Review: The Wheel O' Fortune

The Wheel O' Fortune by Louis Tracy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A full-throated pulp adventure with all the hallmarks.

The hero, Richard Royson, is the heir presumptive to a baronetcy, though he is at odds with the current baronet, his uncle, and seems unlikely to inherit the wealthy estate along with the title. He is also out of work, having given a well-deserved thumping to the son of his employer for sexually harassing and/or assaulting a young woman in their employ. When he happens to be in the right place at the right time to stop a pair of bolting carriage horses and so save Irene, a beautiful young heiress, Irene's companion at the incident, a dodgy-seeming Austrian baron, gives him a job on a forthcoming expedition, funded by the heiress's grandfather.

The expedition's goal is to find some treasure cached by a Roman legion who had marched from Egypt to Saba (biblical Sheba) and looted it there, only to be ambushed by Nubians on their way back to the Nile and slaughtered to the last man - except for a Greek merchant, who managed to escape and write a papyrus giving the treasure's location. This document is now in the possession of the Austrian baron.

The expedition's funder is more interested in the archaeology than in the (to him, dubious) tale of treasure, to his credit, but he is the kind of person who will push on obsessively past obstacles - such as the fact that the location is in territory controlled by Italy, and an Italian enemy of the Austrian has convinced the Italian authorities to forbid the expedition to land anywhere other than a recognized port in their territory.

The hero is supposedly descended from Richard the Lionheart, and, like him, is larger than other men and a fierce fighter; there's a bit of semi-mystical nonsense about him feeling like he's been in Egypt before because his ancestor and namesake was. He's also a good sailor, which comes in handy on the voyage to Egypt and wins the respect of the comic sea-captain Stump. He's pretty much a standard pulp hero, in fact, able to learn Arabic quickly, fight a dozen men and win, and stay awake for 60 hours straight (involving strenuous desert travel) with no significant ill effects. Of course, he and Irene fall in love, even though he has no money (that he knows of) and she's the sole heiress to millions.

The ill-intentioned get comeuppance, the well-intentioned win rewards, and on the way we're treated to some good action scenes and, unfortunately, one of the most stilted scenes of romantic declaration I've ever read. Not that the dialog is particularly natural in general, but it grows even stiffer, to the point of being unintentionally comical, when Royson is having to talk about his feelings. The author also gives the standard speed of a camel at one point as being two and a half miles an hour, and then at a later point has an estimate of an hour and a half for camels to cover 10 miles.

There are some uncorrected scan issues in the Project Gutenberg edition, unfortunately, which I'll draw their attention to - they usually fix them quickly. Mostly the letter "i" rendered as a capital when it should be lowercase, but some misread letters too. Also, someone or something, either the author, an inept editor, or the scan process (or a combination), has inserted many commas where they should not be, such as before the main verb and after prepositions - the second one is a tic I've never encountered before, and I thought I'd seen most forms of comma abuse.

It's otherwise a solid pulp adventure, not one of the greats, but enjoyable, and the inevitable racism that comes with British people encountering Arabs and black Africans is kept to a low level for the time. Irene is appropriately intrepid, Royson is a decent, honourable man as well as a force of nature, and Captain Stump is amusing.

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Review: The hand of power

The hand of power by Edgar Wallace
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a pulp novel that has everything. A secret society! A beautiful actress! Her wicked guardian! Her mysterious origins! A gentlemanly burglar! Disguises! Murder in the street! Kidnapping! Piracy! True Love!

Of course, every character is linked to every other by a chain of coincidence as thick as your wrist, and a key plot point hinges on a Convenient Eavesdrop, because the gentleman burglar happens to lodge with the mother of the other actress (the fake-French awful one), who has been recruited as a patsy in one of the schemes of the wicked guardian (who, in a separate plot thread, just happened to be passing when the head of the secret society fell ill), and the mother also is possibly the only person who knows the true origins of the first actress (the heroine), and happens to be telling her daughter all about it when the burglar overhears, and since he happens to know the people who are working in the heroine's interests and against her wicked guardian, he tells them. It's a big ball of yarn, after the cat has got at it.

If you can suspend disbelief hard enough, though, it's one of Wallace's typical gripping pulp thrillers. It's not clear for a long time what the heck is up with the guardian and the secret society and the heroine and the guardian's mysterious requirement for her to sit in a shop window writing at a desk, with a single rose in a jade vase, or for that matter why the burglar is involving himself. But the author tells it in a way that makes you want to keep reading and find out.

There's plenty of action, especially in the second half, and even a bit of high technology (for the time) - a listening device inserted into the villain's chimney. The characters are more or less stock, though the Scotland Yard inspector is from the records office and has never arrested anyone, which makes him different. There's a highly principled former accountant who is now, oddly, running a PR agency, which I would have thought was the opposite of something a highly principled former accountant would be good at. Perhaps he isn't.

The mastermind turns out to be someone I didn't suspect for a moment, and the hero certainly works for his happy ending, taking plenty of daring action. It would film well, like a lot of Wallace books (he was the most filmed author of the 20th century, and may still hold the record), and the film would be a rip-roaring thriller. Supposedly the 1968 German film Im Banne des Unheimlichen is based on it, but the plot and characters are completely different.

One of the best Wallace books I've read for action and suspense, despite the heavy reliance on coincidence to pull the plot and cast together.

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Review: Cynthia's Chauffeur

Cynthia's Chauffeur by Louis Tracy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In the years before World War I, while P.G. Wodehouse was barely moving beyond school stories, this romantic comedy appeared, involving members of the British and American upper classes, false identity, disapproving elders, questions of finance in the context of marriage, rapid romance, and the British countryside, all elements the master was later to adopt as part of his standard fit-out.

Cynthia is the daughter of an American railroad tycoon. When George, Viscount Medenham, only son and heir of the Earl of Fairholme, comes across an old Boer War comrade whose car has broken down, meaning he can't fulfil his contract to drive Cynthia on a tour of the South-West of England, Medenham volunteers to help his old friend out by substituting for him until the car can be fixed. He little knows that he will fall in love with Cynthia almost immediately - and be unable to speak up, since he's claimed to be merely a chauffeur.

On their journeys to see lovingly described landscapes and landmarks, accompanied by Cynthia's scheming chaperone, who wants to fix her up with an impoverished French count, their relationship blossoms, the count is vexed, the chaperone panicked, both fathers get in a taking because their precious child has fallen into the hands of (they each believe) a schemer, and the unfortunate servants (including Medenham's own chauffeur) are torn between duties.

It doesn't rise to the level of farce later perfected by Wodehouse, but on the other hand, the romance is a lot less ramshackle and better developed than he typically achieved, too; for Wodehouse, romance is usually a plot complication rather than a plot. I saw the attractive qualities in the pair, and the shared delights in history and beauty that drew them together, and believed in their love, even though it progressed so quickly.

There are dramatic and adventurous moments in the book too, but they're not pushed so far as to become implausible, though the final crisis is a bit over the top.

I was disappointed with the same author's Karl Grier , but not with this one. It's not one of the all-time greats, but it's a sound, solid rom-com with adventure and travelogue thrown in.

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Review: A Husband by Proxy

A Husband by Proxy by Jack Steele
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Not written in the hard-boiled noir style, but very much employing noir tropes. It opens with an underemployed "criminologist" (he doesn't call himself a detective, but is totally a detective) in his New York office with his name on the glass of the door, and a tall, beautiful woman coming in to hire him for something dubious. He goes on to be trailed by mysterious people, beaten up and nearly killed, while running hither and yon after clues.

There's a bit of a twist, though. The woman is hiring him to pretend to be her husband, something she needs so she can inherit under the terms of her uncle's will. By the coincidence that was such an important part of most plots at this period, after she leaves he gets another job - two in one day after a long dry period - to do an investigation for an insurance company into the death of a man who, as it turns out, is the woman's uncle from whom she is set to inherit. This places him in a conflict-of-interest situation, particularly since (on almost no acquaintance and not knowing key facts about her) he has fallen in love with her, and it looks suspiciously like she could be involved in the death.

