Sorcery & Cecelia, or the Enchanted Chocolate Pot – Patricia C. Wrede & Caroline Stevermer

I can’t remember when I first heard of this book; it may have been simply through being a fan of both Wrede and Stevermer. I wanted it. A lot. But it was out of print. (*cue tragic music*) I turned to eBay, and as I recall I paid over $25 for my paperback copy. I was dismayed by the price – and dismayed when its condition was such that the seller should have been heartily ashamed of him/herself. But regardless of what it looked like, it was mine and I got to read it and I had a wonderful time. It was worth it.

And then, not too long after, it was reissued in paperback and available for about a third of what I paid. (*cue “sad trombone” sound effect*)

C’est la guerre.

I read it only that one time, but it’s always been on the radar for a reread, so when I saw it offered by Open Road on Netgalley I pounced. I have become rather fond of Open Road – almost every book I have had from there has been (or might become) an old favorite being given the respect and digital exposure it deserves – and my fondness for the company grew a little more as I settled in to once more enjoy The Enchanted Chocolate Pot.

The short version: What fun. What tremendous fun.

My copy’s cover

The longer version (c’mon, this is me, I don’t do short except in height):
S&C is an epistolary novel written as a game, as a series of letters between Patricia C. Wrede (in the character of Cecilia) and Caroline Stevermer (writing as Kate). They were real letters, sent through the actual post office, with the story revealing itself as they went along, and if anyone out there ever wants to try this I’m in. When they realized that the Letter Game had turned into something that could be a book, they went through it to edit and tighten and clarify it, and the rest is history. Nothing was planned; each response had to deal with what came before it with whatever surprises had been sprung, and move the story forward. The spontaneity shows – it’s unpredictable and fresh and fun (I might have mentioned that), and if there are rough patches due to the manner in which it was written it rolls along so merrily and quickly and enjoyably that they barely register.

Kate, in London with her beautiful sister Georgianna for their first Season, stumbles into a garden which should not be where it is and is offered a cup of chocolate by a grey-haired lady holding a striking blue chocolate pot. Kate refuses – wisely, considering the hole a stray drop of the beverage eats in her dress – and writes the whole episode to her cousin Cecy wondering whyever this woman would think she was actually someone named Thomas in disguise! The strange lady is after this Thomas’s magic, which involves that chocolate pot intimately, and it soon becomes clear that the lady is not alone. And soon, thanks to Cecy and Kate, neither is Thomas – whether he wants them or not, they become his allies along with his friend James, newly acquainted with Cecilia. And so it begins, an adventure which unfolds in the correspondence between these two clever, affectionate cousins.

The ladies have said that when they put all the letters together they needed very little editing to make it all flow as a story (just the occasional back-fill of details that were invented on the spot at later dates). I believe it; these two are natural storytellers. They handle Regency language deftly, and riff off the familiar to create their own magic-infused version of the period.

And come on – any book that embraces hot chocolate as its central focus has to be wonderful. Still five stars, I’m happy to say.

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Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher – Timothy Egan

This was a long-overdue Netgalley read – thanks to them.

Once upon a time (in the late 1800′s), a young man discovered the emerging art form of photography. And he discovered that he was good at it. And he began to make a living at it – a very good living, until he was the premiere portrait photographer of the also-emerging city of Seattle. And then one day he met a princess on the beach, and he fell in love.

He didn’t fall in love with the princess, though.

The young man was (of course) Edward Curtis, who is a textbook example of American Dream/self-made man/rags to riches, the kind of success story that … I don’t know, can that kind of thing still happen? And the princess was Princess Angeline, aged daughter of Chief Seattle of the exiled or possibly extinct Duwamish, who lived in a shack and scavenged on the beach. Indians had been forbidden to live in Seattle, but she ignored the law, and the law ignored her, and on she lingered. And in the sight of her gathering mussels on the beach one day, Edward Curtis saw something remarkable, and photographed it. And then brought her to his studio and took her portrait. And upon this intersection with her life he began to realize that she was representative of something remarkable, and terrible: the driving out of native Indian people from the lands they had inhabited from time immemorial. He realized that he was there at the very moment before the Indians and the many and varied cultures they had built up over centuries … vanished. Between “civilized” expansion and missionary zeal not only the physical but the cultural existence of every tribe was being obliterated. Curtis’s realization became an interest, and the interest became a fascination, and the fascination became an obsession, and for the next quarter century the obsession would send him throughout the country racing the tide of progress to find the remnants of each tribe, to talk to elders, and to make a record of what was disappearing.

Cover of Curtis (Midsize)

The result of and also the purpose for this project was supposed to be a multi-volume masterwork of biography, ethnology, anthropology, and – perhaps most prominently – photography, each volume of The North American Indian concentrating on a small number of tribes, or just one, depending on how much access he could gain and how much information he could glean – which depended on how much of each tribe still survived. “Supposed to be” – because nothing, especially art and especially dreams, is ever that simple. It was an expensive proposition to travel to every tribe (and ghost of a tribe) and make the extensive record he insisted upon: not simply photographs (though Curtis’s photos were never simple; his preferred method of developing was the most deluxe and most expensive, and when he couldn’t do that he did the second most), but audio recordings and, when he met up with the technology, film – and while Curtis had long since been able to charge top dollar for his society portraits, it didn’t take long for his personal finances to begin to suffer. In a way, this was a very familiar story. An artist with a big, spectacular, life-changing, world-changing idea can’t afford its execution on his own, and everyone he turns to for assistance has the same reaction: “What a great project! Why, it will be a boon to humanity. I hope you get lots of donations for it. You let me know how that goes. Bye now.”

