Essay: On Women In Fantasy

Yes, yes, I know - all those acres of dead trees and terabytes of cyberspace already filled with thoughts on the subject, undoubtedly way more erudite than mine. What can I possibly add to the discussion? Well, not a lot, probably, but the more fantasy I read, the more these ideas swirl around my brain like smoke, so this is my way of clearing out the fog.

Women in fantasy: it's a fairly broad topic, but I'm going to look at three aspects. Firstly, women both read and write fantasy (contrary to popular belief). Secondly, there's the question of how women fit into the fantasy world created by the author. And thirdly, what roles do women play within fantasy stories. These last two are connected, of course.

Before I start, I should state, for the avoidance of doubt, that I take it as axiomatic that women are just as capable as men in virtually all areas. There are a few physical differences, of course. Women are equipped by nature to conceive, give birth and suckle babies. Men are equipped to piss standing up. Men are, on average, a bit taller and a bit stronger than women. And that's it. Anything beyond the basics is open to argument, because, even if differences are measurable, there's no knowing how much of that is innate and how much is due to cultural pressures. Are men really better at reading maps and fixing engines, or are they just taught to be? Are women inherently more interested in appearance and better with people, or is it just the way they've been brought up? Who knows.

So how much of fantasy is written by (and read by) women? That's another 'who knows' question. There are no definite numbers, and it's a fluid situation anyway - new authors come along all the time, published authors quietly stop writing and no one asks readers what gender they are. I checked the fantasy books I own, and 35% of the authors are female, as best I can tell. I don't deliberately seek out or avoid female authors, I simply buy books which catch my interest. Wikipedia lists around 450 fantasy authors (those well-known enough to merit their own page), and around a third are identifiably female. Lists of 'best of...' or 'top however many of...', on the other hand, tend to have a smaller proportion of female authors. One best 25 list had just 3, which is 12%. This may simply reflect the historical situation - when many of the classics of the genre were written, writing was seen as an activity for the leisured, educated classes, at that time mostly men.

There is a perception that fantasy is largely written (and read) by blokes. So is science fiction, the theory goes, and historical drama and hard-edged thrillers and the like, while the softer genres, like romances and cosy murder mysteries, are a female domain. One female author writes historical fiction and fantasy using a name with only initials, to disguise her gender, because of a belief that men won't read them if they knew the author was female; her romances, on the other hand, use her first name. One male author writes science fiction and fantasy with a full, male name; and he writes urban fantasy (the sort with a semi-clad weapon-toting female on the cover) using only initials. There is one fantasy author with a long list of published works whose gender is, even now, unknown. I have no idea how much author gender matters to readers, but if authors believe it matters, then it does.

I never used to think much about this, because my first and defining experience with fantasy was J R R Tolkien's 'Lord of the Rings'. There was fantasy before Tolkien, of course, and the whole long history of legends and sagas and myths and fairytales informed everything he wrote. Nevertheless, a great deal of what came after was based on his work, and it still influences the genre to this day.

There are three aspects of Tolkien's work which have become traditional in fantasy. Firstly, it's set in a world without much technology. There are water or wind powered mills for grinding corn, there may perhaps be printing presses, but that's about it. When Saruman industrialises Isengard and later inflicts a smaller version on the Shire, it's seen as a Very Bad Thing, covering the clean, fertile land with smoke, debris and pollution, and enslaving the population. There are stone-built towers and cities (often built in an earlier age, and with the aid of magic), and there are metal weapons and tools, but most construction and artifacts are primitive.

Secondly, Middle Earth is a much simpler place than the modern world. It's not the densely crowded, semi-urban and heavily agricultural land that the author actually lived in. Instead it's a vast empty wilderness, with pockets of civilisation dotted about, each essentially isolated from all the others. There are many thousands of years of history, full of wars and other troubles, but somehow it feels very static and unchanging, with no science and no progress towards improvement, stuck in a time-warp of primitive agriculture, albeit an idealised Victorian version rather than the medieval feudal system. And when trouble comes, it's a straightforwardly evil Dark Lord, rather than the complexities of clashing politics or religion or economics.

Then there is the role of women in Tolkien's world. They were there, of course, but relegated to bit parts - wives, daughters, barmaids and the like. It was the men who buckled up their swordbelts and sharpened their daggers and went off to war against Sauron (with just one exception, which I'll come to later). Curiously, virtually all the key players were nobility or outright royalty, something which is often forgotten, but this too is part of Tolkien's mid-twentieth-century English world, where events of tectonic political importance were always the province of the higher levels of society. Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli, Boromir - all were princes, kings or similar. Even the hobbits - Bilbo, Frodo, Merry and Pippin - were 'gentlehobbits', that is, wealthy enough not to have to work. Only Sam, Frodo's loyal-to-a-fault servant, was truly working class.

So it's not a surprise that the three main female characters were aristocratic too. Arwen is the archetypal princess, protected by her menfolk, beautiful, dangled like a peach as motivation for Aragorn (as if defeating Sauron wasn't motivation enough!) and then wheeled out as a marriage partner because, after all, he's the king, so he has to have heirs. You can see why Peter Jackson itched to put a sword in her hand in the film version.

Then there is Galadriel. Now she truly is a powerful woman, because she has one of the three elf rings, but she uses it in subtle, secretive ways here and there rather than getting on a horse and riding off to war flashing it (the elves are really a bit wimpy in the book, they leave most of the swordwork to the humans). She has a man to keep an eye on her, too (Celeborn) just in case we mistook her for a fully independent woman. And somehow the whole business with the mirror makes her seem like a bit of a scary witchy lady.

And so we come to Eowyn (the exception mentioned above). Eowyn gets to wear her sword and ride off to war with the men, and I have to admit that her confrontation with the Ringwraith ("No living man am I!") is one of the great moments of the book. But let's not forget that the main reason she decides to do this is because she has been spurned by Aragorn, who tells her she should stay at home and look after the women and children and old folk and leave the fighting to the men. That, right there, is a woman's dilemma in a nutshell: dull self-effacing duty while you hang about waiting for your man, or else go for personal glory and stuff the women and children. She chooses to die in battle, and it's possible to read into that an unsettling subtext: without a man, she might as well be dead (and let's not forget, she is only 'cured' of illness at the end of the book by accepting her wifely role in life). Still, whatever her motives, she turned out to be pretty nifty with a sword and single-handedly inspired a whole trope of dynamic fantasy warrior babes.

These three archetypes, the princess, the witch and the warrior babe, formed the backbone of women's roles in fantasy for decades. For men, the options were similar: warrior or knight, wizard, priest, prince or king. The working classes could be either gender, in theory (the merchant, thief, innkeeper, farmer and so on), but at all levels of society, it tended to be the men who carried the story forward, and women were a sideline.

Tolkien was, of course, only reflecting the ethos of his time. When he first went to Oxford to take his degree in 1911, women had no right to vote or be a member of Parliament, could study but not gain a degree, were constrained in owning or inheriting property, were barred from many professions, and were taxed as a unit with their husbands, allowing them no financial privacy (this last was not changed until 1990). Women were respected and treated gently, but were seen as unquestionably inferior - wives, secretaries, helpers, certainly, but weak and delicate, not fit for important work. Men were in charge - of nations, of businesses and industry, of religious practices, of hospitals, of their own homes.

When I first read 'Lord of the Rings' in the sixties, this situation had changed hardly at all. Women had by then gained the right to vote, stand for Parliament, to be awarded degrees and to control their own fertility, but were still second class citizens, subservient to fathers and husbands and male bosses amid a still patriarchal society. Even towards the end of Tolkien's life, the obscenity trial of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' in 1960 considered the question of whether it was a book a man would want his wife or servant to read (although the lawyer concerned was much derided for proposing it).

But from then onwards feminism took hold, women became more assertive and vocal, and equality became enshrined in law in Britain, as in many other Western countries. During this period, I read a lot of science fiction, and then baby and child-rearing books, then computer programming manuals, and eventually, when I finally regained the time to read as a hobby again, popular science books. It was only in 2010 that I came back to fantasy, after discovering George R R Martin's 'A Game of Thrones'.

For a while, I read uncritically. There had been changes in the genre since Tolkien's day, naturally. His charmingly bucolic and simple agricultural setting filled with noble lords and honest workers had given way to something darker. The established norm now was the medieval feudal system, with the countryside filled with ignorant, mud-bespattered peasants and towns and cities seething with lowlife: thieves, assassins, whores, drunks, rapists, pickpockets, gamblers and a whole lot worse besides. Tolkien's simple-minded but honest hobbits with their well-regulated Shire had given way to anarchy.

Now there's nothing in principle wrong with that, of course. Fantasy writers can find their inspiration where they will, and it was inevitable that there would be a reaction against the sweetness and light of the elves and hobbits and the noble warrior taking up his sword to defend the realm and rescue the princess. A little gritty realism was probably long overdue. Now, one of the notable features of the feudal system was that women were subordinate by law. Not to put too fine a point on it, they were owned by their fathers and husbands. They were dutiful daughters, staying at home, marrying a man chosen by their father, bearing him children to continue this process into the next generation. Women who fell outside this system also fell outside the law - they had no choice but to become whores or thieves, or opt out of society altogether as nuns.

It tends to be forgotten, however, that everyone was owned under the feudal system. A woman belonged to a man, but he in his turn belonged to the local landowner, who belonged to a greater lord, who himself belonged to the king, who answered ultimately to God. Serf and free man alike owed obligations of labour and time to their superior, who himself had responsibilities to protect them. In such a system, it was easier to deal with family units rather than individuals, and the man tended to be the head of the family and therefore its representative. Usually, the whole family worked together to run the farm, weave the cloth, make the furniture or whatever the family business was, but the man was the figurehead, responsible for public dealings. If he died without an adult son, however, his widow routinely inherited all his obligations and rights. She could take over the property, the business and the family. If he belonged to a guild, for instance, then his widow could take over his membership and train apprentices. It was a pragmatic recognition that she was an essential part of the family business, just as capable as her husband. [See footnote on historical realities]

I never thought much about all of this as I was reading. I soaked up fantasy like a sponge, and none of it seemed terribly far from Tolkien's vision: men ran the show, women were there on the sidelines as love interest, to be captured by the bad guys and rescued by the heroes, to tend the home fires as wives and mothers, and keep things going while the heroes save the world. Sometimes they appeared as witches, to cast evil spells or make dire prophecies. Motivation and plot devices, basically. Now, some fantasy did have female protagonists alongside the men, helping out with the business of saving the world, but as often as not they were a token gesture, or else they still fell into one of the three classic roles: princess, witch, warrior babe. Or whore. There are a surprising number of whores and concubines and the like in modern fantasy. And even when they were out there fighting alongside the men, they still often ended up as love interest, or got captured and had to be rescued. How often does a male character have to be rescued?

Still, it all seemed fairly normal to me. Fantasy is, after all, a backward-looking, traditionalist genre, so it's not that surprising that so many works are rooted in the medieval, and portray women in subservient roles. But then I read a sequence of books that made me stop and think. The first was Glenda Larke's Stormlord trilogy, in many ways a conventional fantasy, but outside the standard medieval backdrop, which had some wonderful independent-minded female characters who, when captured, managed to escape by themselves. Then there was Sue Rule's Shehaios trilogy, which was set in an egalitarian society, facing up to a more patriarchal one. And finally Andrea K Höst's Medair duology featured a female protagonist and a genuinely gender-neutral society and story.

And then, by contrast, I read Richard K Morgan's 'The Steel Remains', which could hardly be more different. It's set in an extreme form of the medieval feudal system, and virtually all the female characters encountered are whores, or sex slaves, or are simply promiscuous. There's also a mad witch, and a bossy mother (married off to a man she disliked at the age of thirteen). The only main character who is female is employed at the whim of the emperor, and although she has the potential to break out into independence, and has elements of warrior-babe-ness, she is still the token female. I cannot remember a single female in a normal, everyday role - an innkeeper, say, or middle-ranking servant. I enjoyed the book, on many different levels, and it was wonderful to see a main character who was openly gay, but the portrayal of female characters made me uneasy.

