A mediocre example of a genre that, in my experience, tends to mediocrity. The mystery is largely progressed through the main character's unexplained A mediocre example of a genre that, in my experience, tends to mediocrity. The mystery is largely progressed through the main character's unexplained superpower, but the solution ends up basically being dropped in her lap anyway. The romance subplot is even less developed, and seems to exist basically because it's expected to, not because the couple is particularly likely; there's little if any justification on the page for their romance.
"Expected" describes the book pretty well, in fact. The love interest even has green eyes - that's the level of cliche we're dealing with. The main character (I hesitate to say "protagonist" - she does try to solve the story problem, but as I mentioned doesn't really resolve it, instead being handed the solution) is the usual small-town small business owner. She can take extended time away from her business without issue in order to deal with the plot, though, because she has a faithful assistant. Her BFF doubles as the murder suspect. There's a hot cop as the love interest. It's all made from box mix.
If you have an endless appetite for books exactly like this, this is one. If you're looking for originality and capable execution of mystery and romance plots that work in their own right, which I was, this is not the book for you....more
This was OK, but not great. The romance was leisurely and clean; the mystery subplot wasn't that mysterious (I spotted the "surprise" criminal well beThis was OK, but not great. The romance was leisurely and clean; the mystery subplot wasn't that mysterious (I spotted the "surprise" criminal well before the characters did); the technology didn't make a whole lot of sense; there seemed to be elements that had either been incompletely cut out or not fully developed; and it needed another edit for typos. (I had a review copy from Netgalley, but the publication date is a couple of years ago, so I assume I have the published version.)
This is one of those space operas where most of the non-spacefaring technology is, if anything, a bit behind the current real-world state of the art, especially the information technology. Much is made of the heroine's ability to organize the ship's files by "alphabetizing" and making them searchable, but every filesystem available today can search files for keywords already. Printed books have been entirely replaced by electronic copies for environmental reasons, but instead of people having one device through which they access everything (such as the ones that already exist in real life), there are a profusion of "flex screens" that, while they appear to be reusable, also get handed round with single documents on them; people carry multiple ones of them. There's also a reference to a "printer" which never seems to get used, and it's not clear what it would be used for, given the other tech that's mentioned. There's no ship's AI even as good as Alexa, and if you want to talk to someone on the ship, you do an announcement over the general PA to the whole ship rather than calling their individual phone (which do exist). It's apparently cheaper to use oppressed humans than automation to do manufacturing. In general, I had the impression that the tech hasn't been thought through, and that the author maybe doesn't know much about current technology.
The interstellar flights are vaguely handwaved, and time to orbit seems very short. An experienced pilot doesn't detect when the ship takes off, orbits, and lands again, which I found difficult to believe.
The colonised planets are fairly dystopian, corrupt and harsh, and society seems to have become more conservative (which could happen; such things come and go, but there's no real sense of a historical reason for it). One of the planets has a "magnetic east," which makes no sense (magnetism flows between north and south; east and west are based on the planet's rotation with respect to its star).
There's an odd distinction made between the captain of the ship and the commander of the ship; these are two different people. It's never clear what the captain does if he's not in command. The size of the crew is never made specific, but there is what appears to be a full-time ship's doctor, which seems over the top for a smallish freighter that carries a few passengers. The doctor is Asian, and is the only person who is not apparently either of white American or Hispanic descent; the overall impression is that all the colonies, or at least all the ones in this part of space, are colonies of the USA, and a USA that is less ethnically diverse than the current one.
At the start of the book, the rationale for bringing the heroine onto the crew is that they are down a person (a cargo handler) and regulations require a full complement. But at the end of the book, they're down two much more senior crew, and that doesn't seem to present a problem for flying to the next planet.
I could ignore all this, which was mostly background, but the plot itself gave a sense that either not everything has been revealed by the end, not all the elements had been fully developed, or big chunks had been cut out and left traces behind. For example, at one point someone references (deprecatingly) the ship commander's religion, but this mention is the only indication that he's religious; we never see any hint of it when we're in his viewpoint. The heroine falls asleep without turning out her bedside light; when she wakes up, it's off, and the person who came to wake her turns it on. The fact that this is mentioned seems like it should be significant, like someone or something turned it off, but nothing ever comes of it, and it ends up seeming like just an odd continuity error. There's some business about a deck plate that keeps coming loose in flight, and other issues with the ship's artificial gravity, but it never ends up getting properly explained. (There is some mention of the gravity being manipulated to hide things being smuggled, but it's not fully worked out or ever completely summarized.)
