Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss

Review: The Star and the Strange Moon by Constance Sayers

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
Review: The Star and the Strange Moon by Constance SayersThe Star and the Strange Moon by Constance Sayers
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fantasy, historical fiction, magical realism
Pages: 480
Published by Redhook on November 14, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

From the author of A Witch in Time comes a haunting tale of ambition, obsession, and the eternal mystery and magic of film.
1968: Actress Gemma Turner once dreamed of stardom. Unfortunately, she’s on the cusp of slipping into obscurity. When she’s offered the lead in a radical new horror film, Gemma believes her luck has finally changed. But L’Etrange Lune’s set is not what she expected. The director is eccentric, and the script doesn’t make sense.
Gemma is determined to make this work. It’s her last chance to achieve her dream—but that dream is about to derail her life. One night, between the shadows of an alleyway, Gemma disappears on set and is never seen again. Yet, Gemma is still alive. She’s been transported into the film and the script—and the monsters within it—are coming to life. She must play her role perfectly if she hopes to survive.
2015: Gemma Turner’s disappearance is one of film history’s greatest mysteries—one that’s haunted film student Christopher Kent ever since he saw his first screening of L’Etrange Lune. The screenings only happen once a decade and each time there is new, impossible footage of Gemma long after she vanished. Desperate to discover the truth, Christopher risks losing himself. He’ll have to outrun the cursed legacy of the film—or become trapped by it forever.

My Review:

The Star and the Strange Moon is a story about hunger, greed, obsession, the power of movies to make magic and, surprisingly, the power of magic to make movies.

This timeslip story has two beginnings, as timeslip stories often do. At first, neither the reader nor the characters have any clue what one will have to do with the other – which is what fuels the obsession and powers the whole journey, both magical and mundane.

In 1986, a woman sees a photograph on a wall and pretty much loses her damn mind. Not that she hasn’t been heading that direction for quite some time, after nearly two decades of brief fortune, lost fame, failed hopes, and entirely too much sex and drugs and, as it turns out, not nearly enough rock and roll.

Her son, all of ten years old, has been the adult in their nomadic existence for seemingly all of his life, taking care of his mother as she drives them from one brief, often catastrophic singing gig to another, making sure she doesn’t kill herself with booze or drugs and talking her down from whatever figurative ledge she’s climbed up to this time.

But something about that photograph on the wall rips away his mother’s last grasp on sanity or reality or normalcy or all of the above in a way that both changes and makes Christopher Kent’s young life – even if, at age ten – he has no idea what who the woman in that photograph was or what any of it means.

The perspective then switches to the woman in the photograph, Gemma Turner, back in 1968, when she was a formerly up and coming actress and the current ‘old lady’ for a rock singer on the cusp of either greatness or being thrown out of his own band. Gemma wants out and away, so she takes the only acting job offered, to star in a horror movie for a French New Wave director who may be a genius director but has no clue about the conventions of the horror genre he plans to both break and break into.

One night, in the middle of filming L’Etrange Lune in a tiny French village, Gemma Turner disappears in the middle of a shoot – literally in the middle of a shot while the camera is recording it all. She wakes up in what appears to be a real-life version of the set of the movie, complete with its ‘strange moon’, in what seems to be 1878, in the person of the character she was portraying.

A character who is soon to be drained to death by a vampire. Unless, somehow, she can change the script.

Meanwhile, back in the so-called real world, her disappearance turns into a mystery that swallows the life of everyone the movie or the woman ever touched. Including, eventually and inevitably, the life of one Christopher Kent, who has no idea who Gemma Turner was or what she might possibly have ever done to his mother.

It will become Christopher’s obsession – and his life’s journey – to find the answer to ALL the mysteries that have grown up around Gemma Turner’s disappearance. It’s a discovery that will break him, make him, and enthrall him to the very end.

And the reader right along with him.

Escape Rating A-: I picked this up because I adored the author’s earlier book, The Ladies of the Secret Circus, with its blend of history, mystery and magic, and The Star and the Strange Moon looked like it was in the same vein.

Which turned out to be true a bit more literally than I imagined, adding to the mystery of the story and my compulsion to finish it because there were bits that started to sound just a bit more familiar than I expected.

They are not the same story, although they do have similarities in their blending of forgotten history, secret realities, hidden magic and family obsessions. Nor do you need to read one to enjoy the other.

But both stories have the same origin. Or at least the same originator, the demon prince Althacazur and his endless and frequently appalling attempts to keep his eternity from being boring. Althacazur turns out to be the ‘man’ behind the curtain, rather like the Wizard of Oz, only Althacazur is a real magical being with all too real and horrific powers.

I want to say he’s not important – and he’s not important to what makes this story compulsively readable and so much fun. So even though the events are all his fault, he’s not all that important in the grand scheme of things, as contradictory as that seems.

What makes this story work is its combination of Christopher’s obsession to learn what the mysteriously missing Gemma Turner has to do with the sad progress of his mother’s life, set against Gemma’s story of taking control of her own destiny in a way that would not have been possible in the time and place to which she was born.

Christopher’s story is a story about hunting down clues, investigating theories, and giving over his own life in the present to solve a mystery in the past. Gemma’s story is about learning to make lemons out of lemonade and accepting that even if she can’t go home again, she can make a home where she is.

That Christopher’s solution to the mystery takes him down a road that runs more than a bit parallel to Outlander isn’t exactly a surprise by the time he gets there. But it does make for a fitting and delightful end to a lovely twisty turny story.

Which now has me more than a bit curious about the author’s first book, A Witch in Time, and whether Althacazur has been entertaining himself with humans even more than we’ve seen in The Ladies of the Secret Circus and The Star and the Strange Moon. I’ll have to find out while I wait for the author’s next book to magically – or demonically – appear!

Review: System Collapse by Martha Wells

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
Review: System Collapse by Martha WellsSystem Collapse (The Murderbot Diaries, #7) by Martha Wells
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: science fiction, space opera
Series: Murderbot Diaries #7
Pages: 256
Published by Tordotcom on November 14, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Am I making it worse? I think I'm making it worse.
Everyone's favorite lethal SecUnit is back.
Following the events in Network Effect, the Barish-Estranza corporation has sent rescue ships to a newly-colonized planet in peril, as well as additional SecUnits. But if there’s an ethical corporation out there, Murderbot has yet to find it, and if Barish-Estranza can’t have the planet, they’re sure as hell not leaving without something. If that something just happens to be an entire colony of humans, well, a free workforce is a decent runner-up prize.
But there’s something wrong with Murderbot; it isn’t running within normal operational parameters. ART’s crew and the humans from Preservation are doing everything they can to protect the colonists, but with Barish-Estranza’s SecUnit-heavy persuasion teams, they’re going to have to hope Murderbot figures out what’s wrong with itself, and fast!
Yeah, this plan is... not going to work.

My Review:

The system that is collapsing in Murderbot’s seventh outing is Murderbot’s own – and it’s angsting about it in ways that are not remotely leading to optimal performance. Which in turn is leading to even less optimal performance.

