Review: 'Daughter of the Empire' by Raymond Feist and Janny Wurts

This book ought to have been right up my street; a non-medieval world, with limited magic, a slow pace driven by politics rather than endless battles, and a strong-minded female lead - what's not to like? In my case, the answer is: almost everything.

 The opening felt surprisingly clunky and uncertain.Many fantasy works start with a dramatic event to draw the reader in, and leave the details of the background to wait for a quieter moment, but this tries to do both at once, with unconvincing results. To some extent it's necessary to explain the unusually high levels of required etiquette, which is required to account for the protagonist's unnatural calmness in a crisis, but the authors simultaneously tried to convey her deep emotions, and this made for a very uneven few chapters. And somehow the situation felt rather forced to me. Are there really no other members of the family? This seems oddly shortsighted in a hereditary system (lots of babies, people; how hard is that to understand?).

The whole story rests on the shoulders of Mara, the seventeen year old protagonist. Given that the story opens with her about to take lifelong vows at a religious order, she seems initially unsuited for the leadership role thrust upon her, and perhaps that would have been a more interesting line to follow. However, it soon becomes clear that she is the conventional spirited and ambitious protagonist, quite prepared to be ruthless to achieve her political aims, and also prepared to take risks and break with tradition where she deems it necessary. Unfortunately, this very ruthlessness makes her something of an unsympathetic character. She has no qualms, it seems, about killing off slaves, rebellious soldiers or anyone else who gets in her way, or simply to send a message to her rivals. And considering that the concept of honour is deeply embedded in this society, she has (in fact, they all have) a very curious sense of honour which allows her to do (apparently) whatever the hell she wants.

The other main characters are all very black and white. Her family servants are the ultimate in loyal retainers, willing to die for her, but also intelligent, resourceful, competent... you get the picture. Her husband, carefully selected solely to create a protective alliance and give Mara an heir, is portrayed as an uncaring and violent brute. Some attempt is made to paint a more subtle picture of Buntokapi later on, but it's really too late by this time. Her enemies are no more than ciphers: the rival leader, driven by long-standing feuds whose origins are lost in time; the stupid men driven by lust; the vengeful woman. Only the Warlord has seems like a genuinely complex character. The rest are no more than lightly sketched background the better to illuminate Mara's perfection .

And here we come to the real problem with this book. [See SPOILER below]

So at this point I'm seriously disappointed. But then there's a seemingly trivial interaction between two supposedly minor characters, at the end of which there's a reveal which changes everything. All of a sudden the political shenanigans become much more complicated and very interesting indeed. For a moment the book gleams with possibilities. Sadly the rest of the book isn't like this. And in fact, immediately after this we're back to Mara being terribly clever and underhanded and devious. I would like her a bit better if she were not so downright nasty to people. Yes, I know she has reasons to be cautious of anyone approaching her, but surely the honour system would deny the sort of ritual humiliation she indulges in.

I was really looking forward to reading this. It presses all the right buttons for me. I like a world that's not a mud-bespattered caricature of the middle ages. I like the system of honour and the rigid protocol. I like a book which builds slowly without leaping from one set-piece battle to the next. I like a story built around characters. And yet none of it worked for me. The protocol and honour seemed to be no more than a clever plot device. The slowness of the book made it draggy at times - there were whole chapters devoted to seemingly trivial events which I lost interest in long before their purpose was revealed. And I hated Mara - really, really hated her. Are we actually supposed to root for a heroine who devises such unpleasant - no, downright evil schemes? There is nothing at all likeable, to my mind, about such a cruelly manipulative person. I can see the attraction in a woman facing up to adversity with spirit and determination and yes, even ruthlessness, so other readers may enjoy it much better, but it's not for me. So two stars for effort, I suppose, grudgingly.

***** SPOILER *****

Everything Mara does, no matter how dangerous or risky, turns out implausibly well. This really isn't much of a spoiler, actually, since it's obvious right from the start that she will ultimately triumph, but I expected her to have some setbacks along the way. But no, everything works out exactly as she planned it and, honestly, this simply isn't interesting. She needs more warriors, so she goes out to recruit outlaws. She needs the cho-ja, she gets them. She wants her husband dead, so he dies. This was the final straw, for me. There were only three possible outcomes to Mara's nasty little plot against Buntokapi: global war, family war or the brutish, stupid husband who beats up his own wife suddenly turns all honourable and commits ritual suicide. I mean, really? All at once, he's being noble? And this man who can't control his own temper comes back to the wife who set him up and says magnanimously, 'Well, that was very clever, wife, you beat me fair and square there.' If it were me, I'd have gutted her first, and honour be hanged. What an evil witch. Ugh.