Deutsch: Mädchen der Tewa, Edward Curtis, 1922. Français : Chaiwa – Tewa, 1922. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I loved this book. The personalities involved in the Project were many and varied – from Teddy Roosevelt to Chief Joseph, from J.P. Morgan to Libbie Custer – and so were their motivations. The overweening belief that one’s way of life and of worship is simply better than anyone else’s, driving armies of spiritual and bureaucratic missionaries to stomp the native cultures into something more resembling themselves (only inferior, of course, because they were never sufficiently like). The money men who had made all their profits by always looking for substantial returns, unable to divorce even a philanthropic and priceless gesture from the need to see it produce revenue. The heads buried so deep in the sand of false, but pretty, history that any attempt to uncover a real story is fought against, viciously. The bitterness of former partners left behind to pick up slack and keep the home fires burning and all that, with little to show for it. The obsession, blind to everything else, overwhelming everything else, from familial affection to self-preservation. It’s all here, and more besides, skilfully woven together and picked apart in utterly readable, often chatty (I loved that the Sioux are described as “scary good at bloodletting”), sometimes poetic prose.

If nothing else, I’m deeply appreciative of having been introduced to Curtis’s photographs. The Kindle edition I read was lacking there – many of the referenced photos are included in the book, but not all of those were visible to me as I read; given a choice, I would prefer this book in paper form, to allow for quicker and easier access to the images while reading. (Meanwhile, I’ve begun collecting them on Pinterest.)

From a perspective of a hundred years later, it all makes so much more sense, all seems so much more vital than it must have to Curtis’s wife. She was the one who suffered from his obsession – stuck at home with a growing family of small children, coping with her husband’s oft-abandoned portrait studio and the family feud left in Edward’s wake and – harshest of all – the steady draining away of the family’s money into funding The Project. But the view from here is so different. Despite the protracted spent on the project, the pressure Curtis felt to make haste was palpable: even just reading I was always aware of the desperation to capture and record as much as possible before it was too late, before the cultures were gone and the elderly who were the only ones to remember were dead. It felt like trying to catch hold of the edge of the tide as it went out.

From here, Curtis is utterly vindicated. His work was important enough to warrant the suffering. His is in many cases the only such preservation done – there are several stories of tribes many years after, when all of the elders were gone and no one was left to remember the old ways which had suddenly become important again, turning to Curtis’s work and through it being able to resurrect the ways they were so long forbidden. I think he’d be pleased.

English: Self-Portrait of Edward S. Curtis 1868-1952. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Related articles

• North American Indian Photographs, c.1900′s (vintag.es)
• St. Louis Art Museum explores Edward Curtis’ complicated legacy (stltoday.com)
• Edward S. Curtis Sets Auction Record (theonlinephotographer.typepad.com)
• Quote o’ the Day: Hin-mah-too-yah-la-kekt (theonlinephotographer.typepad.com)

 

Mariana – Susanna Kearsley

And a happy birthday to Majel Barrett Roddenberry.

As usual, I wandered into this Kindle book from Netgalley with little knowledge of what to expect; I knew there was a sort of time travel involved, and that GR friends enjoyed it, and I was optimistic. That’s odd – I didn’t make a single note or post a single real update as I read this? I think I was too busy devouring it.

I was delighted. The language, the tone, the pacing – all reminded me of one of the fine gothics, Mary Stewart or Barbara Michaels – or of Hitchcock in a non-murderous mood. Rebecca, maybe – although neither Rebecca nor Hitchcock tended toward the unabashedly magical as did Mariana.

It all begins with a family car trip when Julia Beckett was five years old; her father got lost, a cat ran across the road and almost got itself – and them – killed, and looking out the window at that moment Julia saw a little house which she immediately and unreasoningly identified as hers. Years later, as an adult and a working artist who has come into a bit of money, Julia stumbles across another cat – or is it? – and the same house, and still has that feeling of possessiveness, and this time she takes steps to make it true. Before long, strange things begin happening. Julia finds herself seeing through the eyes of – living the life of – a girl three centuries dead, Mariana.

I have to say I was not completely enamored of the version of reincarnation en bloc as depicted here. And I didn’t love the last-minute switcheroo; it didn’t feel right at all. I thought all along that Julia belonged with Iain rather than Geoffrey, but the fact of it was that she was with Gregory, and they were becoming quite serious. For that to change so abruptly purely because of what happened in the past is going to cause some serious pain to Geoffrey, and require quite a bit of explanation. That aside, the two time periods were beautifully handled, as how Julia handled hopping back and forth between the two. Well, mostly. I was left with questions about what was happening to Julia in the present day while her consciousness was in the past; it seems a bit of a stretch that no one ever made note of or passed comment on her odd behavior.

I loved the characters that peopled the book. They’re great folks, dimensional and quirky, but not so quirky it becomes a sitcom. I was happy in Julia’s vocation as an artist; it rang true, and yet didn’t sting. The relationships in the book were well-built; I liked the surprise Julia’s brother throws at her, as a sort of emphasis of both her distraction and the depth of the book’s background. The only relationship I hesitate over is the one most affected by the denouement, as above; I wish there had been added detail or an epilogue or something like that. It was the only thing keeping this at four stars.

 

Devil’s Bargain – Rachel Caine

And how disappointed was I when I discovered that, although I received this book from Netgalley, it is not the beginning of a new series but in fact the first of only two books written in this world, and the second book was published over six years ago? I was a bit crushed, is how disappointed.

Out of the blue one afternoon, Jazz Callender is handed a red envelope by a handsome man (in a ridiculous outfit, but I’ll let that be a surprise). She’s not in the mood for a Valentine from a stranger, and it’s the wrong time of year, so it takes some convincing on the stranger’s part to get her to open it – and even more convincing to make her take what’s inside seriously. The stranger is James Borden, a lawyer with the firm of Gabriel, Pike, and Laskins, and what’s in the envelope is an offer from said firm: they propose that she take the check for one hundred thousand dollars enclosed and use it to open up a private investigation agency. Two conditions come with the check: cases from their firm would take priority over any others, and she must go into this project with a partner she’s never met, one Lucia Garza. It could be a golden opportunity – or it could be an elaborate trap of some kind. Or something else entirely. There’s only one way to find out.

The worldbuilding in this book was terrific. The details are doled out carefully, and naturally – Rachel Caine knows what she’s doing. She knows how to set the hook, and get a reader on the line, and reel her slowly in … She knows there’s no need to dump all the facts on her in Chapter One, or even Two or Three or Ten. Once the reader’s caught, she’s going to be there, dying to know why Jazz isn’t a cop anymore, and why her partner is in jail, and what happened to make Manny the way he is … It’s a level of confidence in the patience and intelligence of the reader that isn’t seen very often. It drove me crazy – I wanted the answers – but at the same time I was favorably impressed by the buildup. And there was certainly plenty to keep me occupied while I waited – this was an action-packed book. Well done.

