Fantasy Review: 'Zombie Attack!!!' by Robert Bevan

This is another mini-story for fans of the characters in the full length novel ‘Critical Failures’. It probably works best if you’ve read that first, but there’s enough explanation within the story for first-timers to keep up. The idea is that a group of friends have become trapped in a real version of the roleplaying game 'Caverns and Creatures'. If you’ve ever thought it might be cool to be a half-orc barbarian or a dwarf healer or an elf sorcerer for real, this book is probably enough to put you off permanently. Or at least to convince you not to have a half-orc barbarian in the party unless you have a very strong stomach. But it’s riotously funny, if you don’t mind the bad language, the preponderance of vomit (and worse) and the gleeful descriptions of dangling intestines. Not deep, but an entertaining, albeit brief, read. Three stars.

Fantasy Review: 'Legion' by Brandon Sanderson

It’s hard to know quite what to make of this novella. Like the curate’s egg, it’s good in parts. The good part is the lead character himself, Stephen Leeds, with his multitude of ‘aspects’ (hallucinations), who act as independent beings with a variety of personalities and areas of expertise, even though they’re invisible to everyone else. They hold conversations with Stephen, and with each other, and ‘advise’ him during his investigative work. When he needs to speak a new language, for instance, he skim-reads a book and then an aspect appears who translates for him. This is great fun, and the interaction between the different aspects, and between them and Stephen, is terrific. I have no idea whether such a situation is plausible, but it’s an entertaining read.

The actual plot, however, is a lot more flimsy, involving a camera with the ability to take pictures of the past, its reclusive inventor and the various organisations that want to exploit the device. Frankly, this part was quite silly, and the heavy overtones of religious debate tedious (the idea being that the camera could conclusively prove or disprove fundamental tenets of various religions). Then the whole dramatic climax and resolution seemed very rushed to me. I know it’s only a novella, but this felt like a full-length novel that had been cut down to fit, rather than having the structure and pacing of a true novella.

I don’t know whether this is intended as a one off, or whether the author is laying out the groundwork for a series of books later. There’s some unresolved backstory about a former girlfriend which suggests there’s more to come. There’s certainly scope for development, and the aspects have loads of potential (although it does seem a little convenient, since whatever expertise Stephen needs, he can summon a hallucination with the requisite knowledge and experience). Hopefully, any future stories will have a more believable plot. Three stars.

Fantasy Review: 'Champion of the Rose' by Andrea K Höst

Sometimes, when I feel as if I’m drowning in a sea of haven’t-I-read-this-before fantasy, the only antidote is some Andrea K Höst. Her work is original, intelligent and quirky, and reassures me that there are some authors out there who aren’t simply recycling the tired old tropes.

The premise here is that the country of Darest, ruled by the Rathen family, has been without a monarch for two hundred years. Being hedged about by unbreakable magic, however, which manifests as a rose bush, it continues to rumble along as if one will turn up any day, creating champions (guardians of the monarch) and protecting the royal palace. Until one day the rose bush produces a flower - an heir has appeared once more. The plot is largely about how the champion finds the heir and the ramifications of that, together with an intriguing mystery - why did all the heirs disappear anyway, and why has Darest been in decline for the past two hundred years?

The magic of the rose is one of the most intriguing aspects of the story. There isn’t anything terribly outlandish about the type of magic the author’s world can produce - there are spells created through spoken words or casting with the hands or carved runes, basically - but the way it is bound up through the rose, the champion, the Rathen heirs and the royal palace is fascinating. It’s also very creepy in the way it is actually a more-or-less physical part of the champion, giving her powers while also controlling her mind and body in very scary ways.

Soren, the champion, is an all-too-rare type of heroine - neither a warrior babe nor a princess nor a mage, just an ordinary woman chosen for no obvious reason for a job she feels spectacularly unsuited for, but which she nevertheless does to the very best of her ability. She doesn’t make stupid mistakes, she doesn’t turn into Wonder Woman, she doesn’t turn to jelly at the thought of a man, she’s just a normal woman using her common sense and intelligence. The romantic relationship resolves itself rather fast for my taste - I would have thought it would have taken longer to get over the traumatic early events - but it wasn’t a huge problem.

The two male main characters, Strake and Aristide, are much less ordinary, but then both have been part of the royal court from birth. They are both complicated and charismatic characters, and both have to suffer emotional shocks which they cope with in very different ways, but the way they inch towards a pragmatic working arrangement is very believable. The minor characters are well sketched out and perfectly believable, although I sometimes got confused about who was who. The Fae were particularly convincing, and the author beautifully captures the ‘other’-ness of them.

The created world is not especially unique, but that’s not a problem as most of the action takes place in and around the royal palace. Superfically the social structure is conventional: a ruling family, several other noble families, the usual array of soldiers, farmers, millers, innkeepers and so on. It’s nice to see that women are just as likely to be guards or monarchs or champions as men. The unique feature here is the prevalence of same sex marriage and also tribond marriages, which is thrown in as part of the background without much discussion or explanation. Much as I applaud this approach, I would have liked to know more about how it works.

The early part of the book feels both rushed and rather slow, if that isn’t too contradictory a description. It seems rushed because there is no background at all to Soren herself and not much about her role as champion before she’s tearing off to find the heir. And then the actual search for the heir feels a bit slow. But from then onwards, the pace picks up and becomes breathlessly fast, in that wonderful page-turningly riveting way. A lot of chores were neglected so that I could finish this as-fast-as-possible. The external threats - a magical killer on the loose and a possible assassin in the palace - plus the internal threat of the enchanted rose itself, which seems to have its own agenda, together with the political machinations of neighbouring countries and the tricky relationships between the champion and the monarch she has to protect, all of these combine to make a compelling story.

My only criticisms are the slightly bumpy start and a few confusing moments where it wasn’t quite clear to me what was happening. And I would have liked a map, too, but it wasn’t a big deal. [*] Overall, a refreshingly different story about believable, complicated people who behave in realistic ways, and revolving around a cleverly-devised enchantment which is almost a character in its own right. A good four stars.

[*] There's one on the author's website, here. Also some background to the story.

Fantasy Review: 'The Black Mausoleum' by Stephen Deas

I was fairly grumpy about the first three volumes of the Memory of the Flames umpteenology, mainly because the author not only killed off virtually every character along the way, and in the most cavalier fashion, but also destroyed most of the infrastructure of his created world. Mind you, it was an exciting ride, without a second’s breathing space between bouts of mayhem and destruction, the dragons were mind-blowingly awesome, and the first chapter of the second book remains one of the best openers I’ve ever read (seriously). And somehow, for some reason, the thing just wormed its way into my mind and wouldn’t let go. So here I am, wondering just where things can go in this post-dragon-apocalypse world.