Then there are a lot of minor typos - the usual thing, small words missing from sentences or substituted for other small words, like "the" for "then" and the like, which are hard to pick up unless you're very vigilant, and some missed quotation marks. There's the occasional missing past perfect tense, too.
If it didn't have all these minor issues, it would still be kind of average and nothing special; entertaining enough, but bland and lacking much development. A solidly three-star book....more
Competently done, nothing actually wrong with it, but I was looking for something lighter and fresher than this dark, old-school portal fantasy. DNF aCompetently done, nothing actually wrong with it, but I was looking for something lighter and fresher than this dark, old-school portal fantasy. DNF at 28%. ...more
Stop me if you've heard this one: (probably) twentysomething young woman whose life is a bit of a low-level disaster gets a mysterious inheritance froStop me if you've heard this one: (probably) twentysomething young woman whose life is a bit of a low-level disaster gets a mysterious inheritance from an elderly relative. It turns out she's magic, and the inheritance is magic, and other people want it, and there's an attractive policeman, and she can talk to her cat now, and there's a murder, and she helps to solve it.
Hundreds of people have written this story, to varying levels of quality. Tim Pratt, for example, has written it very well (Heirs of Grace), taking what's essentially fast food - made in bulk to a formula - and elevating it. This version by Willow Mason is appealing, with good-hearted, if not highly developed, characters and a New Zealand backdrop.
It sets out to do a particular thing, and it does that thing enjoyably enough that my first instinct was to give it four stars; but it's not really a four-star book, not for me. It follows a well-worn pattern without much deviation, and badly needs a copy editor.
At first, reading the sample, it seemed fairly smooth, with all the commas in the right place, so I bought it. I should have been warned, when I saw that the plural of Christmas was written as "Christmas's", that apostrophes were going to be a problem; almost all of them are either missing or in the wrong place, and that's true of a few commas as well. There are also vocabulary issues and a couple of dangling modifiers.
Overall, if this is the kind of thing you like, you will like this; it's typical of its genre in all the good ways as well as a couple of (for me) bad ways. As a bit of fun between more serious books, it worked OK for me. Bigger fans of the form will no doubt be more enthusiastic....more
I decided to give this author another chance, even though the previous book of his I'd reviewed (Celebromancy) had significant issues, because it I decided to give this author another chance, even though the previous book of his I'd reviewed (Celebromancy) had significant issues, because it also had signs of potential. He's written a number of books since then, and authors generally do improve with practice.
I gave that previous book three stars because, to me, the negatives and the positives balanced each other out. I considered advancing this one to four stars, because despite the fact that the same issues are still there, I did end up enjoying it towards the end, and there's still a lot of good stuff. But ultimately I decided that it doesn't quite make it to four stars. It's a higher three than Celebromancy, though.
It's frustrating to read a book by an author who clearly has some ability, but hasn't polished the book to be all it could be. I felt this with some of Max Gladstone's early novels, which showed tremendous imagination let down by some basic weaknesses. This book has the same problem, though it's not as vividly imaginative as Gladstone's.
There are some strengths, definitely. The biggest one for me was the fact that the main antagonist gets a viewpoint and becomes a relatable character; he's caught up in the system just as much as anyone. Even if he has a position of privilege relative to the protagonists, he's at the bottom of the heap as far as his own people are concerned. He really just wants to go home and be with his family. This was well done, and if everything else about the book had been at or near the same level, it could have been knocking on the door of five stars.
But it wasn't. I noted in my review of Celebromancy that it was full of continuity issues. That seems to be a problem for this author, because this book is riddled with them too. I read a pre-release version from Netgalley, and there's a chance that some will be fixed before publication (the publisher contacted me after I published this review and asked for my notes, which I provided), but they are numerous and pervasive, especially early on. A bit of exposition is given twice. A decisive moment in a scene happens twice. A character returning to Genos, the destroyed planet of her ancestors, wonders if she's the first of her people ever to do so, because "no stories of those returns survived in the diaspora", and then two pages later is reminiscing about multiple stories her mother told her of previous people who returned there.