I suspect this kind of "I trust her for no reason except that a wonderful girl like her could never" plot was being parodied by Edgar Wallace in The Angel of Terror , in which almost nobody believes that the villainess is a villainess because she looks so sweet and innocent. It's a trope that I've come across a few times in the literature of the period. Of course, people would also trust men they met for similar reasons; they belonged to a class that was supposed to have a highly developed "code," and showed all the signifiers, so of course they were trusted without further inquiry.

Apart from this rather stupid trope and the general thinness of the romance, and the inevitable coincidences and bits of good luck (alongside protagonist agency, at least), it's a good detective story, with a well-judged mix of action and investigation, and a personal stake for the investigator.

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Review: The Girl and The Bill An American Story of Mystery, Romance and Adventure

The Girl and The Bill An American Story of Mystery, Romance and Adventure by Bannister Merwin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This one relies heavily on coincidence.

"There is a lady, sweet and kind,
Was never face so pleased my mind,
I did but see her passing by
And yet I love her till I die."

The protagonist of this book doesn't quote that old song, but he might as well. It's one of those scenarios where he's never seriously been interested in any woman before, but he sees one in the street by chance and is instantly smitten. Then he meets her again, also by chance, and helps her change a tyre. And then she turns up at his apartment in pursuit of the "bill" of the title, a $5 note which has directions written on it for retrieving something important to her, which has come into his possession by... complete random chance. He then engages in multiple adventures on her behalf, even though she won't tell him her name yet (or what the papers are that she's trying to get back), because he's fallen in love with her and trusts her implicitly. Besides, the other people trying to get the McGuffin are nasty foreigners, and she's of his race, nationality, and class, so obviously he sides with her, quite apart from the instalove.

The adventure bits are fine. It's just that the hero, despite being a lawyer by profession, is a lot braver than he is smart, and a good deal of the plot that isn't driven by coincidence is driven by him being an idiot, though he does have his effective moments too.

We never do learn the name of the girl. He addresses her as Girl.

I picked it up because of an original publisher's advertisement in the back of another old book I read from Project Gutenberg. That book ( Cynthia's Chauffeur ) was better than this one.

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Review: Second Chance Circus

Second Chance Circus by Ryan Tang
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The worldbuilding on this one isn't so much weak (the usual issue with cozy) as it is incoherent.

In a barony which seems much larger than a barony would typically be, there are minor nobles below the rank of baron (normally the lowest rank of noble). It's populated with people who have names drawn from all over Europe, and the cities are similarly random in their naming, one sounding English, another Italian, and a third completely made up. Yes, it's clearly a secondary world, but my usual assumption is that this kind of mess originates from not thinking things through or not knowing much about the real-world originals, rather than from being creative.

There's a great deal of anachronism, which I think is supposed to be humourous; for me, it fell flat if that was the intention, as did the fact that the professors at the university have surnames which are the names of fonts (Baskerville, Roman and Arial).

The editing is also messy. There are quite a few words that are legitimate words that spellcheck will recognize, but are absolutely not the word the author obviously meant to type, or sometimes just not the right word for what he's talking about. It's particularly noticeable that he doesn't know what stirrups are; he uses the word for both reins and cart harness. He also seems to think that bunches of grapes are called "bushels". Partway through, we start to get extra commas between adjectives that shouldn't have them, and most (but not all) of the time, when a plural noun is made possessive, the apostrophe is in the wrong place, before rather than after the "s". Some creatures go from "he" to "it" or from plural to singular in the course of a paragraph. There are a lot of duplicated words and missing words, and occasionally words in the wrong order in a sentence. It's scruffy.

The story and characters are original, at least, not just made from box mix. The plot doesn't have a lot of urgency until near the end, and the characters don't have a great deal of depth, although they aren't just their role plus their archetype; they each have something unusual about them, which saves the book from being completely bland. The maid (who is more of an equal to the protagonist than a servant) is a skeptic, studying science by correspondence at university. The protagonist is a powerful necromancer with a good heart and a lack of self-confidence. The sidekick is an immortal caveman with an excess of self-confidence. Each character has something about them that you wouldn't expect, but they don't have any complexity beyond that, and there's no attempt to preserve a realistic point of view; the completely uneducated caveman apparently knows about turning things in to your professor for a grade, for example. Everyone always felt like a character in a book, and quite a simple book, rather than a real person.

I often say of would-be humorous fantasy that it needs to work as a story even if the humour fails. Since the humour in this one did fail completely and utterly for me, did the story work? It did, but I thought it was mediocre for most of its length. The characters were somewhat interesting, and the concept (which is what got me to pick it up) had potential, but the execution just wasn't at the level I'd hoped for, especially in the worldbuilding and the editing. I did put it down at one point to read something else, and ended up coming back to it, which says something, and I did finish it, and a tense climax that pulled together a few previously-set-up elements saved it from two stars. It's OK, but it lacks polish and depth.

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Review: Mercy for Hire Mission Pack 1: Missions 1-4

Mercy for Hire Mission Pack 1: Missions 1-4 by J.S. Morin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Something a bit different, and I'm always looking out for that. A bounty hunter who is a self-described vigilante samaritan - she goes around helping people who need it, often a little bit outside the law. Yes, it's kind of like a supers story in some ways, or how a supers story should work if the vigilantism isn't tolerated by the authorities, but it doesn't feel that way. It's its own thing.

The worldbuilding is mostly off-the-shelf classic space opera: blasters (with a stun setting), FTL ships, alien races who look like anthropomorphic animals (turtles, monkeys, cats, wolves and dogs, probably a few others). Earth seems to be the center of a multispecies polity named ARGO, an acronym that is never defined (nor is it the only undefined acronym); there's the usual spectrum from civilized core worlds with sprawling megacities where, implausibly, trees are now rare to more-or-less anarchic and thinly settled frontier worlds, mimicking the 19th-century US in many ways. Because of the easy FTL, different planets feel more like states or countries. They're mostly Earthlike, more or less, either naturally or by terraforming, and their alienness is not very marked for the most part. It's set in 2562, and I found the differences and similarities to our present day moderately believable; it wasn't just the 21st century with interplanetary travel and blasters, though it also wasn't so vastly different as to feel alienating (or, to me, highly realistic, given the amount of change there's been in the past 500 years). It does make the common space opera mistake of referring to a constellation (Orion, in this case) as a "system," rather than realizing that constellations are just stars that happen to be in the same direction from Earth at widely varying distances, some of them being further from some of the others than they are from us.

Unlike the very classic style of space opera originating from the 1950s, there is a version of the Internet called the Omni. There are also wizards. These are people who have learned to convince the universe that their opinions about how things work override the normal laws of physics. The magic isn't Sandersonian - we don't know exactly what it can and can't do - so it can operate as a bit of a get-out-of-jail-free card, but its use is limited by two factors. First, it disrupts nearby tech, and wizards also find tech hard to use, which in a technological civilization is inherently a problem for them. Second, in the case of Esper, the specific wizard who's the protagonist, if she goes flinging too much magic around it will attract the attention of the powerful Conclave of Wizards, who are looking for her in an unfriendly manner.

One feature of the worldbuilding that was mostly done well was the made-up future pop culture. It always annoys me when, with some kind of feeble excuse or none at all, books set in the future have no pop culture references from after the time in which they're written. It's not that hard to make up something convincing, and these books do. The author occasionally fails to resist the temptation to use a joke name that's a present-day reference, though.

The worldbuilding feature I found hard (in fact, impossible) to swallow was that Christianity has reunited into the One Church, rather than continuing to split like a cheap pair of trousers every time someone gets overexcited. Apparently, the author hasn't been given the sects talk: "When one fanatic hates another fanatic very much..."

