Review: The Late Scholar

The Late Scholar by Jill Paton Walsh
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Peter and Harriet return to Oxford, a place they both love, though the (fictional) college concerned is one that neither of them attended. The story involves petty squabbling between two entrenched, and equally sized, factions among the College Fellows, one of which wants to sell a historical manuscript gifted by a past donor and use the money to buy land to prop up the college finances, while the other faction considers this absolutely unacceptable. I found this completely plausible, down to the pettiness and inflexible positions, having had the misfortune to live in a block of flats where there were long-standing factions and controversies.

Peter is called in because he is, by heredity, the College Visitor and so entitled to rule in a case of deadlock, but he quickly puts his detective hat on, his interest sparked by the mysterious disappearance of the Warden and the deaths or near-deaths of several Fellows.

It has the series' abiding fault of having too many minor characters with minimal distinguishing characteristics who are therefore hard to keep straight, and, like most of the books, would benefit from a dramatis personae at the front to which the reader can refer, not least to check which faction each one belongs to. I lost track of the politics relatively early on. The investigation also seems to be conducted at rather a leisurely pace, given the stakes. But there are some strong moments, and the mystery aspect is well handled, while the atmosphere of academic Oxford is beautifully conveyed.

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Review: The Terriford Mystery

The Terriford Mystery by Marie Belloc Lowndes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A classic mystery story with a different angle: very little of it is concerned with the investigation of the crime, and what investigation there is doesn't end up being very important, thanks to a last-minute revelation.

Instead, its focus is the distress of the innocent accused and his equally innocent beloved, who are universally believed to be respectively the murderer and the motive for the murder of the accused's late wife. It's only detected as a crime at all because some busybody suggests that the circumstances of her death were suspicious, and her widower, wanting to put the rumours firmly to bed for good, insists on an exhumation, not expecting for a moment that there will be evidence of murder.

The fact that he was the one who insisted on the exhumation is never discussed in his defense, and in fact the legal side of things in general is a bit slapdash. More interesting as a human story involving a murder than a mystery in the genre sense, and the author could have had a stronger grasp on where to put commas and tends to repeat vocabulary and phrasing. I'm also reasonably sure the word "illusive" should have been "elusive".

Still, it's enjoyable for what it is if you don't expect it to be something else.

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Top Books for 2024

This is my eleventh annual roundup of recommended books that I read in the previous year. My summary page links to all the previous roundups.

In the early years, I arbitrarily matched the number of top books to the number of the year (so I had 14 books on the list in 2014). I abandoned that practice after the first four years, and in 2022 I loosened the criteria even further and included almost anything that I gave four or five stars to. This year's recommendation list again has the largest number of books so far, at 100, out of the 114 full-length books I read in their entirety in 2024. I'll admit that I spent a couple of hours on the 31st of December finishing the last two to make an even hundred; also, the total includes some re-reads, two of which have appeared on previous Best of the Year lists. That's likely to start happening more often now that I've been doing this for so long, and I've decided just to add them to the list for both years in which I read them. Taking those duplicates into consideration, that means (if my calculations are correct) that the total number of recommendations across the 11 years is now 391.

The high total number for 2024 mainly reflects the fact that I've been commuting on the train, meaning I have several more hours of reading each week. There were another 22 books I started but didn't finish, something which I haven't counted in previous years. I'll mention below where I got some of them from.

The total also doesn't include a lot of manga read online, because that's hard to track and many of them are still in process.

Here are my figures in a table:

	5 star	4 star	3 star	2 star	Total
2024	8	92	13	0	114
2023	6	82	12	2	102
2022	6	59	13	4	82
2021	5	54	29	3	90
2020	8	53	21	0	82
2019	11	36	17	1	65
2018	5	72	15	2	94
2017	10	56	19	0	85
2016	11	53	12	1	77
2015	11	68	19	2	101
2014	9	70	23	2	104
Total	90	692	193	17	996
Average	8	63	18	2	90

The total happens to be very close to 1000 books for the 11 years I've been doing this. It also makes clear that, of the books I finish, fewer than 10% are worth five stars. About 70% are worth four stars, and about 20% three stars or below.

Tier Rankings

Since 2021, I have ranked the books in four tiers: Platinum (equal to 5 stars), and Gold, Silver and Bronze (which provide more gradation within the four-star space). Essentially, Bronze indicates that the storytelling and the emotional arc were sound and I enjoyed the book on the whole and recommend it to other readers, but with caveats, usually to do with poor copy editing and/or weak worldbuilding. Silver indicates a sound, solid book with no serious flaws, and Gold is a sound, solid book that also has something a bit extra, usually depth of characterization or insight into the human condition, but somehow or other doesn't quite make it all the way to Platinum. Platinum means I thoroughly enjoyed it, no significant flaws, depth, originality, an all-around winner. Significant issues in a book that's strong in other ways can knock it down one or even two tiers.