I wasn’t expecting to see any of the characters from the earlier books, since they’re all dead. Or at least, they’re probably dead, and in the unlikely event they survived, I’m sure the author would kill them off promptly. But actually, there is a survivor (yay!). Kataros is an alchemist, one of those previously in charge of keeping the dragons tame and under control, and now, not surprisingly, blamed for the ensuing catastrophe. Skjorl is an Adamantine Man, a highly trained soldier, manfully determined to fulfil his oath to defend the world from rogue dragons, now free and on the rampage. Siff is unconscious, but has information Kataros thinks is important. I don’t remember whether the two men showed up before, but Kataros spent some time with previous main character Kemir. Until he got killed.

This is a very different book from the first three. The complex social and political structures have been largely swept away, the vast array of squabbling characters has gone too, and even the places are different - they may have the same names, but the elegant towers and courtyards are gone and all that remains is rubble. I did wonder before I started reading just how much world there was left to discover and story to tell after the devastation, but happily the answer is - a great deal. There’s the vast array of interlinked tunnels underground, for a start, some hiding mysterious secrets. There’s the whole history to be uncovered, and the nature of the Silver King of legend. Then there are the strange Taiytakei from overseas - what are they all about? There’s also just a hint of zombie in the background, too. Real or myth? Quite a few myths turn out to have some truth in them here, so who knows. Maybe they’ll be crucial to the plot later on, or maybe the author just wanted to sneak in a zombie reference. Anyway, it’s not long before our hapless trio are knee deep in weirdness.

With such a tight focus on a limited cast, it’s essential that the reader feels some connection with the three main characters. Frankly, I’m not sure that this works, since none of the three is particularly likeable. Actually, that’s not even close - they all turn out to be truly horrible people, with few redeeming characteristics. However, the tension between them is palpable (translation: each of them wants to kill the others, but they also need each other, so there’s quite a lot of hissed abuse and resentful co-operation going on). So there’s plenty of entertainment from watching the interaction and waiting for one of them to snap. Plus, there’s enough interest in the dragons and the backstory and the alchemist’s powers and Siff’s history to keep the pages turning. I loved some of the imaginative touches - the glowing tunnel walls, the golems in the door, the floating castle... There’s obviously a whole heap more about the Silver King, the Taiytakei and the hole in the realm of the dead to be revealed in future books, but these snippets are tantalising.

And, as always, there’s plenty of action. The struggle to survive and to adjust to the new world order form the backdrop here, where dragons rule the world once more and humans scuttle about in the dark trying to avoid being squashed or burned or eaten (and not just by the dragons), and it’s an interesting thought: what do you do when your function in life is gone? Once you were essential and respected and had a sensible lifetime career ahead of you, and now you’re worse than useless, you’ve failed so completely that the world has changed for ever. Do you get cynical and bitter and do whatever you have to do to make life bearable, or do you keep on doing what you’ve always done, clinging to the old ways for as long as possible? Or do you look for revenge? This is certainly a more thought-provoking book than its predecessors, but it’s a fairly grim tale, with limited humour and without the zest which made the earlier books so much fun.

If this paints a fairly depressing picture, it really isn’t. I quickly got swept up in the quest to find something - anything - to combat the overwhelming power of the dragons, and even the treks across the desert wastes, on the brink of starvation, never seemed dreary or dull. This was helped by the short chapters and the rapid jumps from one character and location to another, including time-hopping to fill in the how-we-got-here backstory, something I normally hate but which is very effective here. An aside: the points of view are tightly in character; Skjorl, who never swerves from his highly trained Adamantine Man viewpoint, always refers to his companions as the shit-eater and the alchemist, even internally, whereas Jasaan, less dogmatic, talks about outsiders and gets to know the dragon-riders by name. This is terrific detail.

There’s a great deal revealed here about the alchemists and their strange blood magic, which is all good stuff, and there’s a nice twist at the end which is perfectly logical and I should have seen it coming, but I didn’t. The whole end section is awesome, actually. It still feels, however, as if there’s a great deal more magic out there still to be revealed, as if we’re just paddling around in the shallows of what’s really going on in this world. The Taiytakei seem to be the key to it, somehow, and hopefully we’ll see more of them in future books. The goings on in the realm of the dead are interesting, too. I very much like the idea that there’s a fixed number of dragons in the world, and when one dies, it’s reincarnated in an egg somewhere.

A few minor grumbles: the author still hasn’t come up with a truly sympathetic character, the devastated world is implausibly empty of indigenous wildlife (what do snappers eat when they can’t get humans, for instance?) and we don’t see nearly enough of the dragons (but the awesome cover image almost compensates for that). But none of that matters. For me this book worked much better than the previous three. It doesn’t quite have the outrageous hell-bent-on-self-destruction air, or the wild physicality of all the dragon-riding and amazing sex (occasionally at the same time), nor the hordes of scheming and double-crossing dragon kings, queens and speakers. It’s a more serious and down-beat book altogether.

However, the restraint involved in following a small number of characters on a single, clearly-defined ‘quest’ (for want of a better word) creates, I feel, a much more intimate, closely-woven story, which really explores the characters and some of the underlying themes to greater depth. This is a tautly-plotted action-packed story, with perfect pacing and a terrific blend of character-driven incident and convincing world-building, a totally enjoyable read that I raced through in a couple of days because I just didn’t want to put it down. A good four stars.

Fantasy Review: 'Cave of the Kobolds' by Robert Bevan

For fans of the characters in the full length novel ‘Critical Failures’, this is a novelette set in the same world. To fully understand the setting, it’s better to read the novel first, but it probably works fine on its own. The idea is that a group of friends have become trapped in a real version of the roleplaying game 'Caverns and Creatures'. This story features three of my favourite characters from the book, Cooper the orc barbarian, Julian the elf sorcerer and Ravenus the... erm... raven. The plot is fairly flimsy, but it's the same fun and games ensuing, and the humour is as good as ever, although perhaps not quite as outrageously funny as the book. A good introduction to the author's work, and recommended for anyone a bit jaded by too much grimdark. Not recommended for anyone offended by frequent swearing and jokes about bodily functions. Three stars.

Mystery Review: 'Deadly Sanctuary' by Sylvia Nobel

I don’t expect much from this kind of mystery story. It’s filler, basically, mindless entertainment with a bit of a puzzle to generate some suspense. A few interesting characters, a well-realised setting, a gradual reveal of clues - it’s not much to ask. Sadly, this book fails to reach even these minimal qualifications for me. None of the characters had much personality, especially the heroine, the desert setting never came alive and the solution to the mystery was fairly obvious (I skipped to the end to check my guess). Add in a rather bland writing style and an over-heavy romantic sub-plot, and it just didn’t work for me. That’s just a matter of personal taste, and it’s a perfectly competent effort which (apparently) lots of people have enjoyed, and there are more in the series, but I’ll pass. One star for a DNF.

Fantasy Review: 'Critical Failures' by Robert Bevan

This is a really fun book. The basic premise: a group of friends are keen players of 'Caverns and Creatures', a game not totally unlike 'Dungeons and Dragons' (cough), but when they insult their new Cavern Master, he retaliates by sending them into the game for real. And so a half-orc barbarian, a dwarven cleric, a halfling rogue and an elvish sorcerer find themselves getting used to new bodies, learning to use their abilities, facing up to trolls, goblins, giant ants and a humourless town guard, and finding ingenious ways to survive, but all strictly within the rules of the game.