The largest continuity issue, however, and the one that would be hardest to fix, because it leaves a plot hole regardless of which way you work it, is about the destruction of that planet. At the 58% mark, the nature of the planet-destroyer is revealed (I won't spoil that revelation here), and we're told that there were actually two weapons, one which destroyed the planet Atlan and was then hidden, and an inferior duplicate that was later used to destroy Genos because the Imperials didn't have access to the first one and had spent centuries coming up with an imitation. Later in the book, though, we're told that the same weapon was used to destroy both planets; it's part of what motivates a character.
Whichever version of the story you use, you have to explain why the Imperials don't still have the weapon used to destroy Genos (whether it's the original or the copy). And this isn't ever addressed. They just don't have the weapon.
Apart from the issues with continuity, there were a remnant number of copy editing issues (vocabulary errors, apostrophe errors, mispunctuated dialog, dangling modifiers, lots of excess hyphens) which escaped despite the "meticulous" copy edits the author references in his acknowledgements. Again, I've provided my notes to the publisher, and these could be fixed by publication time, but the sheer number of them means that not only did the editor miss a lot, I've also inevitably missed some - and it also means that the original manuscript must have been incredibly messy. The best predictor of a clean book is an author who doesn't make these mistakes in the first place.
There are other weaknesses which dropped the rating for me, too. The author also acknowledges an editor who pushed him; I don't think she pushed him hard enough, because a lot of the book is just bland. The worldbuilding is mostly bland, standard space opera stuff. The characters are bland, and there's not much to them that doesn't come either from their archetypes or their specific roles in the plot. The language is bland, unremarkable except where it glitches.
The author mentions at the end that the inspiration for the book was the movie Guardians of the Galaxy. But to me, a lot of what made Guardians of the Galaxy enjoyable is missing. It's not over the top; there are some sensawunda moments, but they're generic and, to me, forgettable. The characters are not a set of damaged loners who bicker and fight their way to eventual cohesion as a team in the face of a threat that brings out the best in their previously grungy characters; they're already a team at the start. The married couple (we're told repeatedly and shown occasionally) are devoted to one another. They only really have one argument in the entire book, which seems to be there to raise the tension during the only time they're separated, in a well-worn trope. They get on well with their pilot, too. They all have difficult backstories, which are all more to do with belonging to oppressed peoples than anything specific to them as individuals, but they seem to have coped well with their challenges and become functional adults. Which is great, and it's good to see a functioning marriage and a functioning team; but it's nothing like Guardians.
And the so-called "banter"; on a scale of zero to Whedon, it would barely shift the needle on the bantermeter. It's notably weak.
A few pop culture references are there, but they're more influences from earlier stories, and things like the female tomb raider of the couple being named Lhara. I don't know if John Carter was a conscious influence on Max (sole Earth-human character provided for means of audience identification, transported to space locale by mysterious means - in Max's case, an unexpected, one-way and apparently unique teleportation device discovered on an archaeological dig in Atlantean/ancient-alien ruins), but that's who he reminded me of. Though he's not a fighter at all, but very much an academic who leaves the fighting to his warrior wife.
I prefer it that these influences are subtle, but I'd also like to see something different, something fresh, done with them. The worst features of space opera are here: ridiculously short travel times (at one point, an interstellar trip that is specifically being made not in "warp space" takes 20 days; at another point, a distance specifically described as "light years" is going to be covered in hours, also outside warp space), lasers knock a ship into a spin, and gravity, when wielded as a weapon, is, apparently, purple and silver for cinematic purposes. Giant space turtles (with flippers, whatever those would do) drift on solar winds but cover interstellar distances also in compressed timeframes. But it doesn't have the zest and zing of, say, Tim Pratt's space operas, or - again - Guardians of the Galaxy. It's all pretty much by the numbers, except when it stumbles or fumbles.
Overall, then, while I can still see unrealized potential that could be brought out with more work and focus, this book fell short for me, and doesn't inspire me to read a sequel or others of the author's works.
I received a copy via Netgalley for review....more
Light and cheerful (considering the multiple messy deaths in it), this NA magic academy story rides the popular wave begun by Harry Potter. The first-Light and cheerful (considering the multiple messy deaths in it), this NA magic academy story rides the popular wave begun by Harry Potter. The first-person protagonist starts out as an overprivileged brat, but quickly gains a sense of responsibility as the school comes under threat.