Part of Esper's backstory is that the One Church took her in at a difficult time of her life, and she even became a priestess (the idea that a woman can become a priest conflicts with the firmly old-fashioned viewpoint of the one priest we see). She later left, for reasons that aren't gone into much, and joined a mostly good-hearted group of criminals, from which she's now largely independent; this is where she learned wizardry. She fights, very effectively, using magic to enhance herself so that she can practice the wuxia-like martial arts of the four-handed monkey people's movies.

When she left, she took her sidekick Kubu with her. He's a sentient alien who looks very doglike, if a dog weighed 9 tonnes, and she has magicked him semi-permanently into the size of a very large but believable dog. It's repeatedly emphasized by both of them that he isn't a dog, but he thinks and behaves very like one, except that he's sentient. He's young, not yet an adult, and rather naive, and Esper tries, with limited success, to keep from exposing him to bad influences (given that she hangs out with criminals and other social outcasts on a regular basis).

This pack contains Esper's first four (documented) adventures. The first involves rescuing a poor little rich girl who is the subject of a custody battle between her parents, a retired pirate and his bitter, nasty wife. The 16-year-old girl is cynical and jaded, reminding Esper of herself at the same age, and she attempts to mentor her, with some eventual success.

In the second, Esper goes to a remote planet to hide out from the numerous people she's annoyed, and can't resist getting involved in helping a man who, as an offworlder, is being persecuted by the tight-knit supposedly-utopian community he has married into. She wants justice for him, but it's hard to obtain when everyone believes the insiders over the outsider.

In the third, Esper, still trying to hide out from the Conclave of Wizards and various other people, gets a job as security for a brothel, and goes all crusadey when one of the women who works there is trafficked to another planet by a gangster. She leaves Kubu behind for this one, and he has his own adventures. I found it disturbing in a few different ways, and genuinely suspenseful.

The fourth adventure starts with Esper still trying to avoid the Convocation, in an escalating series of confrontations which test her moral boundaries. (view spoiler)[She is eventually captured, and put on trial for both her own actions and those of her mentor, who took over her body at one point and killed people. (hide spoiler)]

Finally, we have a short story which is entirely dispensable.

Apart from the final short, the complexity and tension of the challenges gradually ratchet up over the collection, which is good.

Apart from a bad habit of dangling modifiers and an occasional misplaced apostrophe when the noun is plural, and using "nonplussed" in the exact opposite sense to what it means, the author's mechanics are mostly good. That's refreshing to see, especially from a book I bought through BookBub. There's a bit more depth to the characters and their backstories than I often see, as well, and the protagonist is driven by a complex set of motivations, chiefly by wanting to do the right thing and protect the vulnerable and more-or-less innocent against the powerful and ill-intentioned. Operating on or beyond the edge of the law, she's in a morally complex position, and the author doesn't shy away from exploring that, or the darker thoughts that come to her when she's going vigilante. Her wins against socially embedded evil are, realistically, not absolute, but are big enough to be satisfying, and there are consequences for her when she defies something bigger than she is. The action scenes are good, too.

Overall, despite the mostly off-the-shelf and sometimes implausible worldbuilding and some missing polish, the character work and plotting are strong enough to almost (not quite) take it to five stars for me, and I'll watch out for more from this series and this author.

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Review: The Shape of Magic

The Shape of Magic by Marco Michelutto
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A magical university story, but not "dark academia" (at least, as I understand it).

The world feels rich, and the magic system has had some thought put into it, which is not always the case with current fantasy. The ancient university feels centuries old, probably because the author is from Europe, where things often are centuries old.

The premise involves three friends: a woman who's a King's Ward, randomly selected from the population to serve the kingdom and provided with an education in order to do so; the eldest son of a duke, who's semi-defied his father in order to learn magic; and a third, who doesn't have much to distinguish him apart from being studious (I kept getting him confused with the duke's son). They have discovered coded instructions in what purport to be old novels for how to use teleportation glyphs to get into hidden rooms in the university, and have found some interesting stuff.

The dowager queen, who is largely in charge, since her son is young, has come to the university talking about a threat of invasion from a neighbouring country that has got rid of its royalty in a revolution and become a republic. She's using this as a reason to convert the university from being almost entirely dedicated to theoretical research over to producing graduates who can project practical power on her behalf, and is also searching for three legendary artefacts that will give her even more power - according to her, to defend the kingdom. But the trio have their doubts.

As I expected going in, given that English isn't the author's first language, the English is often not idiomatic. An editor is credited (possibly not a copy editor), and multiple beta readers, but none of these seem to have picked up the many fumbled idioms where words have the wrong number or the wrong preposition is used; the frequent absence of the past perfect tense when referring to an event before the narrative moment; the use of "may" instead of "might" in the past tense (if it could be "could," it should be "might"); an overall shortage of grammatical commas; occasional incorrect dialog punctuation; or even some basics like almost always omitting a comma before a term of address (the "let's eat Grandma" error), not capitalising a title when it's part of a name, or not starting a sentence with a capital. To be fair to the editor, if the manuscript had a lot of errors they would inevitably miss some, but some of those are glaring. On the other hand, I've also seen as bad or worse from native English speakers. I had a pre-publication copy via Netgalley, and there may be more editing done before publication, but there are just so many issues I don't think it could be cleaned up enough in the time. Of course, if all those people missed them, there will be plenty of others who don't notice or care, but I did, and it degraded the reading experience for me.

The other issue with the writing is that the style will cruise along in semi-formal "fantasy prose" mode for a while, and then a clanging contemporary colloquialism will get dropped into the middle of it. It needs to pick one or the other.

On the positive side, it's a good story competently told, the characters are appealing, the world feels more developed than is often the case, and the tone is cozy and noblebright.

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Review: The Adventurous Lady

The Adventurous Lady by J.C. Snaith
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Just after the Armistice is signed for the end of World War I, two young women, about the same age (twenty), about the same size (smallish), happen to take the same train to the same country village. One is the imperious Lady Elfreda Catkin, the daughter of an Irish marquis, being sent to a country manor to act in a play, but also, her mother hopes, to attract a (specific) wealthy husband. She is not on board with this plan. The other is the timid Miss Cass, the orphaned daughter of a suburban solicitor, going to a different house to take up a position as a governess, since she has no financial resources.

The badly written play Lady Elfreda is cast in, as it happens, follows the general premise of The Prince and the Pauper (or the much later movie Trading Places): it's about an aristocrat and a governess who, meeting on the train, decide to swap places. This gives Elfreda an obvious idea, and between force of personality and getting Miss Cass a little drunk on the fine bottle of wine Elfreda's father has sent her, she manages to sell her travel companion on making a similar switch. She overcomes her maid's inevitable objections in a broadly similar manner, and shenanigans ensue.

I was hoping that hilarity would ensue, but (for me, at least) it didn't. P.G. Wodehouse could, and several times did, take this kind of premise and turn it into a sparkling farce, but this book is neither sparkling nor a farce. It's very aware that Miss Cass has got the raw end of the deal, since when the scheme is inevitably exposed she will have no job, no home, no money and no "character" (reputation). Lady Elfreda airily assures her that she will take care of all that, but she isn't exactly the most trustworthy character, and poor Miss Cass, already timid and nervous, is practically prostrated with fear, and unable to even speak loudly enough to be heard when she attempts her (or rather, Lady Elfreda's) part in the play.

Not playing it simply for laughs, but making a commentary on the very different levels of opportunity and forgiveness available to the two women of two different classes, is a valid choice to make, and that's not what gets it a three-star rating from me. The rating was because the characters don't change. Miss Cass starts out spineless, and she remains spineless. Lady Elfreda starts out arrogant and careless, and remains arrogant and careless. (view spoiler)[Two men who have fallen in love with them while they were playing each other's parts (despite knowing them only a few days, and not knowing much about them at that), and who have been exposed to a certain amount of ridicule as a result when all is revealed, see this and decide to marry them anyway, which I think was a poor choice on their parts. Both of the women, in fact, end up as winners, despite acting badly (particularly Lady Elfreda), and the author outright says that sometimes in life people don't get what they deserve and the story has no moral. (hide spoiler)]

I picked this up from Project Gutenberg's feed knowing almost nothing beyond the title, what I call a "pig-in-a-poke book." Sometimes that works out for me, and I discover a forgotten gem. More often, as happened this time, I'm disappointed. What I hoped early on was a comedy is more in what I think of as a literary novel mode, where people don't act to change their circumstances or learn from their experiences or change for the better as a result of them. At least it wasn't a literary downer ending, but I'm almost more annoyed because of the lack of bad consequences than I would have been with something more realistic. On top of that, the writing is only average.

