ergative's reviews
925 reviews

 Eh. Perfectly fine. Fun enough, I guess. Nothing terribly special to it, but a reasonable enough story to occupy me while cleaning the bathroom or getting groceries. 

 Nothing groundbreaking or novel, but a light, fluffy romp that delivers charmingly on its promises. I will probably read more in the series. 

 Ah, this was a disappointment. The series went on a bit too long, the brilliance of the world-building was already played out, the wit and zing of puns and commentary on machines and technology to humanity was missing, and even the title didn't particularly work very well. After all the camp and drag of Danny's character arc in the previous two books, he was barely present in this one, and the title was justified by something that seemed forced---as if the title was decided well before the final book was written, and McCrudden couldn't make it work as originally envisaged. Many of the characters from the previous books just didn't feature at all in this one (e.g., Danny), and even the ones who did recur (Pam, Janice, Rita, Fuji, Soonyo) seemed to lack a lot of the characterization that made them so memorable. Janice wasn't viewing the world in terms of hair; Rita wasn't viewing it in terms of taxi dispatch, Pam wasn't viewing it in terms of breadmaking; Fuji in terms of printing, and Soonyo in terms of clocking. There were comments about it, sure, but their worldviews seemed a lot less foundationally affected by their professions or machine functions than they had in the previous books, and that fundamental effect on one's perspective was part of what made those books work so well. 

Also, if the nanobots were sentient voting machines in the last book, why was no one attempting to talk to them--even Fuji, who enfranchised them in the last book? They suddenly became an unstoppable dangerous mass once more.

All in all, the series would have been better off as a duology than a trilogy. 

I mean, I was engaged by this, but I kept setting it down and forgetting to pick it back up. None of the conflicts felt quite difficult enough to resolve, so there was very little sense of tension. Sydney's power was enormous from the start, and then after she absorbed the spring spell magic she was effectively unbeatable, so none of the challenges held any doubt in the outcome. The last showdown with Shara felt rather predictable, since there was no other way to raise any sense of tension given how overpowered Sydney was. Miles Merlin had the political power, which could have been a really interesting counterpoint to Sydney's raw magical power, pitting manipulation of the world against manipulation of people to see which comes out on top. But for all the talk of leaders and lawyers and alliances in the Unseen World, there seems to be very little that can actually be accomplished with manipulation of people; the world runs on pure magical power, so Miles doesn't ever manage to use his position terribly effectively. For all that he was set up as this mighty adversary, he never inconvenienced anyone very much. 

And Gray--what a missed opportunity! His true nature was revealed far, far too early, so none of the plot that revolved arond him and his past and present misdeeds had any punch. Harper's quest to make her way into the Unseen World to discover who had murdered her friend had no mystery to it, since we knew exactly who it was she was looking for. And she also gets everything done far too easily: she gets the job at Madison's law firm, is assigned the research that leads her exactly into the archives that tell her exactly what she wants to know, and then everyone she meets holds her hand to help her get the evidence about Gray she's looking for. It's too easy. And that scene where Gray stumbles to Laurent's door after the challenge that hurts him so badly--that was written like pure whump-service, but since we knew that Gray actually was a monster, it had no real oomph to it. And the way that Gray's victims are always girls that he picks up at bars felt like a feeble attempt to draw a parallel between magicians exploiting people with less magic and men exploiting women. That kind of commentary on rape culture and misogyny is so ubiquitous in contemporary fiction that this particular iteration felt perfunctory and had nothing new to add. And when your commentary on rape culture has nothing new to add to the conversation, then it just feels like a book with unnecessary misogyny in it, which I'd like to avoid in my escapist fiction please, thanks.

 Solid, fun, fast-moving, and bantery between a well-constructed ensemble cast. Not quite as clever in the dialogue as it wanted to be, but I laughed in multiple places, and I enjoyed turning the pages. 

