Review: The Complete Convergence Trilogy

The Complete Convergence Trilogy by Melissa McShane
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There are a lot of things I like about Melissa McShane's books (most of them; I'm not a fan of every series).

Firstly, they're well edited. This one has a few typos and other minor glitches, but I spotted a total of a dozen across all three books, and most books I read have twice that number in a single book, or more.

Secondly, the main characters are likeable, committed to doing the right thing, capable, intelligent, and have some depth to them; if they have tragic backstories, they don't whine about them or use them as an excuse for bad behaviour, and if they make bad decisions, they figure that out and do their best to recover and not do so again.

Thirdly, unlike a lot of prolific authors, McShane manages to introduce some depth to the fiction, provide insight into human nature and explore themes, and does that without bogging down the plot in a lot of navel-gazing or repeating herself unnecessarily.

Fourth, her settings and worldbuilding are original and feel solid and lived-in. No painted scenery flats or overworn cliché elements here. In this book, for example, we have two worlds, originally one, separated by magic that went wrong and now, centuries later, coming back together; each has its own part of the original magic system, and a significant thread throughout is figuring out how they relate to each other and whether they can be re-integrated.

If that was the whole thing, it wouldn't be exciting, but we also have romance, politics, war (between and among the people of the two formerly separated worlds), self-discovery, and a strong theme about leadership.

There are good leaders and bad leaders in this book, but not all the bad leaders are bad for the same reason. The main antagonist is a bad leader because she's both psychotic (not always in touch with consensus reality) and psychopathic (treats people as things), but she's the empress of an empire that treats its rulers as avatars of the divine, so... that's a problem. But there are also leaders who are capable administrators but lack a broad perspective because of personal ambition or bigotry, and petty leaders who put their own advancement and glory ahead of the actual aim they're supposed to be working towards, and a leader who isn't very bright and whose decisions are largely driven by cowardice, and leaders who, while both capable and willing to join in the effort for the greater good, are utter weasels. On the flip side, during the course of the story the protagonist gradually comes into her own leadership abilities, which she at first doubts; she's a good leader in part because she's humble. And she observes the leadership style of her love interest, and comments on it throughout; he learns some things about leadership too.

The story is told through her diary entries, which isn't going to be to everyone's taste; I know some readers don't like the epistolary style, though personally I enjoy it. The entries are written after the events, of course, so there's a lot of foreshadowing, and sometimes she has to stop and start again and tell things in the right order, all of which underlines the diary conceit and makes it more believable (though, again, there will be readers who find it annoying).

There's plenty of tension; multiple well-handled, intersecting emotional, character, and plot arcs; and just so much sound craft on display that I can't give it less than five stars. Highly recommended.

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Review: The Golden Triangle

The Golden Triangle by Maurice Leblanc
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Every Lupin book is a little different, but this is one of a group of at least three, written around the same time, that have some strong similarities. We get a long period of setup during which Lupin isn't even mentioned, then someone calls him in as a consulting problem-solver. By this time, we've had drama amounting to melodrama, intense love (often involving someone married to someone else), intense hatred (generally involving the someone else), tragedy, treachery, and patriotism; it couldn't be more French if you fried it in butter and stuck a tricolour flag in it.

In this one, you have sinister Levantines, hidden gold, two people who discover that a mysterious benefactor has been working for years to bring them together, murder, the backdrop of the Great War, a courageous but headstrong protagonist, and, of course, the extreme cleverness and Peter-Pan-like crowing of Lupin as he solves the mystery. It's all thrilling and sensational, if sometimes a bit too much so.

Unfortunately, we also have a black colonial soldier who is literally treated like a dog (he's largely unable to talk because of a war wound, so the protagonist pretends to have discussions with him when thinking aloud, as you would with a pet); he's several times called something that is deeply offensive these days, and (view spoiler)[ends up dying in the service of his "master" (hide spoiler)]. That does introduce a flaw into what is otherwise a rip-roaring novel of action, mystery and suspense.

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Review: Legends & Lattes

Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'd been going back and forth about whether I wanted to read this, having read mixed reviews, but two members of my writing critique group recommended it, so I gave it a go.