I've never played D&D, and my only contact with the culture was reading 'The Elfish Gene' many years ago, so a lot of this could have been incomprehensible to me. It's a testament to the author's skill that it wasn't; there was never a point where I felt I needed more explanation (apart from the title!), or that I was missing the point of a joke. And yes, it's funny, very very funny. The first half depends a great deal on the barbarian orc, whose low charisma rating manifests itself in explosions of bodily fluids and a great deal of swearing and aggression, which palls fairly rapidly, but the second half is much more clever, and laugh out loud humour right the way through. The appearance of the sister (as a half-elf druid with antler’s horns) and her boyfriend (a muscular type transformed into a wimpy bard) liven things up greatly.

The plot - well, it's all pretty silly, but completely logical within the constructs of the game. There were multiple times where a solution took me by surprise yet was satisfyingly consistent, and the ending is ingenious and unexpected, setting things up very nicely for the next book. The characters don't have a great deal of depth (but then a barbarian orc is bound to be fairly one-note), but they adapt very nicely to their changed circumstances and learn to use their abilities over the course of the book. The only big negative for me was that so many of the jokes depend on what can only be described as adolescent humour - a lot of four-letter-words, gross-out descriptions of blood, vomit and worse, dismembered corpses and the like. I'm not offended by such things, but it's a very cheap type of humour, and although a certain amount is fine, and it's in character for the barbarian, the best moments for me were the more subtle ones - such as the halfling having a sister who’s half-human and half-elf, or having to use a British accent to understand elvish. There's enough humour inherent in the situation to make the juvenile jokes unnecessary. This is an entertaining light-hearted read, and I'm tempted to say three stars because of the silliness, but I've had a bad week (stupid cold) and this book cheered me up no end and made me laugh. Four stars.

Non-Fiction Review: 'The Suspicions of Mr Whicher' by Kate Summerscale

The subtitle to this is ‘A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective’ which is a fairly melodramatic summing up. All murder is shocking, in its own way, surely? As for the undoing of the great Victorian detective, he failed to get a conviction, which is hardly the world’s worst offence. But I suppose ‘Case Dismissed for Lack of Evidence’ doesn’t quite have the same ring to it, and although the detective in question was castigated for supposedly mishandling the case, he was subsequently vindicated. Not much of an undoing.

The murder itself, in 1860, and the events surrounding it, are actually quite a small part of the book. A three year old boy is removed from his cot in the middle of the night, has his throat cut and the body stuffed down an outside privy. The difficulty is that the house was securely locked up, so that only one of the inmates - twelve members of a middle class family and their servants - could have done it. There is a lot of detail given about precisely where everyone was and what they did and at what time, all gleaned from official accounts or other contemporary documents, but this is not an Agatha Christie novel, where everyone has a motive. The local police soon devise a favoured theory and pinpoint a suspect, but there’s a lack of evidence. So a detective is despatched from London to solve the case. He has a different theory and suspect, but again there’s no evidence beyond the circumstantial.

In a work of fiction, a story like this would be filled with a gradually revealed pattern of clues, but real life is not so neat. Instead, the author tells us a great deal of mundane detail about train times and weather and laundry arrangements and the entire life histories of the family members, the servants, the local people and the detective. There are maps and family trees and lists of principal characters and photographs. There are prices for items, and menus, and descriptions of people and places. Undoubtedly a lot of research has been done, but the dry-as-dust presentation and the choppy arrangement of it, hopping about from one character to another, remove any sense of engagement with the characters or the situation. It reads like a poorly organised research paper. There wasn’t much drama, either, despite the inherently sensational nature of the murder itself. The most interesting aspect (for me), the detective’s theory of whodunit (the suspicions of the title) and his reasons for that, are barely mentioned in passing, so that he appears to jump to that conclusion almost by instinct, and not by detective work at all.

The author has made some attempt to draw out significant aspects of social history which are relevant to the case. The policy of training specialised detectives for serious crimes was in its infancy, and this particular murder was a notable failure. There was also a certain amount of disparagement from local worthies and the press about the working class detectives setting out to scrutinise the respectable lives of their betters. Fictionalised detective stories began at about this time, and the country house murder behind locked doors was an inspiration for an entire genre. To my mind, the most shocking information was the family tree. The patriarch had fathered ten children by his first wife, of whom no less than five died in infancy and another as a young man, and a further five by his second wife (formerly the governess), one of whom was the murdered boy. Both wives died young.

In the end, there is a resolution of sorts, although (as with all such high-profile crimes) there continued to be doubts ever after about the exact sequence of events, and where the blame truly lay. The book is not the most well-presented I’ve ever seen, and is too loaded down with dull, irrelevant detail, nor do the characters and their desires and motivations ever really come to life, but perhaps it is in the nature of a factual book like this to scrupulously lay out all the possibilities, rather than over-dramatising the author’s preferred version of events. I found it a quick, easy read, engrossing in parts and mostly enjoyable. Three stars.

Fantasy Review: 'The Throne of Ao' by Robert Richardson

The author describes this as a bildungsroman (I had to look that up; it's a posh word for a coming of age story). As such, it's a very common theme in fantasy, but that doesn't make it uninteresting, and there's always scope for a retelling of the old stories, if the author can add an original twist or two. Here, the young man coming of age is Val, who sets off with his friend Uriel and a gnome called Maryl on a Lifequest, the test all young men and women have to undergo in order to be recognised as adult. They are, however, allowed to choose the objective of the Lifequest themselves, and Val chooses a near-impossible one - to find a cure for an illness which afflicts members of his village, and which is ultimately fatal. There's also a restriction (and a fairly arbitrary one, it has to be said), which is that the person on a Lifequest isn't allowed to kill another human.

The three questers make rather a nice group. Val is the idealistic one who's also a fine warrior and discovers magical abilities within himself, Uriel is the cynical one with hard-to-control magical abilities, and Maryl the gnome is an empath who sees the emotions in all sentient beings, and can manipulate them. They have a nice jokey relationship, in between battles. The other characters are less interesting and tend to fall into tropes: the beautiful warrior babe (a couple of those), the roguish thief turned revolutionary, and so on. The people of Val's village are introduced at great length early on, and some of them are interesting and I would have liked to know more about them and the village.

The plot - well, there's a quest which allows our three intrepid heroes to wander around the landscape, and there's a series of set-piece battles, which actually have nothing at all to do with the quest, and more to do with the idealistic Val being distracted by every captured slave and mistreated farmer's daughter and oppressed town he comes across, and deciding he has to save them. Despite some spectacular failures along the way and Uriel pointing out repeatedly that he can't save everybody (good advice, Val!), he keeps on doing it, and dragging his friends along too. Considering Val is honour bound not to kill any humans at all, the body count is quite alarmingly high, and I found it hard to believe he could be quite so naive as to get involved time after time. The fights are very well choreographed, however, and even I could follow them easily (this is a compliment - my eyes usually glaze over at these blow-by-blow accounts).