For the first time, I started to notice how women were portrayed in fantasy, and then it became impossible to read a book without noticing. In fact, when I re-read the first four books of Michael J Sullivan's Riyria Revelations prior to the release of the last two, I was struck by how helpless the women seemed, something that hadn't even occurred to me on the first read. Even when they were acting apparently on their own initiative, there was often a man (or a wizard!) behind the scenes manipulating things and setting the agenda. And inevitably they got captured and had to be rescued, made bad decisions or simply plot-related decisions, or else, like one character, gave up entirely and became catatonic for several books.

Now in all fairness, although they started at a ridiculously low point and climbed very erratically to reach a degree of autonomy, all the women did eventually end up as sensible human beings, acting intelligently without being prompted by a man. I have to say, too, that most people reading the books have no problem with the portrayal of women in them, and the author also disagrees with my assessment. But that's fine. I am simply stating my observations at the time.

It is a curious thing that while women in the real world have been steadily acquiring greater independence, in legal, financial and professional terms, in fantasy there seems to have been a trend away from that, and a retreat even from Tolkien's respectful if patronising attitude, towards something much more negative. I am not going to talk about agency, or the role of rape in fantasy, or misogyny, or whether there are differences between male and female authors - I don't have either the degree in feminist studies or the long list of already read fantasy to guide me. I can only talk about what I have personally noticed in the relatively modest number of fantasy books I've read to date, and wonder about it.

Firstly, there is the question of the types of society portrayed. In epic (or high) fantasy, the author has a completely free hand to invent whatever kind of world he or she likes. It is disappointing, therefore, that so many turn to some caricatured version of the European middle ages, complete with male primogeniture, arranged marriages, male-dominated religion and all the rest of it. And generally there are taverns with serving wenches and brothels and the emperor's harem, and all the usual paraphernalia. Maybe it's just laziness, who knows, but given that these authors can be endlessly creative with monsters and plot twists and magic systems, is it asking so much that they at least think about what sort of society they are creating, rather than regurgitating the whole cliché?

Then there are the roles women are playing in the story. This is not just a matter of character roles, like the princess, witch, warrior babe, whore and so on, but how they impact on the plot. Is the princess there for the hero to fall in love with, or is she actually moving her own armies around? Is the sorceress standing on the battlefield hurling spells at the enemy or even the enemy herself, or is she just required to spout the prophecy that initiates the hero's journey? Is the warrior babe actually fighting alongside the men, or is she there just to get injured or captured, and need to be rescued? And does she hang up her sword with relief when the men come along?

These two issues - of women's place in the created world, and the role they play in the story - are related, but they are not the same. It's perfectly possible for an author to create a traditional medieval world, and yet have female characters who are intelligent, spirited and act on their own initiative (which is to say, normal). Equally, the created world can be twelve kinds of awesome, and yet relegate women to no more than bit-parts designed to motivate the main characters (men). But it does seem to me that if an author starts with the idea that women are confined to passive roles and subordinate to men in their invented world, it's going to be that bit more challenging to make them act independently.

I've mentioned three examples above where I felt women were treated properly, all by female authors, and one, by a male author, which was different. I don't want to make any generalisations from that, or suggest that those four are particularly representative of their gender. There are male authors who write wonderful, fully autonomous female roles, Daniel Abraham, for one (in all his books). Chris Wooding's Braided Path trilogy had several good solid female roles, who drove the plot just as much as the men, if not more. George R R Martin manages to create females in his A Song Of Ice And Fire series who are every bit as devious, selfish and amoral as their male counterparts. And if you want examples of the reverse, of female authors writing submissive and subservient women, I would suggest a look at any number of paranormal romances, the popularity of which is unnerving evidence that a lot of women really like the idea of a creepy undead blood-sucking boyfriend. Eeww.

In contrast, the urban fantasy sub-genre is also becoming the natural home to one particular kind of feisty fantasy heroine, the semi-naked leather-clad young woman toting an array of guns and knives (according to the cover), who spends her life chasing down demons and ghouls and various not-really-human enemies. This may seem at first sight to be similar to the vampire-loving heroine, but in one kind the woman is often a victim, needing male help to survive, whereas in the other kind the woman is a kickass Buffy-style heroine, albeit with a (largely male) Scooby gang. A sort of ultra-warrior-babe, which is fine as long as she really is acting independently and not just following a male agenda, Charlie's-Angels-style.

It is perhaps significant that so many of these feisty women pop up in urban fantasy, which is mostly set in the present day, and not so much in epic or traditional fantasy, which usually has a low-technology, often historical, backdrop. In a modern setting, active, self-motivated women are a perfect fit, but virtually all historical settings, no matter the location or type of culture, tend to have the sort of hierarchical social structure which leaves women at the bottom of the rankings. This does make it more difficult to create female characters who act independently. A princess in such a society has to sit at home in her castle with her tapestry waiting for her prince to carry her off (so that she can spend the rest of her life in his castle with her tapestry, of course), so how is she supposed to go off on that quest to find the magic thingummybob? She can't do it without breaking away from the strictures of her society - becoming a rebel, in other words. Or else a bloke tells her to do it. It's not impossible for authors to find ways round the problem, but it takes some ingenuity.

From an author's point of view, it's a lot of bother to create a world in which women have true equality. There are a lot of details to be taken into account. Education, for instance - are boys and girls raised and taught equally? What about contraception and child-rearing - science fiction can remove reproduction from the equation altogether with futuristic technology, but fantasy can't assume such things. Then there's the matter of choice in sexuality, sex partners and pregnancy - how much freedom will women (and men) have in this created world? And - a big question - who looks after the children? Then there are working roles - will women have the right to maternity leave of some sort? And even without the issue of children, how much freedom will anyone, men and women alike, have to take on any job they feel drawn to? How do economic constraints affect things? Will they even be paid for their work? All these things need to be thought about, even if not every detail finds its way into the story. It's easy to understand why authors shy away from all that bother, and buy into a simple, easily-understood template, like the feudal system.

Yet it does seem strange to me that an author who will spend many hours devising (say) an intricate magic system, or multiple religions, or complex political tapestries, or a whole array of weird and wonderful non-human creatures, will spend no time at all thinking about the role of women in that created world. They will simply be dumped into the time-honoured roles - princess, witch, whore, warrior-babe. Sometimes this is deliberate, of course, as with Michael J Sullivan's Riyria Revelations series, where he set out from the start to create a very traditional type of fantasy, as a counterpoint to the newer gritty style. And sometimes an author will acknowledge the issue, but not want to divert too much attention away from the story, so there will be an occasional female guard (say) to demonstrate the gender neutrality of the created world. This is all fine - so long as an author has thought about the problem, and not simply bought mindlessly into the whole medieval subservient female scenario. Not every book has to have a gender-neutral society, and stories about global conflict and vast battling armies are going to be more towards the testosterone end of the spectrum anyway.

But fantasy has one major card up its sleeve for female equality, and that is magic. If a character can simply recite a spell or wave a wand or wiggle their fingers to unleash great powers, then there is no reason why the reciter or waver or wiggler shouldn't be a woman. And, unlike Galadriel, there is also no reason why she shouldn't be out there in the thick of the action. A witch (or sorceress or wizardess or female mage) can defend herself as well as her male counterpart, she can be just as aggressive if need be and she can leave all the sword-wielding to the men, if she wants to. As mentioned, powerful female characters with magical powers turn up in urban fantasy, set in the modern world, but they work just as well in more traditional fantasy too. It's a get-out-of-jail-free card for authors, because it allows them to create truly independent female characters while retaining the conventional medieval backdrop (if they want to).

The ultimate question is whether it really matters. The patriarchal society has been with us for millenia in virtually all cultures, so fantasy is only reflecting the real world, after all. Even in today's world, where many countries have enshrined equality in law, the reality is not quite like that, and there are still many countries which are unapologetically unequal. Fantasy doesn't even have to reflect the real world anyway; one of its virtues is precisely that it's an escape from reality. So perhaps there's no reason to agonise over it. Fantasy doesn't have to be an equal opportunities employer. No one is going to insist that every book has as many female as male characters, that a fantasy army is fifty percent female or that every evil witch is balanced by an evil wizard (or a good witch, for that matter). Authors have the creative right to tell their stories however they feel is best, even if that means that the troop of heroic questers is all male. It doesn't really matter, does it?

Everyone will take their own position on the question, but my own feeling is that, yes, it matters, at least in some areas. It matters that the proportion of male to female fantasy authors reflects the readers of the genre. It matters how women fit into a created world. It matters how women are incorporated into the story. No one would (or should) insist authors follow strict guidelines, but it matters that fantasy readers and authors and publishers are aware of the decisions they make, and ask themselves the difficult questions: why is this character male or female? would it matter if the gender was different? is that female character acting like a real woman would, or is she just there as support for the men? should the next book I read or review or publish be by a female author? And in the end, that is probably as much as we can expect at this point in history - that authors (and the rest of the publishing world) be aware of the pitfalls and consider their creative decisions with the greatest care.

I have to say that I think the future is quite rosy. Yes, there are plenty of dinosaurs around who think that women have no business writing fantasy (or anything else, for that matter). There are plenty of fantasy books filled with dynamic male protagonists and timid, helpless females, who only get active after they've been raped. There are plenty of fantasy books with virtually no women in them at all. But there are also shining beacons of hope, who write about real women acting intelligently and independently. There are bloggers and authors and readers discussing these subjects in depth. And there is, I believe, a whole generation coming into the fantasy field who regard gender equality as normal, who write wonderful stories with heroines who run businesses or countries, use magic adeptly, organise armies, educate themselves and others, have realistic relationships with men or women who respect them, and manage to raise families while doing it. Fantasy women are finally emerging from the high tower and the brothel and the kitchen, and taking their place alongside men. If you doubt that, you only have to look back to Tolkien and the others of his era, and compare that fantasy with the work of Höst and Larke and Rule and Abraham and many others. There's still a long way to go, but fantasy is getting there.

[A footnote on historical realities] I have not said much here about the historical accuracy of portrayals of the medieval period in fantasy, since it's not germane to my point - whether an author's chosen setting is true to history or not, there is still plenty of scope for women to be portrayed in a full range of characterisations, from fully independent to totally subservient, as their creator wishes. But author Daniel Abraham has an interesting blogpost on the subject here.

Review: 'Babylon Steel' by Gaie Sebold

This one is right on the cusp of fantasy and sci-fi - a city filled with alien races, surrounded by portals to other planes which come and go mysteriously, and are not understood by anyone. Is this magic or a lost technology? But there is a certain amount of magic in this universe, both learned and innate, and gods and demi-gods as well. There is enough inventiveness here to satisfy the needs of the most demanding of fantasy world connoisseurs, with languages and bizarre races and strange mannerisms and belief systems splattered around with gay abandon. Fey folk? Check. Were-beasts? Check. Lizard people? Check. Caterpillary things? Check. Fades, who didn't quite make it through a portal? Yep, got them too. And sex. Lots of sex, everyone having sex with everyone else, furred, scaled or feathered, male, female or hermaphrodite. So if you think mildly graphic lizard/human sex would turn your stomach, this is not the book for you.

The book has two different threads which (and this isn't giving much away) blend together quite early on, and each illuminates the other rather well. The main thread, as it were, that of brothel-keeper Babylon, quickly develops into a sort of find-the-missing-girl mystery, which conveniently takes her into every nook and cranny of the extraordinary city of Scalentine, so we get to hang out in a lot of bars and brothels and unsavoury back-street locations, and meet many of the city's weird inhabitants. This is quite fun, up to a point, but after a while it becomes really difficult to keep the various characters straight. Is this the lizardy one or the one with cute little wings? Or maybe the one whose portal magic went wrong and left him a sort of emotion-sucking vampire? Boy, there are some weird things (people? creatures?) in this book. Thank goodness for the Kindle search facility.

Scalentine feels very real - a truly vibrant melting pot of cultures, without the chaotic and dismal nature of many fantasy settings. Yes, there are scams and thieves and the occasional murder, but the citizens are (mostly) protected by a quite efficient administration. It feels like a rather civilised place, on the whole, although I thought the Red Lantern was a little too laid back to be a well-run business. No wonder it was in some financial difficulties. But the names - ! Previous? A pair of bondage specialists called Cruel and Unusual? Chief Bitternut?? Enthemmerlee??? Fantasy names are always difficult, but still...