In other words, as we check back into Murderbot’s usually snarkastic consciousness, Murderbot is a mess and doing its best to hide the full depth of its mess from itself. Every time its narrative bumps up against the incident that is causing it all the angst, it retreats into “[redacted]” and tries to work around the dysfunction.

The problem is that Murderbot is NOT truly working around whatever is eating away at it. As much as Murderbot likes to believe it is superior to humans – and it often is in the situations in which it finds itself – when it comes to dealing with its own shit it doesn’t function any better than the rest of us.

Which is reassuring IN a character the reader identifies and follows along with – but not so reassuring TO a character from its own internal perspective – as Murderbot learns to its own increasing dismay. And further degradation of its performance.

It seems like Murderbot is suffering from the SecUnit version of ‘Impostor Syndrome’ – and it’s just as uncomfortable for it as it is for us. Also every bit as panic inducing.

Meanwhile, Murderbot, its fellow snarkastic AI ART – or at least ART’s physically smaller drone as ART itself is a spaceship – and their collective humans are in the process of organizing a recently discovered ‘lost’ colony to resist the political, corporate, disinformation campaign of propaganda and eventual virtual enslavement being propagated by the Barish-Estranza corporation.

But the humans that Murderbot’s humans are attempting to help seem to be far, far from ready to BE helped. There’s a schism. In fact, there are multiple schisms among the human population as a result of alien contamination and mind control. And the resulting desire among the humans to get revenge on each other for what happened when they were being mind controlled.

So no one seems to be telling anyone anything like the information really needed to resolve this mess in a peaceful fashion. Then again, that doesn’t seem all that atypical of the history of the planet in contention – all the way back to the original settlement.

Among all the misinformation and disinformation being bandied about, one of the locals finally admits that there’s another colony on the planet that needs to weigh in on their narrowing options. If that breakaway group can be contacted. If they’re still alive.

And if the Barish-Estranza corporate goons haven’t gotten their hooks in first.

But of course they have, because Murderbot’s luck never runs any other way. But it will have to run as fast as it can to catch up and outwit those corporate operatives any way it can all the while wondering if it’s still capable of doing so at all.

Escape Rating A-: As I’ve said in pretty much every review of an entry in The Murderbot Diaries except that first joint review of the first three books in the series (All Systems Red, Artificial Condition and Rogue Protocol), this seventh entry in the series is not the place to become acquainted with Murderbot’s brand of snarkasm. Start with All Systems Red. and buckle up for a wild ride.

For those of us who have been following Murderbot’s (mis)adventures from the beginning, this one feels like it starts a bit in the middle – perhaps even more than usual. And the somewhat dystopian, corporate controlled universe that Murderbot inhabits has become complex enough that I felt a bit lost at the beginning.

Which is also somewhat fitting, as Murderbot is definitely kind of lost at the beginning of the story. So a whole lot of this one is Murderbot being uncertain about itself and its competence, dealing with that uncertainty badly – as it deals with all the emotions it claims it doesn’t have. All the while, the situation in which it and its humans are currently endangered is every bit as FUBAR’d as usual.

Murderbot’s only good days are the ones where it gets to watch its space operas in peace – and those days are generally rare. And none of the days since its humans arrived at this colony have been anywhere near that good.

While the foreground story is of Murderbot’s crisis of confidence and its rise to that challenge, the situation in which it takes place is a combination of humans behaving both badly and humanly, and of the desperation of humans on all sides as the verities of their worldview – however terribly and skewed, begin to erode.

Therefore, in the background of the story, it’s clear that Murderbot’s system is not the only one that is collapsing. Its personal collapse is something that can be fixed – or at least dealt with. But the system of corporate hegemony/control/tyranny of this universe is showing signs of its inevitable collapse – a situation that I hope to see come to the foreground in future installments of this series, especially in the two untitled entries yet to come.

Review: The Lost Cause by Cory Doctorow

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
Review: The Lost Cause by Cory DoctorowThe Lost Cause by Cory Doctorow
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook
Genres: climate fiction, dystopian, science fiction
Pages: 368
Published by Tor Books on November 14, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

It’s thirty years from now. We’re making progress, mitigating climate change, slowly but surely. But what about all the angry old people who can’t let go?

For young Americans a generation from now, climate change isn't controversial. It's just an overwhelming fact of life. And so are the great efforts to contain and mitigate it. Entire cities are being moved inland from the rising seas. Vast clean-energy projects are springing up everywhere. Disaster relief, the mitigation of floods and superstorms, has become a skill for which tens of millions of people are trained every year. The effort is global. It employs everyone who wants to work. Even when national politics oscillates back to right-wing leaders, the momentum is too great; these vast programs cannot be stopped in their tracks.

But there are still those Americans, mostly elderly, who cling to their red baseball caps, their grievances, their huge vehicles, their anger. To their "alternative" news sources that reassure them that their resentment is right and pure and that "climate change" is just a giant scam.

And they're your grandfather, your uncle, your great-aunt. And they're not going anywhere. And they’re armed to the teeth.

The Lost Cause What do we do about people who cling to the belief that their own children are the enemy? When, in fact, they're often the elders that we love?

My Review:

The younger generation has ALWAYS been going to the dogs. Graffiti found by Napoleon’s soldiers, stating EXACTLY that point, that “This younger generation is going to the dogs!” was written in hieroglyphs and was determined to have been etched on that wall in 800 BCE. There’s a similar quote from Socrates that merely goes back to sometime between 470 and 399 BCE. If we ever discover a stone carving or the equivalent left by the Neanderthals, they probably thought it too. Just as we do today.

And as we undoubtedly will thirty years from now, or thereabouts. But the generational fight we’re in the midst of right now isn’t just that – although it is certainly also about that.

It’s also about the same neverending, utterly frustrating argument that 18-year-old Brooks Palazzo has been having with his grandfather – and witnessing his grandfather and his old cronies have with the country and the world around him – for his entire life.

Because Dick Palazzo and his friends are members of the local Maga Club, wearing faded red hats and spouting the exact same neo-Nazi conspiracy-tinged quasi-conservative rhetoric that the original Magas did back in the day – which just so happens to be our day.

But in Brooks’ Palazzo’s 2050s, climate change and progressive policies have come 30 years down the road they’re already on. Universal Basic Income is part of the Green New Deal the Magas hate so much, but the climate change they’ve denied until it’s too late to fix has created a new class of refugee in American citizens, born and bred, whose homes and entire cities have either burned up in uncontainable wildcat fires, become Superfund sites because those same fires exploded something toxic that should never have been buried in the first place, or simply got washed away by the rising oceans being fed by runaway global warming.

Young Brooks Palazzo and his young and idealistic friends are all set to welcome a caravan of internal refugees to the hometown they know and love, Burbank, California. They know they have the resources, they know they have the room, they know they have the skills to pull Burbank into the future and bring all their friends and all the friends they’ll make in the future along for the hard work as well as the ride.