The romance feels more middle-school than post-high-school, and the numbers don't always add up (somehow, 25 people are divided into pairs, for example, with nobody apparently left over). The villain's inside person was pretty predictable, partly because so few characters are developed at all, or even named; and almost every significant person has the cliched green (or rather "emerald") eyes.
The pre-release copy I got from Netgalley has all the usual kinds of errors, though not in too great profusion, and a good copy editor could have it nice and clean for publication without too much trouble.
The kittens who are also ancient demons were fun, and the defend-the-school plot moves along briskly, but it never threatens to rise above the general run of its genre, as I'd hoped it might. A solid three stars, entertaining but unspectacular....more
Logging on to Goodreads to review this, I was presented with a quote by Tracy Chevalier: "I have consistently loved books that I read when sick in bedLogging on to Goodreads to review this, I was presented with a quote by Tracy Chevalier: "I have consistently loved books that I read when sick in bed."
My experience differs. This book, for example.
It's essentially an average action movie in book form. The plot is thoroughly expected, and the characters never attain any depth beyond their familiar types. What worldbuilding there is is tissue-paper thin. It seems to be trying to be Men in Black, but it doesn't even quite pull off being Men in Black II.
If it had been played for comedy throughout, elements like the mind-controlling face cream and the inexplicably steampunk weapons might have worked, but as it is they're simply absurd.
There's nothing really wrong with it, as such - apart from the occasional mid-scene shift in point of view, which is generally considered a rookie error - but it's so thoroughly mediocre that the only rating I can give is three stars.
I received a copy via Netgalley for review....more
This is entertaining, and it does what I expected it to do; it's reasonably faithful to the TV series - which is cheesy, but in a way I mostly enjoy -This is entertaining, and it does what I expected it to do; it's reasonably faithful to the TV series - which is cheesy, but in a way I mostly enjoy - and tells an enjoyable story in a brisk, old-fashioned pulpy style.
By "old-fashioned" I mean that it's adjective-heavy, and has a tendency to "said bookisms" (people "exposit" and "react" rather than just saying things). Some of the sentences, at least in the pre-publication version I read from Netgalley, are long and meandering, and there are a few glaring anachronisms; most notably, the leprechaun in the fifth century is already wearing traditional 18th-century Irish garb, and playing a fiddle (invented more than a thousand years later). There are signs, too, of the writing being done in a hurry, which hopefully will be fixed before publication.
Don't expect literature. Do expect pretty much what you'd get from an episode of the show. ...more
Started out well, and I thought it was going to be both well-edited and fairly original. Sadly, in the end it was neither. Enjoyable enough, but not qStarted out well, and I thought it was going to be both well-edited and fairly original. Sadly, in the end it was neither. Enjoyable enough, but not quite worthy of four stars (I did originally err on the side of generosity, but decided on reflection to give it three).
Firstly, it's based much too closely on Harry Potter, up to and including points for an end-of-year prize and childish bickering (if anything, the HP kids are more mature than these characters - "mature YA" in the blurb apparently just means the protagonist is 19).
Second, there are quite a few excess coordinate commas, and a good few vocabulary issues - homonym errors (like diffuse/defuse); wrong word choices for what the author means (like "conscience" when she means "consciousness"); and one of my pet hates, the jargon "going forward" repeatedly used to mean "in future" or "from now on".
Third, there are two - TWO - Convenient Eavesdrops, and even though neither one is completely essential to the plot, I still despise this plot device with a mighty hatred. It's weak writing, a convenient way to get around point-of-view limitations.
And, while it starts out with a good pace, it suddenly crashes down into low gear for an extended visit to the Department of Backstory, and takes a long time to recover its momentum.
It's OK in a bubblegum sort of way, enjoyable for what it is, but it doesn't inspire me to look for more from this author....more
Let's be clear upfront: this is not a book that intends to be taken seriously. It's fluff. It's cotton candy: bright pink (nothing wrong with that), sweet, insubstantial, and not intended to satiate. It's written quickly to be read quickly, and it needs a good proofread (which I doubt it will ever get), not least to sort out the horrible mess that the author has made with missing and misplaced quotation marks. It's full of cliches, down to and including the first-person narrator checking out her reflection, and getting the Power just when she needs it at a moment of crisis. Fortunate coincidences abound on every side. The heroine gets handed basically everything she wants, with little or no effort to earn it.
It is, in short, a wish-fulfilment fantasy - or perhaps we should say a witch-fulfilment fantasy.