 I am a sucker for everything related to Fairy Bargains, and this book was nothing but Fairy Bargains, piled high and deep, contracts and loopholes and intangible abstractions being traded for other abstract intangibles. The luster of hair, three minutes of life, the strength of ten men, prosthetics of living silver, a golden voice, the vigour of youth and childhood---everything is for sale, and everything can be purchased for a price in the Untermarket, the Goblin Market, below an alternate Victorian London where Queen Elizabeth made a very different bargain with the fairy queen, and built a very different city. 

Deri, an indentured human servant to a powerful merchant in the Untermarket, is ambitious and energetic, and has amassed a tiny hoard of favors and trinkets, baubles he has bargained for in the spare minutes he can shave off the errands he runs for his mystrer. In the course of one of those errands, he helps an inexperienced youth navigate the market in return for three nights out on the town, and then in another bargain manages to lay his hands on the bottled destiny of the heir to the empire. The former he intends to serve merely as a frivolous entertainment; the latter he hopes to use to bargain his way out of his indentures early and set himself up as a merchant of the Untermarket in his own right; but both twine together and grow and expand, and Deri will need all his experience and knowledge of fairy bargains to come out on top.

This book is a wonderful ride, full of rhyming bells and true love and friendship and nascent labour unions, betrayals and intrigue and villainous skullduggery that merits the description 'Dickensian' in more than a few places, and I enjoyed every minute of it.  

 Ah, Emma Southon. So irreverant, so terminally online in her language habits and allusions, so generous in leaving the reader in no doubt as to her likes and dislikes about ancient Rome. Anti-popes, disembodied penises rising from fireplaces, bureaucracy of Bacchinalea, Julia Augusti Filia's sexual exploits---these are most excellent. By contrast, Tacitus, Lucius Tarquinius, and Roman attempts at humour all sucked, each in their own special way.

Yet underneath this gleeful explosion of evaluative, entertaining judgments, there is also a deep sympathy for the parts of Roman history that demand it. Southon's discussion of the Laudatio Turiae, a heartbreaking eulogy given by a grieving widower describing in unusual detail the life and gests of his beloved wife, was one of the most eye-opening parts of the book. This kind of first-hand account of lives lived, unfiltered by political or poetic agenda, is incredibly rare, it seems, and Southon's description of it was very moving. It's clear that she is as taken by Turia as her husband was, and her respect and affection for this couple is apparent in the way she holds her sharp-edged wit in check as she tells their story.

Yet the book is most fun when Southon lets her rapiers loose. She never lets the reader forget that the reliability of the sources is profoundly poor and most of the traditional tales come to us from incredibly biased sources, who themselves were telling tales from centuries before their own time. But this does not mean Southon can't do history. Indeed, when the sources are lacking is when Southon has the most fun, because she engages with her sources like for like. When it's clear that the Roman historians are making things up for reasons ranging from the political, artistic, misogynistic, or simply frivolous, Southon also lets her fancy fly free. For example, when Augustus's daughter Julia was forced to marry Tiberius, contemporary sources make it clear that, although Tiberius disliked Julia, nobody knows what Julia thought about it, and because Southon has very little respect for Suetonius or Tacitus as reliable recorders of history (or, indeed, as people---she really, really dislikes them as misogynistic pricks), she simply reports what they said, and then reports what she thinks they're leaving out. Thus: 'Acccording to Suetonius, Tiberius thought that Julia fancied him too much and made it too obvious while she had been married to Agrippa, and that made him uncomfortable. It is a real challenge for me to imagine any woman fancying Tiberius, who comes across in both literary sources and statuary as being as sexy as frozen chicken, but who am I to kink-shame. Maybe Julia did fancy him. Maybe she was delighted to get her little princess hands on him. Maybe he had a great butt. I don't know. That's the story.' You can just feel the disdain and irritation at their unreliability oozing from every sentence.