But his Gramps’ old buddies, all those old Magas, have a plan to stop that future before it happens. Because they are dead certain that the ship is sinking, and that Burbank doesn’t have enough resources to support the people it already has, let alone the ones that are coming.

They’ll do anything they can to stop the future and the Green New Deal in its tracks. No matter what it takes. And no matter who or what they have to kill. Democracy, the rule of law, innocent children, their neighbors who don’t believe as they do. Themselves even, because martyrs are a great recruiting tool.

And haven’t we seen it all before?

Escape Rating B: In spite of everything I’ve said above, this isn’t actually a dark book. But it’s easy to get caught up in its implications and see a long dark night coming that may make the historical Dark Ages look like a shining beacon of light – if only because the human species wasn’t in danger of extinction at the time.

And there I am, going dark again.

Let me try and wrench this back to the lighter side of this story – which is very much present. The story is told from the perspective of Brooks and his friends as they do their damndest to push forward towards a future. On every page, and in spite of every setback, they still have hope and they’re still working towards it.

They have a vision for a better Burbank, a better country, and even a better world, by taking the lessons they’re learning in this crisis and applying them to the next. They may very well be “fighting the long defeat” to paraphrase Tolkien, but they are there for that long haul and have hopes that it will be made – even if they aren’t the ones to make it.

Because that’s not the point of the struggle but a struggle it most definitely is. They do get down, and some of them bail and all of them want to at different points but they keep living and keep trying.

I found this a compelling read. I groaned when Brooks and Company lost a fight, and grinned when they overcame one of the many, many obstacles in their way. They may be fighting the long defeat but they are glorious in that fight. But part of the premise of the story is that neither side truly wants to let the world burn, they just have diametrically opposed beliefs about the way to prevent that burning or if preventing that burning is even possible. And I’m not sure I still believe that, although I wish I did.

Review: Twilight Falls by Juneau Black

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
Review: Twilight Falls by Juneau BlackTwilight Falls (Shady Hollow, #4) by Juneau Black
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: cozy fantasy, cozy mystery
Series: Shady Hollow #4
Pages: 259
Published by Vintage on November 7, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

The fourth book in the Shady Hollow mystery series sees Vera embroiled in a case involving star-crossed lovers whose affair may have turned deadly.
It's spring in Shady Hollow, and romance is in the air. Even reporter Vera Vixen is caught up in the season as her relationship with new police chief Orville Braun blossoms. But true love is not always smooth sailing, as two of the hollow's young residents come to find. Jonah Atwater and Stasia von Beaverpelt find themselves battling their families in order to be together. And when Alan's father, Shelby, goes over the top of Twilight Falls, all signs point to Stasia being the murderer.
The evidence against Stasia appears overwhelming, and Orville arrests her. It looks like the case is closed, but Vera isn't so sure. There are almost too many clues indicating Stasia is the killer, leading her to suspect someone is setting Stasia up. Besides, what about the mysterious ghostly creature skulking around town at night? Maybe he or she was involved? As Vera investigates further, her sleuthing puts her in direct opposition to Orville, and soon she's stirred up a hornet's nest of trouble.

My Review:

Twilight Falls turned out to be a refreshing breath of spring, the perfect antidote to the wintry conditions descending upon us these days.

It was also a delightful twisty little mystery, as the Shady Hollow series oh-so-frequently turns out to be.

Our story begins as a celebration of all things spring. The days are getting longer and warmer, the flowers are poking their heads out of the ground, the cherry blossoms are having their all-too-brief season and the apple trees have put on their glorious display just in time for Shady Hollow’s annual Apple Blossom Walk Festival for the benefit of the local charities. It’s a celebration of everyone’s survival from the winter, while acknowledging that some creatures’ survival cut a little too close to the bone in one way or another. The funds raised at the Festival go to those in need, while everyone has a great time celebrating the season.

It’s just that kind of celebration – albeit a bit more impromptu one – where the crime that ties the whole town in knots occurs. Twilight Falls, so named because the water at its base always seems to be shrouded in the gloam of twilight, is just far enough out in the woods – or in this case up the river – to seem like a great place to get away for a day.

On this particular weekend day, a LOT of the townsfolk have taken the opportunity of the warmer weather to take the ferry up to Twilight Falls for a day of frolicking for the little ones and perhaps a bit of canoodling for the courting couples on the trip.

Those courting couples include investigative reporter Vera Vixen and her beau, Police Chief Orville Braun, along with a picnic basket and a rare opportunity to spend time together without either of their jobs getting in the way.

Unfortunately, one of the other courting couples consists of Stasia von Beaverpelt, spoiled daughter of the town’s biggest employer,  and her considerably less well-to-do boyfriend, working-class otter Jonah Atwater.

Unlike the cross-species relationship between Vera and Orville, both Stasia and Jonah still have parents around to object, most vigorously, about their romance. Jonah’s father has been objecting so strenuously, loudly and publicly that it’s more of a disappointment than a surprise that he tags along on the ferry to interfere yet again.

But it IS very much of a surprise when the senior Atwater is seen to have an altercation at the top of the falls with a mysterious adversary who draws a knife and pitches him over the Falls – presumably to his doom.

Or at least to the doom of Stasia and Jonah’s romance.

Escape Rating A-: Shady Hollow fits right into the cozy fantasy vibe that has become so popular, and it certainly is a comforting addition (or addiction) to the genre.

I was initially, back in the first book, Shady Hollow, expecting the setup to be more than a bit twee. Surprisingly, it’s not. Not even when taking word substitutions like ‘pawkerchief’ for ‘handkerchief’ into account.

The small town of Shady Hollow is every bit as cozy and twee as the setting of any small-town cozy mystery series, but not actually any more than that. Instead, the various creatures’ species turn out to be a way of highlighting character traits that in human-centric cozies has to be just a bit more explicitly revealed.

But the story proceeds the way that small-town cozies do. The police investigate the crime and come to the wrong conclusion. The romance between the police chief and the ace reporter snags on their strong differences of opinion about whodunnit. The red herrings get tastier and tastier as Orville’s investigation and Vera’s go their separate ways.

While both of them get lots of coffee and sympathy at the local coffee shop. That the shop is run by a moose doesn’t change that vibe AT ALL.

The family drama on both sides of the couple at the heart of the mystery, Stasia’s mother’s ambitions for her to marry well and wealthily, contrasted with Jonah’s dad’s stubborn determination that Jonah marry an otter, period, exclamation point, end of discussion, hit familiar beats in spite of the change in species. As do both adult children’s rejoinder that their parents are just being old-fashioned in their objections.

That their arguments seem to have found a violent resolution is just as typical for the cozy mystery genre as the rest of the story. And it’s all just a lovely and comforting read all the way around. Just like all cozy mystery series, if you’ve fallen for the regular ‘gang’ and the place they live – and I have – then it’s always wonderful to come back for a visit. And it certainly was this time around.

That the ending turns out to be even cozier than expected baked a delightful reading cake with just the tastiest icing imaginable.