And this, in itself, tells me a lot. More of that after this brief summary.
The heroine is a self-described "basic white girl". Her backstory is: Family all deceased, series of jobs she hates, series of failed relationships, lots of student debt. She is explicitly extremely ordinary and completely undistinguished.
As the story begins, she has fortunately inherited a New Age shop from a relative she didn't know she had, but is losing customers because she's not New Agey enough for their expectations.
By another stroke of luck or fate, she stumbles through a portal into a world where she's quite possibly the Chosen One, but definitely a powerful (if completely untrained) witch. This portal opens every seven years, very few people pass through, and there's no TV on the other side, but somehow slang and fashion are right up to the minute (in other words, there's no attempt at thinking through the extremely light worldbuilding).
Everyone (with one significant exception) wants to be nice to her. Just for showing up, she's set up with a profitable business, a place to live (which she gets to redecorate), a new wardrobe, magic high heels that don't hurt or cause her to trip, a magic handbag that isn't heavy no matter what she puts in it, a makeover, and a new instant best friend (a fairy princess who, despite her outgoing nature, doesn't appear to have any existing friends to complicate matters); she's also surrounded by a plethora of hot single men. Also, her cat can talk to her now, and will live as long as she does. I have to admit I'd like that one myself.
See what I mean about wish fulfillment?
There's one complication: when she stumbled through the portal, she fell over a dead body, and she's a suspect in the murder. But only one person seriously suspects her. Sure, he's the local cop, but everyone knows he's an idiot, and they don't take much notice of him. It does, however, mean that she wants to clear her name by finding the actual murderer, something the cop is probably not capable of doing.
I thought about flagging some of what follows with spoiler tags, but to be honest, if anything in this book surprises you you probably aren't old enough to be reading it.
Any serious attempt to solve the mystery takes a back seat for a long time to being heaped with various kinds of gifts, which the heroine "deserves" after "all she's been through". When we do at last return to the mystery-solving in earnest, the heroine comes up with a plan which, while not exactly bad, is as transparent as a well-washed window, and is intended to get her suspect (the only person who hasn't been nice to her) out of the way so that she can search for clues. "It will be as easy as pie!" she says, then, "Spoiler alert: It was not as easy as pie."
Well, actually, spoiler alert, it was. Sure, her initial attempt to search the premises was thwarted, but she then (in a strong echo of how she came through the portal in the first place) discovers by pure luck an alternative way in, which also explains how the crime was committed, and she's able to find clear evidence almost immediately. Plus the suspect, who's crazy but not a complete idiot, has seen through the well-washed window and comes back and confesses. So as far as a mystery plot goes, it's more of a gesture in the direction of one than it is actually one.
As a wish-fulfillment fantasy, though, it's remarkably comprehensive, and that's what I found interesting.
Leaving aside the magical parts, apparently the dreams of a 30-something basic white girl include being given a lot of nice stuff that makes her life comfortable and enjoyable, but which she doesn't really have to work for (because she deserves it); having a fun friend to go out with and lots of attractive men to talk about with said friend; and... here's the significant bit... having a man around who she's sexually attracted to, but who will stay with her, protect her, provide emotional support for her, sleep in the same bed with his arm around her, and will not push her to have sex (because it's against his principles). This is in distinct contrast with a male wish-fulfillment fantasy I started to read a while back; it just assumed that the attractive woman would naturally have sex with the hero. That's only one of the reasons I didn't finish it. There is a man in this book who thinks that way; he's literally a wolf (at least part of the time), and is depicted as a disgusting creeper. I'd say "Men, take note," but any men who are reading a review of a book like this have probably already figured that one out.
I'm in two minds about the whole lack of effort and struggle for the main character. On the one hand, by most rules of writing, this is bad writing and should be boring, but then, most rules of writing are laid down by men. Is it a bug, or - given that this is, after all, a wish-fulfillment fantasy - a feature? What tips me in the direction of "feature" is the thought that many people in general, and women in particular, are experiencing life in the United States at the moment as an unavailing and never-ending struggle, so the very lack of struggle is part of the wish-fulfillment fantasy.
I'm still marking it down to three stars, mind you. It's so utterly expected, so full of cliches, so clearly dashed off quickly to serve a market - in short, so basic - that, in my mind, it doesn't earn four stars, even though it's enjoyable enough for what it is. But it doesn't need to be a great book to give a degree of insight into the concerns of its target audience, and that is what I mostly gained from it....more
Thin, inconsistent characters serve, rather than drive, a coincidence-ridden plot in a stage-flat setting, conveyed in cliched, poorly-edited prose.