I think I have become more generous, and I probably should be giving at least some of my three-star books two stars (a three-star book engaged me enough that I finished it, but had issues serious enough or numerous enough that I couldn't recommend it). I should probably also be demoting the Bronze books down to three stars. I haven't given one star in a long time. So, yes, grade inflation is happening with the star ratings, but hopefully my tier system makes up for it to some extent.

I also don't shy away, in my reviews, from mentioning (with examples) the ways in which I felt the book fell short. This definitely includes expecting some level of professionalism in the preparation of what is, after all, an article being offered for sale. I've been chided several times in comments on my Goodreads reviews for taking this line about books the commenters like, where my criticisms are for things that both the fans and, apparently, the author neither know nor care about, so I've become more careful recently about emphasizing that my review is, like all reviews, about my experience of the book, and other people may legitimately experience it differently.

Here's the link to all of my "Best of 2024" books, and here are my Platinum tier (8 books), Gold tier (9 books), Silver tier (43 books) and Bronze tier (40 books).

A note: I've figured out how to link to lists of books on Goodreads that have the same tag (or "shelf") and were read in the same year. I will take the risk of using these links, knowing that if GR revises their code - which is honestly long overdue - the links may well stop working. I will give brief rundowns on the Gold and Platinum books below.

Discovery/Sources

As with the previous two years, I read a lot of classics, mostly from Project Gutenberg. This is partly because my previous best sources, Netgalley and BookBub, have been increasingly disappointing over the past couple of years, featuring a lot of unimaginative cookie-cutter books, many of them in genres I don't care for, and even the ones I do pick up are often not ready for release, in my opinion. I read 36 books from Project Gutenberg: one, George MacDonald's Lilith, ranked in Platinum; three, all by Dorothy L. Sayers, in Gold; nine in Silver, and 18 in Bronze, with the remaining five books earning only three stars each. There were also three that I stopped reading before I finished them, which I haven't counted in the total of 36.

In contrast, 16 of this year's books came from Netgalley, down from 20 in 2023, 25 in 2022 and 41 in the previous two years: only one Platinum (Robert Jackson Bennett's A Drop of Corruption), zero Gold, three Silver, seven Bronze, and five which earned only three stars. Because Netgalley books are pre-publication, I generally don't use my Needs Editing or Seriously Needs Editing tags on them, since at least in theory they could get more editing before publication (though, honestly, they most likely won't), but four of them were so significantly bad that I did tag them. Three of the three-star books got the Seriously Needs Editing tag, since they were in such a state that there was no chance that they wouldn't still need a lot of editing by their scheduled publication date; they were sometimes so inept as to be incomprehensible. Not all of these were by speakers of English as a second language, either.

In addition, I got 11 books from Netgalley that were either sufficiently bad or sufficiently not to my taste that I didn't finish them. I usually filter the books I pick up carefully, but on Netgalley (where I can't read a preview) I will take a risk on something that sounds like a fresh premise. Sometimes this works out; sometimes, as with these 11 books, it does not.

I bought only five through BookBub this year, down from six last year and 10 the year before, three tagged as "Needs Editing" and two, surprisingly, tagged "Well Edited"; three of them made Bronze and two Silver, so I'm getting better at filtering, apparently, since last year several of them didn't make the Best of the Year list at all. I'll say again: BookBub claim on their website, "We look for content that is well-formatted and free of typos and grammatical errors." They definitely do not do this.

I picked up at least another three or four books via BookBub that I didn't finish, only one of which I actually bought; the others I dropped after reading the sample.

I continued to make good use of the largest library system in the Southern Hemisphere (Auckland Libraries) this year. I read 27 ebooks from the library, more than twice as many as last year (though I didn't have a device that could borrow them until October of last year), and they consisted of three Platinum, two Gold, fifteen Silver, and five Bronze-tier books, plus a three-star. Not included in the total are two I abandoned before finishing them. I also borrowed 12 physical books from the library, mostly to complete my reading of the Lord Peter Wimsey series; there were four Gold, five Silver and three Bronze, so all of them made it to the recommendation list. In addition, I borrowed two e-audiobooks from the library, a Platinum and a Silver. That's a total of 43 library borrowings, with four Platinum, six Gold, 22 Silver, eight Bronze, a three-star and two not finished, an excellent haul on the whole.

I maintain a large wishlist (80-odd titles) on Amazon entitled "Await Ebook Price Drop," and monitor it regularly. I bought four books from my wishlist this year, two Silvers and two Bronzes. There don't seem to be as many books on sale lately, and when they do go on sale they're not always as good as I'd hoped. Two were well edited and one seriously needed editing; it was a LitRPG, which typically are poor in that respect.