I enjoyed reading this touch of spring mystery in the midst of a blustery fall, but I’m absolutely looking forward to the more seasonally-appropriate setting of Evergreen Chase, which I’m planning to read a bit later this holiday season.

Review: A Season of Monstrous Conceptions by Lina Rather

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
Review: A Season of Monstrous Conceptions by Lina RatherA Season of Monstrous Conceptions by Lina Rather
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: Dark Fantasy, historical fantasy, horror
Pages: 161
Published by Tordotcom on October 31, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

In 17th-century London, unnatural babies are being born: some with eyes made for the dark, others with webbed fingers and toes better suited to the sea.
Sarah Davis is intimately familiar with such strangeness—she herself was born marked by uncanniness. Having hidden her nature all her life and fled to London under suspicious circumstances, Sarah starts over as a midwife’s apprentice, hoping to carve out for herself an independent life. As a member of the illegal Worshipful Company of Midwives, Sarah learns to reach across the thinning boundary between her world and another, drawing on its power to heal and protect the women she serves.
When the wealthy Lady Wren hires her to see her through her pregnancy, Sarah quickly becomes a favorite of her husband, the famous architect Lord Christopher Wren, whose interest in the uncanny borders on obsession. Sarah soon finds herself caught in a web of magic and intrigue created by those who would use the magic of the Other World to gain power for themselves, and whose pursuits threaten to unmake the earth itself.

My Review:

Sarah Davis, widow and apprentice midwife, knows all too well that some babies are born who are not meant to live in this world, because she was nearly one of them. But in London in the winter of 1675, when this story takes place, there has been a sudden epidemic of babies being born who are not meant to live in THIS particular world, but rather, a different one where their horns or tails or fur or fangs or even gills would not be the least bit strange or embarrassing for their families. Or otherwise instantly fatal.

It’s not really surprising that this sudden and vast increase in strange and frequently stillborn babies results in accusations of witchcraft and consorting with the devil. (The Salem Witch Trials are still 18 years in the future at this point.)

Actually, from the descriptions of some of the babies, I’m not sure we’d avoid bandying about accusations of witchcraft if it happened TODAY. Demonizing women for their pregnancies or the causes or the results thereof is just as pervasive today as it was in the late 17th century – or any other.

But Sarah is a midwife. She is also, herself, one of those strange children, but when she was born such children were not nearly so common, and her strangeness was one that could be easily snipped away. Literally. She was born with a tail, and an ability to touch on something that her fellow midwives refer to as the ‘Other Place’.

In other words, Sarah has magic. Many of the midwives have a bit, but Sarah has a lot – she just can’t consciously tap into it.

Sir Christopher Wren, very much on the other hand, has money and influence. He has an education and is a well-known scientist as well as an architect. And his wife Faith is very near to term with their second child. A child who was conceived for the sole purpose of opening a gate between this world and that ‘Other Place’ in order to fix the overlap or incursion between the worlds that is causing conditions in both this place and the ‘Other’ to go so very much askew.

Wren believes he’s using Sarah for her power. And he is because he can and he believes he’s right to do so because he knows best. He isn’t and he doesn’t.

Sarah, on the other hand, knows enough. Maybe. Hopefully. Just possibly. Enough.

Escape Rating A-: You remember that Year’s Best collection of Dark Fantasy and Horror that I reviewed last week? A Season of Monstrous Conceptions would have fit in perfectly because it sits right at the haunted crossroads between the two. I went into this book expecting it to be firmly on the Horror side of the fence, and that’s the way it started out, but it crawled over into that crossroads and just a little over to the Dark Fantasy side and planted itself there with its too many eyes and too sharp teeth and crashing worlds and glared at me until I felt sorry for it and realized that I liked it a whole lot more than I ever expected.

This ‘season’ takes place as alchemy was giving way to chemistry. Folk medicine and midwifery, both the practice of women, was being supplanted by trained doctors and surgeons, exclusively male provinces. Magic was fading and logic was taking its place.

This story sits at that juncture. On the one hand, the events taking place are utterly eldritch but clearly quite real. The evidence of babies born with compound eyes, gills and multiple limbs, sometimes all in the same poor creature, is hard to dispute, but it’s not the only thing going wrong in this winter of 1675.

What makes the story interesting revolves around the disparate potential solutions. The magical midwives know it’s happening, believe their magic can fix it, but don’t know quite enough of the science of how the multiverse works to get their fix quite right.

Wren has all the scientific knowledge necessary, as well as the flexibility of mind to accept otherwise unpalatable solutions, but the magic the midwives use is a trade secret he has no access to. His science is just enough to tell him that it’s not enough, either.

Sarah is our point of view character because she stands as the knife edge of balance between all the various factions and forces. She wants to believe that Wren sees her as an intelligent and capable person in her own right, instead of just someone he can use. She already knows that the midwives are using her. She’s caught between the magic she has and the training she gets that does not know how to help her access it. She sees that things are going horribly awry but can’t fix them on her own.

In the end, it’s Sarah’s choices that define both her course and her solution. Watching her use her power but not letting it or anyone around her use her, and her own personal why of it all, makes her a terrific perspective on this story and makes this story a surprising and creepy and often surprisingly creepy delight from beginning to end – just perfect for this Halloween week.

Review: The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror: Volume Four edited by Paula Guran

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
Review: The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror: Volume Four edited by Paula GuranThe Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: Volume Four by Paula Guran
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: Dark Fantasy, fantasy, horror
Series: Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror
Pages: 400
Published by Pyr on October 17, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror series returns with a splendidly startling fourth volume!

From paranormal plots to stories of the supernatural, tales of the unfamiliar have always fascinated us humans. To keep the tradition alive, fantasy aficionado Paula Guran has gathered the most delightfully disturbing work from some of today’s finest writers of the fantastique!

No two mysterious shadows are alike, and the same can be said for the books in this series. T he Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, Volume 4 contains more than three hundred pages of mystical fiction. Reader beware and indulge if you dare, because these chilling tales are sure to spook and surprise!

My Review:

I don’t normally do this, but this was just one of those times when I couldn’t resist rating each of the stories in this collection individually. As all collections are, it’s a bit of a mixed bag, particularly as it straddles two genres that sometimes stride along happily side by side exchanging anecdotes and experiences, and sometimes travel miles apart with dark caves, sucking swamps and haunted forests in between. That only one of those two genres is my usual jam gave the feeling that I should “show my work” so to speak, as any collective will reflect that for this particular reader the two great tastes don’t always go great together. Readers who prefer to read on the horror side of the fence will likely have a similar reaction but with the emphasis on different stories. In the listings below, (DF) represents Dark Fantasy and, of course, (H) is for Horror.

It also felt like these stories made up an important collection, one that should be read and shivered over, not just in the run up to this Halloween, but for Halloweens to come, whenever readers are looking for a wide-ranging collection of stories that go bump in the night.

Without further ado, the stories in, and my commentaries and ratings upon, The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror: Volume Four.

