Books Not Taken: Earthlings

The second in an occasional series about why I have chosen not to pick up certain Netgalley books for review. Blurb begins: "Peridot has lived a sheltered life, raised by an overprotective mother on a remote island, the ways of the world remain a mystery, until the arrival of a young boy Euan, and she finally learns the truth." That needs to be at least two sentences, and rearranged a bit. It's in the style I call "British breathless," a particular way of punctuating that shows very little understanding of where a comma belongs or what it does. Further dings against the book from my personal perspective are that it's a Chosen One story of a young girl with magick (with a "k"), able to use the traditional five elements, and it's a dystopian. The cliches come thick and fast. And then there's the fact that, among the "Advance Praise," I read this: "An Enid Blyton of the social media age" - THE HECKINGTON POST There doesn't appear to be any such publication, and the only three instances of the quoted text I can find in Google are on pages controlled by the author. Is he making up his own press?

Review: Prison of Sleep

Prison of Sleep by Tim Pratt
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Not a bad book, but not, for me, as good as the first in the duology. While the dual timeline (from two different viewpoints) was well handled - I only got seriously lost once - and there were plenty of tense moments just prior to switching the POV, the resolution of those moments often turned out to be linear and perhaps too easy, occasionally facilitated by fortunate coincidence. One of the characters easily succeeds at something (view spoiler)[(neutralizing their enemies) (hide spoiler)] that a much better equipped, more organized and larger group had not seemed capable of doing, for example.

Still, it was an enjoyable ride, and the revelations of what was going on behind the scenes, and the provision of new antagonists, worked well after the resolution of the previous book. This is a highly capable author, but it's not his absolute best work.

I received a copy via Netgalley for review.

View all my reviews

Review: The Young Visiters, or Mr. Salteena's Plan

The Young Visiters, or Mr. Salteena's Plan by Daisy Ashford
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Unconsciously hilarious story by a 9-year-old girl who has some very interesting (and in parts surprisingly sophisticated) ideas about how adults live, interspersed with moments of intense naiveté.

(view spoiler)[Mr Salteena, an "elderly man of 42," has a largely unexplained 17-year-old female house guest named Ethel, with whom, it eventually turns out, he is in love. He makes the mistake of introducing her to his friend Bernard, and she becomes Bernard's house guest; they then take to living in London in a hotel, in adjoining rooms, so they can enjoy the pleasures of the city.

Dialog with unconscious subtext ensues:

"I shall be quite lost in that huge bed she added to hide her embarrassment. Yes I expect you will said Bernard."

She and Bernard eventually get married, and return from a six-week honeymoon with a "son and hair".

Meanwhile, Mr Salteena, with a letter of recommendation from Bernard, goes to the Crystal Palace, where a number of noblemen have "compartments". He pays an earl who knew Bernard because they were at Cambridge together 45 pounds to teach him how to appear to be a gentleman (he's the son of a wealthy butcher), introduce him around in society, and get him a job galloping after the Prince of Wales' carriage in knee breeches.

He eventually marries a member of the royal household, and they have 10 children, but he still pines after Ethel and is never really happy. (hide spoiler)]

It deserves its status as a classic gem. Honestly, I've read books by adults that made less sense and weren't as well plotted, but the naive moments give it the comedy that sets it apart. It reads as if young Daisy had got hold of a few contemporary adult novels and absorbed as much as her nine-year-old mind was able to of the style and approach, then reproduced them with a slight funhouse-mirror twist.

View all my reviews

Review: Silverlock

Silverlock by John Myers Myers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A difficult book to rate and review, because of its mixture of strengths and weaknesses and also its mixture of tones.

Both a strength and a weakness is that the author has a rich background in classical fantastic and adventurous fiction (from the Epic of Gilgamesh on forward), and references it continually. The first-person narrator does not have this background, and never seems to figure out that he is wandering around a literary landscape; his university degree is in business management. I have some background, but not nearly as much as the author, and while the book works without knowing who all of the minor characters are exactly, sometimes (especially near the end), when the namedrops are coming thick and fast, I did feel at sea, and also as if I was in the presence of a show-off who was setting out to make me feel ignorant. Some of the characters are combinations of several legends in one person, which makes it even more confusing (and difficult to look them up on Wikipedia).