I'm part of the Codex writers' forum, but I've hardly been on there this year. That's probably why I don't have any books by Codexians on this year's list.

I bought one book based on an Amazon recommendation, a well-edited Platinum-tier omnibus by Melissa McShane, an indie who reliably writes good books.

Best of the Best

I'll again just highlight the Platinum and Gold books this year, a total of 17 (up from 14 last year). Don't despise the Silver or even Bronze tiers, though; those are still recommendations, still books I enjoyed.

Gold Tier

Let's start with the books I liked a lot but that didn't quite make it to the highest possible level. In alphabetical order by author (links to my Goodreads reviews):

• Bookshops and Bonedust, Travis Baldree. I rarely enjoy a popular book as much as the hype machine tells me I should, but I enjoyed this cosy fantasy with a good amount of mystery and action and just the slightest touch of romance.
• Just Stab Me Now, Jill Bearup. I watched the YouTube shorts series that was the genesis of this book, and it was funny and engaging; the book, for me, is even better. It's a pity the author hates writing, because she's a lot better at it than most people.
• Emissary, Melissa McShane. McShane is reliably good without being (like, say, Lindsay Buroker) predictable or repetitious, and that's obvious even in this, her first book. It's like a much more light-hearted and faster-moving version of Katherine Addison's Cemeteries of Amalo series, with a mystery-solving duo who serve the God of Death.

The remaining Gold-tier books are all part of the Lord Peter Wimsey series by Dorothy L. Sayers. I've been reading a lot of classic mystery stories lately, and although that's out of my more usual genre (fantasy with occasional science fiction), it's not without precedent. As a child staying with my grandmother, I used to read her collection of Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh, but for whatever reason she didn't have the Lord Peter Wimsey stories, so I'd never read them until this year.

The books in the series I placed in Gold tier are, in publication order:

• Whose Body? The series starter, and it starts out strongly: a body in a bath, which is not (but resembles) the body of a man who's just gone missing. Troubled aristocrat Lord Peter has a personal connection, and investigates with skill and empathy.
• Unnatural Death. Did a sick woman die naturally, or was she helped along? And does Lord Peter's investigation do more harm than good?
• The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club. An elderly general is found dead in his chair at Lord Peter's club. Exactly when he died has a great deal of bearing on an inheritance. Lord Peter, whose character is taking on a lot of layers by this point, has to weigh the interests of justice against "the done thing".
• Murder Must Advertise. Lord Peter goes undercover as an advertising copywriter, something the author worked at and hated, so the advertising industry comes in for considerable satire in the course of a fascinating mystery story.
• The Nine Tailors. The best parts of Sayers' books are often the parts that are not the mystery, and this is definitely an example of that, though the mystery itself is bizarre and complicated and difficult to unravel.
• Busman's Honeymoon. A collaboration between Wimsey and his new wife, and the last in the series by the original author (there are some continuation novels, which are mostly pretty good, but don't ever rise quite to the heights of the best ones by Sayers in my opinion). Funny, clever, and with a good deal of depth, it demonstrates that the usual approach of not continuing the story of a relationship past the wedding day is a missed opportunity.

Platinum Tier

And now, the best of the best of the best (a phrase that always makes me think of that scene in Men in Black), also in alphabetical order by author.

• A Drop of Corruption, Robert Jackson Bennett. The first in this series made it into the Gold tier of my 2023 list, and this is even better. It's the more remarkable in that it's not, on the face of it, a book I should like at all - characters with serious personal issues in a dystopian, dank and bizarre biohacked empire, investigating gruesome crimes - but it's just so well done I had to put it in my top tier anyway.
• The Untold Story (The Invisible Library, #8), Genevieve Cogman. The final volume of a series which featured prominently on last year's list, this gives us a rip-roaring conclusion that provides emotional closure on all the complicated intersecting arcs without feeling the need to explain absolutely everything.
• The Mage War (Magebreakers, #5), Ben S. Dobson. Another strong series finisher, returning to the excellent form of the first book after what I felt were some slightly less successful middle books. Strongly noblebright and with an ensemble cast, two things I love.
• Paladin's Strength (The Saint of Steel, #2), T. Kingfisher. The first book featured in the Gold tier of my 2022 list. T. Kingfisher is perhaps the world's leading exponent of awkward romances between damaged middle-aged people in a world of swords and sorcery, and this is one, and a suspenseful, amusing, action-packed, emotionally intelligent one at that.
• Lilith, a Romance, George MacDonald. This was a re-read from I don't remember how many years ago; it's profound in a way that "spiritual" books rarely are today, and also a great work of fantasy from the 19th century that influenced Tolkien and, especially, Lewis.
• The Smoke-Scented Girl, Melissa McShane. Another re-read, this time from 2019, when I placed it second on my ranked list of recommendations. I was re-reading it in order to move on to the sequel, The God-Touched Man, which I didn't rate as highly (it only made the Silver tier), but is still a good book. This one is action-packed, but not at the expense of depth of character or worldbuilding.
• The Complete Convergence Trilogy, Melissa McShane. Technically a partial re-read, since I'd read the first book in 2017. It got an honourable mention in that year's list, probably equivalent to at least a Silver-tier ranking in my current system, though I noted that the diary conceit led to inconsistent pacing and that there wasn't enough character depth for a really high rating. Well, the characters get deeper as the trilogy proceeds, and the diary style settles down and becomes a feature more than a fault, and there's plenty of action, romance, reflection, politics, magic, and just sound craft.
• Tress of the Emerald Sea, Brandon Sanderson. I often give Sanderson's beautifully crafted, brilliantly imaginative, excellently edited books five stars, and if I was still ranking books in order, this one would get the top spot for 2024. The protagonist is 100% the kind of protagonist I particularly enjoy (a pragmatic, capable, sensible, courageous, intelligent and creative young woman who's also kind and genuinely good-hearted), and the journey she takes is suspenseful, exciting, amusing and fun.