It isn't terrible, but it disappointed my expectations.

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Review: The Mostly Forgotten Spy

The Mostly Forgotten Spy by David Harkonson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Mostly forgettable.

It's a supers story in a world where about 60% of people have powers of some sort, mainly fairly useless ones. The main character is tasked with infiltrating a supervillain group by what turns out to be a tragicomically inept superhero support organization, but rather than getting one appropriate to her beginner status, she instead gets swept up in events and ends up in a group which is well above her abilities. Or is it? She manages to muddle through, using her ability to make people forget her, along with bluff, good luck, determination and the help of friends she meets along the way.

The prose is often ponderous, as are the attempts at humour, and the humour tends to be dark - casual violence played for laughs. The characters are thin and generic. At times, there's a conceit that it's being written by someone in the setting, but that comes and goes and is eventually no longer mentioned. It does get a couple of good wordplays off.

I had a pre-publication version from Netgalley, which asks me to believe that the "minor typographic errors" in it will be corrected before publication. I didn't spot many typos, apart from inconsistent name spelling, but I did see instances of several common issues - incorrect dialog punctuation, dangling modifiers, unclear pronoun references, "may" in past tense instead of "might," missing past perfect tense, a couple of homonyms - though none in large numbers. I'm skeptical that they'll all be corrected before publication, but I could be wrong. To be clear, this is a lot better than most superhero novels, which for some reason rank alongside LitRPG and steampunk as most likely to have awful copy editing.

I didn't ever come to love it, but I didn't hate it. It was just OK. Someone for whom the humour was a better fit would probably enjoy it more.

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Review: D'ORC Volume 1: The Book of Certain Doom

D'ORC Volume 1: The Book of Certain Doom by Brett Bean
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Not for me.

It's a satire on a certain type of D&D, where, regardless of "alignment" with good or evil (here, light or dark), both sides just want to destroy the other side with ruthless violence. Maybe also a satire on contemporary US politics? Is it that deep?

The title character, being half (light) dwarf, half (dark) orc, doesn't automatically belong to either side, and there's no moral difference between them that would enable him to choose one over the other to support. So he's just trying to help everyone, and be a decent person. His violence-oriented magic talking shield thinks this is quixotic. The two sides both want to destroy him, because of a prophecy that a figure like him will destroy the world "as we know it" (pretty obvious what that means - end the stupid, pointless battles - but they don't see it that way). An undead chicken that he accidentally mostly killed, consisting of a headless body and the ghost of a head, doesn't have anything so coherent as an opinion, but hangs out with him anyway.

There's nothing wrong with the premise, but the working out of it involves frequent gory battles and lots of death and dismemberment, and I'm just not into it. I can see why the Dungeon Crawler Carl author was asked to blurb it; it's not my thing in exactly the way that DCC isn't.

Plenty of people will love it, though.

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Review: The Royal Academy of Magical Baking: A Cozy Slice-of-Life Fantasy

The Royal Academy of Magical Baking: A Cozy Slice-of-Life Fantasy by Anne Crews
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

To get into the Academy, the protagonist bakes a relatively simple vanilla cake following a well-known recipe, enhanced with simple spells, that is, nevertheless, well executed and surprisingly enjoyable. I don't know if this is consciously intended as a metaphor for the book, but it certainly works as one.

The editing is decent, for one thing, which is rare. I did have some quibbles with elements of the book, but only four or five were editing issues, all relatively minor.

I wrote down some predictions at the 9% mark about how it would go, and almost half of my predictions were correct, mainly about how particular characters would act. I wasn't right about the order in which people would be eliminated from the course (it's set up kind of like a reality show: twelve bakers take the entrance exam, six pass, of whom one will be eliminated in each of the three terms of the first year, leaving three to progress to the second and third years of the course). But by the time each elimination came up, it was clear who was going - right up to the end, which surprised me.

So it's not just made from box mix, which was a relief. It has enough surprising or fresh elements that it's saved from being completely expected, something for which I've dinged books a star in the past. It is, however, firmly cozy, though I'm not sure it completely qualifies as "slice of life" - it has a bit too much plot for that to be the case. (Not a criticism, just an observation that the subtitle could be slightly misleading.)

Like practically all cozy fantasy, it's weak on worldbuilding. There's barely enough to enable the story to be what it is, and the gaps are filled either from Bland Generic Fantasy Setting #1 or direct ports from our world (days of the week, measuring units, even wanting to have popcorn when watching something entertaining).

I'm used to worldbuilding being a weakness of cozy, though I'm not reconciled to it. But at least it has only one truly jarring intrusion from our world, and it's minor (the popcorn). While the world is thin, it at least doesn't feel like 21st-century Americans cosplaying in front of scenery flats, like a lot of cozy books; it has just enough illusion of being a fantasy world that I could relax into it and enjoy the story.

And I did enjoy it. I liked the characters, I believed their actions (even when they were predictable), I wanted Lyra, the protagonist, to succeed, and I enjoyed the cozy feel of everything, even the (for the characters) high-stakes exam moments. It was fun, and I'd eat... I mean, read another.

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Review: The Chestermarke Instinct

The Chestermarke Instinct by J.S. Fletcher
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An unusual classic mystery. Rather than the standard body in the library, we have the absence of somebody - a bank manager who has disappeared, along with some securities belonging to the bank and some valuable jewellery belonging to a nearby aristocrat who's a friend of his, and left them with him for safekeeping. The thing is, nobody who knows him well - the bank clerk who was his ward, his niece, his friend the earl - believes for a moment that he would steal these things and abscond. The niece, who's wealthy in her own right, having inherited a profitable brewery business, calls in the police, over the objections of the unlikeable owners of the bank, and offers a reward and to fund any search or advertising that might be necessary.

While the plot is partially set up by coincidence (as it eventually turns out), it doesn't rely on coincidence to solve it; that's all done through protagonist effort, both of the bank clerk ward and the niece on the amateur side, and the local superintendent and the Scotland Yard detective sergeant on the professional side. The dramatic climax involves an implausibly powerful explosive, but everything else is believable and makes sense, the crime is pleasingly complex, the working out enjoyable to watch, and the comeuppance of the villains satisfactory. There's a romance thread - though not much of one - which is nothing out of the ordinary. All the characters are well drawn and distinctive. Overall, a solid mystery story, and I will be searching out more J.S. Fletcher; I read a couple of others before this one ( The Copper Box and The Middle Temple Murder ) and enjoyed them both.

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Review: The Mudpuddle Manual of Natural Magic

The Mudpuddle Manual of Natural Magic by Ciara Blume
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I generally avoid what I refer to as "this damn thing again" when I see it. By that I mean a book in which a young-to-middle-aged woman with nothing much positive going on in her life (either no relationship or one that recently ended, and a job and living situation she can leave without regret), who inherits a property and/or business from an elderly relative, goes back to her hometown, discovers she has a magical heritage, meets a love interest and participates in solving a mystery. There's generally also a best friend and a cute animal. There seem to be thousands of books now with this exact setup, and I grew sick of them years ago, particularly since they're usually badly executed.

This one, though, inserted a couple of twists on the tired formula and slipped it past me before I twigged. For a start, the heroine, Maida, already technically owned the house/business, a bookshop and cafe; she just didn't know it. Also, the elderly relative (a great-aunt) who's been running the place isn't dead, though Maida doesn't know this either (for sure) for quite a while - the reader does, though. The cute animal belongs to the romantic interest's daughter (he's a widower), not to the heroine. The best friend plays very little role and is offstage for the entire book, spoken to only on the phone.