“Shadow Plane” by Fran Wilde (H with a hint of SF) A story about vlogging and mountain climbing that turns into a much older tale about medical experimentation, the things we do in the shadows – and the things the shadows do to us. Chilling and compelling. (A-)

“The Dyer and the Dressmakers” by Bindia Persaud (DF) Dyes for clothing come from dyers, literally in this tale about dying for the art of dyeing at the pleasure of the crown. Fell flat – or rather colorless – for me. (C-)

“Red Wet Grin” by Gemma Files (H) The old horror of possession and body snatching – although a twist on that – mixed well with the new horrors of COVID lockdowns, nursing homes, and the kind of greed that turns a blind eye. Great story with thoughtful conclusion that chills on multiple levels. (A+)

“The Lending Library of Final Lines” by Octavia Cade (DF) In a dying seaside town made for dying in, a woman sells the last pages of books to folks ready to commit suicide by crab. Eating the pages is magic, pulling them into the story just long enough to drug them, and let them be drug to death. Interesting but the incuriosity of the protagonist leaves the reader not having enough to give it depth because she refuses to have any, (B-)

“Men, Women and Chainsaws” by Stephen Graham Jones (H) A young woman pours her life’s blood, into the Chevy Camaro that her parents died in, so that the car can come back to life a la Christine along with her parents’ spirits to help her reenact their deaths with a one-victim version of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. (B)

“The Woman Who Married the Minotaur” by Angela Slatter (DF) Ultimately bittersweet and utterly romantic, this is exactly what the title says it is, the story of a contemporary woman who marries the immortal minotaur from the Labyrinth on Crete. They have a sweet and surprisingly normal life together, but love made him mortal, and in the end, they wouldn’t have had it any other way. (A)

“The Voice of A Thousand Years” by Fawaz Al Matrouk (DF) A beautiful but sad story about the power of education and knowledge set against the recalcitrance of religion, personified in the story of one old man who discovers a magical instrument and does his best to give it new life even at the cost of his own. (A+)

“Bonesoup” by Eugenia Triantafyllou (H) A bit of a variation on Hansel and Gretel where the ‘wicked’ witch merely wants to save the life of her grandchild by giving other children sugar to replace their bones even while she reserves the meat for her granddaughter who finally figures out how to return the favor. A fairy tale retelling that is every bit as scary as they used to be before the Grimm Brothers made them not so grim. (A-)

“Challawa” by Usman T. Malik (DF) Historical dark fantasy that tips into horror at the very end as a woman returns to her family homeland in India to write a story about the horrors of the early matchmaking industry, only to end up in an exchange of historical tales and ghost stories that leads to a deadly reenactment, that is needed to remove the foreign invaders AGAIN. (A+)

“How Selkies Are Made” by Cassandra Khaw (DF) Not as dark as it might have been. It’s a story and it’s a story about how stories get told. And it’s about how foolish humans can be when they’re in love. A woman promises the wrong man entirely too many things he’s not deserving of. After seven years of abuse, she takes her own fate into her own hands, without murder, without breaking her word, but with the help of a selkie. Of course, that’s not how the story gets told. And it’s a bit unsatisfying in the end because the husband really deserved a much worse ending than the loss of a wife he never cared for in the first place. But she kept her honor. (B)

“The Feeding of Closed Mouths” by Eden Royce (H) Her mother is a hag. Not metaphorically, but a real honest-to-badness hag. A monster who once helped her kill a former co-worker and rob a bank, both of which kinda deserved it. But asking a hag for favors seems to be a sure fire way of turning into one yourself, especially if you’re already halfway there. Plenty creepy with a well done heel-turn but not up to some of the other stories in the collection (B-)

“A Belly Full of Spiders” by Mario Coelho (H) Oh so very much horror about a boy who is no longer a boy rescued from monsters hiding in plain sight by a monster who truly is monstrous, with the help of one hell of a lot of spiders who turns out to be on a mission to save all the little children who are held captive in the dark. (B+)

“The Long Way Up” by Alix E. Harrow (DF) It’s a long way down to hell to retrieve her husband, but Ocean is determined to get Ethan back – no matter what it takes. What it takes is faith, trust and listening in this fractured, modernized, gender-reversed version of Orpheus and Eurydice (B+)

“Douen” by Suzan Palumbo (H) The story of a child ghost who, because she never got to grow up, is experiencing ghosthood through a child’s perspective but reacting with a ghost’s powers. The story is both creepy and innocent, and that both the ghost and the humans manage to reach reconciliation at all was a surprise but the story as a whole was more interesting than compelling. (C)

“The Ercildoun Accord” by Steve Toase (DF/H) The concept of conducting archaeology in the lands of faerie, with human tools and human concepts under tricksy fae contracts and conditions was both weird and cool and did a fantastic job of tripping – or rather, being tripped – over the line from Dark Fantasy to Horror in a well-executed combo of inevitability and resignation, even if the reader can’t imagine why ANYONE would be doing this job in the first place! (B+)

“Sharp Things, Killing Things” by A.C. Wise (H) Everyone has a guilty conscience – even if they don’t remember exactly what it is they are guilty of. Or it’s a story about dark small towns where everyone is up in everyone’s business and the cruelties inflicted in childhood ripple out in depressing waves from both the tormentors and their victims. Or it’s a straight up horror story about a town where the only way out is death and he’s going around making sure everyone takes him up on the offer. This one is really good of its type, it’s just not a type I personally care for. (C+)

“Swim the Darkness” by Michael Kelly (DF) This one reminded me of Shark Heart by Emily Habeck, but this story is much more gently told and is less about the girl who becomes a fish and more about parental regrets and the grief of losing a child when it’s supposed to be the other way around. The equivocal ending feels right, because the story has always been more about him than her. It’s possible to interpret this as him grieving so hard he follows, or him regretting so much he can’t let go. I liked the story better than Shark Heart, but it just wasn’t my jam. (B-)

“The Summer Castle” by Ray Naylor (DF/H) On the border between dark fantasy and horror, and not very clear about it into the bargain, it’s the last summer of childhood for two boys on the eve of war. The horror is all in the implications of that war but the story is a bit more amorphous and nebulous than I hoped for from the author of the totally awesome The Mountain in the Sea. (B-)

“In the Smile Place” by Tobi Ogundiran (H) If you put two other stories in this collection, “Men, Women and Chainsaws” and “Sharp Things, Killing Things” into a blender I think you’d get this story. Which makes it even weirder than it was when I read it. It combines the visitation of adult regret over being a young bully of “Sharp Things” with the haunted places and revenge of supposedly inanimate objects of “Chainsaws” into a single weird and creepy story. (B-)

“A Monster in the Shape of a Boy” (DF) At first, this is a dark fantasy about a boy training to become a monster hunter after he fails his first test – when a monster shaped exactly like himself surprises him so much he forgets his training and does not kill it immediately. His training is grim and dark as it seems designed to turn him into more of a monster than the one he was supposed to kill, only for the story to come full circle at the end and make the reader wonder who is really the monster after all. (B)

“Lemmings” by Kirstyn McDermott (H) It’s fitting that “Lemmings” is the last story in this collection, because I actually remember the video game Lemmings from its original release, and this is absolutely the last place I ever expected to see it referenced. The game’s  graphics were simple and the lemmings were suicidal, but underneath the pixelated gore was a story about scarce resources, preserving the tribe, and the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few and the few being ready, willing and able to throw themselves off a cliff to meet those needs. The way that this story takes that concept and merges it with a viral sensation and a viral plague takes the silly and makes it chilling in the extreme. (A-)

Escape Rating A-: I had to do actual math to get close to a collective rating for this one. There were several stories I straight-up loved on both the Dark Fantasy and, surprisingly for me, the Horror side of the equation, notably “Red Wet Grin” by Gemma Files, “The Voice of A Thousand Years” by Fawaz Al Matrouk and “Challawa” by Usman T. Malik.