The main plot of the missing girl quickly got tedious but fortunately the focus of the second thread, the Avatars of Tiresana, takes over and things get more lively. There are also a number of minor mysteries sprinkled throughout the book to keep things bubbling along. And yes, everything builds to a suitably dramatic finale, and if sometimes the uncovering of vital information felt just a little too convenient and glib, and if the ending was a little underwhelming, and if Babylon was just a little bit too resourceful and implausibly popular, it's easy enough to get swept along in the excitement and just enjoy the ride. This is not a book where an overly critical and logical mind is called for.

This is a fun read, a hugely imaginative piece of work, with vivid characters (even the ones with tails or tusks or issues with full moons), and a good pacy story (or cluster of stories, really - there's a lot going on), and the author manages to take several swipes at organised religion along the way. I liked the chatty first person narration, which brings out Babylon's self-confidence mixed with moments of terror perfectly, and is often very funny. I thought the two parallel threads, Scalentine and Tiresana, worked brilliantly to add depth to the story. I'm not quite sure where things go from here - a pointer to a possible sequel was squeezed in rather clumsily at the end, but whether this is going to be a trilogy or a series isn't clear. Whatever it turns out to be, this is a great start to it - four stars.

Review: 'From A Far Land' by G David Walker

This was a free book that attracted me because it starts in Scotland (where I live), an unusual feature for a fantasy story. I'm not sure what the relevance, if any, is to the plot, because the lead character is American, but it makes a refreshing change. By contrast, the basic premise is nothing out of the ordinary - a seventeen year old boy finds a portal in a ruined house which transports him to - a parallel universe or another plane of existence, somewhere very different, anyway. Oh, and there's a prophecy, apparently. More interestingly, this other place, Teleria, has suffered a catastrophic war long before (it sounds rather nuclear, actually), which not only created the usual devastation, but opened up rifts in the fabric of space, thus connecting with other dimensions. This, combined with the (presumed) radiation, has knocked out advanced technology, allowed all sorts of stuff, good and bad, to leak through from other dimensions and left Teleria with a number of non-human sentient races, as well as some seriously weird animal and plant life. And magic, although, rather nicely, it has a different name. This is much more intriguing than the usual dull pseudo-medieval backdrop, and gives the book an almost sci-fi feel.

The portal-leading-somewhere-bizarre is not an original idea, but it's a very effective strategy. The hapless victim can express his (and our) bewilderment and ask all the right questions, and whoever's on the other side (a Loremaster in this case) can explain some essential background information to him (and us). There's also the potential for some wonderful culture clash moments, and the author plays this up beautifully. There are some terrific laugh out loud moments - I love a book which makes me laugh. It's not just the amusement of hearing the Telerians trying to pronounce Missouri ("Misery? What a dreadful name!") or understand basketball ("... you do battle to establish dominance..."), the real fun is in the trickle of American teenager-isms ("I think my weird-o-meter is broken"), which runs on throughout the book.

The created world is not as detailed as some, but it feels plausibly alien, and I like the way the reader is gently reminded that this is a very different place by little snippets here and there - odd bits of other languages, references to a sixdays instead of a week, and a quarter day's journey instead of hours or miles, for instance (and it varies according to whose point of view we are in, which is brilliant attention to detail). All the strange creatures are well described, and are different enough to be interesting. I particularly liked the mysterious Shanthi, with their invisibility and strange code of honour. And the fighting pack animals seem like a very useful idea. There's quite a lot of history behind Teleria's current state of play, and sometimes the info-dumps seemed a bit heavy handed. We really don't need to know every last detail. Leaving some things mysterious can be more fun sometimes than having everything out in the open.

The magic system is nothing very special - almost everyone has some ability, it involves a bit of finger-waggling, some focus and passion, apparently, and the most adept can do pretty much anything - flame throwing, mind-reading, healing, defensive shields, you name it. I'm not a big fan of these kinds of almost unlimited abilities with the wave of a hand, I much prefer more elegant means of spell-casting (like the air-writing in Brandon Sanderson's Elantris, for example), or a single ability (such as the water-shifting in Glenda Larke's Stormlords trilogy, which the characters used in an amazing variety of ways). And frankly, it's just too convenient when people can be healed of almost any wound. But that's just my personal preference, there's nothing wrong with the arrangement here, and it's used consistently. And I very much like that magic is a post-apocalyptic feature, which also created a few people with super-powers, the Altered (but let's call them gods, for short). This is ingenious.

[ETA: I've been a little unjust here; there are a number of 'orders', each of which specialises in some aspect of magic - healing,animal life, metallurgy and so on. So it's not really as much of a free-for-all as I imply.]

The characters don't have a great deal of complexity, but then the book is (presumably) aimed at a young adult audience. I felt, though, that everyone was too black and white - the good guys were almost too nice, honourable, honest and kind to children, and the bad guys were too evil, razing villages to the ground just for the hell of it and bent on the inevitable global domination. A few shades of grey, or more complicated motives perhaps, would have lifted the book to a new level. And sometimes the tone becomes too overtly moralising and heavy-handed. But there were hints of something more interesting in the mistrustful relationships between some of the races - humans and Shanthi, for instance, and Ferrin and Yellowtooth. I would be interested to know more about that. By contrast, the gloriously mismatched trio of Gatlor, Seerka and Calador got along well, and their verbal sparring in the midst of battle was a highpoint. I also liked the Loremasters - their formality with each other, and their dithering over what to do with Jason, which felt very human (even though not all of them were!).

One other aspect that's absolutely note-perfect is the varying dialogue for the different characters and races. Reyga the Loremaster is done particularly well - a formal style of speech that never tips into the absurd. And Jason, the seventeen year old, never loses his Americanism and behaves exactly as you'd expect someone of his age and background to behave - he's sensible without being unnaturally intelligent, assertive without aggression and (sometimes) plain bewildered without becoming stupid. Even Bothan's Scottish accent sounded fine to me, and that's a hard one to get right.

The story itself is a real cracker, not an original plot but very well done. I was drawn in from the very first sentence, and from then on the pace moves relentlessly. Actually, sometimes it almost felt too fast. There were jumps of hours or days when I felt taking things a little more slowly could have given the book more depth, by expanding our knowledge of the characters, for instance, or allowing the reader to savour this strange world, or simply showing how Jason was feeling about things. The author does a good job of conveying Jason's bewilderment when he first arrives in Teleria, and occasionally when things get really weird, but I would have liked to know more about his reactions as the group travelled toward's Lore's Haven, for instance - there's very little description of the villages or the surrounding countryside, and it's all a bit dry. It must have seemed very strange to Jason, yet he seems to accept everything very quickly.

I very much liked the way the whole story is sprinkled with mysteries and unanswered questions from start to (almost) finish. As one question is answered, another two or three spring up straight away. It's never obvious who Jason can trust, and who might be working for the other side - or even which side IS the other side! And there's the usual problem with teenage-boy-with-unexpected-powers stories - why? How did Jason end up being so important?

There are some plot contrivances that stretch credibility somewhat. The information Nyala gives Jason, for instance, which is conveniently forgotten and then 'remembered' at key moments. The so-useful ability to 'see' auras. And the extremely capable Lenai seems to turn into a helpless female at crucial moments, such as the early attack by the Trellin, and more particularly her meeting with Reyga - this is someone who can make herself invisible, after all, and is a trained warrior, how could she possibly find herself in that situation? She would simply have disappeared the instant she felt threatened. Or, if she were sensible, she would never have been visible at all.

The ending feels satisfying on a number of levels, and although there are no great surprises in the actual outcome, the way things are achieved is rather slick. And, as is customary, while the story is complete in itself, it sets everything up very nicely for the sequel. I thoroughly enjoyed this book, tearing through it in a couple of days because I just couldn't put it down! It's not a particularly deep affair, and sometimes the writing style was a bit dry and factual, but as a straightforwardly entertaining tale, it can't be beaten. Four stars.

Review: 'A Death in Beverley Hills' by David Grace

Another free ebook download, but this one is rather good. Yes, it's got its fair share of typos, but mostly it's a missing or extra word here and there rather than spelling errors or grammatical howlers, so it didn't impinge on my enjoyment too much. In fact, the few spelling mistakes were actually quite funny. The author obviously has trouble with double consonants, so there were a lot of scared tables and shinny clothes and so forth, which was quite entertaining. Well, it amused me.

The plot revolves around an ex-cop called in to reinvestigate the murder of a celebrity's wife, but since the ex-cop's wife was also murdered, there are echoes of the previous case. The style is confusing at first - there are here-and-now scenes, scenes recalled from the present murder's investigation and flashbacks to the ex-cop's past, all jumbled up without much explanation, but you get used to it after a while. It would have helped, though, to have some more memorable names - Steve, Tom, Greg, Simon... they're just too easy to mix up. Even the author gets them mixed up occasionally. The author has a habit, too, of using both first name and surname interchangeably: "Steve said... Janson nodded..." sometimes in the same paragraph, but you get used to that, too, in time.

The first half of the book is quite slow. The ex-cop reads the investigation files and sometimes visits the key people in the case, and it may seem as if nothing much is happening here, but I really liked the subtle way characters are built up in layers, and events are revealed piece by piece. If you pay attention, too, there are all sorts of clues as to what really happened - or are they just red herrings? I found myself devising possible scenarios in my head - always a good sign in this kind of book.

The characters had more depth than is usual for a murder mystery. The cops all tended to come from the same cookie cutter - brusque, wise-cracking, macho types, but the women were more varied and less predictable, and the accused was a wonderful mixture of bravado and sheer stupidity. The ex-cop's history was interesting, and there's a thought-provoking theme on the question of justice - not just the commonplace one of ensuring that the innocent are not unfairly convicted, but the more awkward one of when (or whether) it's acceptable to take the law into your own hands, and how a civilised society deals with that.

It surprised me that this book has received quite a few critical reviews in some places. It's not perfect, it needs some solid editing and it's not great literature, but then it doesn't pretend to be. It did exactly what I expected of it - created a satisfyingly tangled plot and characters who behave believably, without depending on car chases or gun fights or unlikely coincidences. In the end, the identity of the killer was very logical without being blindingly obvious, and didn't come out of left field in the final chapter. Too many authors use sleight of hand to conceal vital clues, allowing them to reveal the killer with a triumphant flourish at the end. My only complaint is that I found the courtroom scenes an unnecessarily drawn-out extension to the plot, and I suspect the author was overly focussed on the visual dramatics of a possible film version. It made the ending a little simpler than it could have been. But it was still good exciting stuff, a thoroughly enjoyable read. Four stars.

Review: '99 Reasons Why' by Caroline Smailes

This is a weird book, in several ways. It's written in the first person by a young woman who's obviously several sandwiches short of a picnic, and set in the sort of estate most of us are thankful we never have to live in. From the argot, I presume it's around Newcastle, but with few changes it could be any major city in Britain. Warning to those averse to bad language - there's a lot of it here, and also some moderately graphic sex, but it's totally in character and not gratuitous.

The protagonist writes as she would speak. Random sample: "The leaflet'd come through the door with that free Herald local newspaper. The newspaper'd been pushed through the door and left on the mat for a couple of days. I pick it up and two leaflets fall out. One's a leaflet offering a free garlic bread if you buy two pizzas from Nice Kebab. It's all glossy. I go in the front room and give the leaflet to me dad." And so on. Now, this could get seriously tedious, but somehow it has the same oddly hypnotic pull of the TV in the corner of the pub showing some random European football game or a quiz show - you just can't tear yourself away. Not sure how it would play with non-Brits, mind.

So I more or less got drawn into it, and as the story goes along, the complexities of life on the estate and the family life of Kate, the protagonist, became more interesting. There's a sort of horrified fascination at all the goings on, which are fairly bizarre but just close enough to most people's idea of sink estate life to be credible (which I suspect may not bear any resemblance to real life). It's a testament to the author's skill that she makes these slightly cartoonish people real enough to generate genuine pathos. Of course, since Kate isn't all there, there's also the amusement for the reader of working out the tensions and undercurrents and relationships that sail blithely over her head. So none of the endings come as much of a shock.