The story does not follow a conventional plot. (I think I detected signs of the Hero's Journey, which I am not a fan of, but it wasn't too obtrusive.) It's a picaresque, "the episodic adventures of a rogue," and involves the viewpoint character facing various adventures, in the course of which he kills several people (in self-defence, but sometimes if he'd been smarter he wouldn't have been in the situation where he needed to), steals a few things (out of desperation, but the same if-he'd-been-smarter caveat sometimes applies), and commits adultery (this was just a straight-up choice on his part and gets no defence from me). He has an old-fashioned outlook on violence and women, not a million miles from, say, Ernest Hemingway, which won't go over particularly well to most present-day audiences.

The events of the story are not just wandering from scene to scene, though, at least not all the way through. He does have goals at various points. The first is to reconnect with his companion, who is every famous bard ever in a single character. Once that's achieved, they set out to help their friend Lucius Jones win his love. This character seems to be a blend of Lucius from the Golden Ass (since he's turned into a donkey at one point, and has to eat roses to change back to human) and possibly Tom Jones, since, while longing after his beloved, he has no hesitation in sleeping with other women if the opportunity presents itself.

The quests escalate as the book goes on, and the third one is to reach the Hippocrene Spring, which makes people into poets when they drink from it. This one is given by an oracle, and involves a descent into the underworld, modelled on Dante's Inferno but guided by "Faustopheles," seemingly a combination of Faust and Mephistopheles. This is where the tone takes a very dark turn, as Faustopheles preaches nihilism and hopelessness, illustrating his points with the characters they encounter. It was a lot more philosophical than the earlier parts of the book, and I felt it didn't fit well; the author, perhaps, was putting down on paper his own darkest thoughts in an attempt to exorcise them.

The character of Silverlock is not a philosopher, and starts the book alienated and uncaring about others, but he picks up some ideals of behaviour from a few encounters along the way (notably including Sir Gawain). While he is never a highly admirable character to me, he does improve, albeit from a very unpromising starting point. He's capable of being fair-minded, a faithful friend, brave, and a protector of the innocent.

The setting never gets much of an explanation, and is a strange mishmash of the whole of literature up to the 19th century (there may have been some early-20th-century material that I missed). Different regions are from wildly different historical periods, and people wander between them, but there doesn't seem to be, say, trade in weaponry, for example. It's meant to make symbolic sense rather than literal sense. Also, the characters that Silverlock encounters always seem to be partway through their stories - the key moments of the stories are happening just as he arrives - which again follows story logic rather than any other kind of logic.

The edition I read has numerous typos (see my notes), including a good many missing quotation marks, and some consistent errors. For example, the author uses a comma after "of course" when it's not required, and doesn't use a comma after "Why" as an exclamation beginning a sentence. I didn't notice any vocabulary errors, though, and the interpolated poems are well executed, in contrast to so much fantasy poetry. Apparently this book is a favourite with filkers (people who perform fandom-based songs), and I can see why.

Overall, it's an odd book, and I can see why some people love it and others hate it. I neither loved nor hated it; for me, the best parts made it good enough to make it to my Best of the Year, but in the lowest tier because of its patchy nature. It did make me consider reading (or re-reading) some of the source material, though.

View all my reviews

Review: The Knave of Secrets

The Knave of Secrets by Alex Livingston
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In a setting where everyone in several different cultures is obsessed with gambling games, this book focuses on a crew of crooked gamblers who end up in the position to maybe do some good.

There are a number of viewpoint characters, including two of the crew but also several other players in the complicated plotting and counter-plotting; at times I found myself wishing for a diagram, which I suspect the author has probably drawn. There's a kind of cold war going on between two powerful nations, an Empire and a Queendom; a third nation, an island where the story is mostly set, is coming increasingly under the influence of the Empire. Because landowning grants voting rights there, and because immigrants from the Empire tend to be prosperous and often buy land, the Parliament is heading for a "tipping point" where it may vote to become part of the Empire rather than remaining independent, which will shift the balance of power between the superpowers. Meanwhile, a supposedly apolitical order of wizards (to which two of the gambling crew used to belong) are keeping secrets that could upset the balance in a different way.

All of this sets the plot in motion, as one of the crew wins a game where people play for secrets, and somehow (it's never explained how) the man he beat knew the wizards' secret and gambled with it. They decide they have to try to keep the current détente between the Empire and the Queendom and the independence of their island, and prevent a war from starting, using their gambling abilities and some unreliable magic.