The people who inhabit that built world were also terrific. Jazz isn’t cuddly, by any means, but she’s interesting, and she’s sympathetic without asking for anyone’s sympathy. She does not trust or take to Lucia at once; their interactions are note-perfect, completely believable. As are those between Jazz and Borden. And did I mention I loved Manny? The second-tier characters could each of them carry a book, easily. They’re all competent without being superheroes (except for Manny, and he’s admittedly a freak), fallible and vulnerable and coming to the page each with his own fully realized past and present, and future as well. They’re not a cookie-cutter Scooby Gang, this lot.

The plot never really lets up. Caine moves it along masterfully at professional-driver-on-closed-road speeds until it executes a three-hundred-sixty-degree spin and stops on a dime, rocking gently. I’ve meditated before on when and whether to give out five-star ratings, and the philosophy I’ve developed about it is that if a book fulfills its promise, does everything it’s supposed to do as an exemplar of its genre, shows off its writer’s abilities nicely, and makes me happy to read it, then it doesn’t have to be Tolkien or Austen or Kay: it has earned five stars.

I am very put out with Netgalley for reeling me in with this book as if it were the beautiful beginning of a gorgeous new series rather than the eight-year-old first of two books. Teases.

Great quote: P 30 – Having a family doesn’t mean you have a life. Only relatives.

Related articles

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A Murder at Rosamund’s Gate – Susanna Calkins

This was a book I requested from Netgalley based on the cover (which despite displaying two of the weird present fashions – “I turn my back on you” and “nearly-headless” – is pretty. I will never learn), and because of an interesting premise.

The latter is fairly basic, really. We have a well-off household, that of a magistrate of London, who has a wife, a grown son (and a daughter, but she’s irrelevant), and a staff of about four: cook, manservant, lady’s maid, chambermaid. This isn’t Upstairs Downstairs, though. This is the 17th century, for one thing, and a smaller household. For another thing, the relationship between Family and Staff is … strange. To me, anyway.

Lucy is Our Heroine, the chambermaid who has an inappropriate bit of a crush on the Master’s son Adam, and whose brother Will is cast under suspicion in a murder. She is a puzzle. In some chapters, she is a proto-Nancy Drew, having intellectual discussions with her master, slipping into places she oughtn’t and sneaking into other people’s rooms to rustle through their belongings, striking off on undercover investigative operations in which she lies (pretty fluently for a good Christian girl) about who she is and/or what she’s about. In other chapters, she seems to be one of the airiest of airheads, getting herself caught out in her suspicious activities, surprised by the same trick over and over, and simply doing the dumbest things possible. See below.

The writing is not, mostly, actively bad, in terms of readability; I was tempted to give the book one star, but I didn’t hate it violently enough, because I was able to actually finish it without skimming too much. It has its moments. But the writing is, rather often, less than great. It’s more tell than show, and somewhat repetitive and redundant. I saw a bit of punctuation abuse/neglect, and at least one editorial gaffe that completely reversed the meaning of its sentence (“They should not be comprehensible even for a young girl” – yes they should). There were some awkward phrasings and word choices that I found very odd … and of course I noted down a few:
- “She was holding a cup of tea to the little girl’s head”, which as Rachel points out sounds like it’s a weapon;
- “the Mayor ordered all of the stray cats and dogs to be rounded up and executed”, which really shouldn’t be a funny sentence and yet is – did they get blindfolds and cigarettes?
- “I did not ask you to take the hand of God as your own!” I … know what this sentence is supposed to be saying. I don’t have a clue what it’s actually saying;
- “the stone … plopped down” … Maybe it did make a plopping sound when it landed, but “plop” is inherently a funny word, and this shouldn’t have been a funny moment (since the stone landed on someone’s head and smooshed it). But it made me snort.

(I have to drag Mark Twain into a review again: “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”)

But, really, much as I gripe about it, I have read worse, and recently.

One example of the lack of attention to detail, though (to return to the griping), is this:

@ 49% … a horrible stench assailed her nose…
@ 50% … a great stench assaulted her nose…
@ 51% … the terrible images that had just assaulted her senses…

This violence against Lucy’s senses related to a visit to Newgate Prison (which took place two weeks after her brother’s arrest – and was her first visit. Filial love? Not so much), and on the one hand it’s clever to use violent words to underscore the violence of the prison. On the other hand, using the same word twice and a similar word in a third place, all within a very short span, isn’t so clever.

I have to pull out two more choices the author made, because even with everything else I’m complaining about they struck me as the most absurd things in the book (except for the CPR). One: We reach the climax of the story, and finally the killer is unmasked and confronted. And someone steps in, trying to reason with him. Well, lecture him, really. And he pauses in the middle to wag his finger at the killer. In the middle of what should be a deadly serious, suspenseful, life-or-death scene, “[he] wagged his finger” at the crazed killer as if he’d been a naughty boy and spilled the soup. There are books that make me laugh out loud, and there are books that wring audible sounds of protest from me. This did both.

Newgate, the old city gate and prison (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’ll spoilerize Part II of the above groaner, just in case. It did not make me groan; it made me swear at the characters. Lucy: “We have to find a way out! Before Lucas returns!” Lucas, you see, is the killer; yes, I saw it coming (it was either him or the reverend, and I liked the reverend as a suspect better); he’s gone away for a minute, leaving Lucy with Adam – and the reverend’s bloody corpse (I guess Lucas didn’t like having a finger wagged in his face, either). Lucas has, in keeping with grand villain tradition, told them how he’s going to kill them too, and it’s going to happen just about as soon as he comes back, so it would well behoove these two to boogie while they can. Hence Lucy’s exclamation. And Adam’s response? “In a minute”, and they snog. And I really hoped in that moment that Lucas would indeed come back and kill them both.