If you’re looking for something appropriately spooky and scary to read this Halloween season, The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror: Volume 4 – and all of the previous volumes in this series! – are sure to give you just what you’re looking for. Especially if you’re looking for stories that HAVE to be read with the lights on.

Review: Under the Smokestrewn Sky by A. Deborah Baker

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
Review: Under the Smokestrewn Sky by A. Deborah BakerUnder the Smokestrewn Sky (The Up-and-Under, #4) by A. Deborah Baker
Narrator: Heath Miller
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss, supplied by publisher via Libro.fm
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy, portal fantasy, young adult
Series: Up-and-Under #4
Pages: 195
Length: 4 hours and 48 minutes
Published by Macmillan Audio, Tordotcom on October 17, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

The end of the improbable road.
Since stumbling from their world into the Up-and-Under, Avery and Zib have walked the improbable road across forests, seas, and skies, finding friends in the unlikeliest of places and enemies great in number, as they make their way toward the Impossible City in the hope of finding their way home.
But the final part of their journey is filled with danger and demise. Not everyone will make it through unscathed. Not everyone will make it through alive.
The final part of the enchanting Up and Under quartet reminds us of the value of friendship and the price one sometimes pays for straying from the path. No one’s safety can be guaranteed under the smokestrewn sky.

My Review:

We have come, at last, to the final chapter of Zib and Avery’s journey into and hopefully through the Up-and-Under. It’s a journey that has taken them from their ordinary and mundane homes – even if Zib’s and Avery’s definitions of ordinary and mundane are entirely opposite to one another – and sent them along the Improbable Road on an equally improbable journey through every single one of the elemental kingdoms in the Up-and-Under.

They’ve picked up friends along the way. And, even if they haven’t changed physically along their way, they’ve certainly changed quite a bit on the inside – just as they’ve changed the lands they pass through on the outside.

Even though, as their quest winds closer to its end, this particular part of their journey sees Avery backsliding rather a lot into the boy he was at the beginning. A boy who couldn’t quite wrap his logical and orderly mind around the immutable fact that the Up-and-Under was entirely mutable from beginning to end, that things absolutely did not work there the way they did back home in America. And that the way things did work in the Up-and-Under might not be what HE was used to, but just because things were done differently did not mean things were wrong or ridiculous.

It’s Avery’s bit of stubborn backsliding that pushes the story off the Improbable Road and into their very last set of adventures in the Up-and-Under. Adventures that will have a much bigger impact than any of them imagined when they began.

Because for every great change there are great consequences, and the time has come for someone to pay them. Whether or not anyone wins this last throw of the dice, someone is going to have to lose.

Escape Rating A-: I’ve enjoyed Zib and Avery’s journey through the Up-and-Under, so as a treat for this final entry in the series I decided to try it in audio. I still loved their story, but the audio wasn’t quite as much of a treat as I was hoping it would be.

The voice actor was terrific at differentiating the characters’ voices, but one of those characters is the voice of the narrator who is telling the story to us as the audience. Because of the nature of the series, that its protagonists are predominantly young adults or not quite that old the storyteller character took on an arch tone that arched so very high that it arced all the way over into condescension – which led me to switch to text at the halfway point. I liked the storyteller’s voice a LOT better inside my own head.

However, whether in text or in audio, Under the Smokestrewn Sky is the story that brings the journey through the Up-and-Under to its ending, and it’s a story full of surprises and costs and consequences – as it should be.

No matter the age of the protagonists, this has been the story of an epic fantasy quest that combines bits of Narnia with elements of Wonderland. Zib and Avery have been brought to the Up-and-Under to fix what’s gone wrong there, while for Zib and Avery the quest is to find their way home. It’s not going to end in a big battle between good and evil, because those concepts aren’t exactly the same in the Up-an-Under as they are back home. Instead, it’s a quest to put the out-of-balance back into balance – even if some of what they see looks like evil to Zib and Avery’s – especially Avery’s – eyes.

And, even though Zib and Avery are still children, this has been an adult journey which has to carry adult consequences for someone. A someone who might be either Avery or Zib – even if that doesn’t feel fair. Because part of the lesson Avery has to learn is that fairness doesn’t enter into the big answers to the big questions nearly as often as his life so far has led him to believe that it should.

Readers who started at the beginning of this journey in Over the Woodward Wall will probably not be surprised at how all the big questions that were asked at the beginning of the story get answered at its end. But following Zib’s and Avery’s journey to get there has been fantastic!

Review: Generation Ship by Michael Mammay

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A++ Reviews> book reviews
Review: Generation Ship by Michael MammayGeneration Ship by Michael Mammay
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: science fiction, space opera
Pages: 608
Published by Harper Voyager on October 17, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

In this riveting, stand-alone novel from Michael Mammay, author of  Planetside,  the beginning of a new human colony must face tyrannical leaders, revolution, crippling instability, and an unknown alien planet that could easily destroy them all. In 2108, Colony Ship  Voyager  departed Earth for the planet of Promissa with 18,000 of the world’s best and brightest on board. 250 years and 27 light years later, an arrival is imminent. But all is not well. The probes that they’ve sent ahead to gather the data needed to establish any kind of settlement aren’t responding, and the information they have received has presented more questions than answers. It’s a time when the entire crew should be coming together to solve the problem, but science officer Sheila Jackson can’t get people to listen. With the finish line in sight, a group of crewmembers want an end to the draconian rules that their forebearers put in place generations before. However, security force officer Mark Rector and his department have different plans. As alliances form and fall, Governor Jared Pantel sees only one way to bring  Voyager ’s citizens together and secure his own a full-scale colonization effort. Yet, he may have underestimated the passion of those working for the other side... Meanwhile, a harsh alien planet awaits that might have its own ideas about being colonized. A battle for control brews, and victory for one group could mean death for them all. 

My Review:

“Space, the final frontier”…has an awful lot of, well, space, in it. But Star Trek promised that we’d navigate all that space at faster-than-light speed, better known as ‘warp’. Which is probably what FTL will be named if we ever figure out how to do it. Trek history said (says? will say?) that we’ll have it all figured out by 2063 – at least according to Star Trek: First Contact.