The world-building is sketchy, to say the least. There seems to be an assumption that the landscape is too ordinary to need description - there are woods and farms and so forth - but I would have liked a bit more detail. ‘The trip through the dwarven tunnels was uneventful’ doesn’t exactly set my sense of wonder on fire. The underground city is dismissed with ‘Dwarven wrought buildings towered hundreds of feet into the air, as did statues and monuments’. One setting (which is introduced as a city, quickly becomes a town, and then is a mere village) merits no description at all. Surely Val, from his nameless village on the frontier, would notice whether the buildings were similar to those of home or very different (bigger, perhaps, or stone-built, or more ornate). What are the streets like, do people dress differently, is the food any different here? But sadly we never find out. And there's no map (every fantasy story that steps outside a single location needs a map, in my opinion). However, there is a fabulous array of strange creatures, some just tossed in as background to a scene or turning up at a battle. I particularly liked the giant insect thingy, used for riding, and the burrowing land-shark - very ingenious.

The magic system is extremely carefully thought out, and very well described when it happens. I find it a little too powerful for my taste, especially since absolutely everybody has some innate ability (varying from race to race) but that's a personal preference and not a criticism. There is always a price to pay when it's used, and it's often not quite enough to win the battle, so it's not quite the get-out-of-jail-free card it could be. I very much liked Maryl's empathy magic, and one of his battles, where he fights a hive-mind of wolf-like beasts within his own mindscape, is brilliantly done and very evocative. The healing powers are a little too convenient, but again, that’s just me.

A minor quibble: humans are called 'humes' in this world, and magic is called 'magick'. The former seems fairly arbitrary to me. The latter is, according to the author, a convention to distinguish it from the sleight of hand card tricks and so on performed by entertainer magicians. I can't see myself that there would be any confusion. Within a fantasy story, the use of magic is so commonplace, it surely needs no special measures to explain it. Besides, the ways magic occur in the book's world make it very clear that it has nothing to do with trickery.

And a major quibble: the story may be great, but the writing needs a very thorough edit. There are few spelling mistakes, but there are some grammatical errors that had my inner pedant, head in hands, screaming. The worst are things like 'he had ran' and 'he had tore'. Apart from that, the writing is merely heavy-handed at times. There are places where the point of view head-hops alarmingly, which is disorientating. Then there are pacing issues. In order to get to the action more quickly, presumably, a lot of setup is skipped over. For example, in the hostile city/town/village, Maryl uses his empath's magic to get them into the boss's house, by manipulating the servants' minds, but we never see this, it's simply mentioned in passing, and we jump straight from entering the town to breaking into the house. A paragraph or two describing how he does this would have been nice. There are occasional infodumps, places where an ability or a piece of history is simply explained, as if in the classroom, and a few places where modern terminology intrudes: 'it sucks' for example, or ‘flying by the seat of his pants’, and a rather eloquent and introspective section where Val is musing on his willingness to kill ends with talk of endorphins, andrenaline and hormones. Now, it's not impossible that they would have known and used such terms, but it stopped me in my tracks and spoiled a very nice moment. However, the writing improves noticeably as the book goes on.

There's a nice little story here. There are some very original and creative creatures, the magic system is well done, even if it’s a little too powerful for my taste, the battles are believably choreographed and the characters are interesting, especially the complex Uriel. Val’s journey from ordinary villager to war hero to legend is realistically detailed, and although he’s inclined to rush in overconfidently, he often pauses to reflect on the consequences afterwards. There are moments of real depth in these introspective interludes. Unfortunately, the plot is just too flimsy and episodic, there's a lack of description and the writing issues interfered with my enjoyment. For those who like lots of action with an array of weird beasties and a hero who always manages to rise to the occasion and aren't bothered by the rest, you'll love this book, and a good edit would give it the professional polish it currently lacks. Unfortunately, the negatives kept it to three stars for me.

Fantasy Review: 'Warbreaker' by Brandon Sanderson

I was very critical of the author’s debut work, ‘Elantris’, feeling that although it had an awesome magic system, the characters were cardboard and the plot mostly flat. This one is not simply better, it’s in a different league altogether. Another awesome magic system, plus well-developed characters and plot - and it’s funny! OK, it’s a little ponderous at times, but lots of extra brownie points for humour. There are some similarities - the princess uprooted from home, the all too human gods and the action largely takes place in a single location. And there’s a depth to it, a thoughtfulness, which I never found in ‘Elantris’.

This one focuses on four main characters. Not one but two of them are in fact princesses uprooted from home - two sisters, one of whom, Vivenna, was trained almost from birth to marry the mysterious god-king of the neighbouring realm, and the other, Siri, who is, at the last minute, sent in her place. Then there’s the flippant Lightsong, one of the pantheon of ‘returned’ gods. And the mysterious Vasher, a disreputable character with a sentient sword (ooh, I love talking weaponry!). In addition, there are also some wise-cracking mercenaries, various gods, priests and minions, and the god-king himself.

The plot is largely about the political machinations surrounding the god-king and a threatened war against the homeland of the two princesses, but the real depth to the book comes from the subtly different religions they follow. The questions of faith and who you trust and what you actually believe underpin the whole story, together with the theme that nothing is ever quite what it seems. Who is really good and who is evil? Who has real power, and who merely has the illusion of it? As the two princesses gradually adapt to their changed circumstances, they learn that everything they believed about themselves and the world may be wrong.

The magic system is hugely complicated and yet it all makes sense. It’s not as elegant, perhaps, as the air-writing system seen in Elantris, and it has a few contrivances that - surprise! - turn out to be essential for the plot, but on the whole it fulfils everything I expect of it: a few basic rules which can be adapted in a myriad different and ingenious ways. This results in a delightful surprise round every corner - someone gets into trouble, and the magic (called Breath here) is used to devise a way out. It never feels like a cheat, because the rules are laid out ahead of time. Not everyone likes this kind of magic system, admittedly, preferring the mystery of a more fluid type of magic, but I love those moments where it comes into play and you think: oh, of course, so obvious. Much better, to my mind, than those wait-what? moments where the wizard waves his staff to invoke some hitherto unsuspected spell.

I was drawn into this right from the first page, and it just got better. There are some very slightly saggy moments in the middle where I was thinking: not another Lightsong-being-daft chapter (there was a little too much of Lightsong, for my money), but then there's a terrific twist which turns everything upside down and after that the pace never let up. OK, the climax was a tad melodramatic, and the ending marginally implausible, and the big with-one-bound-they-were-free moment was one that was flagged up almost from the beginning, but nevertheless this was a terrific read with a tightly woven plot with reveals and reverses and unexpected outcomes all the way through. I loved it. Five stars.