IThin, inconsistent characters serve, rather than drive, a coincidence-ridden plot in a stage-flat setting, conveyed in cliched, poorly-edited prose.
I've got quite good at avoiding two-star books, but this one slipped past. I happen to like the "fake relationship becomes real relationship" trope, and the sample seemed promising; the hero was established as a kind man (he literally pats the dog), and while the heroine hadn't shown a lot of courage or intelligence yet, I was hoping that she would develop some.
Sadly, she remained passive, except when she was being feisty (but still, mostly, not doing much, just expressing verbal feistiness - although she briefly fights like a cornered rat). And the "kind" hero turned out to be, most of the time, patronising and domineering. None of the characters (apart from the one-dimensional minor characters - mainly servants - who functioned as talking scenery) had much consistency, except for the villain and the female antagonist. The villain was straight out of melodrama; I pictured him in an opera cloak, twirling his moustaches, and if he didn't exactly say "Aha! My proud beauty!" he came damn close. If railway tracks had been available in the period, he probably would have tied the heroine to them for some contrived reason.
The female antagonist, meanwhile, was a bitchy, cold, mean-girl gold-digger who broke the hero's heart so thoroughly that his entire arc was being able to admit to himself and to the heroine that he loved the heroine. His. Entire. Arc. It wore very thin long before the end, and made this supposedly kind man repeatedly cruel to the woman he theoretically loved.
We had several cycles of "hero sexually teases heroine, who he thinks is totally hot, and she's very into it, but he doesn't follow through because OMG must protect his poor broken heart". She, meanwhile, remains completely passive and doesn't take any steps to gain the satisfaction she wants; it's entirely up to her husband to decide whether or when they have sex, and she can neither deny him if she doesn't want it, nor initiate if she does. Both of them are deeply embedded in the patriarchy, in other words, which, while period-authentic, is one of the few period-authentic things about the book, and one I could have well done without.
Their Barbados plantation is full of happy "workers" who sing and dance and harvest sugar-cane. We are never told if they are slaves, though at the time this would probably be the case. The issue simply never comes up. Their primitive jungle music finally drives the hero over the edge, and he's no longer able to hold back from porking her. But his poor broken heart, wah, wah!
The plot lurches from trope to trope, coincidence to coincidence (including my personal pet hate, the Convenient Eavesdrop), and a good many significant plot points are never explained. How, exactly, did the heroine end up unconscious in a pile of rubbish, where the hero happened to find her (about 12 hours before he suddenly needs a woman to marry in order to inherit a bunch of money)? We never find out. How did the villain track them down? How did the hero survive? Why did the best friend's letters, which would have eased some tension, never arrive? The answer seems to be Because Plot. Much of the plot, too, is driven by the characters stupidly withholding information from each other for unconvincing reasons.
There are threads that fizzle out, too. (view spoiler)[The heroine is going to try to work on the pirate captain by telling stories, but never does. The main characters have what is set up to be a naughty bath together in a natural spring, but they wash each other's faces, hair, and backs and then get out. There's a genuine awesome moment when the imprisoned heroine makes a shiv from a broken plate, but she never shanks the villain with it, which I was so looking forward to.
There's even a cat ex machina, right at the dramatic climax, to save the heroine from her passivity. (hide spoiler)]
Romances, especially Regency romances, don't seem to be renowned for their believable plots or careful period authenticity, so maybe those things would have worked OK if everything else was well executed. But the dialog is cliched, and the copy editing poor (with missing words, incompletely revised sentences, and missing or misplaced punctuation - up to and including possessive apostrophes). The characters end up neither particularly likeable nor particularly admirable; the hero's arc is pathetic, and the heroine's nonexistent. Even the sex scenes are trite, and underline the toxic gender roles of the MCs. So, for me, this was a miss....more
I picked this up free in a promotion run by a group of authors. I gather that it's a self-published prequel to a trad-pub series.
I'd be mildly intereI picked this up free in a promotion run by a group of authors. I gather that it's a self-published prequel to a trad-pub series.