Review: 'The Emperor's Edge' by Lindsay Buroker

I was bouncing around websites looking at reviews for something else when I tripped over this. It was free, it had good reviews, it sounded intriguing - a female enforcer (cop) in a steam-punk fantasy setting - so I downloaded the sample, and just kept reading. It's not deep, but it's pacy, funny and has interesting characters, and sometimes that's just what I'm in the mood for.

I've never read anything steam-punk before, but it was well done. The setting felt perfectly believable, with steam-powered this, that and the other, and a lot of mechanical devices just there, without too much isn't-this-clever authorial explanation. And, being fantasy, there's magic too, which is cool, although it's a relatively minor part of the story. I very much liked the winter setting, which made the snow and the frozen lake significant factors in the plot. Combined with the steam-powered machinery, this gave the story a nicely atmospheric feel.

The main character, Amaranthe Lokdon (and no, names are not the author's strongest suit), is terrific - intelligent and self-sufficient, able to think her way out of trouble and only occasionally needing to be rescued by a bloke. I liked Sicarius the laconic assassin too, and super-smart emperor Sespian (see what I mean about the names?). And there's a backup team of colourful characters, and some perfectly credible villains, too. It's always nice to find bad guys whose motives are a little more complex than simple global domination (although there was an element of that, too, of course). And all the characters behaved believably; in particular, Amaranthe's conflicted emotions when face to face with her former enforcer colleagues or when seeing Sicarius in cold assassin mode was nicely done. She felt like a truly rounded personality, if a little unnaturally bouncy and resourceful, but then that very much fits with her being one of only a few female enforcers.

The plot - well, it's certainly imaginative (not the hackneyed emperor's-in-trouble motif, but the creative plan to rescue him). There are a lot of implausibilities, it has to be said, and Amaranthe's unlikely team falls into place surprisingly easily for such a motley crew. Sicarius, in particular, seems like a confirmed loner, yet he signs up for Amaranthe's slightly hare-brained scheme remarkably easily. And it surprised me how often they walked openly around town, despite Sicarius being a notorious assassin and Amaranthe having her face plastered over the wanted posters, and sometimes Amaranthe was a bit too keen to confront possibly hostile enemies or beasties. But still, her seemingly unlimited capacity for devising ingenious escapes more than compensated, and frequently put a big grin on my face as she insouciantly walked out of yet another scrape.

My only complaint is that sometimes the plot devices were a little too obvious; so when there's a piece of machinery or a spade lying around, you know it's going to come in handy before too long. And is it just me, or are there an awful lot of secret passages and ducts in these buildings? I don't know whether it's intentional (because the protagonist is mid-twenties), but the book would fit perfectly well as young adult. There's no swearing or sex, one not-very-graphic near rape (but isn't there always?) and the violence is not particularly gory. It's all good clean action-packed stuff, without a single sagging moment. The romance is fairly low-key, too.

The ending is suitably dramatic, and even though the outcome was never really in doubt, it becomes a real page-turner. As always, the situation is resolved by ingenuity and dogged perseverance rather than brute force or magic. Of course this wouldn't be fantasy without a certain amount of badassery on display, but still, the majority of the fighting is more of the elbow to the chin or tripping up variety, and there's always an air of disappointment from the heroine that differences couldn't be resolved more peaceably. It's notable, actually, how often Amaranthe simply talks her way out of trouble. This is an entertaining caper with loads of humour, a believable and interesting setting, and a nice mixture of characters. Despite the implausibilities and contrivances of the plot, it's a fast, enjoyable read. Four stars.

Review: 'Back On Murder' by J Mark Bertrand

This is one that I picked up for free at some point, experimentally, and I really enjoyed it. It's not at all an original premise - washed up cop trying to find his way again, some traumatic history, rocky relationship with his wife, a drugs-style shooting, a missing girl, leaks to the press, blah blah, and many of the twists and turns were quite predictable, but it really didn't matter. I found myself drawn into it almost at once, and was soon tearing through it in every spare moment.