This is a version of our world without cellphones and, I think, without the internet, so around a 1980s or even 1970s tech level. The main impact this has is that people aren't always able to contact each other or call for help if there isn't a landline nearby, though some of the magical people have telepathic watches that are early-internet-adjacent. There are shifters, witches, fae, and (offscreen, with the best friend) vampires. It's possible that this started life as a Harry Potter fanfic, or at least used elements of the HP universe; the phrase "wizarding world" comes up at one point, and male magic users are sometimes called "wizards," though there do seem to be Ordinary (= muggle) people who have found a way to use magic, and are called "mages". There's a whole pureblood thing going on, too. The chapters are headed with extracts from several different books, and one is about how important it is to preserve pure witch/wizard bloodlines (it's about as awful as you'd expect). Marriages between witches and shifters are severely looked down upon and often don't produce viable offspring, but sometimes they do, and not all "pureblood" families are actually as pure as they pretend.

Departing from HP, there is "synthetic magic," which is addictive for magicals and gives Ordinaries some degree of ability. It's a major plot driver, and the antagonist is a startup douche who founded the company that makes and distributes it. He's utterly unconcerned about negative effects, and practically argues that they're a feature (see above under "startup douche"). 

Maida makes a mostly pleasant main character, with a distressing backstory which she gets over without much difficulty. There are several sympathetic male characters besides the love interest (Maida's father, his executive assistant who's like a brother to her, an elderly wizard we meet near the beginning). Everyone's nice except the startup douche and Maida's aunt, who's determined to take offence at and criticize absolutely everything about her, though they all have their flaws and foibles as well. Her great-aunt is the secondary protagonist, and has a satisfying arc.

I had a pre-publication copy from Netgalley, and there are some commas where they shouldn't be, a few apostrophe errors and a shortage of hyphens in compound adjectives (which aren't compulsory, at least not for American English, but do make reading easier). Hopefully it will get another edit before publication, but even if it doesn't, it's quite readable.

Overall, I found it a pleasant read, with likeable characters and a well-constructed plot, albeit built on a version of what's become the standard chassis for this type of book. If you like this kind of thing, this is certainly one, and a better-than-average one, though for me it fell short of being amazing.

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Review: Success

Success by Una Lucy Silberrad
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Not a complete pig-in-a-poke novel; I had already read this author's The Good Comrade , so I knew she wrote well and that I'd be getting something that wasn't standard or expected, but I didn't have much idea what that would be. I just picked it up off the Project Gutenberg feed.

It's not in any particular genre, and it undermines the tropes of the one genre you might think it was in ((view spoiler)[romance, since the two main characters don't marry, though they consider it; they are friends, not lovers (hide spoiler)]). But it's thought-provoking, and well worth a read.

The central character is an engineer named Michael Annarly, a brilliant man, but hard to work with because he doesn't care much what people think of him, or try to spare their feelings if he thinks they're not doing good work, and he demands special conditions that most employees wouldn't be given, in order to do his best work. When he tells his employers that he's finally finished a design for them for an "aerial torpedo" (what we would call an air-to-air missile - this is very early 20th century, and airship warfare is what's in view), something they've been wanting to get from him for a while, they almost immediately contrive an excuse to fire him. There's a good deal of hypocrisy, unfairness and outright unethical practice involved, something that becomes clearer as the story progresses.

They're an important firm, and having been fired by them for reasons that are not publicly announced, but are rumoured to have to do with his lack of professional ethics (when in fact it was theirs), he's left in a position where he probably can't get a similar job with anyone else.

Fortunately, when he's in London to plead (unsuccessfully) with one of the firm's directors, his cousin Nan sees him walking the streets, looking devastated, and kindly invites him home, where he tells her what's happened. She arranges for her father, who sells antique furniture, to give him some technical drawing work, drawing chair backs and the like for restoration and other purposes - work well below his level, but something. The two become friends, more like siblings than cousins, and in many ways it's that relationship, more than any specific work that he does, that helps Michael hang on. Nan is a quiet woman, the sort that most people overlook, and yet her intervention and her continuing support of Michael are key to the book. She also has a lot more skill than people credit her with.

It's a wonderfully humane book, full of quotable bits about engineering as well as about life. Michael is, essentially, a brilliant problem-solver, so he can go into any context where there's a technical problem to solve and figure out what's going wrong and how to fix it. At one point, though, he's brought in to do some consulting and tells his client that he can't fix the problem - it's not the machinery, it's the people. Partly through his experience, and partly through Nan, he comes to have a much better understanding of the human side of work, and is never in danger of repeating his previous mistakes.

There are some aspects of the book that fell short for me. There's a clumsily obvious foil character for Michael, the brother of a man who works for Nan's father, who, like Michael, came up with an invention that would make his employer a lot of money, and who asked for a proportionate reward. When he was given five pounds, he tore it up, threw it in his boss's face, resigned, and has now spent years working on a better invention to make the previous one worthless, as revenge. He's bitter and miserable and makes the people around him miserable too.

Then there's the moment where Nan is calling for divine judgement on the company that fired Michael just at the moment when a process he developed for them goes disastrously wrong in a way that wouldn't have happened if he'd been there, costing the directors a lot of money. (Both characters happen to be in a location close enough to the plant to hear the bang and see the flame go up just as Nan is, uncharacteristically, ranting.) It struck me as, again, too obvious.

Most of the book is not like that, though. In fact, if anything it has the opposite fault; things just happen that don't obviously contribute to the overall thrust of the book, like the extended sequence around Michael's sister's wedding, the main upshot of which is to allow Nan to meet someone who plays a relatively minor role later on. Though, thinking about it, the wedding is probably also there to highlight the conventional expectations and values of Michael's family, in contrast to how his life works out.

It's not at all a tight plot, and, with the exception of those couple of clumsy moments, it doesn't point up the theme too strongly either, which is a strength more than it's a weakness. The title, "Success," is, in a way, the theme of the book; Michael learns, as Nan already knew, that the conventional markers of success don't really matter - money, fame, marriage, recognition by your employer or by others that you've helped, like the city council whose power station Michael helps to rescue from complete disaster because he happened to be doing a consulting job next door when it failed. What matters is that you're doing good work and that there's someone who understands you; that's success. The comeuppance that is finally served to the nefarious firm and the director most responsible for Michael's dilemma is almost extraneous.

I enjoy books that are not conventional, that are quite unlike anything else, and this is one. It also has a good deal to say about topics I'm interested in: the failures and injustices built into the way work is organized, the meaning of success, the process of solving hard problems, and the importance of human connection and kindness in the world. For me, despite a couple of weaker moments, it was indeed a success.

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Review: Strange Animals: A Novel

Strange Animals: A Novel by Jarod K. Anderson
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

I was misled by the blurb, because I focused on the words "enchanting," "fun" and "cozy" and skipped over the words "haunting" and "creepy."

It's a horror novel, and I don't enjoy horror. There's a creature running round the woods killing innocent people, and it's (probably, unless there are two creatures; I stopped about of a third of the way through) a large skeletal wolf with black... stuff sometimes covering and sometimes revealing its bones. It's also intelligent and telepathic.

Really well written, well edited, fresh concepts, a terrific book in many ways, but unfortunately not at all my preferred genre, and I would have appreciated more of a heads-up about that so that I could have not bought it.

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Review: Report of Dr. Benjamin Franklin, and Other Commissioners, Charged by the King of France, with the Examination of the Animal Magnetism, as Now Practised at Paris.

Report of Dr. Benjamin Franklin, and Other Commissioners, Charged by the King of France, with the Examination of the Animal Magnetism, as Now Practised at Paris. by Benjamin Franklin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A fascinating historical document, for a few reasons.