Fantasy Review: 'The Tough Guide To Fantasyland' by Diana Wynne Jones

This is a wonderful, wonderful book. It’s the perfect antidote to all those terribly solemn tomes full of wizards speaking portentously, hidden heirs to the kingdom, the sort who instantly become amazingly adept with a sword, and tediously earnest quests for magic McGuffins. In the guise of a guidebook (with a map - naturally), it’s actually an encyclopedia of fantasy tropes. Instead of a proper review, I can’t do better than to give some examples:

[Quote]
ENDLESS QUEST: See QUEST, ENDLESS.
NUNNERIES. The Rule is that any Nunnery you approach, particularly if you are in dire need of rest, healing or provisions, will prove to have been recently sacked. You will find the place a smoking ruin, littered with corpses. You will be shocked and wonder who could have done this thing. Your natural curiosity will shortly be satisfied, because there is a further Rule that there will be one survivor, either a very young novice or a very old nun, who will give you a graphic account of the raping and burning and the names of the perpetrators. If old, she will then die, thus saving you from having to take her along and feed her from your dwindling provisions; if a novice, she will either die likewise or prove to be not as nunnish as you at first thought, in which case you may be glad to have her along.
PRINCESSES come in two main kinds: 1) wimps; 2) spirited and wilful. A spirited Princess will be detectable by the scattering of freckles across the bridge of her somewhat tiptilted nose. Spirited Princesses often disguise themselves as boys and invariably marry commoners of sterling worth. With surprising frequency these commoners turn out to be long-lost heirs to Kingdoms.
QUEST, ENDLESS: See ENDLESS QUEST.[*] [/Quote]

Essential reading for all fantasy fans. Five stars.

[*] This reminds me of the very old joke - Recursion: see Recursion.

Fantasy Review: 'Anuna' by Helen E Sharman

This is an interesting book which I enjoyed a great deal, although with a few reservations. I loved the setting - Anuna's people live in a village built under an overhanging rock shelter, in the style of many such found in the southwestern US and Mexico. This is an unusual and evocative setting, very nicely drawn. The author has also created a beautifully detailed world view, a religion combined with a magic system, which makes perfect sense. The early part of the book, which describes how Anuna becomes a 'Weaver' (spiritual leader and healer) to her people is lovely, and the little traditional stories scattered throughout the book are charming.

The characters are more of a mixed bag. Anuna herself is a very sympathetic character, whose anxieties are perfectly in keeping with her age and experience. She knows herself to be capable, but she is easily cast into despair and needs constant reassurance. However, her growth in confidence during the story and the way she takes up the role of leader while retaining her humility is very believable. Baran, too, comes across as a fully rounded person, and Dog, of course, is a wonderful character.

The villain is a little too black to be truly believable. The author makes a good effort to give him redeeming qualities and the sort of history which explains his behaviour, even if it doesn’t excuse it, but still I found him just too evil to be realistic, and his men seemed too ready to follow him unquestioningly. And then there are the kidnapped women from Anuna’s village. Oh dear, what a bunch of useless victims. Even given their beliefs and the horror of the situation, I would have expected a touch more resilience and common sense. Given that a large part of the plot revolves around them, it’s a pity they’re not a bit more robust.

The plot is a fairly simple one: while Anuna is off in seclusion becoming a Weaver, her village is raided and almost everyone killed, apart from four women taken off to become breeding stock for the raiders. There are no swords, no battles, no kings or empires, no duelling wizards, no quest to save the world. The only fights are the scuffling in the dirt variety, with the occasional dagger, spear or kick to the groin. This is a very basic story of survival in very trying circumstances, the battle of good and evil writ very small and personal. I had some issues with the women’s belief that suicide is the only honourable solution to the defilement of rape, but the author addresses the idea head on, so it doesn’t go unchallenged. For those sensitive to the subject, rape is a central theme but there is nothing graphic or erotic in the depiction of it, although I confess to some unease at the heroine’s sexual response in a context of captivity, brutality and rape.

The author’s writing style is rather nice, detailed and descriptive without being overwrought. However, there’s a great deal of angsting amongst the women, a lot of crying and even falling into swoons, which I don’t have much patience with, I’m afraid. There’s also a lack of polish - numerous minor typos (not spelling or grammatical errors, so much as mistypes - ‘it’ for ‘in’ and the like - plus words missed out and odd extra words, as if an edit failed to remove all the unwanted words). A character called Korak later becomes Karak. And a logic fail - a major plot point is that two of the village women reject Anuna because she is now ‘tainted’, except that one of the women, Orana, is herself ‘tainted’ in exactly the same way. Hypocrisy by the women, or an error?

There are also outbreaks of total stupidity on the part of some of the characters. Who, given the choice of being burned alive or trying to escape, would actually say - no thanks, we’ll burn? And who, having reached safety, would actually turn round and go back for them? In fantasy, all sorts of improbable things can happen, but (magic aside) human nature remains the same, and some actions just aren’t credible.

Despite these quibbles, I enjoyed the story and tore through it a couple of days. There is a strong romance element, and for those who like large-scale action and epic dilemmas, this is not the book for you, but I rather liked it, especially the unusual setting and the well-thought-out magic/religious system. And Dog, who has a starring role. The negatives keep it to three stars.

Mystery Review: 'The Quiche of Death' by M C Beaton

I’ve read some of the author’s Regency romances, but this is a very different animal, a cosy murder mystery in the style of Agatha Christie, the first in a long series featuring grumpy middle-aged Agatha Raisin, a London PR executive taking early retirement in the picturesque Cotswolds and finding it deadly dull, until a murder crops up. This is very much a formula book, where the key is not so much the crime itself, but the nature of the detective (or amateur sleuth, in this case) and colourful setting. This one does well on both counts. Agatha herself may not be the most accomplished social animal (translation: she falls out with pretty much everyone), but she’s still someone we can sympathise with and root for when her quiche poisons the local bigwig. And having lived in a small village myself, the descriptions of rural life and attitudes struck a chord with me. The first half of the book I found very readable, as Agatha tries, and mostly fails, to fit in with village traditions, and the author describes these twee Cotswold villages very well. Non-Brits might find it hard to believe just how stuffy these small English villages can be, but I found Agatha’s experience totally plausible.

Many of the characters were no more than caricatures, and the irritating Ray was quite implausible, but there were one or two with some depth - Agatha herself, and the vicar’s wife, Mrs Bloxby, in particular. I liked the young policeman, Bill Wong, as well. As for the murder - the most likely suspect and motive were obvious, so it became a question of working out how it was done, and frankly, anyone could have come up with half a dozen different ways of achieving it. Not the most challenging exercise for the little grey cells, but neither the police nor Agatha could manage it, it seems. And then at the end the book descended into farce. Nevertheless, this was an enjoyable light read. Three stars.

Fantasy Review: 'Flank Hawk' by Terry W Ervin II

I knew something of what I was getting into when I chose to read this book. Within the first couple of chapters, there are zombies, ogres, goblins and dragons. And panzers. That’s panzers as in German WWII tanks. Heading each chapter is a snippet of seemingly modern-day technology-heavy action. This is a doozie of a tale. It’s as if the author wrote a checklist of all the fantasy elements he liked and threw everything into the mix. Wizards? Check. Golems? Check. Magic swords? Check. Cannons, rifles, pistols... Yep, let’s have all those too. Crusaders, troglodytes, gargoyles, unicorns, giants, werebeasts, elemental spirits, ogres? Why not?