This approach to history is what we need more of. It's so common to see Suetonius and Tacitus revered as these majestic sages who are our only links to this mighty history, but Southon isn't letting us have any of that. She knows what people are like; she can see what Suetonius and Tacitus were like (kind of assholes), and she makes it clear how much she trusts them, while also holding her nose and picking up what they put down because that's all that she has. And she never loses sight of the context in which they were putting it down in the first place. The story of Boudicca is brilliantly contrasted with the story of Cartimandua, for example, as Southon lays out how each was used by Tacitus to serve as a metaphor in his morality lesson about the decline of traditional Roman values (as he saw it)---which, naturally, makes what he says about historical events he purports to relate extremely suspect.

So, in sum, this book was entertaining, naughty, informative, funny, and at times very moving. Of all approaches to history, I find Southon's the most effective.

 

This was a perfectly acceptable take on The Fall of the House of Usher, taking the basic frame narrative and adding character backstory, setting, proper plot, and underlying explanation for the weirdness in the original Poe story. The first half, when we were learning about the culture of Galatia, the history of Alex Easton and Denton, and meeting Miss Potter (who was a delight), was very strong, and I was having a great time. But when the actual mystery of Madeline's weird behaviour was being explored, I didn't find it very mysterious. I'd guess basically everything long before Easton and Denton and Miss Potter figured it out. There was a pleasing little moral dilemma that had be resolved, and which I think was treated effectively. 

But, at its heart, I felt like there was a conflict between what Kingfisher does best---light fluffy banter---and what this book was aiming to be: horror. The reduced amount of banter made the narrative less fun, while the wit in dialogue and narrative that Kingfisher, by virtue of being a witty writer, could not entirely expunge, made the horror bits less scary. Which is fine, for me---I don't like being scared---but I do wish there had been just a bit more fun and less vibes in this book. I read The Fall of the House of Usher to make sure I was fully up on the source material, and got so bored and impatient with the emphasis on vibes and atmosphere to the exclusion of plot, that even the much more measured quantity of that which Kingfisher included here just felt like more of the same, which made me restless.

This is very personal, and highly related to my own previous experience with Kingfisher, my own opinions about the proper proportion of vibes in Gothic horror books, and my own reaction to Poe.  I think Kingfisher accomplished well what she set out to do, and I'll read more of her horror, now that I know it's not actually that scary, because I'm always up for some Kingfisher. I just kind of miss her fluffy bantery romps. 

 This dragged. Its plot and conceit were perfectly serviceable, and I think the characters were well developed, with believable personalities. The structural tensions were all there. Thinking back on the shape of the plot, I can see it's actually perfectly well developed: Maeve, a nun responsible for dispelling ghosts and ensuring the dead rest in peace, runs across a mysterious stranger who makes a deal with her: she helps the stranger--the titular Imogen Madrigal, who is actually a reanimated corpse--discover who killed her, and the Imogen will use her influence to help Maeve support her nunnery's weakening finances. This is all nicely set up: Maeve has the expertise in hauntings and ghosts and death to work effectively with a reanimated corpse. Imogen, however, is affiliated with a network of louche and hedonous poets, whom the nunnery really doesn't care for (for reasons that are never fully clear to me; it's not moral tut-tutting; it's more that they like to do things like seances, which the nunnery thinks are cruel to the dead), and also had ties to the university, which the nunnery also doesn't get on with, because the spiritual vs. scientific approaches to ghost are incompatible. The society built for this world was nicely designed, and I  enjoyed the various visits Maeve makes on her nunnish errands to dispel spirits in various places that lay out the various factions and philosophies. Also, someone keeps trying to kill Imogen again and finish the job properly, so Maeve's under some pressure to clear things up fast. Really, all the pieces are there for a rollicking romp.