I have to say learned a few things from this book, I must say – because as I read I kept saying “Wait, what?” and having to go off and search out things like whether Quakers forbid alcohol (I thought they did – they don’t, and didn’t). Because of my protest against the line about Lucy’s mother expecting her to marry by 25 – which seemed terribly old for the period – my friend ^ Sub Nomine pulled up an excellent article about marriage in the 1600′s among servants. And, too, there’s this:

“I have seen many a time when an accused man grows flustered, or is tongue-tied, or simply forgets to pose the right questions to his accusers”

- was one of the most succinct and lucid statements I’ve ever seen as to how and why the legal profession was evolved. It might be silly, but it was a small lightbulb moment for me, and I give full marks for that. So I was properly schooled a few times here, and I promised the book a star for that … My problem with that is if I had trusted the writer more, I wouldn’t have felt the need to keep questioning what I was reading, and questioning what I was reading took a lot away from my ability to enjoy the story. Somehow – whether because it really is inaccurate or because I lost faith in the author early on, or a combination of both – I just didn’t believe the setting.

The truly insupportable incident of the Restoration Era CPR did not help at all.

There are some other blatant anachronisms –
- “My kids are sick” – not referring to baby goats;
- “That is why I run these ideas by you”
- But the most glaring of them, at least as far as my notes go: “We … got bloody hammered once”. Best I can find online is “hammered” first being used to mean drunk in … 1986. (Granted, it’s just online research, but this site has always seemed to be a very reliable resource.) Why not go all out and just say “We got sh**faced”?

I just find it curious that the author chose to set the book in the 1600′s, and very specifically 1665-6. This could have taken place anytime there has existed a master-servant relationship – or, even better maybe, where there wasn’t, since the master-servant relationship in this book is, for 1666, rather bizarre. Maybe.

“When Lucy arrived back at the Hargraves’ house, she found that Cook had tied a wreath laced with black ribbon on their door. She saw, too, that rushes had been laid in the streets to muffle the sounds of carts and the footsteps of tradesmen and gawking passersby.”

This show of mourning is for a dead servant – and one who apparently (in fact) ran off with the silver. I don’t know everything; I wouldn’t even say I know much. But this stopped me in mid-chapter, because it just seemed extraordinarily unlikely.

Or maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s true that in 1665 the class system wasn’t so strictly defined, and the rapport between Lucy and the family she works for wouldn’t be so shocking, and it wouldn’t be unheard of for a servant to be the object of such a display. Be that as it may, I was still consistently bemused by the relative informality – not to mention the freedom Lucy has to wander hither and yon in her NancyDrewishness. She seemed to be out and about as much as she was home doing her job.

(As, for example:
“As Lucy wandered, she found herself veering away from town and toward the open fields and glens…She looked around, realizing only at that moment that she had wandered right to Rosamund’s Gate, where Bessie had met her fate.”

Sorry, what? I don’t care how zoned out you are in your grief, if your best friend has just been murdered, and you know of at least a couple of other girls who met the same fate, if you’re a woman in any time period you do not lose track of your surroundings, particularly to the extent that you meander off alone into an open field and in fact right up to the site of your friend’s death. You don’t. Ever. And if you do, you might as well stick a bow on your head and hang a tag around your neck saying “For: The Killer. From: Stupid”.)

My overall impression of Rosamund’s Gate is that two different manuscripts sat together on a desk and the pages became interleaved in chunks. One storyline, which dominates the first part of the book, is about a serial killer going about killing women in historic London, and the plucky chambermaid who tries to find out who it is. The other, taking over most of the second part, is about London in a time of plague. Once the second plotline comes in, the first pretty much tucks itself up out of the way. Nobody thinks about the murders, or talks about them – the suspect that had been taken up is released; the family leaves the city, and is fully occupied in mourning the dead and keeping themselves alive. Murder is irrelevant when so many people are dying all over London, and the point is even made that criminals go free because their accusers or the jury pool or the judges have died. (This section is one reason for the second star – it was very well done. Not well integrated, but of itself well done.) The mystery manuscript seems to be finished with. Then – a few months in book-time, a few chapters in reader-time – it is, abruptly, as though the book suddenly remembers that the killer hasn’t been revealed, and all at once there is a flurry of activity to wrap up the mystery plotline.

It was obvious that there was a lot of research into the period, but it came out in bursts, like a child at the beach running back to show parents the cool shell or piece of seaweed or rock she found. The eye portraits, for example: they were fascinating, and sound beautiful and mysterious – but the author admits that such things were “not popularized until the late 18th century”. So – why, then? They were very cool – but they were not integral to the plot, and in fact did not make a huge amount of sense, as it turned out; so why shoehorn them in?

In an author’s note at the end of the book, Ms. Calkins says this: “At times, I took minor liberties for the purposes of creativity and readability, using far more modern phrasing and spelling than people would have used in seventeenth-century England.” Well. I’ll leave it up to individual readers whether the liberties were “minor” or not, and necessary or not; I think my opinion is pretty clear. I doubt there’s a sane writer in the world who would try to use authentic seventeenth-century spelling (such as it was) or phrasing throughout their novel; of course it would be unreadable. But for my writing my goal is/will be to maintain a consistency, create a flavor of the time and place I’m writing about, and do my damnedest to avoid anything that will pop up in a reader’s face to remind her that, after all, this is just a bunch of words on paper (or whatever) telling a tale that just came out of my head. A story is – unless you’re Guy Kay – a fragile thing, like a soap bubble being coaxed into being, and it doesn’t take very much to pop the bubble.

A final kvetch – would it be too much to ask to have some passing comment as to who Rosamund was and why the Gate is named for her?

 

 

Garment of Shadows – Laurie R. King

Bless Netgalley’s buttons, persistence paid off and I finally got approved. If only it hadn’t taken me so long to get this review written … par for the course, lately.

The story is well set up, with an economy and elegance that should make lesser series writers weep. It is not long after Pirate King. Holmes doesn’t know where Russell is. Russell doesn’t know where Russell is, nor whom for the matter of that. The skills she has worked to acquire startle her as she discovers them – the slightly sarcastic explanation her hurting brain supplies to take all of them into account is thieving circus performer. But because of her skills, she is able to adapt to her situation and launch an investigation based on the things in her pockets.