Conclusion

With Netgalley and BookBub no longer providing a reliable supply of good new fantasy fiction, I've branched out a bit from the narrow focus of most of my earlier lists and read a lot more classics, a change that started in 2023. But thanks largely to the library, I've also read a lot of good recent fiction. Along the way, I've seen some serious stinkers that I didn't consider met the most basic standard of professionalism, but that, in at least some cases, other people did enjoy. Enjoyment of books is a subjective thing, and even though I try to give reasoning for my preferences and ratings, other people's mileage will inevitably vary, since they give different weightings to the factors I consider and may well like elements I don't like, and vice versa. That's exactly why I give details of what did and didn't work for me; the thing that ruined the book for me may be your favourite thing ever, or something you don't care about in the slightest, or don't even notice.

Still, if your taste is even approximately like mine, here's another year's worth of reading recommendations which ought to yield something you'll enjoy. I will note that one of my last year's Platinum picks, Kaliane Bradley's The Ministry of Time, won a Goodreads Choice Award in its genre (science fiction) in 2024, and both Bookshops and Bonedust and Tress of the Emerald Sea were nominated in 2023, so my taste isn't completely outside the mainstream - even if a previous Goodreads Choice Award winner and another nominee were the recipients of my "Most Disappointing Book of the Year" awards in their respective years.

I look forward to more good reading in 2025.

Review: The Complete Guild of the Eternal Flame Box Set

The Complete Guild of the Eternal Flame Box Set by Talia Beckett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Sometimes, a decent D&D-based sword-and-sorcery yarn with a bit of character depth is exactly what I'm in the mood for. This is one.

While it's clearly based on D&D (it's obvious, even if the author didn't outright say so), it makes the excellent choice to go the opposite of the obtrusive LitRPG route; rather than sticking all of the game mechanics into the story, the author has carefully kept them out entirely - no mention of spell slots, characters with non-strength-based and non-intelligence-based classes haven't obviously dumped strength or intelligence (the half-elf rogue is described as "burly"), and combat flows like novel combat rather than game combat. Armour reduces the damage done by a blow at one point, rather than D&D's binary hit/doesn't hit. It's not so much like a D&D game as it is a novel set in a D&D-like world, if the game aspects were ignored and it was treated just as a fantasy setting. Nor does it follow D&D all the time, though the characters' classes and even most of their subclasses are pretty clear; the ranger has no spells, for example, and magic sometimes works a bit differently, though I don't know what edition the author plays.

In terms of the plot and characters, I did expect the characters to start trusting each other with their backstories sooner than they did. The fourth book ends with the first of them confiding in one of the others, and it's only at the end of the fifth book that they all fully confide in each other - which does make a nice ending point, so I can see why the author timed it that way. We only got hints at the backstories prior to that point, which did provide intrigue, but we had to take it on faith that because of unspecified Bad Things that had happened in the past, these five adventurers had all individually decided to help others in order to atone for their previous bad decisions or actions that had hurt other people (and all happened to meet in a tavern in a town with a problem they could solve, but that's a genre trope, and I give it a pass). The characters are, in other words, noblebright, good-hearted people who will do what they can to help others, even risking their lives to do so.