And that brings me to the book's big gimmick. Each chapter is titled as one of the 99 reasons ("21: the reason why I'm square" for example), but after number 88, there's a mini questionnaire, where you pick a colour, a number and an object, and are then given one of 11 possible endings. There are 9 in the book, another one on the author's website, and the final one will be hand-written and auctioned for charity. On the Kindle, you can choose a different ending if you like, and it's also possible to simply page past the questionnaire and read all the possible endings, one after the other. [Note: on the iPad version, there's a wheel to spin to get an ending, but I don't know whether you can see them all). They vary from happy ever after to - well, less happy. There's a certain amount of overlap, obviously, but all of them fit perfectly well with what's gone before.

Now this is all very clever, and the publishers are marketing the book as state of the art, new use of technology and all that, so that ebook readers get the ending they want. Which is nonsense, of course. Links in ebooks are very nice, but they aren't exactly a quantum leap away from 'turn to page 99' in a printed book. And as for getting the ending you want, what you actually get is completely random. Maybe there's some deep psychological theory as to why one combination gets you an upbeat ending and another gets you something tragic, but since you can immediately go off and read a different ending, it hardly matters.

The real problem with this sort of strategy is that it completely destroys any suspension of disbelief. Yes, of course we all know that there's no Kate Jones, no mam, no Uncle Phil, no Andy Douglas. But the whole point of telling a story is to make us knowingly go along with the pretence that there is, to the extent that we can feel real emotion for these completely imaginary characters. As soon as an author says: well, I could have a real prince come along and sweep the heroine off her feet, or I could have them all wiped out by a meteor (not a spoiler), what do you think? Well, then it just becomes an academic exercise. The bubble has burst. I'm sure this was an interesting challenge for the author to write, and it's definitely a marketable technique (I bought the book because of it, after all), but I really don't think it works for the story. Some of those endings would have been very affecting to read, had they been the only one, but being one of many reduces the impact.

On the plus side, the story is absorbing (up to the alternative endings, anyway), it's well written and the characters are genuinely interesting and (on some level) emotionally engaging. But the gimmicky multiple endings drag it down to three stars.

Review: 'Treespeaker' by Katie W Stewart

This was another free book, although I have no idea where I got it from (it's still cheap on Amazon). I've learned to be wary of freebies, but there's no need with this one - it's a charming and absorbing story, well-written and thankfully also well-edited. It's a quiet tale of one man and his son trying to protect their people's way of life from encroaching outsiders. Those with a liking for action should look elsewhere; there are no battles, no sword fights and not a single buckle is swashed.

I very much liked the setting - a gentle society living (rather idealistically, it must be said) in harmony with their forest, protected by their god Arrakesh and his mouthpiece Jakan, the Treespeaker of the title. It's probably not a realistic way of life (acorn bread?? and how do they manage to find so much firewood without impacting the forest?) but then this is fantasy. The most disappointing aspect, for me, was the traditional division of labour - men hunt and collect firewood and mend the roof, women tend goats and vegetables, and cook and sew. But at least the women could become Elders, which is something, I suppose. But I would have liked a little more information about the lifestyle of the Arrakeshi. And a map - fantasy is always better with a map, in my opinion (I did eventually find a rather sketchy one on one of the author's numerous websites/blogs).

The story is, it has to be said, somewhat simplistic. The Arrakeshi, with their principle of living in harmony with the forest, are definitely the good guys, and Carlika, the world outside, is the Big Bad, set on eliminating or enslaving the Arrakeshi and exploiting the forest resources. And although some attempt is made to justify these actions (they are forced to use slaves to dig for coal because they destroyed all their own forests, slavers have to earn a crust too and so on), it's fairly half-hearted. Carlika itself is rather glossed over - there are roads and farms and towns and villages, but the story jumps quickly from one place to another, and Jakan's reactions to this strange environment are only sparsely described. Since he has never left the forest before, it should feel more alien to him, yet this seldom comes across.

The magic systems used by the two societies are equally differentiated. The Arrakeshi have a Treespeaker for each tribe, who is in communication with the god Arrakesh through the forest itself, and follow orders regarding the number of deer they can hunt each year, and so on, to maintain a proper balance. The Treespeaker also has healing powers, augmented by a special kind of stone. The Carlikans have a more destructive kind of magic, which can control minds, create fire, fell trees and generally wreak havoc.

The characters are not overly deep, but they do have a certain quirky charm. I would have liked to see some of the female roles given more screen-time, rather than being used as background characters to help or motivate the leading men, or simply to move the plot along. The two main characters, Jakan and his son Dovan, would have worked just as well as women, I think. But it's a minor point, and some of the older women are interesting - Megda and Hekja, for instance. And all the characters are realistic mixtures of good and bad impulses.

The plot gets a little contrived towards the end, or maybe it's intended to be allegorical or some such, who knows. It could have done with a slightly slower pace, too. There was a lot of Jakan's journey that was just passed over, and in no time we were back in the forest. I understand the author's desire to get to the climax, but the whole quest seemed all too easy, somehow. In particular, he found Varyd without the slightest bother. The final confrontation produced a few nice twists, but generally the outcome was very much as you would expect, with some unexpected magical events (close to deus ex machina at points) to help things along, and everything set up nicely for a sequel (although this reads perfectly well as a stand-alone).

It's not a profound book, and some of the 'you just got to have faith' and 'there has to be balance' messages were layered on with a trowel. As the author says: "This is not a book about good versus evil. This is a book about belonging, balance and belief." OK, we get it. It is also a very readable, straightforward story of one man struggling to do the right thing, even when he isn't quite sure what that is. I found it a great page-turner, with emotionally engaging characters, a heart-wrenching problem for them to solve and an intriguing, if not overly detailed, setting. An enjoyable read. Somewhere between three and four stars, but I'll be generous, so let's say four.

Review: 'Painless' by Derek Ciccone

This was a free book I picked up in my early Kindle days, and it's still cheap. It was in Amazon's top 100 free list for months, which is a good sign. There are two separate strands to the plot. The first is about a family with an unusual child, and Billy, who arrives to rent their cottage, and this part is very readable. The characters are not perfectly drawn, and some are more fleshed out than others, but they do feel more real than is usual in a book of this type, and they all have some serious history which gives them a bit of depth. Billy in particular is an interesting character, and there are intriguing mysteries in his past.

The other strand is about a secret military-type organisation, and this I found much less interesting. The focus is very much US-centric, with a great deal about Vietnam, Iraq, Iran and 9/11, and there are lengthy quotes from Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, and generally a lot of patriotism swilling about. Nothing wrong with any of that, naturally, but it seemed as if the author was using these events to create a certain emotional response and that doesn't play quite so well to those of us outside the US. It is also a somewhat clichéd plotline, with a predictable outcome.

The book's style strikes me as something a beginning author would produce - a little clunky, not really flowing, lacking self-confidence and over-heavy with the imagery, as if the author has taken a few creative writing classes, and hasn't quite developed his own voice. Frequently he explains or even repeats what has just been said in dialogue, as if not trusting the reader to follow along, even though there's nothing terribly convoluted in the plot. The pacing feels a little off, too - there are long descriptive or exposition passages, not all of which seem relevant. There are quite a few minor typos, but no worse than many such self-published books.

The major drawback is credibility. The fundamental premise is that the family would take on an unknown man, not just as a lodger, but also as a more or less full time child carer for Carolyn, the four-year-old girl, without checking his background or asking any proper questions. It would have been interesting, I think, to read about the first meeting between Billy and the parents to see just what took place and why they felt able to trust him, but although the author wrote this part, he edited most of it out. It would have been more believable, I think, if Billy had been around for a while - as a long-standing tenant, or perhaps employed as a groundsman or some such - and then got called upon to babysit later.

And then - the big stumbling block for me - after numerous incidents where Carolyn has been injured on Billy's watch, and after she was almost snatched from her home, he leaves her on her own while he chases after a potential kidnapper. No, I don't think so. No one could possibly be that stupid - could they? But then her parents are pretty stupid too - they let their feel-no-pain reckless daughter run about the wilderness with sparklers. And sometimes you wonder if Billy is really all there. Having chased a guy across Montreal and tracked him down to a bar, he sits watching his quarry and eating a meal until the guy gets up to leave, when - surprise! - the chase begins all over again. Why wait? And if he doesn't want to approach him directly, why not use the waitress to take a message?

I confess that I began to lose interest at this point and started skimming to get to the end. This is not a bad book, if you like this sort of thing, and the plot is neatly worked out most of the time, although the characters have to do some crazy things sometimes to get it moving in the right direction. But the writing isn't strong enough to create any real tension or excitement, the twists are visible from five miles away and the ending was never in doubt. Even the big reveal about Billy's past was hardly a surprise. Ultimately, it wasn't for me, but those who don't mind the illogicalities and the obvious plotlines and the endless descriptions of banal meals and clothing might enjoy it. Two stars.

Review: 'Cat's Eye' by Margaret Atwood

This is an astonishing book, at a number of different levels. The surface story is of Elaine, a middle-aged artist who returns to her childhood home of Toronto for an exhibition of her work, which activates all sorts of long-buried feelings and memories, but as a summary, that doesn't even come close to capturing the essence. The approach is first person present tense ("I stand in the snow...", "I walk up the street...") for describing both present and past, which sounds confusing, but actually the switches in time cause only the slightest joggle before the mind adjusts. Using the same style for all eras of Elaine's life also works brilliantly to underscore one of Atwood's major points - that "Time is not a line, but a dimension, like the dimensions in space. If you can bend space you can bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light you could travel backwards in time and exist in two places at once."

The prose is literate without ever being flowery or overblown, and Atwood has an uncanny skill for choosing exactly the perfect word every time. Whatever a reader may think of the story or themes, the book is a delight to read purely for the precision of the writing. Atwood writes with a painter's eye. "We wear long wool coats with tie belts, the collars turned up to look like those of movie stars, and rubber boots with the tops folded down and men's work socks inside. In our pockets are stuffed the kerchiefs our mothers make us wear but that we take off as soon as we're out of their sight. We scorn head-coverings. Our mouths are tough, crayon-red, shiny as nails. We think we are friends." And, like a painter, she carefully builds a picture of Elaine's life, brush-stroke by brush-stroke, layer by layer, to create a nuanced depth of character.

There are many different themes that resonate throughout the book. The art world. Gender roles and how women interract differently with men and women. The feminist movement. Childhood and adulthood. The nature of time. The casual cruelty of adults towards children and of children towards each other. The need for resolution. Science and art. Atwood takes sly digs at Toronto, old and new, and the modern world generally. Undoubtedly there are many more layers that whizzed over my head.

At a personal level, I felt an unusually strong affinity for the lead character. Certain aspects of her childhood life resonated with my own. Not that I was ever bullied, but the sense of dislocation from those around you, the desire to fit in at all costs and not make waves, the lack of connection with a childhood home and the unexpected connection with somewhere quite different (in Elaine's case it was Vancouver: "...as far away from Toronto as I could get without drowning", in my case Scotland). And I liked that Elaine was on the outside just a rather ordinary middle-aged woman, but her art seethed with violent emotions (not directly like me, there, but I can understand it).

But even without any personal connection, this book is a wondrous affair, every line a joy to read. The story itself is fairly slight, but the undertones have as much depth as the reader cares to draw out. And if it sounds dry, it's not, it's salted with humour that had me laughing out loud many times. I highly recommend it. Five stars.

Review: 'The Order of the Scales' by Stephen Deas

Again, this third book of the trilogy starts where the previous one left off, with the war still going on and the rogue dragon Snow still working to free more of her dragon pals from human slavery. The author's strength is in action, and there's no shortage of it here. The dragon/human battles are terrific, and Deas constantly reminds us of the dragons' vastly superior size and strength - the earth shaking as they land, the turbulance in the air when they take off, the heat and smoke when they spit flames, and the numerous ways in which they can kill humans without even trying. He captures the physicality of riding them brilliantly too.