Amnesia, while a much-maligned plot device, is only a cliché because it’s overused because it’s so gosh darned much fun to read, and I imagine to write about. To pare down a character to her most basic elements, and to send her into a story armed only with her wits and the skills she discovers she has – it’s a little like hitting a reset button in a game, retaining all the muscle memory and intelligence, but being left to wonder why exactly you have these abilities. It was fun to watch Mary try not only to deduce where she was and why as well as who, but to explain to herself why she knew how to pick a pocket and a lock. And her reunion with Holmes was everything that it should be.

It’s a suspenseful read, a wonderful return to the sort of adventure Holmes and Russell shared in the beginning. Great fun.

(Wouldn’t Holmes’s origami go against the Islam strictures against graven images? “You shall not make unto you any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down yourself to them, nor serve them.” Oh dear. Ah well.)

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The Lady of Secrets – Susan Carroll

This was a Netgalley book for review.

 

You know the saying about only having one shot at a first impression? That’s the first thing that keeps coming to mind about this book, in a couple of ways.

 

First, the genre baffled me. As always, Kindle book + no memory of what the synopsis said + no cover to judge by (not that the cover, deceptively pretty as it is, is so helpful) = mild befuddlement. Oh, okay, I thought, it’s a fantasy, with witches in sixteenth century Scotland. Wait. Historical fiction. Wait. Fantastic hist-fic – no, hist-rom? What it is, I guess, is a mélange of romance (with its full portion of romance tropes), historical fiction (on shaky ground), and a smattering of fantasy (witchcraft = real). As so often happens with a book like this, I just kind of wish it had stuck to one thing or another, and not tried to do everything.

 

This was my first book by the author, and considering this is the sixth book in a series that’s a little awkward. I will say the author does a pretty nice job of bringing a newcomer up to speed, with only occasional moments of (before I finally checked to see whether there was indeed a series) “that incident alluded to there has to have had a whole ‘nother book of its own.” That happened quite often. Still, there isn’t too much reliance on a reader’s previous knowledge. Whether that would be enjoyable for someone who has followed the series, I don’t know – I picture frequent pauses to say “I know. I was here” – but it worked pretty well for a newbie.

 

The other part of the book’s strange first impression was that the prologue was one of those intensely irritating ones in which something tumultuous happens – and then chapter one opens years later and miles and miles away with an entirely different cast of characters. (I understand the temptation to write such a prologue, and am in fact guilty myself in the book I’m trying to write. That doesn’t mean I hate them less in my reading. It just means that I’m going to try to find a better way to do it myself.) One main factor in the irritation is that I spent the next several chapters wondering which of the two men introduced as main characters had been the teenager in the prologue.

 

And it’s to those two men the “first impressions” thing applies as well. They are introduced in a threatening atmosphere: a village girl is giving every appearance of being possessed, and Meg, the Lady of Faire Isle, has been called in to try to help her – and at great personal risk, she has come. Any given moment could see the village ignite into superstitious/religious fervor against the girl, against Meg as a witch, against the eccentric old lady the girl is accusing of having cursed her … And the two strangers who are staying in the village are not helping. One is obviously a gentleman, his companion a physician who would have had to work hard to impress Meg more negatively. The description of him is chilling.

 

First: “… with enough light, the devil could be kept at bay.
It hadn’t worked, Meg thought with a small shiver. He hovered over the bed, in the guise of a tall dark man.”

 

Then: “Margaret stared deep into his eyes and it felt like falling into the depths of a well. She had never encountered an expression so dark, so cold, and so empty. Not since the last time she had looked into her mother’s eyes.”

 

(Her mother, by the way, for those who like me haven’t read the other books, was blind. Considering the amount of confusion the withholding of that bit of information caused me in the first 25% of the book, you’re welcome. Also? This just makes the description more unnerving.)

 

And then, a few pages later, he is being self-deprecating and kind of charming and making Meg – and, I admit, me – laugh.

 

And all the while I kept thinking “But … evil.”

 

Having already been expected by the book to switch tacks rapidly, maybe the author expected it to be easier this time. It wasn’t. I was just showing signs of whiplash by this point.

 

The whole second phase of the book felt to me like a car that needs a tune-up, clunking a little every time the gas pedal is pressed. Here’s this woman whose vocation could also be the death of her, only venturing off her island to help those who need it. And here is this complete stranger asking her to go with him to England to try to help King James I get out from under a curse. After some initial scrambling to keep up with the setting (wait – we’re not in England? Or at least Scotland?) I sat there reading in disbelief as Meg protested and refused and refused and protested and capitulated and went off and got on a boat with two complete strangers. For someone introduced as a Wise Woman, this seemed remarkably unwise. And even worse – when they get to London they’re staying in the home of one of the two men who has all-but-abducted them. Okay.

 

The other aspect to this that failed was one of wardrobe. Meg and her friend/bodyguard/duenna Seraphine (whose story as it appears in this book is ridiculous; it must have a book of its own. *checks* Wait – it doesn’t??? Oh good grief – hello book seven) left their island to go to a tavern in a mainland port village to see to a girl who seems to be possessed. It was not a long trip; they didn’t plan to stay long; I reiterate: it was a village; they were trying to keep a fairly low profile. Which to my mind means they didn’t bring much baggage – in fact, as far as I recall there was no mention of baggage. Five minutes later they’re on a boat to London to see the king. They do not stop off home to pick up so much as a change of undies. Right. They get to London, and Seraphine disappears and comes back with the medieval equivalent of a bunch of shopping bags from designer boutiques. Meg: “Oh, ‘Phine, what have you done? I thought we agreed any finery was unnecessary.” Wait a minute. Margaret is about to have an audience – a private audience – with James I, and she was planning on going in the dress she wore to the village at the beginning of the book? In what way in that world is finery unnecessary when going to call on the king? Wouldn’t that be highly inappropriate, and seen as disrespect, and – given James’s touchiness – possibly end in imprisonment? It’s nonsense.