Firstly, it's the report of a distinguished Royal Commission, including Benjamin Franklin (then US Ambassador to France), Lavoisier the chemist, and the prominent physician Guillotin, namesake (but not, as is widely believed, inventor) of the execution device which was to see so much use a few years later - including on Louis XVI, the commissioner of the study.

Second, it's an early example of experimental method, here applied to testing the claims of Mesmer about his practice of "animal magnetism". The commission concluded that there was no evidence that such a force existed, and that the effects being produced by Mesmer and his followers (one of whom cooperated closely with the commission, while Mesmer refused to do so) were the result of the physical pressure and manipulations done by the operators, alongside the power of "imagination" - in other words, what we now call the placebo effect or the mind-body connection. They established this in part by blind (but not double-blind) trials, including performing Mesmer's prescribed operations on people who were unaware of it, and not performing them while telling the subjects that they were performing them. The effects occurred when people believed the operations were being done, even though they were not, and did not occur when they were unaware that the operations were performed, confirming that it was the belief of the patient and not the actions of the operator that made the difference. It was a thorough investigation, and their conclusions are well supported.

Third, what is said about "animal magnetism" itself - Mesmer's theory and practice, and how the public sessions of "magnetisation" were done - is itself interesting in several ways. The description of the theory of "animal magnetism" - which the report shows, using an earlier study, was wholly derived from since-abandoned theories of physicians from a couple of centuries previously - bears a remarkable resemblance to eastern ideas of chi, a power underlying everything that can be circulated in the body, and for which specific points on the body are significant. I'd be interested to know whether Paracelsus and the other theorists mentioned had any contact with China and other civilizations where similar theories were held.

Further than that, the descriptions of faith healing - not only by Mesmer, but by other people at the time or in the then recent past - are classic, and sound exactly like modern faith healing, including the charismatic services I witnessed myself as a young man. Working a large group of people up into a specific state of mind by a long and elaborate ceremony; the way in which, once someone starts to have a dramatic response, others join in; the explanations for why it sometimes fails - all of these are part of a playbook which is still in use more than 250 years after the publication of this report, showing that debunking is a work that is never completed, and that people don't change that much.

The tone, of the early part of the report especially, at times has more in common with such aggressive debunkers as YouTube's Miniminuteman than with a dispassionate scientific approach, and it's clear that the writers of the report (and the introduction to the English translation) considered Mesmer to be perpetrating conscious fraud, though they don't outright accuse him of doing so. They certainly do say, strongly, that the precipitation of "crises" in which people experience pain, vomit, void their bowels, and sometimes cough up blood is harmful rather than helpful, especially when repeated and taken as the norm.

The medical terminology and beliefs of the time are old-fashioned now, of course; most of our current medical science dates from no earlier than the 19th century, and largely from the 20th. But the commissioners were able, even within their own framework of understanding, to distinguish clearly between a physical and a mental cause of the effects they observed, and that's the key point they were making.

If you're interested in the history of the scientific method, in faith healing, in the mind-body connection or in the process of debunking frauds, this relatively short book is well worth a read. You will have to navigate the 18th-century language, but it's mostly clear enough to a modern reader.

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Review: The Golden Journey of Mr. Paradyne

The Golden Journey of Mr. Paradyne by William John Locke
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Essentially a midlife-crisis story, from the time when having a midlife crisis was admired, at least in men. It's much shorter than I (for some reason) expected it to be, and I read it in about an hour.

Successful lawyer Paradyne wakes up one morning and discovers he's the owner of a gypsy wagon and a horse and is travelling through France selling brushes and such, and has been doing so for several months. The last thing he clearly remembers is shortly before his departure from suburban Ealing on a holiday to France with his wife, who is not with him, though her ticket is. A mysterious, itinerant young man played a melody he'd never heard before outside his house, and that seems to have kicked the whole thing off.

He loves being a travelling brush-seller - perhaps because he was already wealthy, had a lot of money with him and still has a good bit of it, and therefore isn't living hand-to-mouth. His old life of the law was a dead life; his wife had even described him as a dead man, and he thinks of her now as a dead woman, cold and sour. He sees no downside whatsoever in just walking away from all his responsibilities and continuing his journey, and the narration doesn't contradict him in this. His options seem to be a dead life between his suburban home and his city office, or a romanticised life on the road, in the open air. There's no hint of a third way, in which he learns to truly live while also being faithful to his commitments.

It's well enough executed, but the naive romanticism loses it the third star from me. I'd hoped, at a small inflection point in my own career, that it might help me think through next steps. It did not.

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Review: Big Money

Big Money by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A standalone from Wodehouse's classic period (between the wars; this came out in 1931). It does briefly feature a minor character who was also in Sam in the Suburbs , the house agent "of druidical aspect," Mr Cornelius, and the central characters are pretty much his standard ones under different names, but he has fun with them, and so did I.

Wodehouse wrote several books with "money" in the title. As well as this book, there's Uneasy Money, Money in the Bank and Money for Nothing. His father's pension from the civil service, paid in Indian rupees because of his service in the East, had been suddenly devalued just before Wodehouse could go to university, so he knew about being a young man with a good education but minimal skills and little income, and many of his young heroes (and heroines) are stuck in this way. The typical plot involves them somehow obtaining "the needful" via comeuppance given to their stuffy, more prosperous elders, and this book has that typical plot, though with some twists. The wealthy man here decides to rip off his impoverished secretary, whose aunt left him what he believes to be a worthless mine, by buying it for less than its actually considerable worth. Meanwhile, the secretary has, by complete coincidence and without knowing who she is (or her name), fallen in love with his boss's niece, who is engaged to a close friend of his.

There's the usual tangle of multiple coincidental relationships between all of the cast members, and the usual meetings by happenstance; the hero meets his beloved three times, all briefly, and all of them involve coincidence. At this point, still not knowing her name, he proposes (which is why I give this my "thin-romance" tag). Also, of course, he has assumed a false identity, and his friend has assumed a disguise (to avoid his creditors), and everything is very complicated in the Mighty Wodehouse Manner. Courage and cleverness and a decent helping of good luck are required to untangle it all.

It's fun, though, and the prose sparkles, and I enjoyed it.

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Review: Thornley Colton: Blind Detective

Thornley Colton: Blind Detective by Clinton Holland Stagg
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Not the first blind detective (as far as I know, that's Ernest Bramah's Max Carrados), but very much in the same tradition as its predecessor, with the trope of the blind man who has developed his other senses to an extraordinary degree. He can read written or typed pages (or music manuscript) by feeling the back of the paper with his fingers, for example, and has particularly keen hearing. He can somehow grab accurately for someone's arm or otherwise know exactly where they are and in what position, which comes up on more than one occasion, and some people refuse to believe he's actually blind. He himself sometimes lectures about how people with sight are deceived by it, while he is not, because he interprets everything in a situation and makes a mental model of it and how it must have been.

It's clumsy at times. For example, in the first story, someone - in dialog - mentions Colton's secretary Sydney Thames and says his name is "pronounced like the river" - which would be obvious, since he'd just pronounced it. It would have been more natural to say that it was "Thames, like the river." There's a reason for the name, repeated in each of the stories (which I assume were published individually in magazines before being collected): Colton found Sydney Thames as a baby, abandoned on the banks of the London river, and adopted him. He's also taken on a young New York lad - the stories are set in New York - who's known as "Shrimp" or "the Fee," because he was the only payment received for solving a murder, of Shrimp's mother by his father. The boy is very keen to imitate his two heroes, Colton and the fictional Nick Carter, and gets as involved in Colton's cases as his guardian will allow, sometimes putting himself in danger as a result.

The openings of the stories are usually a flight of descriptive prose in the style of the time, a bit overwrought and melodramatic for modern tastes. Having set the scene, the author brings Colton into it, usually by pure coincidence - he just happens to be in the vicinity when the crime is committed - but sometimes because he's called in by people who know his reputation as a "problemist," which is what he calls himself rather than a detective. He's independently fairly wealthy, and doesn't need to have a profession or charge fees, but solves problems for the sake of the interest he takes in them and also for the good of the victims.