Well, why not is an interesting question. This is certainly a book where anything can happen, and most likely will. There are long - very long - battle sequences where one evil thing after another appears, and just as our heroes appear to have triumphed, something even more horrible appears, yet the eponymous Flank Hawk, a farmboy having no special skills, improbably survives everything. For anyone who likes high-octane action, this is definitely the book for you. But it does mean that a lot of other things get lost by the wayside. There’s no subtlety or depth to the characters, for instance, they are mostly just a succession of names, most of whom will become (literally) cannon fodder before too long. There’s little time for introspection or thoughtful addressing of deeper themes. There’s not much background or world-building or detailed history, although what there is is nicely done. There’s no sense of unique time or place. And there’s no sign of complex motivation. There are just a lot of unspeakably evil things trying to wipe out everyone else and take over the world because - well, just because, I guess.

But interspersed with all the zombified mayhem, there are, eventually, moments of greater interest, to me at least. In fact, almost everything beyond the battlefield is intriguing. The encounter with the seer in the King's City is fascinating. The dragons are cool (but then, dragons are always cool). I liked the whole hierarchy of wizards, and the differences between them: “... the elemental magic of wizards left no trace, while that of an enchanter could linger for hours.” I have a suspicion that the principles were inspired by either online or tabletop gaming, but still, it felt nicely complex. And towards the middle of the book, when Flank Hawk sets out on his Impossible Quest (tm) and forms an unlikely alliance with two passing characters, the story opens up nicely to become something much more interesting.

The writing style is unsophisticated, and there are clunky moments (“Ha ha,” he laughed...) and times when things were clumsily phrased and could have been clearer. The Crusader's pseudo-medieval language grated on me a lot, and there are a few mistakes in it. I would have liked some more information about the wizardly hierarchy - Grand Wizards and Lesser Enchanters and Imperial Seers are a bit hard to sort out without some kind of guide. And a map would have been very useful. Throwaway references to Milan and the Alps are mixed in with talk of the Faxtinian Coalition and the Vinchie Empire and the Reunited Kingdom.

It's hard to imagine any of the bigger traditional publishing houses picking up a book like this. Only a small independent would take a chance on this sort of off-the-wall book. To say it's original doesn't even come close. I would love to be a fly on the wall if the author ever has to pitch this to one of the big six publishing executives. "Well, it's got every fantasy idea you can think of in it.[*] And Nazi technology. And a nuclear holocaust. And an Ebola outbreak. And Crusaders..." Frankly, I love the ideas more than the execution, as the writing perhaps isn't quite up to the ambition of the plot, but it rattles along at a frenetic pace, and in between the overlong battles, there's a nice little story with an interesting backdrop. There were moments when I laughed out loud at the sheer craziness of it - for instance when the trio face down a giant, armed variously with rocks, a spear, a rifle with bayonet, a prayer and an evil magic sword. This is just not your average fantasy book.

Ultimately, it really didn’t work for me. There were too many zombies for my taste, too many mindless and weird creatures altogether, and I would have liked more depth to the characters and less fighting. The interesting combination of the mercenary, the werebeast and the Crusader was one which, had the story slowed down enough to let the characters blossom a little more, could have been very powerful. Although I like a story to surprise me, this is one where there appear to be no constraints at all on what might turn up next. It reminded me a little of my only encounter with the imagination of China Miéville (an encounter I lost, I might add; I just don’t have the right receptors in my brain for that kind of weird). So for me it was no more than two stars. But for those made of sterner stuff, or who like rip-roaring action from start to finish, this is an interesting book with a nicely worked out ending and some clever ideas. There are some really neat details tucked in there which show a great deal of careful thought. I commend the author for his fertile imagination.

[*] There were no fairies, pixies or prophecies. I didn't notice any vampires, either. But pretty much everything else. Even the farmboy turned hero.

[Edit: the author has posted a link to this review on his own blog, which has attracted an interesting comment on my 'gender bias'. You can read it here.]

Mystery Review: 'Dusk' by Maureen Lee

Maureen Lee has written a great many nostalgic family saga type books about her native Liverpool, but this is a different kind of story, set in Cornwall, written some years ago and now self published. Or rather, it was - it seems to have disappeared from Amazon, and the author's website has no information about other plans, so I'm not sure whether it's about to be republished or whether she simply withdrew it from sale.

This book has ‘THRILLER’ on the cover in capital letters, but it wasn't, in the end, a particularly thrilling experience. The story of three sixteen-year-old girls, not children and not yet women, and what happened during their last summer of innocence and the secret they kept for many years afterwards, is not an original idea, and for most of the book the story crawls along predictably and uninterestingly. The author has made some attempt to give the three distinctive personalities, and to some extent this works but there wasn't quite as much depth as I would have liked to any of them. It's difficult, admittedly, to describe severe depression convincingly. Daisy should have been a sympathetic character, but somehow we never quite get under her skin, although, to be fair, this is partly because we only ever see her through Norah’s eyes.

Fortunately, there are some twists at the end which raise the book above the merely pedestrian. It isn't a bad book, actually, it's a workmanlike and readable affair, with characters which are moderately realistic, a plot that rises above the hackneyed and a comfortable writing style. There are numerous minor typos, words missing and the like, but nothing drastic. It's disappointing, however, that it never quite manages the depth that would have made it memorable. The way in which the three women are affected by their experience and how it influences their lives is a theme that the author touches on, but never manages to imbue with the emotional resonance it deserves. Nor is there much sense of time or place, just a few topical issues tossed for dramatic effect. So I never much cared about the characters and it wasn’t particularly thrilling, but nevertheless I kept turning the pages, and it was an easy enough read. Three stars.

Fantasy Review: 'Twixt Heaven And Hell' by Tristan Gregory

The beauty of fantasy is that you just never know what you’re going to get. Even when it sounds like a conventional plot theme, an accomplished author can put a new spin on it and produce something special. I was nervous about this one - a war between Angels and Demons, waged with the help of humans? It sounded trite - but as I read on, it turned into an absorbing study of magic, and an unexpectedly thought-provoking analysis of war.

The central character is Darius, a wizard who has built an elite troop of soldiers around him, a sort of special-ops with magic. There are numerous other characters in his world - his fellow wizards in the city of Bastion, some of his soldiers, and, on the opposing side, the warlord and his sorcerors. And a few angels and demons put in an appearance, too. Although Darius is the main point of view character, several other characters have point of view chapters too, partly to fill in details of events in other places and partly to fill in background. Of course, this also serves to give them more depth. I’m very much a fan of this way of writing which is nicely fluid and works well to keep the action moving. Having a single POV protagonist is very restrictive, and having equal rights always feels artificial to me.