 

So there’s a curse on the king, maybe; he thinks there is, and that’s what matters, and Meg is the only one who can help him – although there’s every possibility that helping him might get her killed, since any help she can give will look like witchcraft and James is notoriously anti-witch. Meanwhile, Meg actually has another motive for going to England; she wants to find out more about her mother and the incredibly evil coven she was head of, and whether any of the members have survived and still practice. Meg had been raised to be her mother’s witchy successor, and more, and made a horrified and frantic break from that life when she was young. And as it turns out there are still women out and about in England who believe in her as the chosen one or what-have-you, and want her to take up her rightful place. Oh, and then – possibly related to the king’s curse – there’s the plot featuring Guido (Guy) Fawkes… which Our Heroine refers to as “the gunpowder plot”, which just irritated me as a piece of pseudo-prescience.

 

All of these scattered threads wind together into a weak climax that involves Meg at the mercy of the sort-of-reborn coven, being coerced to perform an evil ritual, while meanwhile the two heroes (neither of whom is particularly heroic) are variously involved with Fawkes (helping? Trying to stop? Both?). Despite her (rather weak) efforts to be Glinda the Good Witch, Meg/Margaret/Megaera (isn’t that one of Godzilla’s enemies?) is helpless to resist the evil coven. I kept thinking of how I would have my (strong, angry, intelligent) heroine react if I were writing the scene … and instead I kept getting Meg’s reactions. Which ran along these lines: “No! Please! I – all right, I’ll go with you. No! I won’t! Wait, you’re threatening me and my friend a lot, all right, I’ll play along and hope the cavalry comes. No! I won’t! I don’t know how! Well, okay, I’ll fake it, and oh golly look a ghost, I think I’ll pass out now and hope a big strong man comes.” Which he does.

 

Persecution of witches (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The ghost I mention above is just about the most literal deus ex machina I’ve ever seen. Meg’s mother, we are assured throughout something like four hundred pages, was an infamous Bad Witch, killing babies and kittens and plotting against the throne and leading astray assorted young women and brewing poisons and oh, just all sorts of nasty things. She was not a nice person. She wasn’t a very good mother. She died (maybe) when Meg was six. I covered the fact that she was evil, right? With Meg terrified of her and of being forced to follow in Mum’s (sorry – Maman’s) footsteps and be Evil-The Next Generation? So here Meg is being forced to try her hand at necromancy to reach the Evil Sisters’ evil grandmother, and who does she get instead? Mum. Is Mum still evil? Of course not. She’s tender and motherly like she never was in life, starts to apologize for all her evildoings, is interrupted by Evil Sister #2, and retaliates by – apparently – reaching through Meg to kill Evil Sister #2. Moral: don’t interrupt the ghost of an evil witch. Or something.

 

There is, I realize now, the vaguest possibility that this post-mortem personality transplant makes sense in light of the other books in the series; this is, after all, the sixth book. However, I haven’t read the other five, and without coercion won’t ever read the other five, and it made so little sense in light of this book that I started wondering if perhaps manuscripts had gotten mixed up at some point.

 

Besides the sheer idiocy of the deus ex, there was Meg’s behavior in this situation. If this was just some high-born female who never knew anything but embroidery and flowers who was stuck in this situation, that would be one thing. Going along with it all almost without protest and then fainting to be rescued – that would be fine for such a “heroine”. But this woman is supposed to be the strong, independent Lady of Fair Isle. She’s a leader. She’s a mature woman – 31, which was practically old in 1605. And she has worked her entire life to overcome the shadow of her mother’s evildoings, and to do good and only good. For her to recoil in utter horror at how of all her mother’s Evil deeds this is one of the Mostest Evilest, and then to capitulate with barely a squawk and actually sit down and try to perform this So-Evil deed of necromancy … and then for Evil Mum to turn up and not be evil at all … The manuscript had to have fallen in a bin (not, unfortunately, the correct bin) and gotten mixed up with another.

 

There was so much else. The setting, as I mentioned somewhere up there, was indeterminate. It hopped between prologue and Chapter 1 from Scotland to France without as far as I recall or noticed at the time making that clear, and left me floundering. Characters’ nationalities made no difference to the text – French, Scottish, English, peasant, noble, it didn’t much matter; there was little to indicate any of it. Not that I would enjoy lashings of pidgin scattered through dialogue – but I don’t remember any mention of anyone switching languages to accommodate someone else, or having trouble understanding or keeping up, or … anything at all that would indicate there were different tongues in the mix. At some point late in the book I believe Meg is referred to as being French, which threw me for a loop; it seemed so unlikely. For one thing, since when is “Meg” (or Margaret, or Megaera) a French name? Or “Faire Isle”? London and King James and the Gunpowder Plot? It could just as easily have been a completely invented world and monarchy and history. That might have helped, quite a bit.

 

Guy Fawkes before King James (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

One of my biggest pet peeves, which I probably share with a lot of people who love historical fiction, is the anachronistic outbreak. There are few things worse than being completely taken out of a book’s historical setting by a carelessly used word or phrase (though most of those few things were also present in this book). “The fuse will be lit and then wham!” Yes, I’m quite certain comic book sound effects would have been part of common speech in 1605. And “criminally insane”, used by one character, made little sense in the context. Insanity wasn’t really accepted as a defense in 1605, was it? A criminal was a criminal.

 

Those “few things” I mentioned? Here’s another. “Climb into bed and w-warm me.” My reaction was “Is there no cliche this book won’t stoop to?” It hit quite a few, right down to the old switcheroo, the character-so-seasick-she-wants-to-die, and the dangerous-royal-boar-hunt (I think it was boar – doesn’t matter). If there are any that were missed, they’ve probably already been addressed in the other books in the series… I gave this two stars out of my one solitary burst of holiday spirit. It will keep the second star because it made me chuckle, on purpose, once or twice. But it was a near thing.

 

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City of Dark Magic – Magnus Flyte

This book (received from Netgalley) did not get off on the right foot with me. The publisher apparently thought it would be oh-so-amusing to put this little note at the very beginning:

“The manuscript of the book you are about to read arrived in the mail one day at Penguin headquarters in New York with no cover letter. It was written on stationery from the Hotel La Mamounia in Marrakech using a manual typewriter, and postmarked on the Isle of Mull. The return address was simply ‘Flyte, Magnus.’ When the editors sought details about the author, they found them to be conflicting. He may be American. He may have ties to one or more intelligence organizations, including a radical group of Antarctic separatists. He may be the author of a monograph on carnivorous butterflies. He may live in Venice, Vienna, Vladivostok, or Vermont. City of Dark Magic may be his first novel.