But reality is likely otherwise. At least so far as we know now, and seemingly as far as the engineers, designers and builders of the Colony Ship Voyager knew by the time it launched in 2108 – less than a century from our now.

(Albert Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity implies that FTL travel is impossible for anything that has mass. Meaning humans. And spaceships. Even light is implied to be incapable of traveling faster than the speed of light.)

None of the above prevents humans from either wanting or needing to leave Earth and putting down roots – so to speak – among the stars. Even though the nearest planet we know of, at least so far – is Proxima Centauri b, four light-years away. The nearest likely habitable planet, again, that we know of so far, is Kepler-452b and it would take 1,400 years to get there.

Without FTL travel, space is big and vast and even potential ‘Class-M planets’ (again to use Star Trek terminology because Trek named everything) is too far away from Earth for conventional space travel to work.

The two most often used science fictional methods of interplanetary travel for colonization that work – often badly in fiction – with this dilemma are sleeper ships and colony ships. Generation Ship, as one can tell by the title, is a colony ship.

Colony ship stories have all sorts of dramatic possibilities because, while space may be vast and infinite, the world of the colony ship is relatively small and even claustrophobic – especially over a vast, generations-long, journey to a new home.

Also, humans are gonna human, no matter what circumstances they find themselves in.

Which leads us, by a bit of a roundabout, to the Colony Ship Voyager (Trek again!) on its 250 year journey from Earth to Promissa. A planet which may or may not live up to its promise even as it hoves into sight and reach.

While there’s a philosophical cliché that “It’s not the destination, it’s the journey”, in colony ship stories it’s not the journey, it’s the destination where all the dramatic tension comes into play. The journey, at least after the drama of the launch and the early years of settling in for the long haul, is mostly about keeping on keeping on as everyone adjusts to the new normal.

But the destination, or at least the increasing stress as the destination becomes all too real, represents a time of great change, as the life and routine that the ship has settled into is about to be overset by planetfall. Which may or may not be everything everyone hoped and dreamed way back when the first crew set off on their journey.

And will certainly upset the status quo. Life is going to be vastly different after the ship’s crew become planetary settlers. Whoever it is who has knowledge and power aboard ship may or may not have the skills it takes to be a leader on the ground. Which does not mean that the shipboard leaders aren’t going to do their level and even skullduggery best to remain powerful and privileged.

The story of Generation Ship is all about the jockeying and politicking and outright underhanded dealing that goes on as the Voyager’s probes are able to finally reach the ‘promised land’ and the end of the long journey is about to begin.

Unless, of course, Promissa itself has other ideas.

Escape Rating A++: In spite of the relatively small size of the Colony Ship Voyager, the final months of its long journey to Promissa contain a utterly riveting, terrifically complex and downright huge story that isn’t about the science of colony ships a quarter so much as it is about the political shenanigans of the humans aboard them.

It’s a roiling stew of “we have met the enemy and he is us” coming to a full boil in an atmosphere of “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely”, especially over time and covered by the slowly eroding illusion of “we’re all in this together” mixed with a heaping helping of “the greater good”.

At the center of the drama are a series of first-person perspectives from all over the ship, from the all-powerful but absolutely not all-knowing governor who is desperate to hang onto his power while cementing his legacy, to the over-ambitious security guard who is just so sure he’s smarter than everyone around him, to the reluctant leader of the not-so-loyal opposition to the scientist whose beloved science is telling her that they are not ready to make planetfall – no matter what the governor has manipulated people into believing. While behind the scenes an ace hacker/engineer sees a truth about their ship that no one is ready to believe or understand.

By seeing the situation from so many sides we’re able to get inside the life of the ship, AND the life on the ship, which are not nearly as much the same things as everyone believes. We’re watching a world come apart – even if that’s what was always supposed to happen. And it’s utterly fascinating as the players negotiate and maneuver themselves into a situation that is nothing like the first crew expected.

And it’s absolutely riveting every step of the way, even as it recalls several previous colony ship stories that wrestle with the same issues but take them down to the mat or to the planet in entirely different ways. If Generation Ship sounds fascinating to you, and I sincerely hope it does, you might want to also check out Braking Day by Adam Oyebanji, Medusa Uploaded by Emily Devenport, Mickey7 by Edward Ashton and, last but absolutely not least, the Pixar film WALL-E.

Review: A Stroke of the Pen by Terry Pratchett

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
Review: A Stroke of the Pen by Terry PratchettA Stroke of the Pen: The Lost Stories by Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy, short stories
Pages: 240
Published by Doubleday on October 10, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Far away and long ago, when dragons still existed and the only arcade game was ping-pong in black and white, a wizard cautiously entered a smoky tavern in the evil, ancient, foggy city of Morpork...
A truly unmissable, beautifully illustrated collection of unearthed stories from the pen of Sir Terry Pratchett: award-winning and bestselling author, and creator of the phenomenally successful Discworld series.
Twenty early short stories by one of the world's best loved authors, each accompanied by exquisite original woodcut illustrations.
These are rediscovered tales that Pratchett wrote under a pseudonym for newspapers during the 1970s and 1980s. Whilst none are set in the Discworld, they hint towards the world he would go on to create, containing all of his trademark wit, satirical wisdom and fantastic imagination.
Meet Og the inventor, the first caveman to cultivate fire, as he discovers the highs and lows of progress; haunt the Ministry of Nuisances with the defiant evicted ghosts of Pilgarlic Towers; visit Blackbury, a small market town with weird weather and an otherworldly visitor; and go on a dangerous quest through time and space with hero Kron, which begins in the ancient city of Morpork...

My Review:

I first became acquainted with the Discworld and its creator – or perhaps perpetrator would be the better word – in the early to mid 1990s when I had a long commute, audiobooks were still on actual tape, and the collection of same at the library where I worked wasn’t all that big because there wasn’t all that much available.

Two of those available titles were The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic, the first two books in the Discworld . It wasn’t exactly love at first listen because those first two books were a bit weirder than I expected, and looking back from the perspective of even Mort, only two books later, it was pretty clear that the author figured out he had a series going on somewhen approximately between The Light Fantastic and book 3, Equal Rites.

I don’t think he was all the way there until book 8, Guards! Guards!, which is a much better entry point for the series. (I digress – but hopefully not too far or I’ll fall off the edge.)

The point I’m working my way around is that masterpieces like the Discworld do not spring fully formed from the head of Zeus – or even two Zeuses in the case of Good Omens, co-authored with Neil Gaiman.

The stories in this collection, these ‘strokes of the pen’ by Sir Terry Pratchett, are a bit of a portrait of the beloved author as a young scrivener who was still in the process of figuring out what in the hell he was doing and quite possibly where was he going in that handcart.

The story of these stories is a bit of a story all by itself. They were published – these are not early efforts that were never intended to see the light of day. It’s just that they were published in a tabloid newspaper, the Western Daily Press, published in Bristol in the U.K. from 1967 to 1984, mostly under the pseudonym Patrick Kearns.