I'd be mildly interested to know whether the editing is better in the trad-pub books. It isn't terrible (a copy editor is credited), but it needed another pass. Word choice issues, like "I'm here at the bequest of the captain" (request or behest, but not bequest, which relates to leaving someone something in your will), bare/bear, prevalent/prominent, fashioned/erected, ring/wring; missing apostrophe in what should have been "years' worth"; occasional missing commas before terms of address; missing minor words; typos ("were" for "where", "as" for "was"); "may" instead of "might" in past tense narration, and a missing "had"; a missing question mark; mispunctuated dialog (capitals when sentences resume after a tag); the odd omitted quotation mark; all the usual stuff. It's an average job, about what I see from many authors, trad-pub or indie.
I didn't take it down to three stars because of the editing, though, but because the story itself didn't engage me particularly strongly. At the 50% mark, I considered stopping, but decided that since I'd read half of it I might as well read the rest. None of the characters really came alive for me, the plot was by-the-numbers, and the setting was a bland, generic low-magic fantasy city. It didn't inspire me to pick up others in the series, because while there was nothing particularly wrong with it, there also wasn't anything outstanding about it. It was just OK. ...more
I was a bit underwhelmed. There was nothing actually wrong with it, and the copy editing was excellent (only one slip that I noticed: "died it black" I was a bit underwhelmed. There was nothing actually wrong with it, and the copy editing was excellent (only one slip that I noticed: "died it black" instead of "dyed"). It was just lacking in suspense.
I realise that a cosy mystery isn't going to have as much suspense as other kinds of mystery, but I didn't feel that it had other great strengths to make up for it, either. The characters were flat, with no real distinguishing features, and the main character had no great stake in solving the mystery. She also seemed to have plenty of time to take away from her work to disobey the inspector (who ritually admonished her not to investigate every time they spoke) and poke around among cooperative informants.
Few red herrings, and I spotted how the murder was done long, long before the detective did.
Also, the cover and blurb promise steampunk. There were a few things powered by steam, but punk was conspicuous by its absence. ...more
Warning: I write funny fantasy myself, so I was listening to this BBC audio production not only for my own amusement, but also to learn. That means I Warning: I write funny fantasy myself, so I was listening to this BBC audio production not only for my own amusement, but also to learn. That means I analysed the humour, and analysing humour is like making a butterfly collection: it kills what it studies. So you might prefer not to read this review, unless you're also interested in the anatomy of comedy.
The humour in ElvenQuest comes pretty much entirely from stereotype and cliche. Specifically, most of the jokes work like this:
[Cliche/stereotype from bad fantasy fiction]
[Immediate frame shift to cliche/stereotype from contemporary/real life]
It's an effective comedy technique--it's the one that works so well in the popular memes Business Cat, Business Baby and Successful Black Man. And by giving the show a better cast than the script really deserves, the BBC has managed to make it funnier than it would otherwise have been.
Nevertheless, it doesn't rise, even for a moment, above stereotype and cliche. The characters and the setting are paper-thin, and there's no depth to anything, including the humour. It's funny, but because it relies on a single comedic technique, and doesn't attempt a good story, character development or anything other than a series of simple gags, it wears thin quickly. It successfully picks the comedic low-hanging fruit, and if that's all you're looking for, it works. I'd hoped for more, though....more
This book comes out of Harper-Collins' Authonomy project, a means of crowdsourcing manuscripts in which users vote for their favourites and the winnerThis book comes out of Harper-Collins' Authonomy project, a means of crowdsourcing manuscripts in which users vote for their favourites and the winners get published. It's a kind of American Idol of books. It appears, in both cases, that the wisdom of crowds produces fairly bland, commercial light entertainment, though in this case it's lacking a bit of polish.
The Golden Arrow is entertaining. I found it amusing, though not to the point of actually laughing (I'm a tough audience). The hapless protagonist, the hostile squirrels, the classic comedy duo of the men in the pub, all worked for me. Unfortunately, the light comedic tone did also undermine any tension the author set out to create with the protagonist's separation from his time machine in medieval England. I was never in any doubt that everything would come out fine.
Time travel stories are hard to do well. For one thing, the past is a lot more foreign than most modern people realise, and often time travel stories (particularly comedic ones) deal with this by ignoring it. In this case, the people who should have been talking late Anglo-Saxon/early Middle English or Anglo-Norman French just speak modern English with a limited vocabulary, and there are no major issues with the protagonist understanding them or vice versa. I wouldn't place a lot of reliance on anything else about the history, either, but I don't think we're meant to (after all, it is about the Robin Hood legend).