Unfortunately, the action seems to be a substitute here for a coherent story. The one truly interesting story - the dragons, their ways and their history, and dealing with the escaped Snow - is muddied by various distractions, such as the ill-fated religious uprising, and the political in-fighting between the royal families which culminated in a disastrous war. This ensures that the final confrontation with the rogue dragons is a desperate battle for survival, but it's hard to believe that the dragon kings and queens can be quite so stupid. To be honest, everyone comes across as stupid, dragons and humans alike, which is a pretty nihilistic world view, it has to be said.

Creating realistic characters or relationships has not been the author's strongest suit in this series, but the surviving characters have built some history over the course of the trilogy, and thereby acquired at least a little depth. For some of them, in fact, there are the beginnings of something more profound. Kemir's wavering between suicidal bravado and survival at all costs never seemed totally believable, but it does give his character an edge of pathos. And, astonishingly, I had a lot of sympathy for Jehal in this book. It's bad enough to be shot at by your mother-in-law, but to be taunted for being a cripple by the man who put the crossbow in her hands is a bit rich. I'm still not quite sure whether he cares more for his wife or his lover, though. It seems to depend a great deal on which one is with him and available, and therefore boring, and which is believed dead or held prisoner, and needs to be avenged or retrieved, and is therefore more desireable. The grass is always greener, I suppose.

The ending is not one of those uplifting, heartwarming, victory-against-all-odds affairs. This is not really a spoiler, because anyone who has read the first two books will know all about the author's wanton destructive tendencies. Towards the end, there was a real question in my mind as to whether even one main character or eyrie or tower would be left standing at the finish. As I said in my reviews of the previous two books, I think it's a dangerous strategy for an author to wilfully kill or maim quite so many main characters, since it tends to disconnect the reader - what's the point in getting invested in a character who might die at any moment? And these are not satisfying redemptive deaths, or even (it seems) essential for the overall plot, rather they are simply throw-away moments, not even shocking after so many previous examples. Characters simply disappear without trace, or are presumed to be dead. Sometimes they turn out to be alive after all, only to die for real a few pages further on, or else they survive endless trauma only to be casually dispatched with hardly a mention. At least one disappeared without my noticing at all. Maybe this is all meant to be a Terribly Clever Commentary (life's a bitch and then you get squashed by a dragon, maybe?), but I got tired of it pretty quickly.

At the end there were enough dangling plot-threads to knit quite a long scarf. Like who did steal the white dragon, for instance. Actually, I thought we solved that in book one, but obviously I was wrong. How the magic spear works. Who or what the Silver Kings really are, and their relationship with the Taiytakei. Why they wanted dragons, and why (since they had some seriously powerful magic) they couldn't just take them. Actually, the whole magic system was a mess, a real hotch-potch of this and that, none of it made clear or apparently connected to anything else. It felt as if we needed another book just to join all the dots (assuming they could be joined).

And then there were the motivations: I was never very clear exactly why all the dragon-kings and queens were so hell-bent on war, and so ignorant (or perhaps careless) of the threat of the rogue dragons. I get that a lot of knowledge had been lost over the years, or had degenerated into myth and legend, and I also get the secrecy of the alchemists, but the whole point of a multiple realms arrangement is to prevent this kind of collective madness (checks and balances, and so forth). But maybe they were just too inbred after centuries of intermarrying. And as for the dragons, revenge isn't a very clever strategy either (and although they said that wasn't their objective, it's hard to think of another word for what they did). Once free of human enslavement, they should have been planning for their own future: finding safe, hidden eyries, and working out that the best way to provide themselves with a reliable food supply is to nurture the humans who breed the cattle. So not a lot of intelligence on display on either side.

There's a great deal to enjoy in this book. The battles are terrific, and if you like dragon action, this is definitely the series for you. The dragons are brilliant, actually. Daft, very often, but brilliant. The pacing is better this time, with less backstory to be shoehorned in, so that the action lurches page-turningly from battle to town burning to confrontation to battle again with hardly a pause for breath. There are also some laugh out loud moments, some deliciously spiteful exchanges and a wedding that ranks up there with one or two of George R R Martin's (no, no, not that one - and not that one either - Tyrion's, maybe, or Littlefinger's, in terms of gloriously mismatched but very funny couplings). This ought to have been a good four stars, but for me it never quite lived up to the promise of the first of the trilogy, and the muddled ending and the cavalier treatment of so many characters holds it down. If I'd cared much about any of the characters I'd knock this back to two stars out of spite at what the author did to them, but let's say three stars for the action and humour. And the dragons, of course. Gotta love the dragons.

Review: 'The King of the Crags' by Stephen Deas

The second book of a trilogy is always intriguing. Will there be a change of tempo or a new direction, or will it simply carry on from the first book? In this case, the answer is - both. The prologue overlaps directly with the last section of book one, and is perhaps the second best opening I've ever encountered after 'Tigana', although - obviously - for very different reasons. It's funny and tragic at once, it summarises some of the story so far while also capturing the essence of the characters involved. I won't spoil the surprise by saying any more, but it is brilliantly funny, in a macabre sort of way.

And then it's straight into new characters, new directions, a new religion even, and the fallout from book one, and - hmm, suddenly it's all a bit dull. Whenever the dragons are around, it's terrific, but I'm just not that into the humans. Trouble is, they're either very mad or very shallow, and all of them are slightly flat, and when it's just the same old deviousness as in book one, it feels a bit repetitious.

The fast pace of the first book is much more uneven here, so that there are moments of breathtaking action interspersed with long passages of quite dull description ('To the north, he could see... And to the east...'). Yawn. Especially when a lot of it seemed to contradict the map (and I don't think I had the map upside down). And quite a lot of the backstory came out by means of one character explaining it at length to another, or, worse, soliloquising (or, as often seemed to happen, talking to himself in a dream - lots of dreams in this series). It's not that it was uninteresting, in fact some of it was fascinating (the bits about dragons - the family history was just laundry lists of names), but it did slow the action down. And sometimes in the middle of a solemn bit, there was a laugh out loud moment, or some really black humour, which felt a bit jarring, somehow.

But there are glimmerings of depth to some of the characters - Jaslyn, for instance, and (can it be possible?) Jehal. And Meteroa intrigues me. But the Nightwatchman needs to get a grip on himself - he takes the moral high ground at every step, and claims he only follows orders, when he seems to be as devious as anyone else. I'm not quite sure what he's trying to do, actually, or why, or whether his hypocrisy is no more than a convenient plot device.

And speaking of which, there wouldn't be much of a story without a great deal of stupidity on Zafir's part. In the first book, her motives were very plain. Not commendable, but understandable. But this time round, it's not clear to me that she's driven by anything more than irrational jealousy, which, given the likely outcome of her little schemes, boils down to plain stupidity. It is always difficult for an author to dream up convincing motivation, especially when the character is hellbent on war and general mayhem and a lot of slaughtering of royalty, but I don't really get what Zafir is up to, frankly. Or maybe it's all that inbreeding, and she's just barking, who knows. Insanity is another big feature of the series.

But whether because of Zafir or the dragons or (maybe) just because the author felt like it, a lot of characters die in this book, some of them quite abruptly. This is a technique which has its attractions - there's a certain exhilaration, I suppose, to bumping off main characters or having them horribly maimed, and the likes of George R R Martin have used it with abandon. But there is a downside. For the reader, it can have a disconnecting effect - why get invested in a character when her or she is quite likely to be dragon food a few chapters further on? Once or twice has shock value, but the more this happens, the greater the desensitising effect. I would have thought that authors actually want readers to care about the characters, and this is not the way to do it.

But there again, there's actually no one here who has a half-way decent impulse in them. All the main characters are devious, scheming, selfish bastards and it's tempting to say that, actually, they deserve everything they get. Even the dragon feels obliged to point this out. So yes, maybe dragon food is all they deserve to be. The ending is a veritable orgy of double crossing, so it's very hard to work out who (if anyone) is winning. And by this time, I'm not at all sure I much care. Let's hope the final volume hits the high spots again. Three stars.

Review: 'The Adamantine Palace' by Stephen Deas

Well, this is a whole heap of rip-roaring fun and no mistake. It's not profound, the characters are all selfish and devious bastards, the world-building is a bit flat and the writing is capable if not particularly memorable, but - what a cracking story. Of course, it's the dragons who make it. I've heard it said that dragons are a bit out of favour these days, and publishers are avoiding them. Maybe so, but I for one just love them, and these dragons are terrific - big, powerful monsters, just like they should be, and totally mean-spirited. And they feel very alien, nothing like the loveable pals from Pern, or even the riddle-swapping Smaug. Brilliant.

The plot revolves largely around the political machinations of the various dragon-owning families, and it's at a level which makes Machiavelli look like a two year old. There are lies and subterfuge and double-dealing, all layered up to create an incredible writhing snake-pit of deception. I kept up with it pretty well until about three quarters of the way through, when it got to the point of (for all I know) double double double dealing, and I kind of lost the thread altogether. So at the end, I'm not completely sure who was really in league with whom, and who was just pretending to be. It was complicated. But it really didn't matter, because all the twists and turns raced by so fast it was all a blur anyway. Talk about breathtaking.

The characters never really came alive for me. They all seemed just a little too - well, too much. Too clever, too smug, too beautiful, too sexed up, too devious, too self-centred. There were just a few moments where something deeper shone through - Kemir deciding not to kill Semian, for instance, but to inflict a much slower and more painful punishment on him, in pure revenge, and Jaslyn's grief for her dragon. But mostly the characters seemed distant, too unemotional and too wrapped up in their own cleverness to be truly three dimensional. A word of warning, however: don't get too attached to any particular character, as the author is shockingly ruthless about disposing of them without a moment's notice.

The real stars here are the dragons, and what stars they are. These beasts are not cute or cuddly, but they are intelligent, and once they start to break free from human control they make formidable opponents. While the political complications got a bit dull towards the end, every dragon chapter was a joy, even if edged with a tinge of fear. You just never quite knew when they were going to eat one of the named characters. Because that's what these dragons do. Very much looking forward to seeing where things go from here. This is a book with some flaws, but it was such fun to read it merits four stars.

Review: 'Who Listened To Dragons' by Tom Kepler

I don't often read short stories - I'm more into sprawling multi-volume works at the moment - but this is a good reminder of what I'm missing. A seemingly innocuous and gentle ramble, and then - wham, the kick in the tail. Like a fine whisky, it slips down oh so smoothly, and then sets you on fire.

These three stories from the author of the wonderful 'The Stone Dragon' have the same timeless, classic simplicity of the novel, with an almost whimsical surface hiding something much more profound underneath. The longest of the three, after which the book is named, is a charming tale of family and differentness and the magic that lies therein and much more besides, because this is the kind of writing where you can take out of it as many layers as you want - every time you look, there's something more there. It's also the one with the biggest emotional kick at the end. The second story, 'River's Daughter', is beautiful even though I'm not at all sure I understood much of it. My favourite is the last, 'T'uk's Dilemma', which elegantly explains an intriguing quirk of the novel.

All are written in a lyrical style which would bear reading aloud, and both the first and third could easily work as bedtime fairytales for children (but perhaps not 'River's Daughter' - 'Mummy, Mummy, what does "urging the last of his seed to release" mean?'). And all of them share another quality with the novel: they silently work their way into your brain so that odd images and thoughts and layers of meaning hover around like smoke for days afterwards. Highly recommended. Four stars.

Review: 'The Wrong Time' by Robby Charters

This is what happens, folks, when you get a brand new Kindle and rush out to fill it up with all sorts of free stuff. Some of what you find is perfectly readable, and some of it is brilliant, and some of it is... well, not so much. It sounds fine - man finds himself in an alternate reality, married to someone different, tries to get back 'home'. And so on. But I couldn't get past the friend called Roary McGreggor. Really? And he got a train from London at Paddy's Station. Really? That's some alternate reality. And then he flew through the Bermuda Triangle in a heli-sphere and found himself in Neverland... And the writing wasn't stylish enough to make this readable. So no, not my cup of tea. An uncritical child might enjoy it. Possibly. One star for a DNF. Edited to add: OK, I finished it and I get the point. Still didn't like it.