He places a high value on human life, though he sometimes causes innocent people emotional distress in the course of setting traps for the criminals, often to the dismay of his secretary Thames. The secretary is overawed by beautiful women, and becomes anxious in their presence, and if Colton seems to be harsh with them he protests, despite regarding Colton as a father figure.

It's tropey and sometimes ridiculous, uses some terms for various races that were common at the time but are now regarded as deeply offensive, and isn't written in the best prose I ever saw. But it's lively and vivid, the characters aren't all simply stock, and the mysteries are cleverly worked out. It has enough flaws that I put it down to three stars, but it's a high three.

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Review: The Angel of Terror

The Angel of Terror by Edgar Wallace
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A whiz-bang Wallace, with a female villain who looks like an angel but is actually a complete psychopath. Of course coincidence plays a key role in the plot, but that's more or less expected for a book of this period. Wallace manages to create an intense atmosphere of suspense around what the villain will do next (since she has basically no moral limits), and to evoke strong sympathy for the protagonist. The villain does, however, have to be a bit incompetent, and also unlucky, for the heroine to survive, and you need to suspend your disbelief a good deal and just go along for the ride.

The heroine, who has voluntarily taken on her late father's debts, is offered a bizarre proposal: marry a man wrongly condemned for murder, so that his cousins, suspected by the man's young lawyer friend of being actually behind the murder, can't inherit. She does that, and becomes wealthy as a result, but also now has a great big target on her back - and doesn't listen to the lawyer when he warns her about the female cousin.

There are some good action set-pieces, and a rip-roaring conclusion. Classic Wallace.

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Review: Beware of Chicken 4

Beware of Chicken 4 by CasualFarmer
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Two of the besetting issues of this series are that there are too many characters, and that each book has a long slow start before getting to the central conflict (if it ever does get there - this one almost does not, and then doesn't stay long).

The two things are related, and this book shows that particularly starkly. The reason it takes until halfway through - not a quarter, not a third, but halfway through - for the plot to get going is that first we have to visit about 20 character viewpoints (not a rhetorical number, it's actually about 20) and have, for each of them, a repetition of basically the same thing: a reflection on past hurt and how now, in the cozy found family started by Jin the cultivator, it's probably going to be OK. All this is interspersed with slice-of-life stuff: building onto the farm, getting new production processes up and running, celebrating festivals, playing puerile practical jokes that everyone finds hilarious and endearing, and drinking too much alcohol.

Then when something resembling a plot does get going, it consists at first of an extended flashback to ancient times as recorded on a crystal retrieved I've-forgotten-how a couple of books ago. It takes until two-thirds of the way through the approximately 120,000-word book before the present-day characters start making plans to do something, they're not quite sure what yet, about the plot problem, which has taken this long to articulate. Sure, it's a strong one. But most writers would have introduced it at about 25%, for good reason: a lot of readers don't like hanging around for 80,000 words waiting for the plot to start, even if the company is pleasant.

And then, once the problem is defined... we're back to the slice of life. There is what could have been a nice bit of intercutting of peripheral characters in a pitched battle against demons versus Jin's wife giving birth to their child, but part of what it does is show by the contrast how flat scenes can be if they lack serious challenge. The birth is a tiring but problem-free experience, with none of the potential issues that get mentioned ever eventuating. The demon fight is desperate and includes great losses, even though the outcome is never really in doubt, but it's narrated in a way that also minimises the importance of those losses.

I find the characters more memorable than the plot in these books, and maybe that's because we spend more time on character growth and insight than we do on plot progression (though the two are inevitably linked). Even though for me there was a gap of getting on for three years between reading Book 2 and Book 3, I remembered the characters fairly well - but the events quite poorly, and the fact that the author provides us with zero refresher is, therefore, an avoidable fault. For example, early in this book, Jin visits a village where Big D, the chicken of the title, has been training a disciple, and there's some sort of sign or something outside the village, and it cracks Jin up when he sees it. This sign was, I think, put there in Book 2. That was hundreds of pages and, for me, several years ago, and I have no memory of it whatsoever. But does the author give even a tiny clue, half a sentence, a few words about what it looks like so I, and other people who've forgotten, can share in the joke? He does not. Tens of thousands of words for atmosphere, but not even half a dozen for recap.

The copy editing continues to improve, though there are still awkwardly phrased sentences ("He headed down a set of stairs and began to descend them") and the odd typo, and errors like equating rabbits and hares (they're different animals). Belying is used for betraying, seller for buyer, match for march, decreed for declared, singular for single, exultations for exhortations, "cadaver" when it's not an entire body but a disembodied head, and "the first thing is first" as probably an eggcorn for "first things first."

And yet, with all these faults, it's still amusing and touching and appealing at times. It's just... it wouldn't be that hard to make it a lot better (IMO). It definitely wouldn't be hard to make it a lot shorter without losing much that I would care about.

While reading this book, I came across a Reddit AMA the author did a few years back, where he says that the published versions are already "half to a quarter" of the length of his drafts, so I hate to think how overwritten the drafts are. In that same thread, though, he specifically references "noblebright" as something he was shooting for - which he achieves, no question. Interesting that the Word of Noblebright has spread to the point that someone who is demographically different from most of the noblebright authors I know (by which I mean he's likely under 40) has heard of it and thinks it's a good thing for a book to be. We're less obscure than I thought - which, honestly, isn't hard, since "less obscure than I thought" is the direction in which there's the most space.

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Review: The Side Questers

The Side Questers by J.J. Kochmanski
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Two NPCs in a fantasy MMORPG have become conscious, able to act independently like players.

Why they've become conscious is a slight spoiler, so I won't mention it, but it creates tension and stakes in the real world as well as the world of the game, and adds a layer of dramatic irony.

This is LitRPG-adjacent, but not true LitRPG, in that the game world is explicitly a computer game, not just a gamelike isekai, and there's not a lot of time spent on stats and skills. That works better for me than the more central LitRPG experience, honestly. It's also better written than the average LitRPG, apart from some minor glitches which I'll mention to the publisher (I had a pre-publication version via Netgalley for review).

The characters, particularly Anya, the barkeep, who is the main viewpoint character, quickly won my sympathy. She's courageous, determined and intelligent, and I wanted her to succeed.

The world is a generic fantasy game world, which is more likely to be by design than from a failure of imagination on the part of the author. The players the characters encounter include some arrogant griefers who have bought their way to level 99, and some more-or-less-helpful gamers who regularly play together from widely separated locations.

The plot has an arc towards justice and love and The Right Thing, which I enjoyed. I couldn't see how the author was going to manage a resolution that produced a good outcome for everyone who deserved one, but he pulled it off admirably.

Recommended.

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Review: The Secret Library

The Secret Library by Amanda James
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A celebration of the power of fiction to inspire and uplift people, in the form of a magical-realist novel in which characters from books literally come alive through the work of authors, editors, and readers.

Lucy is introduced to us first as a 10-year-old girl looking forward to staying with her editor grandmother at her beautiful house in Cornwall. Inspired by her grandmother, she herself becomes an editor - but by the age of 30 is becoming disillusioned with the sameness (and darkness) of the fiction that's submitted to her company. She's an acquiring editor and a developmental editor, so she chooses which books to move forward with and then helps the authors make them as good as they can be. And she's finding it hard to come up with "diamonds"; everyone is writing the same book, and not doing a great job of it. I definitely empathise, because it's hard these days to find books to read that aren't just a rehash of the same few premises, most of them dark and depressing. Even in the positive speculative fiction subgenres - noblebright, cozy fantasy, solarpunk, hopepunk - there's a lot of mediocre or poorly crafted work that's just repeating the same ideas.

In light of the theme of books that stand out from the norm, it's a... bold move to invoke one of the most overused tropes of contemporary fantasy fiction: an inheritance from a relative that introduces a woman to her magical heritage. There's also instalove, not just one but two instances, and despite all of the lampshade hanging about how that's unrealistic, there it is at the heart of the story.