The editing was rough in places, though I've seen much worse lately; there were a surprising number of missing closing quotation marks (and the occasional missing opening quotation mark), a few simple typos, and some homonym or vocabulary errors (refuting/disputing, too/two, knell/knoll, censor/censure, diffuse/defuse, horde/hoard, peaked/peeked, discrete/discreet, even sales/sails). In the first book, characters sometimes "reply" when there isn't a preceding line of dialog to reply to. Pronouns for the ranger's wolf companion and several other creatures, including human enemies, go back and forth between "it" and "he" rather than picking one and sticking with it. In a few places, a sentence degenerates into garble or changes grammatical direction in the middle, or an idiom gets mangled. It oddly uses metric measurements in a fantasy world, and then mixes them with traditional units, and then gets the conversion wrong. The west gate becomes the east gate at one point, and a period between one and two years has, a few pages later, shifted to between one and two months. Confusingly, the same pronoun is sometimes used for two different characters in the same sentence or adjacent ones, leading to a mental stutter and having to go back and parse the sentence again, and some modifiers dangle. It's below average; I generally see at least a couple of dozen errors in the average published book, from trad-pubs as well as indies (though indies sometimes make different mistakes), and this is almost twice that. But the author can write in the past tense, which isn't as widespread a skill as you'd expect, and nearly all the apostrophes and most of the commas are in the right places. It's scruffy, but wouldn't be hard to fix. Some readers won't notice, or care.

I think I know why there are so many issues: the author has a lot of books out, so is going for the reproductive strategy of a lot of offspring with small investment in each one, and probably doesn't spend much time on revision. I know that's economically preferable for some authors, but it does short-change the readers a bit. And it doesn't need to be a straight-up choice between quality and quantity, either; Lindsay Buroker and, even more so, Melissa McShane manage to produce a lot of books and still maintain high quality. (If you like this book, McShane's Company of Strangers series is similar, but with a more original world and much better editing.)

The story would normally place this in the Silver tier of my 2024 Best of the Year list, with the other solid, enjoyable books, but because the editing is distinctly below average I can only put it in Bronze, and I'd hesitate before picking up another book from the same author.

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Review: The Timekeepers

The Timekeepers by Jill Archie
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Unusually for a steampunk/clockpunk novel, this one has very few vocabulary errors. The rule of thumb seems to be that you can have an airship in your book, or you can use vocabulary correctly, but not both. Perhaps the reason this one is comparatively clean in this regard is that the voice reflects the sheltered 16-year-old protagonist, and the author doesn't try to use any fancy vocabulary.

Unfortunately, at least in the pre-publication version I had via Netgalley, it does have not only most of the other errors that 70-80% of authors typically commit, including sometimes punctuating dialog tags as separate sentences (and numerous dangling modifiers, and commas and apostrophes in the wrong places, and frequently missing past perfect tense), but also some issues I see less often: the wrong form of the word used sometimes when it is in the past perfect, and in general a number of sentences that aren't quite grammatical, or don't mean quite what they're obviously intended to mean, or aren't as clear as they should be about who is doing what. An editor is credited; the fact that she didn't fix all of these doesn't mean that she's not a good editor, necessarily, just that there may have been too many issues to deal with in the time allotted.

Not every reader cares about this kind of thing, but if you do, be advised that there is a lot of it, and that even if you don't notice the specific issues, you may find you're confused occasionally.

For example, quite often there's a sentence of the pattern "Onyx did X when Y happened," which sounds like it means that she did X triggered by Y and the effect is being described before the cause, but actually makes more sense if you include the past perfect and say "Onyx had done X when Y happened," and the sentence becomes about two separate, independent events that happened in sequence. Another example where a sentence isn't as clear as it could be: "She used a fresh handkerchief to wipe away the small streak of blood from her shoulder." In this sentence, "she" is one female character and "her shoulder" belongs to a different female character, so that even though the plain meaning of the sentence is that character 1 is wiping her own shoulder, the reader has to infer from context that character 1 is actually wiping character 2's shoulder.

The plot is a simple one, quite predictable, and relies heavily on the main character making bad choices. At one point, for example, her father is kidnapped and the kidnapper sends a ransom demand: Send me the McGuffin by return of post! The heroine then proposes that she and her two companions instead go to where her father is being held (which they can discover from the means the villain used to send the message), unarmed, and take the McGuffin with them. The companions, both of whom are older and more experienced, praise this as a great idea and see no issues with it whatsoever. She then recruits someone she knows is a slightly unhinged radical to help them, by promising something she knows she can't deliver. Exactly the problems you would expect ensure.