The world-building is rather well done. The field of conflict between the two warring sides seems rather small and empty - a city or two, some fortresses and not much else. But it becomes clear that there’s a reason for this, and there are other settlements and cultures existing around the fringes and beyond the immediate range, and in the past there were more. The history of this war, in fact, is very much a central part of the story and the author draws out the strands of the past very elegantly. And then there’s the magic. The real meat of the story, for me, is the growing realisation (on both sides) that magic is not just a static ability, it can grow and be developed in all sorts of new and ingenious ways. The way that Balkan, for instance, researches and then experiments with new forms of magic, and even a sort of magical technology, is fascinating to watch. Even wizards, it seems, must adapt and change with the times.

Ultimately Darius is forced to face up to the consequences of the current war and its escalation, and decide whether having the angels on your side is sufficient reward for the constant battles and deaths caused by the demon-supported enemy. This is a fascinating train of thought - is it really such a great idea to have angels bringing you healing and other gifts, or are you better off on your own? I don’t think I’ve ever encountered this argument before, or at least not so explicitly. And so, eventually, the story reaches its own answer to the question, or at least sets events in train for it to be discovered (in a future book, presumably). The final conflict is huge, an earth-shattering experience which changes everything. It should be an emotional overload, but somehow it just - isn’t. If I have one complaint about the book, it’s that somehow there isn’t enough emotional engagement with the characters and their respective fates. Even when named characters died, I didn’t feel it. The author sets everything in place and pushes all the right buttons, but for me it simply didn’t work. I don’t know why that should be, it’s a complete mystery to me, and I can only assume it’s just a matter of mood.

I had some minor quibbles along the way. I felt there were too many important new characters introduced late in the day. Sometimes the attempts to humanise characters were a little clunky (the family lives of Balkan and Pendrick in particular). I would also have liked to have Traigan, the enemy warlord, make an appearance at the end, since he had been such an important part of the plot, and I wondered what happened to the thralls at the end. I’m not mad keen on angels and demons in fantasy, since inherently good or evil characters are a bit dull, but in this case the author showed a much more complicated and interesting side of the angels, at least (the demons were - well, just demons, on the whole). But on the plus side, the characters all behaved sensibly and intelligently, and I very much liked the way that Arric (the council leader) and Darius overcame their initial hostility and reached a working accommodation. In fact, the whole story simply oozes intelligence, and easily overcame the modest amount of clunkiness here and there in the writing, or the very small number of typos. An enjoyable and thought-provoking story, notable for the well-developed world-building and constantly evolving magic system. And a map - always extra brownie points for a map. Four stars.

SciFi Review: 'The Phoenix Conspiracy' by Richard L Sanders

This seems like a fairly standard sci-fi affair, but there’s a nice mystery at the bottom of it, and there are some amusing elements tossed into the mix. Thought you couldn’t find vampires and werewolves in sci-fi? Think again. And it starts well, oh so well. But then... oh dear. What a disappointment.

The characters are basic cookie-cutter types. There’s the maverick captain with the tragic past and an addiction problem, brilliant (of course), young, a risk-taker but gets results. There’s the seasoned senior officer with the impeccable career who suddenly and inexplicably goes rogue. There’s the beautiful female second-in-command, who plays things strictly by the book. And so on. It’s not that these are uninteresting, but there isn’t anything very original about them either. Nevertheless, there’s a good rapport between the various crew members, and a real feeling that they work well together as a team. I enjoyed the early parts of the book very much - the confidence and joking between the characters, the mysterious goings on the team are investigating, the easy writing style without too much techno-babble - all of this was very appealing.

There are some oddities that jumped out at me. The hero goes into a crowded bar to meet his friends but has trouble finding them. Erm, isn’t that a problem that was solved by mobile phones? So why have spaceships in the future lost the ability to track down individuals? The hero keeps his stash of illegal drugs in a safe, opened purely by thumbprint. Well duh, there’s a reason safes usually have a combination lock. And how many times must this supposedly brilliant person forget to hide his pills away before he gets the message?

And then there came a point about two thirds of the way through where the hero does something so incredibly stupid that I nearly tossed the book away. Now, I have no problem with protagonists who take risks in order to further the plot. Sometimes an author just has to have his characters do something radical to move things along. But it has to be plausible. Here, the options are: 1) we fail and we’re all screwed, totally; or 2) we succeed, and - well, actually we’re probably all screwed just the same. In other words, the likelihood of any realistic success is virtually zero. And from there it’s all downhill, so that the options become: 1), 2), 3)... we’re all screwed and this time we die, horribly, painfully. And the only way out is the miraculous rescue out of nowhere (also known as deus ex machina). No prizes for guessing what happens...

Now, maybe some readers are less critical than me, and in between all the frankly stupid decision-making is some quite dramatic action stuff - hand-to-hand fighting through the corridors of space-ships, that sort of thing. And for those who enjoy that, it may well compensate for the idiocy that made it necessary. It’s unfortunate that the author’s grasp on sentence structure breaks down at this point, and he develops a nasty habit of breaking off entire clauses. Which is very irritating. And makes my inner pedant scream. Which is quite unpleasant. Argh! Now, I understand the effect he’s trying to achieve - in a particularly tense moment, short choppy sentences work very well to increase the drama, but please, please, please - let them be sentences, and not horrible bits and pieces.

And then, right at the end, there’s a massive info-dump revealing the mystery that set things off and what’s going on behind the scenes, with the proviso that none of this may be true, it may just be a clever ploy to suck the hero into the conspiracy of the title. Plus it sets everything up for the next book in the series. It may not be a surprise that I won’t be one of those breathlessly waiting for it to download. Sorry, but this was too silly for words. I’m happy to accept that the hero of a book is a brilliant risk-taker, but only if his actions are in fact brilliant. The first two thirds of this book was heading for four stars, but then it cratered, leaving it at two stars, at best.

Fantasy Review: 'Throne of Jade' by Naomi Novik

This is the second book in the alternate history series about Temeraire, the dragon captured as an egg from the French and inadvertently hatched at sea and induced into captivity by the ship's captain, Will Laurence. Where the first book focused on Temeraire's growth and training as a part of the Aerial Corps, engaged in fighting the French during the Napoleonic wars, this book is about his personal history. For it turns out that Temeraire is a rare Chinese Celestial dragon, the egg was sent as a gift to Napoleon, and the Chinese are not happy about him being deployed in the war, ridden by a mere naval officer, and want him back. Relations with the Chinese are delicate, so Temeraire and Laurence are packed off to Peking to negotiate some kind of deal.

This book has the same characteristics as the first, being more about the formality of language and manners than action. There are some quite dramatic encounters, but these episodes are brief. The highlight for me is, as before, Temeraire himself, who is by far the most interesting character in the book. He has a refreshingly straightforward attitude to life, and time after time Laurence is forced to attempt to justify his own society's customs and morals against Temeraire's much more liberal ideas. These discussions are fascinating - Laurence is a product of his own era of history, and there are many ideas which he accepts without thinking, and others where he has absorbed his family's somewhat different ideas (he is against slavery, for instance, even though it is still legal in Britain). For instance, it is fascinating to juxtapose Temeraire's instinctive feeling that it is wrong to flog or hang a man, with the obvious need to maintain discipline aboard ship. The Chinese have very different ways of treating dragons, too, and Laurence is forced to acknowledge, against his natural feeling, that they do some things better than the west.