The key factor for me was that all the characters felt like real people. The cop himself, Roland March, his wife Charlotte, the other cops, the various people drawn into the investigation... all of them felt like the sort of folks you could meet any day of the week, with all their little foibles, their histories together, the way they behaved. I read so many books where the characters are simply one-dimensional that it's a real joy to find one where they're fully rounded, and make stupid mistakes from time to time, or even get distracted by an attractive colleague.

This book has been categorised as 'Christian' by a number of readers, but if that is normally a turn-off for you, don't be deterred. Several of the characters are openly Christian, and there's a connection to a local church, but there's absolutely no preaching. The main effect on the plot is no swearing, no obvious sex outside marriage, and no real vices amongst the main characters, but that doesn't make it dull or heavily religious at all. Actually, it makes a refreshing change from the usual book of this type.

Some negatives: there were moments when the plot required characters to do fairly stupid things, or fail to make the obvious connections, just to trigger a dramatic moment or a big reveal. There were a lot of minor characters to keep track of, especially when they would disappear for several chapters and then pop up again out of nowhere. Thank goodness for the Kindle search function. And the hero's wife has to be fairly unpleasant for a while in order to ramp up the drama: at one point she starts in on him as soon as he steps through the door, then accuses *him* of always arguing, and when he eventually does what she's been nagging him to do, she rewards him with sex, which felt a little odd to me.

One aspect I felt uncomfortable with was the link to 9-11. Sometimes it seems as if you can't open a book without one or other character being connected to the tragedy, and in this case it seemed like a bit of an unnecessary stretch, a cheap appeal to emotion which could have been dealt with more creatively. It's a small point, however. On the plus side, I enjoyed the setting of Houston. I lived there for a while way back when, and it was strange to find what were respectable neighbourhoods in those days characterised as drug infested now. But the descriptions of the area seemed spot-on to me, as far as I could tell.

The story built nicely to the climax which was suitably dramatic, tied things up neatly and yet left the odd loose end to be picked up in a future book, perhaps. An entertaining, readable story. Four stars.

Review: 'Harbingers of Mortality' by Steve Thomas

I enjoyed the first in the 'Histories of Atreus' series, 'An Exercise in Futility', although it was a little dry. This one, however, is anything but, starting with a bang and going on in great style. Unusually for a fantasy series, this one starts many decades after the previous one, so it features a completely different set of characters and problems. It's not even necessary to have read the first book, as the essential details are explained in passing as the story develops.

The first book had a fairly limited view of the created world, but this one opens things out nicely to show us more of the world itself. The real focus, however, is not so much the geography or the political arrangements, but the different applications of magic. The use of magically imbued sand, seithsand or seidrium, to power spells through runes, is here seen in a formalised approach, through years of study at the Academy. In contrast, the Paiktur have an innate ability to live on the sand and use that for magic in an untrained and primitive way. And the elves are born with a fixed amount of magical capability, which has to be used sparingly because they die when it is used up.

The Paiktur have an unusual way of life. They live in Thelluk, magically created villages where a single adult male defends his harem of females and their children. Male children are turfed out to live alone in the desert when they reach adulthood, until they are mature and powerful enough to challenge another male for control of a Thelluk. If they succeed, they generally then kill the children. This is a type of society seen in many primate species, and also in lions, but not so often in human cultures, for although powerful individuals sometimes acquire a harem, infanticide is generally frowned upon (maybe because harems are traditionally passed from father to son rather than acquired by conquest). It's an intriguing idea to find in a fantasy novel, and the author quite correctly points out that where all the adults have magical power, the combined magic of the females will always win out over a single male, however strong, so really they have the final say in which male takes control of the Thelluk.

The characters are a lively bunch, with very distinct personalities. The best part of the book, for me, was when the motley group of Jeshu the assassin, Vunrata the mage, Gandahar the magically enhanced but mute knight, and Krinpet the not-quite-all-there bouncy young man were on their journey. The wildly different foursome sparked off each other very entertainingly and the humour flowed nicely (I love it when a book makes me laugh out loud). Once they split up, however, much of the humour was lost, and the other characters were a bit less interesting. I did like the ogre, though.