Review: 'The Shadowed Path' by Simon Stone

This is an interesting debut, a very assured piece of writing, the first part of a trilogy set in a vaguely Romanesque world. There's a good, exciting opening - a gladiatorial combat followed by some desperate goings-on in the nightmarish Shadowland. Then, after something of a cliff-hanger, the pace drops abruptly as several years are skipped over. This reminded me a little of the Monty Python episode: a gentle tour through the English countryside ends up, after increasingly improbably twists, with our heroes facing a firing squad, then - tada!- 'Reel missing', there they are back home. 'Phew, that was a lucky escape!' Now I daresay four years in the Shadowland would have been a very different story, and not the one the author wanted to tell, and undoubtedly snippets will be revealed over the course of the trilogy (the mysteries of Shadowland are obviously central to everything), but I still found it a bit disappointing.

The world-building is fairly broad-brush: there's the decaying Romanesque empire with its slaves and decadent way of life, and the religious empire, with its blood sacrifices and fanaticism, now on the rise, and a few bits and pieces on the periphery. The Roman aspects are quite detailed (almost too much so for my taste; I don't really like a setting that feels too close to the real world), but the rest is just sketched in. The real star of the show, however, is the Shadowland, the mysterious interior of the continent, filled with evil inhuman creatures and now spreading at an unnatural rate. Then there are the Waystalkers, the strange beings said to have been created by one of the gods to fight the evil, enslaved to humans and compelled not to harm them. It's a very intriguing setting, although there isn't a great deal of detail.

With the background a fairly blank canvas, the characters need to shine and I'm not sure these quite do, not yet. Marcus is a likeable enough bloke, but there's nothing much about him to make him stand out. His experiences in Shadowland have obviously left him traumatised, so that he seems almost unnaturally calm. Tyacles and Lokan are interesting but nothing special, and Sheena (or Jinx) - well, let's give her time to bloom. Simply having a traumatic or difficult past doesn't necessarily add interest to a character, but this is the first part of a trilogy, so it may well be that both Sheena and Marcus will develop over the full course of the story.

A lot of new characters appear in the second half of the book, and there's an air of setting things up for the remainder of the trilogy. The few glimpses we get of Sulia and its people are only just enough to get a flavour of their very different world, without really fleshing them out very much. By far the most interesting characters are the inhumanii - the Waystalkers and their families, kept as slaves in Prast, trained to kill the evil creatures in Shadowland but not allowed to harm humans without driving themselves mad. Parellio Redhands is absolutely fascinating - creepily menacing, with his own agenda, very powerful and he may (or may not) be able to kill humans. And his connection to Marcus is very intriguing. A terrific character.

The writing is literate and well-edited, on the whole, although the book is sprinkled with that curse of the self-publishing author, the sound-alike spelling ('reign' instead of 'rein', for instance, or my favourite - 'grizzly' instead of 'grisly'), and a few other minor typos. [Edit: removed reference to typos since fixed.] I'm not mad keen on the author's policy of putting the reader into the head of a new character who then disappears for ever a few pages later. It's disconcerting at first, and then it just gets irritating. Nevertheless, the plot flows seamlessly from chapter to chapter, and it's clear that this is all very carefully planned.

The plot, it has to be said, is a little slow. It seems to take a long time for Marcus to find out what's been happening back home while he's been off battling beasties and the whole nightmare of Shadowland, and there's a fair amount of angsting going on as well. This is quite useful, since it shows us the turmoil inside the calm exterior, and perhaps suggests that Marcus is not so much passive as numbed by his experiences, and almost unable to feel any emotion at all, and that gives some potential for things to change, but still, there was a little too much angst for my liking. Nevertheless, the story was trundling along quite well, the journey to Agotha was good, there was Jinx and Parellio to keep everything jumping and I was really enjoying it, and even beginning to get interested in Marcus and friends.

And then it all went wrong, in the last few chapters. It's a shame, because it was great up until that point, an enjoyable, well-written story, with enough interest and mysterious backstory to keep me turning the pages and a whole swathe of cliff-hangers to ensure I'm looking forward to the rest of the trilogy, heading for a good four stars - and then, whump. Sorry. Can't give it more than three stars. I daresay it's just me being contrary, and others wouldn't care about it at all, but for me it just didn't work. Mind you, I'm still probably interested enough to read the rest of the trilogy.

Here's the detail of the ending that I disliked:

WARNING: SPOILERS BELOW!

Well, first of all, there's this invasion of strange northern barbarians, who have apparently travelled the length and breadth of the continent to trash a random Prastian city. Well, fine. I can buy that, I suppose. Even though they've hardly merited a mention beforehand. Even though it makes no real sense. Whatever. This is fantasy, after all.

And then there's Evrethia. She's the one who arranged for Marcus to go on his ill-fated jaunt into Shadowland, the one he spent years planning revenge on, the one who (he has discovered) has taken all his father's money and left him to die in squalor, the one Marcus himself has travelled for weeks to catch up with. And finally he does. And the conversation goes something like this:
Marcus (brandishing large dagger): I hate you, you stole my money and killed my father, and now I want my revenge!
Evrethia: Yes, SO sorry about all that. My father made me do it.
Marcus (putting dagger away): Oh. Well, that's all right then.
W-e-e-e-l-l. OK. I suppose. Whatever.

And finally, we have Marcus traipsing off into Shadowland, the one place in the world he never wants to see again. Why? Because the women need rescuing from the barbarians. Which women? The one who tried to kill him in the night, and the one who stole his money, killed his father, etc, etc. Now, Marcus is the guy who's been through so much in Shadowland that he is completely passive, uncaring, devoid of feeling. This has been underscored for the entire book, it's his defining characteristic. And suddenly he cares enough to go to the rescue? And for these two women, of all the women in the world? It's bad enough to resort to the women in peril routine as motivation at all, but for these two, it would be much more believable for Marcus to say - screw them, the barbarians can have them.

Now I suppose, if I'm being fair, this is all to show that Marcus isn't, in fact, the emotionless character he's been portrayed as, that a beautiful woman or two (even women who try to kill or cheat him) have the power to soften that iron heart of his, and if that works for you, that's fine. It just didn't work for me, it was too abrupt a change. And I would love it, actually, if Sheena/Jinx and Evrethia were to extricate themselves from their captivity, pulp a few barbarians and turn up, bright-eyed and bushy tailed, to greet Marcus before he's gone ten paces into Shadowland, but somehow I don't see that happening.

Review: 'Darkness Rising' by Ross M Kitson

It's always a pleasure to come across a richly imagined secondary world, and the author has produced a terrific example here. There are whole continents, mountains, islands with realistic climates and distances worked out; there are humans with clearly differentiated races; there are cities and keeps and ports with distinctive characteristics; there are details of languages and religions and clothes and food and customs. There is a long list of intriguing sentient non-human races - the hermaphrodite Galvorians, for instance, and the avian Netreptans who live in cloud cities. Oh, and mer-people. There are knights who fly on griffons. There are numerous different nations, a multitude of alliances and a several thousand year history. All of these combine to create a wonderfully textured and nuanced backdrop to the story. And there are maps - lots of maps, very detailed, and a list of characters and a glossary and a timeline. This is great stuff, and I love it.

The magic system is not well defined yet, although mages are aligned with the four elementals of earth, air, fire and water, there are wild mages and dark mages and rebel mages, and there have been mage wars, suggesting a turbulent history. And the prisms of the series title are clearly an important part of things. There are also clear limits to what is possible with magic, and costs involved, which I like to see. Nothing is as dull as a character with virtually unlimited powers.

With so much detailed background, it does mean that the early part of the book is littered with references to people, places, events which are a mystery, but this is traditional in fantasy and it isn't hard to keep up. Besides, the reader is drawn in by the other great strength of the book - its characters, who all feel like real, well-rounded people. And if the early focus, the slightly naive Emelia, is not particularly interesting yet, there are others who are - Jem and Hunor, for instance, and the shape-shifting Marthir and her pals. I like the female knight, as well - nice to see women in non-traditional roles, doing their own thing, not simply there as motivation for the blokes.

I do have one quibble about Emelia. For an otherwise meek and sensible person, she shows a reckless tendency to listen at doors or chase after people she shouldn't. It's like those cheap horror films when the hero(ine) hears noises in the basement at night... Sometimes you should just run the other way. To be fair, the author establishes this aspect of her personality right from the start, but still it seemed a slightly implausible way to get her to overhear or see things. But I like the way she takes control of her own destiny, and isn't simply pushed around as a victim. There are times when she seems quite passive, following the others' lead, but it isn't unreasonable, given her age and experience.

The plot is nothing very original. There's a servant girl who has innate powers which make her special, which she has to learn to control. There appears to be an evil mage with a dastardly plot to enhance his abilities and make himself super-powerful. There are political machinations going on. There are some clichés around - the dreams, for instance, although this is part of the title [Edit: or it was; the original title of 'Dreams of Darkness Rising' has now been shortened], and actually I think they work rather well. Some of the plot devices are a little threadbare - the debauched son of the house, the I-don't-know-what-came-over-me blackouts, the mysterious stranger in the graveyard and so on. Once the story gets properly under way, however, there's plenty of action going on, with sword-fighting and mage battles and the like, and we get to travel around this wonderful world too, which is great fun. I very much liked the ruined or changed cities which dramatically paint in the historical background, far more effectively than the mini info-dumps, or characters explaining it.

Some minor issues. The author's writing style is nicely evocative without being overblown, but there are a few typos, especially with names, and there are numerous sound-alike spelling howlers and a grammatical error or two which had my inner pedant screaming. This is not uncommon in self-published works, but it does detract from an otherwise well-written  book. However, the series has recently been picked up by a publisher, so hopefully these problems will be fixed.

The middle sections sagged a little in places, but mainly because I was so invested in the two threesomes (Emelia, Hunor, Jem; and Marthir, Ygris and, um, the other one) that any digressions from their stories seemed annoying to me. I'm not sure that we really needed to see the bad guys up close anyway, busily pursuing their evil sorcery, with a little recreational dismemberment thrown in. This can work to explain their motivation, but (unless I missed something) the objective seemed to be the usual thing: power, global domination, yada yada, without much more underlying it than irredeemable evil. But these episodes did serve to fill in some of the backstory. There is a whole heap of backstory to fill in, it has to be said, and the author seems keen to ensure the reader knows every last drop of it.

What I liked: the wonderful characters and their interactions; the world and everything about it (the detail here is incredible); Emelia's 'inner voice', who even has her own name - Emebaka (is she really a separate entity, or just a part of Emelia? this had me guessing all the way through); the complexity of characters' motivations and actions (Orla's rigid knightly code versus Hunor's pragmatism, for instance, and the difficulty of knowing who is on who's side). There's also some very nice thinking in the different cultures: the Goldorians have a repressive religion which keeps women well wrapped up and burns mages at the stake yet is very liberal with the workers, while the Eerians have slavery and a knightly code of honour. It's terrific to find such thoughtful details in the background. I also liked the romantic tension between the main characters, which was extremely subtle and nicely done.

What worked less well for me: there's lots of action (which is fine), but all too often it was hard to see a logical reason for it and every journey seemed fraught with bad guys and various monsters leaping out of nowhere; and then it was surprising how often someone quite unexpected would come to the rescue at the last moment. To be honest, the numerous skirmishes got a little repetitive after a while. I'm not a big fan of fight scenes, so I tend to let them just wash over me, but they all seemed to be pretty well thought through and moderately realistic, as far as I could tell. There was a certain amount of beheading and dismembering, and blood gushing and so forth, but it never got too gross. The backstory just got too complicated sometimes (too many empires and wars and magely goings on to keep track of). I also lost track of some of the characters from time to time, so I was mystified when they turned up out of the blue (Livor, for instance, or Torm). Happily, my Kindle makes it easy to check back to previous appearances.

The ending seemed a little disjointed. The various characters split up into numerous subgroups each with its own action, and sometimes I had trouble keeping up with who was where and who was fighting whom. One big climactic battle would have been more satisfying, somehow. I was left puzzled by a couple of things - where did the wolf-like thingy come from? and where exactly was the crystal? But I assumed that was just me not paying attention - I was racing through it at the end, desperate to see how it all turned out.  On the whole, despite a few minor quibbles, this is an excellent start to the trilogy - richly imagined, well written and thoroughly absorbing. I loved all the main characters, with their quirks and complexities and quarrels and insecurities, and I loved this beautifully detailed world, which feels completely real. A very enjoyable read, and I look forward to the rest of the series. Four stars.