The worldbuilding involves a world that is spread across the main gears of an enormous clock, of which the main character's father is the Timekeeper. It's consistent in its aesthetic - lots of gears and springs and brass - but not especially realistic; I don't think it's meant to be. It's there to create a vibe, not to be a serious science-fictional speculation. If that's the case, it does its job, and at least it's original. Still, even giving physics a holiday, there are parts of the setting or the events that didn't make sense to me. I never did get straight in my mind what the scale of the tower that holds the clock hands was, for example, and I couldn't figure out how a mirror at the top of a staircase could possibly make it look as if the stairs continued up. There were a number of other minor examples where my suspension of disbelief stuttered, not because of the steampunk aspects, but just because of something incidental which looked like it had been invented on the fly to make the plot work, despite not being particularly credible. For example, the obviously misanthropic airship inventor conveniently has two spare bedrooms in his airship - the exact number needed by the characters to, among other things, have a series of interactions that forward the plot - even though the author flat-out says that he didn't seem the type to entertain guests (and even though, in what is intended to be the fastest airship in existence, you would probably want to save as much weight as you could, but that's a physics thing, and I did say I was going to give the physics a pass).

Overall, for me it fell short of being a book I'd recommend. This is primarily because, at the sentence level, the prose frequently doesn't do its basic job of accurately and clearly conveying the author's intent. But also, a plot based largely on the incompetence of the main character (who's still supposed to be some sort of special chosen person), who must be opposed by incompetent villains in order for her to succeed, doesn't work for me, and I constantly struggled to maintain my suspension of disbelief about secondary details.

There's some light philosophy about living in the moment and not fearing death. It doesn't have enough depth to raise the rating.

It engaged me enough to finish, but I was constantly distracted by the many issues, so it gets three stars.

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Review: A Drop of Corruption

A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The second book of a series of which I very much enjoyed the first, despite the grimness of the setting. I eagerly picked this one up when I saw it on Netgalley, and it didn't disappoint.

The detective duo are kind of Holmes and Watson turned up to 11. Ana is brilliant, erratic and eccentric, and a drug user; she also swears constantly. The rather stolid Kol sees, but he does not observe - or rather, he records his sensory impressions with great accuracy (thanks to his particular neurobiological alteration, something that's quite common in the setting), but only occasionally comes to a conclusion about this evidence. That's mostly left to Ana. Watson, unlike Holmes, had romantic relationships; Kol is popular with both women and men, and uses casual sex to try to deal with his loneliness. He's also not just Watson to Ana's Holmes, but Archie Goodwin to her Nero Wolfe, since she finds sensory stimulation so overwhelming that she mostly stays indoors if she can manage it and sends Kol out to do the legwork.

Normally, a foul-mouthed drug user and someone who uses casual sex as maladaptive coping, working on graphic murders in a bureaucratic and sometimes corrupt empire threatened by horrifying kaiju, wouldn't be my cup of tea at all, let alone a five-star book. But Robert Jackson Bennett does it so well that I can set aside the dark, dingy, dank and dirty setting and characters and enjoy the clever detective story and the over-the-top high-concept worldbuilding - and the dedication of the central characters to justice. It has the same general feel as his Founders Trilogy, which I loved: a dark, strange world in which morally complex people stubbornly pursue what's right.

I mean, this series takes the idea of monstrous kaiju who produce biochemicals which cause drastic modifications in living beings, and makes that the technological basis of the empire that fights the kaiju by, among many other things, deliberately turning some of their people neurodivergent, and then works out rigorously what that would look like. And it looks very strange. It's the kind of thick worldbuilding that I love in, say, Brandon Sanderson, where the world is very different and that means the author can tell a story that could only happen in that world; the setting is inextricably enmeshed with the characters and the plot, rather than serving as scenery flats (that we've seen a dozen times before) behind The Usual Drama. And yet, all of the characters have believable motivations, and ultimately it's a story about humanity, and what's always the same about it even when so much else changes. It's also about the sometimes blurry line between being exploited by a system and sacrificially serving something greater than yourself for the good of all. The villains are on one side of that line, as both victims and perpetrators; the heroes work hard to stay on the other side, and to enable as many people as possible to join them there.

The author thinks this is a fantasy novel, and the level of mechanical technology supports that, but to me it feels science-fictional as well; the technology is just biochemical, and well beyond anything we are capable of, to the point that it's sufficiently advanced to read as magic.

The books I get from Netgalley are not necessarily in their final form, and may get more editing after I see them. This one doesn't need a lot; the occasional missing or added word or missing quotation mark, the excess coordinate commas that nearly everyone puts in, occasionally a singular/plural issue where the phrase is confusing and it might be either one. It's smooth enough that I was able to stay in the story most of the time without being distracted by poor execution.

Even though it doesn't look, at first glance, anything like my normal preferred read (which is cosy fantasy), I'm putting this in the Platinum tier of my 2024 Best of the Year list, because it is ultimately noblebright, the worldbuilding is brilliant and original, and the story it tells has depth and weight and a lot of thought behind it.