Lucy starts meeting characters from books, which isn't new to her, since she talked and played with Bilbo Baggins, Christopher Robin and Mary Poppins as a child. What is new is that, by editing unfinished manuscripts that her grandmother has left to her along with the house, and writing the authors, who had given up, encouraging notes, she reaches across the decades and causes the books to have been finished, and successful, and inspirational for readers. Their key characters emerge into the real world and start to play a role in the plot.

The book has ambitions to be one of those wonderful, inspirational books that lifts people up and influences them in the direction of kindness and generosity. I think it gets partway there. The reason that, for me, it doesn't get all the way there is that it's competent rather than brilliant in its execution, and overt and obvious in its message, which is sometimes more told than shown. The characters are well drawn, but they don't come alive and step off the page like the ones we're told about from the previously-unfinished novels within the novel; they feel generic to me. The hot fisherman with the sensitive soul, the disillusioned 30-year-old editor, her bouncy best friend... none of them have that extra spark of uniqueness. For that matter, the fictional characters who are so vivid to the readers that they enter the real world are not, in this novel, that vivid. The book's reach exceeds its grasp.

It's a commendable reach, though, and a good message, and an enjoyable book. I do recommend it for lovers of positive fiction and people who are thinking about giving up on their dreams.

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Review: Sorcery on the Sunset Express

Sorcery on the Sunset Express by Ronald D. Ferguson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Disclaimer: I requested and received a copy from the author prior to publication. We are members of the same writers' forum, where the author posted asking for readers for his upcoming book. The author explicitly stated that there was no expectation or obligation for a review.

This is a solid, enjoyable story set in an alternate North America (mainly Texas, but also Louisiana and New Mexico) in 1907. The background is that Southern wizards managed to stalemate the American Civil War and (in some way that isn't explored) transform the Confederacy into the Southern Alliance Monarchy; Texas and California are independent republics, and there is still a USA, just a smaller one. The alternate-world setting isn't just decoration. It introduces rich and powerful people who are also foreign nobility, warranting an extra layer of caution in dealing with them, and it enables the author to have both the technology of 1907 (telephones and cars - the latter more plentiful, if anything, than in our 1907) in the cities, and a version of Texas that's more like the untamed West of much earlier times in its outlying districts.

The status of slavery in the Southern Alliance Monarchy wasn't clear to me, but it's illegal in Texas, and the main characters are careful to treat the black people they encounter (serving as stewards in Pullman cars - there's a lot of train travel, as the title implies) with respect. I did find it slightly unlikely that, in the first decade of the 20th century, a young woman of respectable background would routinely travel in the same sleeper compartment as her male colleague; people do assume they're an unmarried couple, which they're not (though there are plenty of hints that he admires her considerably), but nobody acts as if it's scandalous or tries to stop them, even though there are mentions of a strong influence of Baptist morality in the Republic of Texas. Both the characters have a Baptist background, too.

Their background, in fact, is strong overall. Brandi, the female partner, has ended up as a consulting detective in part because, when she tried to study advanced physics at a university, she was told that there was no place for a woman to do so, and found herself pushed into a job as a second-grade teacher. Her father is a doctor, and she's learned some things from him. She's capable, highly intelligent, and definitely the Holmes of the pair. Unfortunately, she's also very sharp-tongued, given to lecturing her unfortunate partner Jerry not only about things he's ignorant of but also about his behaviour, which is that of a working-class Texan from a difficult family background who had to drop out of college when he was injured and lost his football scholarship. His father was a drunkard, a womaniser and a wife-abuser who pretended to be a preacher in order to get money for his other activities, meaning the family moved around a lot until he finally left his wife and son; the mother, abandoned not only by her husband but by a self-righteous congregation, struggled for a while and then died while Jerry was still a teenager. He's since been a Texas Ranger, a job he was thrown out of for taking a principled stand that wasn't politically acceptable to his bosses, and came very near to getting him lynched in the prologue.

This is a lot more character development, and a lot more worldbuilding, than I often see, though admittedly I've been reading cozy fantasy lately, which is notably weak on both of those things. Still, it means that there's some heft to the events the characters get caught up in. There are a number of violent deaths, some of innocents; serious threats and tension; and a twisty mystery to unravel.

The main mystery involves the theft of payrolls being securely (or so one would think) transported by train, watched constantly by guards, but when the train arrives at its destination the money has somehow vanished from the locked safe - not once, but multiple times, despite elaborate precautions being taken. There are also secondary mysteries, including a couple of murders.

The method of the heists is clever, and the process of solving the case entertaining, and the action scenes well described. The time and place are competently evoked, and the characters are memorable and have dimension. I recommend it.

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Review: Beware of Chicken 3

Beware of Chicken 3 by CasualFarmer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Much the same strengths, and faults, as the earlier books in the series. Fortunately, for me at least, the strengths predominate.

Before I get going on the review itself, I will have a quick rant about the DRM. I got this book from the library via Overdrive, and because it has Adobe Digital Editions DRM on it, instead of just checking it out of the library with an app on my phone and synching my e-reader over wifi, I had to check it out, download some software to my computer, sign in with an Adobe id, go to the Overdrive website, sign in with my library card, download the epub, import it to ADE, plug in my e-reader to my computer with a cable like some sort of medieval peasant, and transfer it. It's a lot of unnecessary friction that adds no value for anyone, and I wish publishers would stop using it.

Anyway - review. The pacing at the beginning and end continues to be an issue. Slow start, banging middle, slow wind-down with too many endings. There's a big "tournament arc" section, and while it's well enough described, the big problem is that nothing really hinges on who wins, and it's pretty obvious who that's going to be, and she doesn't even seem to care all that much about the win anymore either. The aftermath of the tournament, though, with a battle against an actual adversary where there are high stakes and it's not at all clear who's going to win and we're afraid it isn't the heroes, is much more gripping. Of course, for this part to work as it does, we need to have had the earlier events to set up alliances and introduce characters, but still, the contrast between the fairly meaningless fights of the tournament with the truly tense ones of the aftermath struck me as an excellent illustration of the writing maxim, "Don't write action scenes, write scenes that require action to resolve them."

There are, as other reviewers have noted, too many characters, many of whom get a viewpoint (even minor ones that we never see again). But at least the character voices are distinct, and what they do and say is often interesting. There are also too many subplots, and since it's two and a half years since I read the previous book and there is absolutely zero time spent on reorienting the reader to what has happened previously, some of them didn't mean as much as they otherwise would have. This is one of the issues with books originally published as long-running serials, though it could be fixed easily enough with a quick "previously on..." at the front that you could skip if you were reading right through.

The copy editing seems to be getting better each time. There are now fewer instances of the same issues: apostrophe in the wrong place when the noun is plural, dialog punctuation, "may" where it should be "might," a dangling modifier, disagreement in number between noun and verb, some cases in which the pronoun reference was ambiguous because who "he" or "she" referred to had changed without notice, and a few vocabulary errors: pendants/pennants, singular/single, namesake/name, the eggcorn "another thing coming" instead of "think," observance/observation, brought/bought, filed/filled, aides/aids, "brace" when it doesn't mean "two," borne/born, even/ever, decreed/declared - some of which are confusions and some of which are likely typos.

What makes these books good, though, is the warm and generous tone, set by the central character, the "hidden master" known as Jun. He's been drawn into the world of cultivation from Canada, and it shows; he's polite and kind and generous to everyone, and his priorities are for everyone to get along and be happy and prosperous, which I personally think are great priorities, and ones we could stand to see more widespread in this or any other world. In this case, he has stumbled into having the power to spread his values, though he does so by influence rather than force; it's just that he does have the option of force to prevent people with different values from wrecking things, and to get other people with power (but less power than he has) to listen to him seriously.

Partly so that everything is fresh in my mind, but also because I enjoyed it, I'm moving straight on to the next volume without reading something else in between. Once I do the stupid multiple-step Adobe dance, that is.

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