I'm glad I did. Unlike the earlier, in some ways similar, novella Coffee, Milk & Spider Silk , it makes full use of its sword-and-sorcery setting, mashing it up with modern coffeehouse culture but at least changing the names of things in a way that made sense for the fantasy world. The fact that Viv is an orc and used to be an adventurer matters, in a way that the MC in the other book's identity as a drider and a former cop absolutely did not.

I should disclose that I dislike coffee, as Tolkien said of Dune, "with some intensity," and don't frequent coffee shops, but I still enjoyed this cosy fantasy about the first coffee shop in a fantasy city. When I say "cosy" fantasy, that's partly about tone (I wrote about this in a blog post a couple of years ago, entitled, tongue in cheek, A Cozy Manifesto); but it's also about the stakes being relatively local and personal, rather than global or cosmic or even national, and this book certainly matches that part of the definition. Still, an important element of the book is that not only Viv, but a number of other people, come to care about the success, and indeed the existence, of her coffee shop; the stakes are interpersonal as well.

And this isn't just a slice of life, in which Viv and co. putter along putting new things on the menu from time to time, though it's that too. There's a plot, with challenges to overcome, and part of the importance of it is that Viv doesn't deal with it the way she once would have when she was an adventurer (of, if I had to guess, the Barbarian class), by taking her greatsword off the wall and going about beheading people; she forms alliances instead.

If I have a quibble, it's that the challenges are overcome quite easily, though that's not unexpected in a cosy, after all. People (mostly) act sensibly and with goodwill; the one character who would belong in a grimdark fantasy stands out in stark contrast. This warm tone is the essence of cosy.

In terms of editing, apart from a few too many commas between adjectives that don't require them (a mistake practically everyone makes these days), and a dangling modifier or two, it's very clean. In an interview that's included in the back, the author quotes (unfortunately without attribution) an excellent piece of writing advice that he follows, and that I wish more authors would follow: "Write using words you know, in your own voice."

The result is an enjoyable, well-executed piece which makes me want to read more from this author.

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Review: Eluthienn: A Tale Of The Fromryr

Eluthienn: A Tale Of The Fromryr by Sam Middleton
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

Sadly, it appears to be an unwritten law that you can have airships in your book, or you can use vocabulary correctly, but it's either one or the other. This book conforms to that law, and is also frequently missing the past perfect tense; in fact, it has a fairly complete collection of common issues, including dangling modifiers, sentences that change grammatical direction partway through, and commas before the main verb. I'll note, as always, that I read a pre-release version via Netgalley and the published version may have fixed some of the issues, though there are enough of them that I'm confident a lot will remain. Some of the vocabulary errors were very basic, too, like taught/taut or even it's/its; another demonstration that having an English degree does not mean you've learned good mechanics.

The story was better than the execution, but more tragic and serious than I personally prefer; there's an occasional bit of humour, but it's usually coarse jokes by secondary characters. It wasn't so good that I was willing to keep slogging through the ropy mechanics to see how it ended, though. I did my usual test, when I'm finding a book heavy going, of going off and reading something else to see if I cared enough about the characters to come back to it, and discovered I didn't.

At the point I gave up on it, about halfway through, the two storylines and their two protagonists had not yet intersected. Other reviews indicate that once they do, things get more exciting, though the action scenes weren't really what I had a problem with. There was the occasional scene where the description of every step the character took through the (admittedly somewhat interesting) setting became a bit much, and I wanted more summary of things that didn't matter so we could get to the things that did; the author, I think, is proud of the setting, having done a lot of work on it, and wants to show it off, but overdoes it now and again.

I had some trouble believing in the idea of a vast underground realm where flying ships nearly 1km long and 400m wide (assuming a "league" has its usual meaning of three miles) have plenty of room to maneuver, and things being hexagonal or octagonal apparently because it was cool rather than for any practical reason didn't help, but at least it was fresh and original.

I'm following my usual practice of not giving a star rating on Goodreads to a book I haven't finished, but Netgalley will make me give a rating; it will be three stars, because honestly most authors have bad mechanics these days (though these are worse than average), and the story wasn't awful, just not much to my taste. Lots of people will enjoy this more than me.