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Review: Fundamental Magics: Leander's Machine

Fundamental Magics: Leander's Machine by Alex Evans
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

From the author's blog, it emerges that this book was translated (by the author) from French, and it badly needs an editor to get it into smooth English. Not only do we get a full collection of all the usual editing issues, but the verb tenses are frequently off, and there are a great many mangled idioms (with missing or substituted prepositions, missing words, and singular and plural sometimes swapped round). I'm used to seeing books where the author uses simple past instead of past perfect tense; I seldom see one where it's also the other way round, as here. There's also a whole passage of three or four paragraphs copied and pasted into the wrong place at one point, which is nothing to do with being translated or the author (probably) not having English as a first language; it's just careless proofreading.

Usual disclaimer: I had a pre-publication version from Netgalley, and there's some chance that there will be more editing before publication. However, given that there's so much work to do, I'm confident that it still won't be in good shape when published. I mention these things in my reviews because they bother me, and if they bother you, you probably want to know that they're present; I know they don't bother everyone.

The start of the story is slowed by too many initially unconnected subplots with no clear overall plot question to resolve. We get the MC's flashbacks to her difficult childhood; a visiting scholar from a distant place that most local people distrust; an incubus (who, at one point, refers to himself as a succubus) who's dropped through a rift; disappearing academics; the MC's hiding of her status as a shaman. Switching back and forth between these means that none of them progress very fast, and there's not much sense of forward momentum until at least halfway through the book, when the supposedly intelligent main character chooses to go with a man who has more red flags than a May Day parade, without telling anyone where she's going or with whom. This despite the fact that two people with similar knowledge to her have already disappeared in unexplained circumstances.

And then she goes with another dodgy guy, and accepts a drink from him. I don't appreciate stupid female characters, especially when they're supposed to be intelligent.

On the upside, this is a magic-as-technology book, which I enjoy; that's why I picked it up. The worldbuilding isn't in great depth, but it's adequate. There is a bit of "Aerith and Bob" (where made-up fantasy names are mixed with familiar names from our world), but there are several different ethnicities in the city and, giving the benefit of the doubt, maybe that's the reason and the author has worked it all out carefully. The magical terminology is suitably arcane, and sounds like real technical jargon.

I was engaged enough to finish the book, without ever wanting to put it down and read something else, so that's something. And despite her narrow life, poor choices and determination not to get involved in the plot until it intersected with her academic interests, I did like Adrienne and want her to emerge as a winner, even if it wasn't clear exactly what that would look like. But she is always reactive more than proactive, and ends up having to be rescued from several situations she should have been smart enough not to get into in the first place, and between that and the non-idiomatic English, I won't be picking up the sequel or adding it to my recommendation list.

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Review: Lilith, a romance

Lilith, a romance by George MacDonald
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A good many years ago now - I forget exactly how many - I went through a period of reading the books that C.S. Lewis mentioned as influences on his writing. It took me to strange and wonderful places, this being one of them. This review is from my 2024 reread.

There's a strong line of fantastic fiction that runs through the canon of English literature from Beowulf to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo , The Faerie Queene , Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest, The Pilgrim's Progress , Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained , Gulliver’s Travels , William Blake, William Morris, our present author George Macdonald, Lewis Carroll, G.K. Chesterton, E. R. Eddison, A Voyage to Arcturus , and on to the Inklings (C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and others) and beyond; I count Susan Cooper as being in the tradition, and I'm sure there are others I'm not aware of. Many, though certainly not all, of these authors and works include a good deal of Christian theology and/or allegory in their fantastic fiction, and George MacDonald is definitely one. He was a clergyman, unorthodox but devout, and this and several of his other works feature both Christian and fantastic elements side by side and entangled with one another. He also wrote realistic fiction, which is less well known.

It's a portal fantasy, with a mirror (often associated with Lilith, who would possess women by entering them through mirrors) as the door, or one of the doors; there's also a cupboard in a library, disguised with fake books, and a fountain. The British portal fantasy tradition, in my opinion at least, probably originates from Celtic legends of trips into the Otherworld through ancient burial mounds or "fairy forts," but Macdonald has a key role in bringing it into the English-language fantastical tradition, especially through his influence on C.S. Lewis, who regarded him as his "Master". He wasn't the first to use a mirror as a portal, though; Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass was published more than two decades earlier. MacDonald was a mentor to Carroll, and encouraged him to publish Alice in Wonderland, which MacDonald's children enjoyed.

Nearly 40 years before Lilith, MacDonald had published Phantastes, which I consider in part a dry-run for Lilith; it also features a young man pulled into a dream-like world and a quest involving a woman. It took inspiration from the German author Novalis, just as the character of Lilith, mentioned in Goethe's Faust, was imported via Goethe into English romanticism and the school of the Pre-Raphaelites; German and Scandinavian folklore is a strong influence on the British fantastical tradition too.

