It's a failing in me as much as in the book.

I was also highly annoyed to be teased not once but twice with the possibility of Miss Climpson, my favourite character from the series, becoming involved, only to have her turn out to be unavailable to assist and so never seen on the page. (I would read the juice out of a book in which Miss Climpson and Bunter, my second-favourite character, team up to rescue Lord Peter, or to do anything else, for that matter.)

The Hodders edition I read shows telltale signs of having been set using a scan and OCR and then not proofread adequately; there are double commas, missing commas, inserted commas, commas that should be stops and vice versa, and typos (increasing towards the end, which suggests a rushed deadline), including several words that a simple spellcheck would have caught. A typical sloppy Hodders job. Get a different edition if you can manage it.

View all my reviews

Review: The Ballad of Sprikit The Bard And Company

The Ballad of Sprikit The Bard And Company by Sean O'Boyle
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It's very seldom that any book compared to Discworld is remotely close to the genius that was Sir Terry Pratchett, and this is not one of the rare exceptions, as far as I am concerned. I found it mildly amusing at best. At least it doesn't, like most of the Discworld would-be imitators, rely solely on stupid fantasy tropes and silly names for characters that are about as deep as the ink on the paper; there is some depth developed for the main character. There's not as much as I'd like, though, and the secondary characters, even the ones who are onscreen a lot, remain little more than their archetype plus their plot role. The setting is an extremely generic sword-and-sorcery world, though with hardly any magic in it. About the only original note is something I didn't find credible: the story takes place in the Free Lands, a lordless buffer zone between two large kingdoms/empires, which, though it certainly contains criminals hiding out from the law, is remarkably free of ruthless warlords taking advantage of the power vacuum, and seems to run surprisingly smoothly for the most part. Also, soldiers from one of the neighbouring powers are free to wander round it without anyone challenging their right to be there pursuing a supposed criminal (the main character, who has been framed). And I was never clear on who was minting the currency they used; maybe it came from one or other of the neighbouring powers.

Not only is it far from Terry Pratchett, it's not to be compared with The Lies of Locke Lamora , either. Where that book involves subtle and elaborate heists, this book mostly involves Sprikit telling lies that wouldn't fool a chicken and then having to flee when they are inevitably seen through.

My common-errors bingo card filled up quickly; especially prevalent were missing commas after such sentence-introductory words as "well" and "yes," and before and after terms of address (a very basic rule), but also commas inserted between adjectives that shouldn't have them. There are some mispunctuated sentences of dialog, a few sentences that don't make logical or grammatical sense or use the wrong preposition, and some vocabulary issues, notably "phase" for "faze," "wretched" for "retched" and "wailing" for "whaling," all common mistakes, but also "hilt" to mean "sheath," "namesake" to mean "name," and "binds" to mean "bonds" or "bindings". Apostrophes are often in the wrong place when a plural noun is involved, the past perfect tense is not always present where it should be (and sometimes when it is there, the verb is in the wrong form, though this may just be the author's dialect), and "may" is consistently used in past tense narration where it should be "might". "Lay" is used a couple of times for "laid" (a common overcorrection for an even more common error). All of these issues, as I say, are ones I see a lot, but here we see not only all of them but dozens of instances of some of them, which degrades my reading experience compared to a well-edited book. At just over halfway through (which is where I stopped), I had marked nearly 150 issues, and I'd stopped marking "Well" at the start of a sentence with no comma to follow it, because there were so many instances of it I would have been constantly marking them. This makes it, at a rough calculation, approximately 12 times as bad as the average book I read in terms of number of errors.

The book has strengths as well. Some of the set-pieces are well paced, with a good ebb and flow of tension as the protagonist almost escapes, then is very nearly caught, then is forced to an even more desperate action and almost escapes again... The closing in of the villain on the party gives us some sustained tension too, though not so much so that I wanted to keep slogging through the mediocrity in order to finish it.

Overall, it's a generic fantasy that I didn't find all that funny, or at all deep, and that needed a ton more editing. The author shows promise, but will need a lot more work to reach his potential.

View all my reviews