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Review: Unnatural Magic

Unnatural Magic by C.M. Waggoner
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read the (at time of writing) two books in this series in the wrong order, and it was interesting to compare the two of them. The worldbuilding definitely feels a level deeper in the second one ( The Ruthless Lady's Guide to Wizardry ), though it's not shallow here by any means, and the meaning of a lot of cultural ideas, like being "householded" (something between concubinage and adoption, depending) and the "releft" (apparently a holding place for souls awaiting reincarnation), are both clearer and made clear sooner in the second book. This one is still good, though, with engaging and varied characters, a compelling mystery to unravel, and plenty of magic to enjoy.

The characters range from the young and rather Regency-missish Onna, who is much better at magic than her culture is prepared to accept, to the pragmatic and foul-mouthed troll Tsira, along the way taking in an impoverished gentleman who (for excellent reasons) deserts from the army, where he's a junior officer; the greatest wizard in the world, who was raised in the theatre and is, consequently, extremely theatrical; and a number of minor characters met along the way, most of whom have something unusual about them to make them individual rather than a face in the crowd. Two groups of characters are separate for slightly more than half the book, and at first aren't even pursuing a common goal, but when they come together, both now investigating who is murdering trolls and cutting them up, they mesh well, and everything building up to that point is fully justified and important.

One thing I noticed about the other book, but didn't mention in my review, is that the majority of characters seem to be bisexual. We get more of a view of troll culture in this one, and it appears that gender and sexuality are a lot more optional for trolls than humans, though - possibly under the influence of the culturally dominant trolls - they're also more optional for humans as an accepted part of their culture than in the approximate equivalent time and place in our world (early-19th-century Europe).

I spotted the villain relatively early, not because they looked at all likely in the world of the story, but just because I know how stories work, and they were the person who would be the most dramatic choice. The pursuit of the solution to the mystery was interesting to follow anyway, and the villain's motivation was surprisingly relatable.

(view spoiler)[I did think that Onna's childhood friend's epiphany and apology were what I think of as an author's-wishful-thinking repentance, without much in the way of preparation within the story; it was the kind of scene a lot of people wish would occur more often in real life, but which seldom does. (hide spoiler)] However, this was a minor flaw.

Speaking of minor flaws, there were a few small glitches: a word repeated at the end of a sentence, the typo "string" for "sting," "lead" for "led," "laid" for "lay" and vice versa, an excess comma in the phrase "Of course I do," "straights" for "straits," and misplaced apostrophes in what should be the trolls' quarter and the wizards' club. I still give it my "well-edited" tag, because in a book this long that's a small number of mostly subtle errors.

Though at times more bloody and frequently raunchier than I usually prefer, these are excellently written books by a skilled author, and I enjoy them even when they're in territory I usually avoid.

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Review: The Knife and the Serpent

The Knife and the Serpent by Tim Pratt
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There is an intersection on my Venn diagram of books between "well written" and "not for me," and this book is in it.

Why did I pick it up? Especially considering that the premise of "relative dies suddenly, young woman goes to deal with the estate and discovers she's Special" is a) not a great premise in itself and b) the basis of many, many badly-written books?

Well, it was because this author has used that exact premise before, and elevated it into something wonderful, namely Heirs of Grace . That book has what I call the Glorious Ending, where someone makes a generous choice out of love that averts what has, up to that point, looked like inevitable tragedy.

The problem is, as I said in my review of his short story collection Hart and Boot and Other Stories , "Tim Pratt is an author of two very different aspects. The aspect I encountered first was in his Marla Mason stories (as T.A. Pratt), in which unpleasant people do unpleasant things to other unpleasant people, with a good deal of meaningless and often kinky sex, graphic violence, and occasional drug use." And that is the Pratt of this book, more so than the other, kinder, more joyful and hopeful Pratt that I was looking for. It isn't all the way up against the stop at the dark end of the spectrum; Glenn, though he clearly has issues, isn't a bad person, and Vivy's main issue is that she doubts everything about herself except her ideology, which is the thing she actually should be doubting (in my opinion), and their relationship, while kinky, is loving, but Tamsin is a straight-up Marla Mason character. She's a Hidden Princess, a type of character I'm particularly allergic to, and the only reason that she might look slightly like possibly a bit of a decent character if you stand a long way away and squint in a bad light is because she spends a lot of time standing next to a psychotic murderer, who is much worse. The murderer who killed her grandmother, who raised her. The murderer who she then hired to get revenge on the people who (she is just now learning) wiped out the rest of her family, who she doesn't remember; why she wants revenge on the people she hasn't met who killed her family members that she didn't know, but not, apparently, on the guy who's right there who killed the one family member she did know, may have something to do with the fact that her revenge would also make her rich and powerful. As far as I read, which is a little over halfway, she doesn't spare a single thought for the collateral damage that would be involved on innocent wage slaves who just happen to be in the way.