The Grandfather Paradox (in the guise of a many-greats-grandmother paradox) is invoked in order to justify why Erasmus, the protagonist, doesn't sleep with medieval Maude, who has a crush on him for no actually justified reason apart from that he's the protagonist. However, it's presented in the form of "You might be influenced by your memory of me not to form a relationship with someone else, and the two of you might have otherwise been my ancestors." Erasmus doesn't seem to think about the fact that she could become pregnant and he could thus become his own ancestor, or, for that matter, that encouraging her, and others, into danger for his own ends could result in the death of someone who was destined to be his ancestor. When he does muck up the timeline, it's not through any of these major meddlings but just by being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
There's a "Great Man" theory of history at work, a very old-fashioned take, which goes so far as to suppose that events as remote as the English Civil War and the suffrage movement wouldn't have happened at all had Robin Hood's legend been different. Historically speaking, this transparent attempt to raise the story stakes is bunk, and since it seems to be presented seriously it doesn't get the comedy pass.
There's an attempt at physical comedy in prose which doesn't work, about trying to get a longbow through a low doorway. If you imagine the scene, it's clear that just holding the thing horizontally would remove the whole problem (or if it wouldn't, that wasn't effectively conveyed).
Kudos, though, for the quiet feminism which a) assumes, without discussion, that Marion's band of women would be just as effective as Robin's band of men, if not more so, and b) also assumes that patriarchy would successfully suppress this fact and reduce Marion to the love interest, while forgetting her followers entirely.
Harper-Collins retains its unenviable title of "Major Publisher Most Likely to Publish a Badly-Edited Book" with this one; I marked almost 30 errors of grammar, usage or word choice, some of the more significant being "more knowledgeable than his years would usually belie", "seemed to comprise of" and a couple of number agreement errors along the lines of "all attempts at silence was discarded". Along with the only mildly amusing story balanced out by the poorly-thought-through premise, this results in only three stars from me.
I received a complimentary copy from NetGalley in exchange for an unbiased review. ...more
I read a lot, and almost all of it is fantasy. I tend to avoid epic fantasy, though, because it's so often the same stWhy I stopped reading this book:
I read a lot, and almost all of it is fantasy. I tend to avoid epic fantasy, though, because it's so often the same story tediously retold at unnecessary length. I pick up a book, read the blurb, and see one (often more than one) of the following described, and I quickly put it down again.
Epic fantasy plot #1: The Chosen One must find the Lost McGuffin in order to defeat the Dark Lord, who… [at this point I stop reading]
Epic fantasy plot #2: A corrupt empire is at war with cruel barbarian kingdoms, and someone of low status must… [at this point I stop reading]
Epic fantasy plot #3: A naive youngster suffers the loss of his/her parents when their village is destroyed, and his/her quest for vengeance/understanding/a place to belong is complicated when he/she discovers powers which nobody must know about. Along the way, he/she finds unlikely companions, who… [at this point I stop reading]
Progeny is, clearly, Epic Fantasy Plot #3. Strike one.
Another of my pet peeves about fantasy in general is something which I probably should just reconcile myself to, because so many people do it. Tad Williams does it, Tamora Pierce does it, Nathan Lowell does it. And R.T. Kaelin does it.
I'm referring to the practice of creating a world in which the dominant religion (usually the only religion) is a form of polytheism or paganism, in which neither Judaism nor Christianity has ever existed -- and then giving your characters biblical names like "Rachael" and "Marie". (Giving them strange spellings, like "Nikalys", doesn't help.)
My view of this is that it's either laziness or ignorance, or both. That may be too harsh. This may be something only I care about. But in any case, strike two.
Strike three - the thing which caused me to set the book gently aside, because after all I don't want to hurl my Kindle across the room - concerns basic astronomy. Very basic astronomy. Basic geometry, really.
Fantasy authors, if you must have more than one moon (and, really, must you?), please take 30 seconds with Google and find out how moon phases work.
The phase of the moon is created by the angle between the planet, the moon, and the sun. A full moon appears when the sun is on the other side of the planet from the moon, so it is illuminating the side that faces us. A new moon appears when the sun is on the same side of the planet as the moon, so it is illuminating the side that doesn't face us.
This means that a full moon and a new moon will not be in the sky at the same time.
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