The magic in this book is getting very powerful. In 'Exercise', it seemed quite controlled, a bit difficult to master, but limited in application, but here everyone seems to be able to do anything they want, and the only difference is in the source of the power, whether it requires an external source or is in some way innate. I'm not a big fan of anything-goes magical power. It always seems too much like deus ex machina, somehow - a character gets into trouble, and poof, with one bound they're free (or invisible or transformed or tossing enemies aside or whatever it is). Although mostly the magic is constrained by needing seithsand to power it, once powered up they can seemingly do whatever they like. The distinction between having god-like powers and actually being a god is a bit too subtle for me.

The plot quickly got convoluted. I have to confess to finding it confusing at times. Once the main characters began to split up into subgroups and reform, and people kept disappearing and turning up at crucial moments later, it got hard to follow. The trick of hopping about in time to fill in missing details didn't help, either, and it seemed like a rather clunky technique to reveal something about one or two characters (and parts of the reveals were obvious anyway). Fortunately events were dramatic enough to keep me turning the pages, although the ending seemed a little flat, somehow. There was never sufficient emotional engagement with any of the characters or with the objectives of the plot to create the necessary tension. Sometimes it even seemed as if the characters themselves didn't much care about the deaths of their comrades, although perhaps that was just because of their slightly distant personalities. The final battle in the mine seemed curiously devoid of any focus - or, to put it another way, I wasn't at all clear who I was supposed to be rooting for, since all the characters involved had been point-of-view characters at one time or another, and none of them were obviously hero or villain at this point.

Unfortunately, although this is an enjoyable read and starts very well, it then loses its way a little from the midpoint onwards. The initial sharply defined characters and objectives - the elf looking to extend her magical capabilities with the Paiktur, and the mismatched four trying to track her down - starts to sprawl into less clearcut plotlines - the sulky goddess, the troubles at the mine, the rebellious local leader, the fight contests. All of it is perfectly logical, but it seems to be more an exploration of ideas about the effects of magic and the nature of civilisation than about telling a compelling story. The epilogue serves to tidy things up a little, although I'm not sure that it really qualifies as a happy ending, especially given what was done to the Paiktur. There is some good, detailed world-building, nice characterisation and an interesting, if not entirely believable magic system, and the humour is welcome, but the choppy later sections and the flatness of the climax keep it to three stars.

Review: 'Red Dust Road' by Jackie Kay

I knew nothing about Jackie Kay before opening this book, so it was a bit of a leap in the dark. She writes poetry, it turns out, and has obviously attracted some attention with it because she has an MBE. But this book is not about her writing, it's about how she was adopted and came to find her natural parents. Not that there's much to say about that - they never really become three dimensional, glimpsed in rather fraught occasional meetings in their old age. But if the central focus of the book is a little hazy, the decorative curlicues around the edges, the snippets of life with her adoptive parents, are what bring the story to vivid life, rich with humour and deep affection.

To be honest, I often wonder with a book of this type just why the author decided to write it. Fiction and poetry I can understand - there's a desire to tell a story, to create something new and original, to say something. But a memoir? Why would an author think these little vignettes from an ordinary life, however well written, would be interesting? Is it catharsis? It's clear that meeting her birth parents was a traumatic experience, on both sides, so maybe Kay felt the need for some kind of release, a kind of blood-letting, or perhaps a way of packaging it all up neatly into something small and manageable like a book, so it can be tidily shelved away. But what exactly do all her friends and relations (long-standing or newly discovered) feel to be written about in this tell-all way - the family's secrets spread out in the open for people like me to maul and comment on and make judgments about.

Maybe the author intended it partly as a celebration of her adoptive parents. Certainly the contrast with her birth parents could hardly be more stark, and makes their own eccentricities (they were active socialists and atheists) seem trivial and positively benign by comparison. It is also clear that, whatever the emotional ups and downs and physical difficulties involved in meeting her birth family, and however great her euphoria when things went well, it was always her adoptive parents who grounded her, and formed the solid bedrock of her life.

This is not a particularly original book, in many ways. There are many other works written by people tracing their roots and finding out surprising things about themselves and their families. There are many other works about the experience of being black or lesbian or adopted. Some of them are far more profound or moving than this one. Kay had, after all, a fairly sheltered upbringing in a loving family. Nevertheless, however lightweight the subject matter, Kay's writing skills shine through, and there's enough humour and charm here to make the book an interesting, if not compelling, read. Three stars.

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.