She also receives a bit of plot help, in the form of a necklace she accidentally finds that enables her to access her family's hidden caches of weapons and wealth.

Glenn and Tamsin are the two first-person viewpoint characters. Glenn often finds it necessary to talk about his and Vivy's BDSM relationship, which is something that I neither grok nor want to grok, and Tamsin is just stone cold. There's also a highly annoying AI called Eddie, balanced to some degree by a more jovial (but still murderous) AI named Swarm.

It's possible, even likely, that this book also has a Glorious Ending in which Glenn (I would bet) does something generous and loving that averts tragedy, but honestly, I don't want to spend the time with these characters that I would have to go through in order to get to that ending, if indeed it is there.

I received a pre-publication version via Netgalley for review.

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Review: Inspector French and the Cheyne Mystery

Inspector French and the Cheyne Mystery by Freeman Wills Crofts
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A classic detective story which can be regarded as a pioneer of the "police procedural" type, though Inspector French, the Scotland Yard detective, doesn't appear until about the 60% mark. The Cheyne of the title is a remarkably gullible man, who's fooled twice by essentially the same scheme and then continues to believe the criminals when they tell him several more ridiculous stories. Still, I found the various adventurous shenanigans entertaining while waiting for him to figure out that he needs to involve the police.

Once French is on the case, he approaches it methodically and makes progress through sound detective work. I wasn't surprised to discover that the author was an engineer; French is, in a way, an engineer of a detective, working steadily and solidly and without much drama. Unlike most fictional detectives, he has no personal peculiarities to speak of, and is happily married (though his wife is only briefly mentioned). He's almost more a plot device than he is a character, at least in this book.

While the plot doesn't constantly rely on coincidence, there are a few lucky chances that keep the dull-witted Cheyne alive despite himself, one of which (a woman happens to find him after he's been injured, and gets help) is never explained; the woman subsequently becomes involved in the case, helping him to investigate, and eventually and inevitably becomes his love interest (view spoiler)[and is lightly refrigerated, in that she's kidnapped, removing her from the action but giving Cheyne a reason to finally go to the police (hide spoiler)], but we never find out why she was in that part of town (which wasn't her neighbourhood or anywhere close to it) late at night in the first place. (view spoiler)[The villains, who are not otherwise murderous nor experts in chemistry, rig up an explosive to kill Cheyne, careless of possible collateral damage, which also seems out of character for them, and by sheer chance he leaves the bag containing it on a café table while he goes to get another cup of coffee, thus saving his life. (hide spoiler)]

The conclusion of the book, once French figures out the puzzle, is rather anticlimactic. (view spoiler)[They pursue the villains to the location of the treasure, to find that the villains and almost everyone else who was with them are dead in a fight over the money; the exceptions include the female villain, who is forgiven, indeed rewarded, and doesn't face any legal consequences, and of course Joan the love interest; neither of them did anything protagonistic while waiting for rescue, though they did become friends. Cheyne doesn't face any legal consequences either, presumably because his various burglaries were attempts to get back property extorted from him that wasn't his in the first place, and he and Joan get married, having known each other a total of a few days and then thought about each other while separated for maybe six weeks. (hide spoiler)]

It's a curate's egg of a book; parts of it are excellent, mainly the parts where Cheyne is, somewhat ineptly, trying to solve the case himself and doing all kinds of daring, or rather incautious, things in pursuit of that goal. Once French arrives, it becomes less an adventure and more of a puzzle, and after French solves the puzzle, it wraps up rapidly, with any further excitement occurring off-screen and being reported after the fact. I enjoyed it despite its unevenness and the things that didn't make much sense, and would consider reading other books by the author if I was in the right mood, but it's not up to the standard of other classic books of the time.

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