Lilith, in Jewish and Mesopotamian legend, was the first wife of Adam, and is regarded as a demon. She is, among other things, a symbol of a particular kind of feared femininity: seductive, lacking in submission, hating children, obsessed with her appearance. Lewis mentions her as an ancestor of Jadis, the White Witch, in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe . In MacDonald's version, she is offered a chance at redemption. MacDonald's main unorthodox belief, which hindered his career as a minister, was that everyone could be redeemed by a universally loving God.

Before we even meet Lilith, though, we meet a series of other allegorical and instructive characters in a series of weird landscapes which the narrator, Mr Vane, travels through. There's Mr Raven, the sexton (sometimes a talking bird, sometimes a man dressed in black), who tells him about how the people under his care are dying so that they may live, and sleeping so that they may wake. There are the Lovers: happy, generous, wise, tiny children, a kind of noble savage, who, if they mature too much and give way to greed, become dull and ill-tempered giants who forget their origins and cease to even notice the existence of the remaining Lovers. Unfortunately, some of the younger children speak the overly cutesy baby-talk dialect that makes Carroll's Sylvie and Bruno such hard going, though at least there isn't much of it. There are the inhabitants of a run-down city where everyone is rich (or thinks they are) and strangers are despised; the inhabitants also think they are free, even though they live in terror of their ruler Lilith, who destroys their children if she can. On the same page we're told that they do no work apart from digging up gems out of their cellars, but buy everything they need from other cities, and also that they've inherited their wealth and never spend it. A lot of things in this book are supposed to not make sense, but there are some things that don't make sense that I suspect the author didn't intend to not make sense, as well. There are two female leopards which are sometimes shapeshifted women and sometimes have an existence independent of those women.

Mr Vane, the narrator, is given to making bad decisions through not listening to his wise guides. As Mr Raven warns him, though, doing so means that he brings about evil which turns out for good, and he does eventually manage to do something positive, if not much. He's at a very low stage of spiritual development and has a lot of work to do, which probably makes him exactly the right audience proxy for most of us.

The whole book is visionary, and frequently alludes to both the Bible and Dante, as well as medieval legend. The influence on Lewis's The Last Battle is particularly marked (there's even a version of the "further up and further in" phrase), though it also reminds me of some passages in Lewis's Space Trilogy and of pretty much all of Charles Williams. Like Williams' best work, it gripped my attention and occasionally moved me. The depth in it is in the ideas, rather than in the characters (who are mostly allegories or symbols of one kind or another) or the plot (which is episodic, and contends with a protagonist who won't do as he's told). It's very much a working out, in mystical and symbolic form, of the author's beliefs, so it will work less for you the less you share those beliefs, though I think it does stand on its own merits to a degree; the description is vivid, and the conflicts are powerfully conveyed.

It's a great enough work that I'm leaving it at my original rating of five stars, despite some minor caveats. There's more in it than I saw, for certain.

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Review: Who?

Who? by Elizabeth Kent
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Melodramatic. Everyone (but especially the women) is extremely emotional and makes bad decisions. It has what I would describe as a poor grasp of mental health: a woman who, it is emphasized by her doctor, is not insane, is nevertheless so mentally delicate that he declares that upsetting her emotionally could kill her. Someone has a stroke, and instead of making it difficult for her to walk or talk, it makes her childlike. The alcoholic, however, is believable: according to her, nothing is her fault, and every bad decision she ever made was fully justified and caused by someone else's actions.

Parts of it are predictable (I spotted who the young Frenchman was instantly), and it would be more so except that the characters behave erratically; there's a last-minute complete 180 that doesn't at all ring true to everything the character said and did in the immediately preceding chapters, for example, which shows unmistakable signs of only happening because the author needed it to work that way for the plot to come out right.

It also shows a poor grasp of writing mechanics for the time. These days, I often see people putting extra commas in lists of adjectives that don't belong there - particularly before a colour, which is this author's abiding fault - and before the main verb of a sentence, and leaving question marks out of sentences phrased as questions, but it was less common in books published a century ago, when editors mostly weeded out these issues even if the authors didn't (and the authors usually did).

I've given it my "thin-romance" tag as well, which I give to any story where a supposed great and abiding love arises instantly because someone is physically attractive, and without the characters subsequently spending much time together or having any real chance to get to know each other, becomes the basis for a lifelong commitment. It's borderline, in this case; her love for him, based on his actions in rescuing her, is more believable, though still a bit thin, but his love for her didn't seem to me to be well-founded at all, particularly since he spends much of the book not sure who the object of his affections actually is - hence the title.

At least the title does include the question mark.

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