Review: 'The Hare With Amber Eyes' by Edmund de Waal

I found this very hard to get into. It's a dry-as-dust history of the author's family, based around a surviving fragment of their at one time vast art collection. The academic style and lengthy descriptions of architectural features plus the use of words and expressions unknown to my dictionary made it heavy going. Occasionally there would be a shaft of light - a picture of one of the people talked about, or talk of a lover - which brought these long dead characters to life somewhat.

Gradually, however, as the decades pass and the author reaches a generation he knew personally, people who left diaries and postcards and letters and word of mouth descriptions, the book becomes a little less heavy-footed. Even then, even when the tragedy of the First World War rolls over the family and flattens them, it is hard to sympathise over much. Yes, they lost a lot of money, and the footmen were all called up, there was no fuel to run the car and it was impossible to get to the country house or visit the cousins, but still, they all survived, they had enough to eat (unlike millions of others), they still lived in their vast Palais in the centre of Vienna with all its paintings and books and sculptures intact.

Eventually, we reach the moment which has been inevitable from page 1. For this particular family is Jewish, living right in the centre of the maelstrom of Hitler's Europe, and it was impossible for them to emerge unscathed. This part of the story is deeply moving, as all such stories are, and the author underscores the tragedy by the contrast between the life they lived before the war, with its endless round of social occasions, the arrays of costumes necessary, the lavish food and drink, the minutiae of the wealthy bourgeois daily and yearly round, and the transition to modest suburban life, virtually all their possessions lost, extended family scattered around the globe or dead.

The final part of the book takes the collection of 'netsuke' (carved toggles designed to be hung on kimono sashes) back to their origins in Japan, and this is a more upbeat read. Despite all that has happened, there is still the same acquisitive purchasing of art going on, the same moving through a landscape of social functions and mingling with the great and good of the art world which has characterised the family since the netsuke were first purchased in Paris close to a century earlier. This is not a family which is sliding into obscurity, despite its trials.

On the whole, I found the snippets of family life more interesting than the endless catalogue of furniture, architecture, art works and decoration. As an insight into the treatment of Jews, it probably does not add much to the canon, although the snapshot of a certain way of life has its interest. The book would be enjoyed best by those more knowledgeable about art and history than I am. Three stars.

Review: 'Relentless' by Robin Parrish

This is an OK read, better than many of its type if a little uneven, with a compelling ending and well named - the pace truly is relentless. Not even sure what genre this is. I had it as fantasy, but the opening chapters seem more like technological thriller, but after a while elements of fantasy start creeping back in. It's the first part of a trilogy, after all, and there's a prophecy... Anyway. Good, fast start, with an intriguing premise - man suddenly realises he's in a different body, and he can actually see his normal body across the street. What has happened to him and why is the central mystery of the book.

This is one of those books where the frenetic pace substitutes for depth, and neatly covers any cracks in the plot. Several times, I was thinking: hang on a minute, that can't be right... and then another man with a gun or a sword jumps out and off we go again. There's a lot of action here, and people getting hurt, and then having to go out into the action again and get hurt all over again. Anytime the action lets up for a moment, it's time for a mini-info-dump. And sometimes the scene jumps were a bit too abrupt, and I couldn't quite work out where we were or why or how they knew something or other.

The characters are a little unbelievable, and why is the hero's love interest is always so beautiful? But at least the author has made some effort to paint in the backstories of several of the characters and give them a little more depth than is usual. And the women are just as capable, feisty, aggressive and/or devious as the men. I found the hero just a bit irritating. One minute he's aggressively pursuing bad guys and demanding answers or else, the next he's reduced to jelly. But it is a strange situation he finds himself in, I suppose I can cut him some slack.

A number of people have categorised this as a Christian book. There's certainly no overt religious theme or characters, and the only unusual aspect is the small number of deaths for a book of this type. A great many get injured, sometimes repeatedly, sometimes badly, and some of them survive brushes with death an improbable number of times, but rarely is there an actual death. But those who are forced to kill agonise over it, there's a theme of forgiving even those who betray you and there's a recurring theme of good and evil, so perhaps it's right there without being preachy.

This is not at all bad, as such books go, although I never quite believed in it or got into that sucked-in page-turning mode. It's patchy - there are moments where it gets close to something more profound, and then it veers off into yet another car chase or racing down fire escapes or some such. I think the author visualises it as a high-action movie. The ending was rather good, with a number of very neat twists. Those with a greater ability to suspend disbelief, who don't mind the hero evading death by a whisker yet again or who enjoy high-action stuff with gun-fights AND sword-fights would probably like this a lot. Three stars.

Review: 'Unclean Spirits' by M L N Hanover

I'm really not a big fan of urban fantasy. Discovering the author's created world is (for me) the most exciting part of fantasy, and starting in the real world takes a lot of the fun out of it. Besides, our own world but with magic, vampires, demons, werewolves and the like? It's so implausible that it only really comes off as comedy, like Harry Potter or Buffy. But I have this hypothesis that Daniel Abraham (as Mr Hanover is better known) can't write a bad book, so here I am, reading an urban fantasy with a semi-clad young woman on the cover.

The first book of a series is always the trickiest. The author has to establish the world, establish the premise, introduce the characters, deal with the 'oh no! this can't be happening to me!' stuff, and also produce a plot which captures the essence of the style, whether kick-ass action or romance or mystery or whatever, in a sufficiently entertaining way that the reader wants to rush out and buy the next book. It's a hard act to pull off, and very often it takes several books before the author hits his/her stride.

So I was kind of expecting this to be spotty, and yes, it is, a bit. The writing feels uneasy in places, almost like the author's trying too hard to be edgy: "Across from Eric in the dim orange light of the bar, a man laughed and the waitress smiled a tight little smile that didn't reach her eyes. Eric tapped his glass, the tick-tick-tick of his fingernails sounding like the rain against the window." And the names: Jayné. Chogyi Jake. Midian. Ex. And Aubrey - that one sounds like a gay bloke to me, or maybe an elderly classics professor at Oxford, not the cute love interest.

Maybe it's me, but I found Jayné's barely-out-of-her-teens angsting a bit tedious. Tears, tantrums, shopping sprees, more tears, breathless sex, tears again, sleepless agonising, frantic housecleaning and yet more tears, with instant wild mood-swings between despair and euphoria - tedious. Even though she has reason for a certain amount of mental instability, it doesn't make for entertaining reading (although the euphoric phases can be very funny). And is it a bit creepy that a man in his forties or thereabouts writes this sort of stuff? Although if I didn't know the author was a man, I wouldn't guess. He's always written women well, and I think that after one or two more books, when Jayné learns to stop agonising, she'll be an interesting character. Not sure about the love interest, though. He seems a bit insipid to me. The other two blokes are far more interesting (and one woman and three men? how is that going to work out in the long term, I wonder?).

But underneath it all is a readable and (when Jayné leaves the angst behind long enough to get on with it) pacy plot, and the action moments are terrific. Nothing quite goes right, despite all the careful planning, and it helps that the Big Bad is intrigued enough not to just kill everyone on sight and stops to talk about it first (why do they always do that?), but I very much liked that in the end it needed a lot of teamwork and people helping each other out to get things to work. There wasn't a huge amount of tension in it (well, they weren't all going to die, were they? and it is the first of a series...), but it was nicely done. A good three stars.

Review: 'The Demon Queen and the Locksmith' by Spencer Baum

Strange book, quite surreal. It's young adult, which limits the scope, but nevertheless there's some depth to it. The premise: three teenagers meet by chance, it seems, in the park and witness some strange events which lead to them developing superpowers. And if the idea is not the most original ever, the author gives it a whimsical, bizarre spin which is anything but hackneyed. There are butterflies and bugs and an oak tree and strange swirly patterns and a Hum emanating from a mountain and espresso - lots and lots of espresso.

About half-way through the story changes from the whimsical to a straightforward race to flee from the bugs and survive long enough to work out what is actually going on, and this part is a real white-knuckle ride. Of course, this being young adult, the outcome is not much of a surprise, but the story is very readable, there is some knowledge gained along the way (about bugs and pitcher plants and how social insects organise themselves, among other things), and there is a teeny, tiny amount of advice about dealing with bullies hidden in there too. A short but sweet book, and it was free too. Not entirely my thing,  which keeps it to three stars.

Series Review: 'The Riyria Revelations' by Michael J Sullivan

This is a review of the entire series, originally published as six books: 'The Crown Conspiracy', 'Avempartha', 'Nyphron Rising', 'The Emerald Storm', 'Wintertide' and 'Percepliquis'.  Now republished in three volumes as: 'Theft of Swords', 'Rise of Empire' and 'Heir of Novron'. There is also a free short story prequel: 'The Viscount and the Witch'. The author is now writing a series of novel-length prequels.

Many spoilers below - don't read on if you haven't read the whole series.

I have something of a love/hate relationship with Michael J Sullivan (not at a personal level, I hasten to add, I've never met the man). His Riyria series was one of my earliest introductions to self-published ebooks, and taught me that you definitely don't have to be with a mainstream publisher to be any good. Not great literature, but easy to read, entertaining and riotously funny - what's not to like? I was steadily working my way through the six-book series, which got better and better, when it was picked up by a big name house, and publication of the final book of the series was delayed. I was pacing myself with this delay in mind, and, having read the first four books, I decided it was time to buy the fifth, only to find - nothing. All the ebooks had been pulled, ready for the big re-release. Damn. Should have paid more attention. So annoying.

But then the author released a free short prequel (which was nice), and since he writes the best blog I've ever come across, with a self-effacing manner and a truly wonderful sense of humour, I forgive him. For those who had bought all five previously published books, he made sure that they could get the sixth in matching format, which is totally cool. He's very good at connecting with his readers and participating in online discussion groups, and sometimes that veers into over-enthusiastic self-promotion, but that's just part of the digital age, I suppose.

The Riyria series has been billed as a return to traditional fantasy, adult books but without swearing or graphic sex, with each book readable on its own while nevertheless having an overarching story. So how well does it measure up? Well, there's certainly no swearing or sex, but there is some violence (that's unavoidable in this type of story), and there is an attempted rape in 'Avempartha', plenty of implied sex and plenty of whores, too. So adult reading, yes, but it works well as young adult too. And while you could, I suppose, read any of the books on their own, they make most sense read together in the proper sequence.

The traditional fantasy aspect is a problem for me, because almost invariably it means a pseudo-medieval setting with all the usual baggage - kings, knights, castles, tournaments, mud-bespattered and stupid peasants grubbing round in the dirt, ragged urchins in the towns picking pockets, a few wizards, elves, goblins and dwarves in the background, and women reduced to a handful of minor roles - princess, whore, serving wench and (if she's lucky) warrior babe. Sullivan has bought into this wholesale, and I suppose I shouldn't compain, since so many other authors do the same. Tolkien set the standard here, after all. But it is tired and clichéd and (frankly) lazy.

In a few ways, Sullivan has added his own touches. For most of the series elves are sad half-breeds, enslaved and badly treated and eventually exterminated, and the only dwarf is a total scumbag. And there are some fabulous magical places - Gutaria, the enchanted wizard prison, Avempartha, the exquisite elven tower, and Drumindor, the dwarf-built tower on a volcano. Some of the fringes of the created world, like Dagastan and Calis, are well-drawn, too. But the legendary lost city of Percepliquis was a disappointment to me.

The magic system is unoriginal, too. A wizard waves his hands in the air and harnesses natural forces to achieve his spells, and there seems to be no limit to this. That's about it. Fortunately, the story never devolves to the level of wizards hurling thunderbolts at each other, which would have been tediously uninteresting. Magic is used sparingly, and is generally a surprise when it appears.