But the rollicking never actually romped. Everything just dragged. The repeated murder attempts are never quite frequent enough to convey a sense of genuine threat, so they appear kind of randomly and desultorily rather than actually reinforcing the fact that there are dangerous people operating in opposition to Imogen and Maeve. Instead, most of the plot focuses its attention on the growing tensions between Maeve and Imogen (nudge nudge wink wink), and related but different tensions brewing between Maeve and her best friend--a plot point also takes far too long to come to a head. Everything needed to be tightened up substantially. I felt like I wanted to be halfway through the book at 30%, and by the time I was at 60% I wanted to be hitting the climax. Literally, this book was too long by half.

Further, one quite key plot element, which seemed far too central given its awkwardness and unnnecessariness, really irritated me. See, the world was designed to be at a technological level of--oh, say, 1920 or so. Telephones exist but are uncommon, and electricity exists but not everywhere. Imogen was murdered by having her throat cut, so she can't talk very well out of it even after her corpse reanimated. So how does she communicate? With cell phones! Excuse me--not cell phones, 'hand telegraphs'--which work exactly like modern text messaging. But there isn't really any plot-necessary purpose that I can see for shoe-horning in such an obvious modern device. First, I don't fully understand why Imogen can't just talk. There's perhaps a hint that her inability to speak fluently is particularly trying, given how much she used to rely on language during life as a poet, but that doesn't become clear until very, very late in the book, and is not thematically important enough to justify such a weird narrative choice. There's very little use of text messaging that takes advantage of its use for remote communication--certainly nothing that a well-placed messenger child couldn't handle--or even a traditional telegraph boy. It's mostly just how Imogen and Maeve talk to each other during in-person conversations. And yet Imogen's communicative habits don't actually match the medium. There are scenes where Maeve interrupts her at places where a speaking person would interrupt another speaking person, but it doesn't work for text messaging, because the interruption would either appear earlier--if the words appear one at a time on her receiver--or else much later, after the message is complete, if the text messages are sent in whole chunks once the texter hits 'send', the way modern cell phones do. These hand telegraphs were an enormous component of how Maeve and Imogen communicate, and they just didn't work. Every scene with them felt forced and weird, as if the author is incapable of imagining how to function without a cell phone, and so had to force a weird approximation of them into the world she'd created. There is MAGIC and GHOSTS. If you really want Imogen incapable of speaking (which is not really necessary, as far as I can tell), have her use MAGIC. (Also, these 'hand telegraphs', if they truly work by radio waves, the way a scientist explains, seem a WILDLY INSECURE means of communication if you're trying to avoid letting a killer know your plans.)

There were also some irritating editing oversights. Imogen and Maeve are hiding from a killer at one point in a cellar, and so start writing back and forth in Maeve's sketchbook to communicate.  For a few sentences Maeve speaks aloud before returning to writing down her thoughts so as not to be heard--apparently a concern she'd forgotten half a page up. And, for that matter, why not use their hand telegraphs rather than writing by hand? For that matter, there are multiple scenes where Imogen writes to Maeve in a sketchbook rather than using a hand telegraph, for no other reason than that--as far as I can tell--a previous draft had Imogen using hand-writing, before the author decided to insert cell phones--excuse me, hand telegraphs--and forgot to change it everywhere.

So, in sum, this book felt very, very first novel: too long, some odd plot decisions, and some weak editing--but the components for a much better story were all in place. I hope the author can wrangle them more successfully next time. 

NB: I was provided with a free ARC of this book from Netgalley. Inasmuch as I can be sure of such things, I do not believe it has affected the content of this review.

 This was a great end to the series. It tied up all the plot threads that had been building throughout the previous four books: the rising tensions with Samarla, the growing influence of the Awakeners, Jez's growing Mainish tendencies, Silo's growth as a leader, Frey and Trinica's reconciliation--all of it followed so naturally from what had come before, and resolved itself so satisfyingly. I liked that the Ketty Jay didn't break up permanently. It reshuffled and rearranged itself, and made plans to continue swashbuckling into those hints of other stories that were dropped previously in the series. Great job, all around!