(view spoiler)[Unfortunately, they're ill equipped for this task and flail about a good bit, and the author has to rather obviously plot armour them against being assassinated. Someone who has every reason to kill them off and has already demonstrated that he is physically and morally capable of doing so (by killing several minor characters) simply decides not to for no discernable reason, and they also face no consequences from a run-in with a gang boss whose threats got them into the game in the first place; he just vanishes from the board and is never mentioned again. Later, the crew leader wins a game he probably shouldn't have been able to win, reveals the wizards' secret, and appeals to someone to do something she probably can't do (given that she is not really in favour with her superiors) to prevent that revelation from starting a war. (hide spoiler)]

The issues in those spoiler tags, and my difficulty in following the overly convoluted plot at times, took this book down to the bronze tier of my annual Best-Of list, but it does have a good many strengths and shows potential. I particularly enjoyed the worldbuilding, the different games and the feeling of deep and rich cultures. I also found the idea of a nation (one of the two superpowers) where the wealthy gain access to formal power by funding public works to be an interesting one, though I'm not sure how it would arise or how long it would be enforced in reality.

I received a pre-publication version from Netgalley, which needs some work for typos (mostly words missing, added, duplicated, or mistyped) and the occasional vocabulary glitch, but is otherwise largely sound.

View all my reviews

Review: Ought to be Dead

Ought to be Dead by Scott Warren
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Because of a glitch on Goodreads that didn't associate this one with his other books, it wasn't until I reached the end that I realized I'd read one of Scott Warren's books before ( The Dragon's Banker ). The same strengths and, sadly, the same weaknesses are on display here.

Strengths: this is an engaging, well-told story with a competent protagonist whose heart is in the right place (even if it doesn't beat much anymore). Garth Nix has taught me that I don't mind reading about necromancers if they're working on behalf of the living, and so I took the risk of picking this up, knowing that it could be darker than I prefer. It wasn't, and it had a gentle humour that added to the enjoyment. It's a premise I haven't seen a thousand times before, and it hits the emotional beats well in a soundly-structured plot.

Weaknesses: I got a pre-publication version from Netgalley, and I don't know how much copy editing it is going to get between now and publication, or how good the copy editor will be. But even a very good copy editor who is excellent at punctuation and has a better-than-average vocabulary will only be able to do so much to compensate for the fact that the author is truly terrible at punctuation, commits most of the other common language mistakes, and makes a lot of vocabulary errors (not only using the wrong spelling for numerous homonyms, but using the wrong word altogether in many cases). Having written multiple books, and obviously being committed to writing as a significant part of his life, this author ought to invest some time in improving his grasp of basic mechanics, because the many, many issues seriously detract from what is otherwise a good book.

It makes it to my Best of the Year list, but in the lowest tier. Without the dozens of copy editing issues, I would have rated it a good deal higher. Again, many, even most, of these may well be fixed by publication, but when there are so many, some will always slip through even the best of copy editors. Far better not to make the mistakes in the first place.

View all my reviews

Review: A Man of Means

A Man of Means by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Early Wodehouse (first published 1916), with a collaborator, but showing much of what was later to be the distinctive Wodehouse comic style. Even the scheming butler at the end sounds like Jeeves, though he pulls something that Jeeves might not have.

It's the story of a deeply undistinguished nebbish of a clerk who begins the book by asking his employer to lower his salary, since once it hits 150 pounds (per year, presumably) he will have to get married to his landlord's daughter. Being of weak and conventional character, he has got engaged to her despite not at all wanting to get married, because it seems to be expected of him.

He then, in the first of a number of coincidences, wins a large amount of money, and takes one of his few decisive actions in the whole book in order to escape the marriage.

This is a collection of six stories, each of which puts him in a different comic situation and (usually) extracts him from it by luck. For the first three stories, his capital increases each time, and several times he again finds himself expected to marry someone he doesn't really want to (who is after his money; he has no other perceptible attractions, or indeed qualities) because of his weakness of character.

Now, a main character who lacks agency (and personality, and much of a spine) and a plot driven by coincidence are usually fatal flaws for me, but somehow these stories make it work. The comic situations are so absurd, and the secondary characters so entertainingly depicted, that, like the little boy in Princess Bride with the kissing scene, I didn't mind so much.

View all my reviews