The characters all fall into stereotyped roles - warrior, princess, thief, whore and so on - and in the early books they had little depth, but over time the main characters developed more rounded personalities. Royce, in particular, is a complex and fascinating character, and I think it was essential to see him at his rawest and worst, immediately after Gwen's death, to realise just how far he had come over the course of the story and understand just how low he could fall, left to himself. We were repeatedly told how dangerous he was, but that was the moment when we actually saw it. Hadrian is a much simpler person, with a touching faith in the innate goodness of people. Very likeable, and the two make a great team. The joking between them is one of the highlights of the books (far too much fantasy is overly serious). I loved the way they worked together seamlessly (climbing out of the well back to back, for instance, or instinctively watching each other's backs while meeting the Diamond on the bridge at Colnora). But I also liked their very different personalities: when they meet the Diamond at the inn, Royce remains motionless, alert, while Hadrian ambles round the room eating walnuts.

The other characters work less well. I loved Myron's innocence, but I simply didn't believe he could know so little of the world after all his reading and living at an abbey frequented by travellers, and I found him unconvincing as a philosopher guiding Royce through his darker moments. The rest are fairly one dimensional, even after six books: Alric the whiny aristocrat, Mauvin the warrior, Degan the prat, Magnus the grumpy stonesmith, Archie the fool and so on. That doesn't make them uninteresting, it just means they aren't emotionally engaging.

I have to mention the four main female characters: Arista, Thrace/Modina, Amilia and Gwen. I didn't notice it the first time through, but rereading the first four books while waiting for the release of the last two has highlighted for me just how depressingly caricatured and helpless they were. Maybe it's because in the interim I read several books where women were just as competent and realistic as their male counterparts, but this time through it just jumped out at me. Gwen is the classic good-hearted whore. She was an independent woman who ran several successful businesses, but ultimately her role was to be loved by a man, and be the mother of his daughter. Oh, and to make prophecies so that the plot could progress. And Amilia never really progressed beyond downtrodden servant, and love interest for a man. She certainly never developed any self-confidence.

Thrace/Modina made the leap from peasant girl to empress, but to be honest, I never really found it totally convincing. In 'Avempartha' she is sent off by Esrahaddon to find Royce and Hadrian, where she promptly falls victim to a potential rapist and has to be rescued. She then spends most of the book being silly, doing stupid things, running round shouting 'Daddy, Daddy!', getting captured and having to be rescued. She has a moment of lucidity when she takes the sword hilt, but actually killing the beastie seems to be more by accident than design. She spends the whole of 'Nyphron Rising' in a state of catatonia. She is only marginally better in 'Emerald Storm' and 'Wintertide', and now she's suicidal too. It's only the arrival of Mince with Esrahaddon's cloak that knocks her out of her depression. Was it Mince's words which did the trick, or the magic cloak? No idea, but I prefer to think it was the cloak, since surely only magic could explain her otherwise miraculous transformation into serene (and sane) empress.

Then there was Arista. Now, in one sense I liked how she turned out. Her final incarnation, as a regular human being rather than a haughty princess, was nicely believable. But the way she got there was to be manipulated, captured, rescued, dragged around the countryside, captured again, rescued again, and finally (just in case we suspected she was acting independently for once) to carry out Esrahaddon's last instructions. Oh, and then she became love interest and motivation for a man. Even though she was a powerful wizardess in her own right by then, at the final confrontation it was men with swords (and twirly knife things) who fought for the survival of mankind, while she stood on the sidelines wailing 'Oh Hadrian!', and waiting to be called upon to bring Royce back to life.

Now it may seem churlish to grumble about this. It's no more than almost every other fantasy writer does, after all, and it was Tolkien, bless him, who started the rot by making Arwen no more than Aragorn's reward, and even Eowyn only became the kickass warrior babe in despair after falling for the unattainable hero. And yes, Modina made a great empress and Arista was pretty useful in a crisis. I just wish they hadn't been so helpless along the way. Of course the men had their moments of being manipulated and having to be rescued, too, but they still came across as independent people, and as often as not they got themselves out of trouble. Only very rarely were they there mainly to act as motivation and love interest (Sir Breckton, maybe).

There's one last character I should mention: Nimbus. The whole Kile story was flagged up so many times that I should have seen it coming, but I didn't and it was a lovely moment. I'm not a fan of gods taking an active role in fantasy, they're just too powerful, but this was a beautifully elegant way to say, yes, there are gods in this world, but their interference can be a good thing. Very subtly done.

The six books all had plots which, while part of the overarching framework, were still workable as stand-alone reads, and the author pulled this off pretty well, I think. The individual plots were fairly flimsy affairs, on the whole, and some of them were actually quite silly, but they worked as entertaining capers. But when you get to 'Percepliquis', the final book, it becomes possible to see the story as a whole, and here the author's talent shines through. It takes a great deal of skill to write six books which weave together into a satisfying and united whole, without loose ends or forced motivations or sleight of hand, and Sullivan not only achieves this brilliantly, he also manages to leave open the central mystery (the identity of the true Heir of Novron) until the last possible moment. This is an impressive feat.

'Percepliquis' itself is, in many ways, the archetypal fantasy story: the quest to find a magical gizmo to save the world. The ten questers were a fairly motley crew, and some of them seemed to be there just to make up the numbers. I have to say, for a lost city, Percepliquis was remarkably easy to find, but then Sullivan has never been one to spin out a story, thankfully. The highlight of the journey was the tetchiness infecting virtually all the participants. Royce and Magnus are grumpy by nature, Alric and Arista had an outbreak of sibling rivalry, and Degan was an ass, as he has been from the start. And even the even-tempered Hadrian bopped Degan on the nose (a wonderful moment). Only Myron rose unflappably above the sniping. I liked the author's skilful pacing over the journey (and the whole book, really). The moments of high drama are masterfully interspersed with thoughtful passages, comic relief, gentle romance, simple description and, sometimes, despair. Beautifully done. And the challenge at the end is absolutely perfect.

The sixth book is full of twists and big reveals, and I have to confess to guessing most of them ahead of time. I didn't anticipate that Novron was an elf (but it makes perfect sense), and I definitely didn't suspect Arcadius of killing Gwen, but I marked Royce as (possibly) the heir the moment Mercy was revealed as an heir, I worked out the Patriarch's anagram and I knew Thranic would turn up. And as one piece after another fell into place, and the overall picture came into focus, it became clear just how cleverly plotted the story was.

Looking back at the complete series, Sullivan himself has said that he thinks the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and I would agree with that. Each book revealed a little of the picture, but only when the whole of it is visible is it possible to see how everything works together - the elves, Novron, the Nyphron church, Esrahaddon, the Patriarch, Royce, Gwen, Hadrian, Arcadius, the whole enchilada. It's like one of those ingenious three dimensional puzzles that looks impossible until you push and twist just right, and everything falls into place. Of course, it's perfectly possible to read the books just as entertaining stories and not worry about the big picture, but it's a lot more fun to try to work it out for yourself. And the final book is just mystery heaped upon secret wrapped in enigma.

Reviewing some of the earlier books, I was moderately critical of Sullivan's writing. There were typos and clunky dialogue and poor grammar and Americanisms, none of which matter much unless you notice them, but I did. On rereading, I noticed them less, and it also became clear how much the writing improved over the course of the series. He'll probably never have the poetic flow of (say) Rothfuss, or the over-the-top gloriousness of (say) Martin, but he has a style of his own, which works fine for this type of story. In 'Percepliquis' the writing was so much more confident that it pulled off all the complexities of the finale - the deeper notes, the romantic interludes, the archaic language, the poems, the dreams - with barely a jarring note.

Sullivan has given his readers something special: a story which works at multiple different levels. He has achieved his aim to produce clean traditional fantasy which is enjoyable and entertaining, while also providing a more complex puzzle for those who want it. The two main characters and their relationship, and particularly Royce and his distorted view of the world, provide a deeper layer of interest. Some memorable highlights from the whole series: Gutaria, Avempartha, Drumindor; Royce and Hadrian climbing out of the well, standing back to back on the bridge meeting the Diamond at Colnora, meeting the Diamond (again) at the inn; Alric charging the gates of Medford, Alric rescuing Arista, Lenare spitting Luis Guy; Myron mystified by his sister, Hadrian bopping Degan, Royce using Gilly to escape from the tomb. And the unforgettable: Royce going ballistic after Gwen's death. And a special mention for best performance by an inanimate object: Esrahaddon's cloak.

But I think Sullivan has achieved something more. He was one of the first to turn to self-publishing and actually make it profitable, by tirelessly working to promote his books and, of course, by having worthwhile material to sell. He then successfully transferred back to traditional publishing, thereby proving that the two systems can peacefully co-exist and support each other. He is one of the new breed of author, who has reached out directly to his audience and built a personal connection, and he's still doing that despite the new publishing deal. Of course, all of this attracts a certain amount of venom from some quarters - the pro-indie set who hate him for selling out, and the anti-indie set who hate him for making a success of going it alone. I hope he won't let that bother him. I hope he continues to write at this level, that he continues to be the same down-to-earth, self-effacing person, that he continues to be successful. But even if he doesn't write another thing, he has left a worthy legacy behind him: six books which make one terrific story, and an inspiration for all aspiring writers.

Review: 'Percepliquis' by Michael J Sullivan

It's always special when you reach the end of a series, particularly one which was planned from the start, rather than growing organically. The mysteries will make sense, questions will be answered, characters will receive their dues and loose ends will be tied up, or so one hopes. And on the downside, it's likely some characters will die, perhaps even major ones, and it's always possible the ending will ruin the whole series. Fortunately, Sullivan ends on a high note. There are serious moments (but then the future of mankind is at stake), but he avoids the temptation to get too heavy or preachy, keeps the humour rolling and throws in some nice twists, although the ending is rather simplistic and overly sentimental.

Percepliquis pulls together virtually all the main characters into one questing group - a Fellowship of the Horn, as it were. Some of them didn't seem like main characters before, and I'm not sure they were all necessary to the outcome, but they have all been around pretty much from the start of the series. As with all six of the books, the plot of this one is fairly stand-alone, even though much of it builds on what has gone before. And as with them all, it's not always clear at the time who is manipulating events and who is acting under false pretences. Things are never quite what they seem. I can't imagine anyone would read this book without having read the previous five, because there's a lot of backstory to keep in mind, but the author does a pretty good job of filling in the necessary details.

I like my fantasy to surprise me, but actually there weren't too many surprises here. Maybe the foreshadowing was a little heavy-handed, or maybe my reread paid off, but most of the twists and turns were to some extent predictable. There were only a couple of moments that came out of the blue (but they were both terrific - very satisfying and making perfect sense). And yes, almost all of the questions were answered, there were deaths, but largely it played out as expected. Some of the reveals felt a little too contrived, there was a heavy layer of sentimentality everywhere, and there was a walk-on part for almost every character who survived the previous five books, but on the whole it worked pretty well. The author's writing reached a new high for this book; the poems worked well, the archaic language was much better than before and the dreams fitted perfectly, a hard trick to pull off. Even the romantic interludes were better. And the Royce/Hadrian banter and sniping was extended to the whole questing group, which was great fun and perfectly in keeping with their characters.

What didn't work? Well, the whole elf destruction routine felt very over the top. They were provoked, no denying it, but trying to kill every last human seems an excessive response. And given how powerful they were, their methods seemed a bit haphazard. The search for the underground Percepliquis was heavily redolent of the Mines of Moria in Lord of the Rings, with the pause to decide which of three passages to take, Arista cast in the Gandalf role, the Ghazel playing the orcs, and even a Balrog-type fire beastie being summoned. Fortunately, no one quite said 'Fly, you fools'.  And at the end of it, the ruined city of Percepliquis was - well, ruined, and (for me) not terribly interesting. 

I'm still not a fan of Arista. I understand what the author has tried to do with her development, and some of it is successful - she's not the whiny aristocrat any more, and seeing Alric again emphasizes just how far she's come. But she still can't manage to do anything by herself, even magic, without a man rescuing her or at the least holding her hand. Of the other characters, Royce is the most complex and therefore interesting, and Hadrian the shining foil to his darkness. Myron is a truly wonderful character, who comes into his own in this book. And even Magnus makes his peace with the world.

Eventually, all is revealed, and the ending is satisfying, although a bit too cute. There were a few implausibilities necessary to make it work, but on the whole everything fitted rather well. As with the whole series, an enjoyable, pacy read, page-turningly good, entertaining rather than deeply profound, although this final episode had more finesse than its predecessors. A good four stars.