I hate cutesy author profiles. This has an archness to it, an aren’t-we-clever-ness, which I find completely off-putting – and that’s without even bothering to bring up the little fact that a writer sending in a book as described would have their manuscript circular-filed before the echoes of the manual typewriter died. This just … isn’t funny. In point of fact, two women wrote it. Just say so.

Adding to the bad taste that left in my mouth – The Goodreads ad that keeps popping up for it:
“What do a music student, a U.S. senator, a 400 year-old dwarf, and a time-traveling prince have in common? A mystery in Prague. ‘This deliciously madcap novel has it all’ – Conan O’Brien

(Really? Conan O’Brien a) reviewed a book and b) called it “deliciously madcap”? Are we talking about the same Conan O’Brien?) It irritated me because the “400 year-old dwarf” thing was a complete spoiler for me. I was going to put spoiler tags on it, but it’s in the ad, and in the GR synopsis, so … *shrug* OK. Whatever. The other irritation is – “madcap”? I … no. No, it’s not. Madcap: wildly or heedlessly impulsive; reckless; rash: a madcap scheme. Synonyms: Farce, romp, frolic. Bringing Up Baby is the first movie to come to mind and also in a search. Bringing Up Baby does not have a body count. (Arsenic and Old Lace, also a madcap comedy, does certainly have a body count, but all those killed are a) killed off-screen, b) are complete strangers to the viewer, and c) are killed by well-meaning old ladies. And it’s very well written. A&OL is funny, which is helpful in a comedy.)

A body count racked up by government baddies and the CIA and the KGB and whatever else is in here (what isn’t in here?) and including among its number a loved one of a main character and someone rather nice and inoffensive who never did anything to annoy me unlike the main characters – ? Not madcap.

Sarah Weston is a music student in Boston; her mentor went to Prague to work on the music section of the creation of a museum for the straggling heirs of a Czech royal family, from a massive amount of treasure that had either survived or been recovered from the Nazis and the communists. There are hand-written papers from Beethoven in the collection, which is how Sarah’s mentor got involved, and he has recommended her to come and assist him. This job offer comes hand-delivered by a dwarf retainer of the Lobkowicz family, and is followed shortly by word of Sarah’s mentor’s death by suicide.

There is some good stuff in here. The writing was solid. It just wasn’t “madcap”, or altogether consistent. I seem

to say this a lot lately, but – I wanted to like Sarah. One stumbling block for that is … well, she’s a sl- no. I’ll be nice. She is an enthusiastic connoisseur of the sex act. The – no, I have to say it: the sluttiness didn’t really seem to fit in with the rest of her personality, but there is an Encounter on her very first evening in the Palace. Two, really, with two different men, one at the table in the middle of dinner with someone she has barely met, followed by one in a bathroom – and the male partner in the latter remains a mystery to her for several chapters. I’m sorry. I don’t like starting off a book completely disgusted with the main character I’m expected to spend the next couple hundred pages with.

As for the rest of it … I don’t see farce here. I don’t see madcap. If this had been written as a serious mystery/fantasy/whatever with a sense of humor, it might have worked; the reason this made it to three stars instead of less was that there were moments that actually had me by the metaphorical lapels, and had me fascinated. But … it was trying to be a farce. Actually, I think it was trying to be the Pink Panther – and I hate to admit it, I didn’t find that terribly funny, either. Either time. Most of the impulsive behavior (see “madcap” definition above) encompasses sex, which just annoyed me more than anything. Perhaps the fact that Sarah is given the ability to see Beethoven, and he farts a lot – ? Maybe that was supposed to be funny. Gas is always funny, right? Wait, there’s a dwarf – is that supposed to be inherently funny? What looks like a toenail in a box, which Our Heroine ingests? Tee hee? Yeah – no. I didn’t think so. It was all of a piece with that weird little intro – trying to be arch and coy and funny. And failing.

I don’t know. I said there was some good stuff in here; there certainly was a lot of stuff in here – kind of like the masses of all kinds of treasure and artifact the experts are combing through in the Palace. But where they ended up with a beautiful, elegant museum showcasing all the wonderful things, this – this was just a bit of a mess.

Spy caper? Comedy? Fantasy? Mystery? Political commentary? Tick off “All of the above”. If the writer(s) (or editors) had just picked one – even two – of these and concentrated on doing that well, this could have been good.

At least now I can live the rest of my life knowing Beethoven was gassy. Yay me.

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Monster in My Closet – R.L. Naquin

One-word review: fun.

To expand upon this: What a ridiculous amount of fun!

To explain: This is the tale of Zoey, an unusual lady who with her friend Sarah plans weddings for those lucky enough to find them. It doesn’t really signify that Sarah is single and Zoey is divorced from the extremely clingy Brad (who just will not go away) – they’re good at what they do.

As the description says, one night Zoey is wakened by the sound of someone in her house, and discovers her intruder is not entirely a stranger. Strange, yes; stranger, no. It’s the monster who scared the daylights out of her by peering from her closet when she was five. He didn’t mean to frighten her, Maurice tells her now; it was all a misunderstanding. Now – sit-sit-sit! – he makes her coffee and the most amazing muffins and begins to try to help her understand that her ability to know what those around her are feeling isn’t, as she’s always assumed, is not something everyone can do.

Things become stranger for her from there. Maurice has come to her for help because he knows she shares the ability her mother had, the talent for helping others that made Zoey’s mother a heroine among fairies. And so begins Zoey’s rise as her mother’s successor, and before long she is rubbing elbows with brownies, fairies, and a small dragon… Not to mention the local herbalist and his atypical pet. And the paramedic who isn’t exactly what he seems.

Oh – and the succubus. Forgetting the succubus would be for Zoey hazardous to her health. Not just for Zoey – for all the women in her life. She has, apparently, due to her abilities, a special flavor, a savor unlike ordinary mortals. Some, less subtle demons, would just visit Zoey and suck her dry – but not this one. He’s cleverer than that – that would be killing the egg-laying goose. Come to find out, every woman on whom she has – intentionally or un- – used her gift carries away a tinge of that flavor of hers, and the connoisseur succubus is tracking down these women and consuming them. And it’s up to Zoey to stop him.