I have no idea how accurate the depiction of Chinese life of the era is, or whether the author has taken liberties, but it all seemed very plausible to me. There were some fascinating details, for instance the ceremony on board ship when crossing the equator, which the author mentions in passing without going into much detail. Both the Chinese delegation and Temeraire himself are mystified by the whole thing, but the author resists the temptation to info-dump all her research on the subject, writing as if we were of the period and would naturally know all about it. I rather like this minimalist approach, which suits the book very well, giving it almost an authentic air of having been written in 1806.

This is actually a thought-provoking book in many ways, addressing a number of ideas head on, such as slavery versus voluntary service, and others less directly, such as the absolute will of an emperor versus the democratic monarchy system prevailing in Britain. It’s not a high-action book, although there are episodes of drama, but in some cases they feel rather bolted on as an afterthought to ramp up the tension. However, the tension between the British and the Chinese is nicely done, and the slow but definite way in which the barriers begin to dissolve and the two sides inch their way towards an understanding is beautifully described. In the end, everything hinges on trust, or the lack of it, and the resolution is both frighteningly dramatic and ultimately very satisfying. Once again, I enjoyed this book unreservedly, and although it wouldn’t suit everyone, for me it’s another five star affair. I’m almost nervous to read any further in the series in case this high standard comes crashing down. Can any author sustain the ideas and this level of writing for nine books? It’s hard to imagine.

Mystery Review: 'Mama Does Time' by Deborah Sharp

This is a book that sets out right from the start to amuse and entertain, with no pretensions beyond that, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. I've never been to Florida, so I've no idea whether the small town lifestyle portrayed here is accurate, exaggerated or a parody, but it made me laugh and it gets extra brownie points for that. The author has a sharp and acidic way of describing characters so that they appear fully formed and in garish shades of dayglo orange or baby pink in the reader's mind. There's absolutely nothing subtle about it, and it's a style you either love or hate.

The plot - well, the plot is neither here nor there, but essentially, a body has turned up in the car of the eponymous Mama, and her three daughters attempt to clear her name. That's about it, really. The story is told from the point of view of the middle daughter, Mace. There's some romantic interest between Mace and the cute detective assigned to the case, and also between Mace and the cute ex-boyfriend. There are numerous possible murderers, all with plausible motives, and the whole thing builds nicely to the inevitable dramatic climax.

This will never win any literary prizes, but it's nicely done, the Florida setting is evoked well enough that you can feel the sweat trickling down your back, and the mystery is guessable without being overwhelmingly obvious, which is all one can expect. It wouldn't be everyone's cup of tea, and I found a few irritations - the author is inclined to explain even irrelevant details, such as why the heroine's watch is still working after she fell in the swamp (it was waterproof - well, duh!), and the characters are more like caricatures. But there's a Southern charm to it all, and I enjoyed it. Three stars.

Fantasy Review: 'Temeraire' by Naomi Novik

[Also known as 'His Majesty's Dragon'.] This has a very simple premise: imagine the Napoleonic wars, but with dragons. It sounds mad, but actually it works astonishingly well. The author manages to capture the ethos of the times perfectly - the class system, the rigid formality of manners, the somewhat florid language - while still creating a fascinating work of fantasy.

The starting point is the acquisition of a dragon egg from a captured French frigate, which inconveniently decides to hatch while the British ship is still returning to port. Not wanting to allow such a prize to go to waste, the crew, or rather the officers (that's the class system at work again), decide to see if the dragon will accept a harness. As it happens, it is the Captain, Will Laurence, who manages it and has to leave the Navy and join the dragon corps as a result. His regrets about this, which he regards as being cast out from good society, and how he comes to terms with his situation, form a good part of the book. It is interesting that he is now regarded as a pariah both by his own sector of society, including his family, and also by the Aerial Corps personnel, who see him as coming from outside their close-knit and unorthodox culture, completely untrained, and resent him walking off with a prize dragon when they have (in their own eyes) far more suitable and highly trained people.

There is a certain amount of action, since the dragons are all trained for aerial combat as part of the war effort against the French, but the focus is very much on the characters - both the humans who live with the dragons, and of course the dragons themselves, who are very much characters in their own right. Laurence's dragon, the Temeraire of the title, is in fact by far the most interesting character here, being highly intelligent and curious and somewhat radical in his politics, which puts Laurence rather on the defensive, forced to justify the customs he himself takes for granted. Laurence spends quite a lot of his free time reading to Temeraire, including scientific works which Laurence himself doesn't pretend to understand, but the dragon does. It must be a bit like having a very precocious child, I suppose. The relationship is a close one, and there are some wonderful moments between man and dragon. To be honest, Laurence himself struck me as a difficult person to like in many ways, since he has very rigid ideas of propriety - a very prickly man - but his affection for Temeraire is charming.

The dragons are quite carefully thought out. There are various wild species which have been bred and cross-bred for aerial combat purposes for centuries, and different nationalities have bred their own varieties with different characteristics. Only some can breathe fire, for instance, and none of the British ones can, but they have a variety which can spit acid, for instance. Unlike the Pern variety, these dragons aren't telepathic and they talk quite normally, but there is a very strong bond between dragon and handler, even if the handler mistreats his dragon (I found poor Levitas very distressing to read about). Nice, too, that there are female dragon handlers, although true to the times, this is by the choice of the dragons, not a blow for feminism. Laurence was quite shocked by the idea (but then Laurence is easily shocked, it has to be said). I also liked the idea that, since dragon handlers have much shorter lifespans than dragons, handlers try to arrange for a son (or daughter) to take over when they die, and there is a certain amount of pragmatic breeding of humans for the purpose - the author has obviously put a lot of thought into details like this.

The plot develops quite nicely, although it really isn't particularly important. The objective is to describe the society of two hundred years ago as it would have been if there were dragons in the world then, and this the author does brilliantly. One could argue that access to dragons over many previous centuries would have changed history far more than is evident here - would there even be a Napoleon and a Nelson, for instance? But that hardly matters.

The writing style is perfectly in keeping with the period, and so is the behaviour of the characters. It might seem a bit slow, and not everyone would enjoy the formal language used, but I loved it. I liked the whole idea of the Aerial Corps, with its slightly informal air, and the way the larger dragons go into battle loaded with gunners and bombers and whole teams of crew, rather like a ship of the air. This makes the battles quite unusual, with attempts to board enemy dragons and hand to hand combat (with swords and pistols!) while strapped on to a dragon conducting his or her own form of combat. This is one of those rare books where I actually didn't want it to end. Luckily there are nine books in the series to date, so those who want can indulge their enjoyment of Temeraire for quite some time. Five stars.