But the Western Daily Press was – and still is – a very small newspaper. The stories were published, read and mostly forgotten, with the exception of “The Quest for the Keys” which had been cut out and preserved by one enterprising fan – howsomever without any of the borders of the pages which would have revealed where and when it was published. A painstaking search through the British Library’s Newspaper Archive resulted in the discoveries that have been published in this collection.

The stories themselves are a LOT of fun. Every single one gives the reader a chuckle or at least a smile, and there are hints of what evolved into Pratchett’s style of both telling the story and making snide asides about the circumstances even in the earliest instances.

But they are very, very short, and with the exception of “The Quest for the Keys”, which was published in four parts, it’s obvious that the newspaper had limited space for fiction – and probably everything else. So these are touches, tastes, teasers and don’t get into a lot of detail.

Still, by grouping them in little series, the reader does get a pretty clear picture of places like Blackbury [sic] which seems like it could be just around the corner from Unseen University – no matter how much the stories refer to far-distant London. Which could, with a bit of a squint, be Ankh-Morpork.

Although, speaking of Ankh-Morpork, the final story in the collection, “The Quest for the Keys”, is set in the city of Morpork. Perhaps the annexation of Ankh is just around its corner. And again, a bit of a squint turns the lazy and underhanded wizard Grubble into the more inept but much nicer about it Rincewind of The Colour of Magic, while the hired sword Grubble has hired and duped, Kron, seems more than a bit like a younger and savvier Cohen the Barbarian, perhaps with just a touch of the inestimable Sam Vimes.

Escape Rating B: A Stroke of the Pen isn’t exactly the Discworld , but it is Discworld -adjacent. Which is as close as it’s possible to get now that its author, creator and perpetrator is no longer among us. It’s at that intersection of not being sure whether to cry because it’s over, or smile because it happened. The stories themselves are generally fun but not terribly deep, because there wasn’t time in the format to get that way.

So, think of this collection as a last twinkle of the author’s eye, and enjoy!

Review: An Inheritance of Magic by Benedict Jacka

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B+ Reviews> blog tours> book reviews
Review: An Inheritance of Magic by Benedict JackaAn Inheritance of Magic (Stephen Oakwood, #1) by Benedict Jacka
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: urban fantasy
Series: Stephen Oakwood #1
Pages: 384
Published by Ace on October 5, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

The super-rich control everything—including magic—in this thrilling and brilliant, contemporary fantasy from the author of the Alex Verus novels.
The wealthy seem to exist in a different, glittering world from the rest of us. Almost as if by... magic.
Stephen Oakwood is a young man on the edge of this hidden world. He has talent and potential, but turning that potential into magical power takes money, opportunity, and training. All Stephen has is a minimum wage job and a cat. 
But when a chance encounter with a member of House Ashford gets him noticed by the wrong people, Stephen is thrown in the deep end. For centuries, the vast corporations and aristocratic Houses of the magical world have grown impossibly rich and influential by hoarding their knowledge. To survive, Stephen will have to take his talent and build it up into something greater—for only then can he beat them at their own game.

My Review:

In a famous exchange between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, Fitzgerald claimed that “the rich are different from you and me” to which Hemingway rejoined “Yes, they have money.”

That principle is at the heart of An Inheritance of Magic, as the story begins with Stephen Oakwood discovering that he’s related to a rich and powerful family – who have only looked him up in order to stomp him like a bug.

Because they are powerful because they are rich, and rich because they are powerful, and as far as they are concerned his only use to any of them is as a pawn in their games – both mundane and, more importantly, magical.

The magic is called drucraft, a talent in which Stephen has had only one teacher and little to no training. Which means that over his relatively short life, he’s learned to do things that organized training would have told him were impossible. And maybe they mostly are, but for him, some of them are not.

So Stephen’s story is about having the lesson literally beaten into him that the playing field is not level – because it isn’t. And it’s about Stephen deciding that even if that is true – and it is – there is nothing stopping him from doing his level best to level it – one way or another.

If he doesn’t have the training to play by their rules, he can develop the power and more importantly the will to make them play by his. Because they’ve already made him see what the worst case scenario might cost him and he’s not willing to go there again.

No matter how many rules – or people – he has to break along the way.

Escape Rating B+: An Inheritance of Magic is a combination of a coming-of-age story and a coming-into-power story set in an urban fantasy version of our world where magic hides in plain sight even as it magnifies the ambitions and the sheer reach of the rich and powerful.

Stephen Oakwood is the perspective through which we learn about this hidden world as he is rather forcibly jerked into it – initially very much to his detriment. He’s always known about drucraft, and has been doing his best to practice the first principles of the discipline that his father taught him, but Stephen is at multiple disadvantages when the story begins.

His mother disappeared when Stephen was barely a year old and he knows nothing about her. His father disappeared three years ago, just as Stephen turned 18, and no trace of him has ever been discovered. Stephen is supposed to be starting his adult life, but at 21 he’s barely scraping together enough to get by and can’t decide what he wants to do when he grows up.

He wants to find his dad. He wants to practice drucraft. But he needs to pay rent and keep himself and his cat Hobbes fed and watered. He’s drifting when he literally gets kidnapped by his mother’s obscenely rich and powerful family so that the members of his generation of that family can use him as a pawn in each of their games to become the sole heir to the seat of power.

The story of An Inheritance of Magic is the story of how Stephen stops being a pawn. But it’s only the barest beginnings of that story, because first he has to learn a whole lot more about what drucraft can do for him in his struggle, and the reader has to learn what kind of magic it exactly is and how it works. Meaning that a LOT of the story is taken up with our introduction to drucraft through his learning and training process.

It means that, while the beginning of this story is very scarily WOW, and the ending is slam-bang awesome, the middle is a whole lot of lonely exploration of both his craft and the world in which it happens. For some readers that’s catnip and for others it will be a bit of a slog and your reading mileage may vary.

And there’s more than a bit of a trigger warning for that scary WOW at the beginning. Because Stephen’s one true hostage to fortune is his cat, Hobbes, so, when his powerful but psychotic family wants to teach the upstart a lesson they take it out on poor Hobbes. While the cat does eventually get better, because Stephen’s combination of guilt and angst leads to a breakthrough in his craft and power, I almost DNF’ed at that point because the cat’s pain and Stephen’s anguish over it were almost too much for this cat lover to bear. Hobbes comes back stronger than ever and so does Stephen, but OMFG it was awful going through that with them. So consider yourself warned.

Hobbes’ situation aside, this type of story, of a young man discovering that his rich family are lying assholes who want to use him and him learning how to hoist them and the society they think they own on their own petards is not exactly new except for the drucraft. In fact, it’s the setup of a fair amount of Harry Potter fanfiction of certain stripes.

Which doesn’t mean it’s not an interesting setup for a series, because it most definitely is. Particularly if you’re the kind of reader who likes seeing a whole bunch of assholes get righteously taken down – because I think we’re going to get there in the end.

I most definitely AM that kind of reader, so I’m looking forward to seeing where Stephen Oakwood’s adventures in drucraft lead him, and us, to next!