I love that Zoey never realized how unique she is – she has gone her whole life assuming everyone can tell what those around them are feeling. How else can people communicate? Once she works her way through the reality (that’s why people don’t communicate very well), she has to rethink almost everything she does every day. She has always been able to soothe ruffled feathers, and find a way to make people happier, and to tell if someone was lying to her or had her best interests at heart. And now she has to make up her mind about whether this is as it should be, or does she have the right to manipulate others’ emotions, now that she knows what she’s doing?

The characters are lovely, the whole concept is just a hoot, and I am very, very happy that this will be a series. (Number two in March! Hurrah.)

 

The Book of Madness and Cures – Regina O’Melveney

I received The Book of Madness and Cures through Netgalley for review – thanks to them and the publisher.

I have to say I was disappointed with this book. I didn’t really have expectations, per se; I think I’ve commented before about how odd it is to go into most Kindle books as blindly as I do. I rarely read a book right after acquiring it, so opening it up some time after having read the description that prompted me to buy it (or, in this case, request it), divorced of even the cover image, is a strange feeling. But the The Book‘s writing held my attention from the beginning; I liked the tone, and the first-person narrator, Gabriella Mondini, and the setting, and the idea:

Gabriella is the daughter of a doctor, and of a temperament and mind to follow him in his profession. However, she lives in 1590 Venice, and a woman doctor is – barely – tolerated only if a man sponsors her. Which is fine, while her father does so; but he left some ten years ago on a journey to – ostensibly – gather medicines from foreign climes along with data for the tremendous Book of Diseases he has spent Gabriella’s lifetime compiling. His last letter makes it clear he’s not likely to come back, and he orders Gabriella not to send after him – so of course, since she loves him and also since she cannot continue to practice medicine without him, she packs her bags and convinces her servants to come with her to go find him, leaving her fretful mother (think Mrs. Bennet, in a way) all alone without a qualm.

A journey through Renaissance Europe is a great frame for a story. The quest for tales of unfamiliar diseases and cures is also promising. That the journey is undertaken by a woman, accompanied only by an elderly couple, and is also following in her father’s footsteps – this was where the disappointment began to set in for me. I continued to enjoy the writing; I continued to like Gabriella; but somehow I wasn’t entirely satisfied by the settings, the descriptions of which seemed to be dominated by the religious and climactic temperatures rather than the taste of different food and the smell of foreign scents and the feel of different air.

Also, I admit the Italianization and Renaissancization (I know, I’m tired and making up words now, sorry) of countries’ names took some getting used to. So much of the writing felt quite contemporary – especially with things like Gabriella mentioning that something was a meter away (or deep or wide) when the metric system was not (as best I can find) invented for another 150 years or so – that, in the exhausted stressed-out stupor in which I read this, the antiquated names threw me. Yes, it took ages for the lightbulb to go off that the next country the travelers were headed for was Scotland. Yes, I felt stupid when I realized.

Gabriella is an intelligent woman, a tremendous boon to her father’s work while she surreptitiously begins her own book, focusing more on women’s ailments. She is Different, a creature utterly apart from the ordinary run of women, particularly in the time period. Which is why I felt let down by her. The fact that during two of the stops along the way she falls, to one extent or another, in love with a handy (and of course young and handsome) intellectual – this did not feel like it fit with the rest of her personality. The fate of one of those young men went nowhere; it was a somewhat far-fetched and disturbing incident, and I can’t think of a thing it added to the book. The romance Gabriella eventually tumbles into felt almost grafted on, and the disruption it threatened to her search for her father offended me slightly; here she is, on a Mission to find her father, setting out to prove everyone wrong about the womanly stereotypes, and she is about to be thrown completely off her undertaking by a man? Sigh.

Worse, though, for me, is the complete illogic of the search. The idea is that Gabriella and her father wrote to each other fairly regularly over the ten years he’s been gone, and now she will try to find him by following the path described in those letters. But does she start with the most recent letter, the warmest scent, the freshest trail? Well, no. She starts at the very beginning and literally follows her father’s path from place to place to place.

In a way, this is a great way to tell the tale. As she visits the people her father stayed with and worked with ten years ago, and eight years ago, and so on, as in a few cases she gathers up items he left behind him, it begins to be obvious that he’s not well. There’s something very, very wrong – and not physically. She sees her father’s deterioration as an unfolding story, a puzzle being completed piece by piece and place by place; if she had done the logical thing and started at the end she would have been confronted with the end result and the book would have been a third the length. But I wish her choice of journey had been presented as the logical thing. I wish there had been some reasoning for it: she only knew her father’s first location, and only on talking to the people there could she learn his next stop, and the next, and so on to the end. Oh well.

Anecdotes from Gabriella’s Book of Diseases are dusted throughout the book, along with samplings of her father’s letters and bits of his book – but unless I completely missed the point (always possible) there is no corollary made between them and the journey as far as I could see, and no purpose other than entertainment value. And in fact for me the entertainment value was, while certainly present, somewhat limited by the fact that the tales told were about half an inch away from being fairy tales. These stories – of a woman covered in hair, and another so severely claustrophobic she could no longer live in a house, and of the black tears shed by those prevented from speech for long periods … There are documented medical cases of some version of the first two conditions, at least, but these stories themselves were fantastical, despite the fact that at least some were supposed to be from the direct experience of Gabriella and her father. If there had been more of a magical aura about the rest of the story, I think I would have swallowed the whole thing happily. As it was, the only real unreality of Gabriella’s quest was the unlikelihood that a woman and a pair of elderly servants would have as successful a journey as they do (even with the women dressed as men at times). The contrast between the pretty thoroughly mundane of Gabriella’s narration and the fantasy of the so-scientific Books just stuck in my throat a little.

The cap to the disappointment was in the ending. No spoilers here, but I felt there was at the same time a too-complete resolution and a complete lack of resolution to the story. It wrapped up too quickly and neatly while still leaving bits and small ends dangling annoyingly. Overall, it felt like a near miss.

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