Kelly Robson

This is a very weird book, but it's got compelling world building, the kind of characters who grow on you, and a bad attitude about government, so there’s a lot to recommend it. I also really enjoyed that every character, from lusty layabout to faerie tormentors to dancing parliamentarian had female pronouns. It’s a world of women, where mothers have power, and respectful address is beauty — a story that doesn’t take itself too seriously, I think, but has a lot of things to say.

After being conscripted to the low parliament through her own misfortune, skilled scribe and incorrigible flirt Lana Barker is swept away to a magical land of fairies under threat of imminent destruction. She has the strength of heart and high ideals of a traditional hero, but sets them against an unusual enemy: an out-of-touch and dispirited representative government. The ambiance of the setting and the charms of the main character carry this book. Lana is well-suited to a parliament show more defined by ritual, with her practiced methods of courtship mirroring the rules and traditions of lawmaking. Her attitude towards the parliament--a combination of desperate helplessness at a seemingly unsaveable world and a desire to do something about the failing government--feels timely and real, at least to the political climate in which I live. While that may make the book sound rather dark, more painful themes are balanced with a light-hearted and fairytale-like tone. Overall, it's a unique and interesting read. show less

This is a delicious slice of Gothic weird horror fiction from Ms Robson, wherein a rather outre young Englishwoman is rescued from her Bohemian poverty in Victorian Paris by one of her louche friends. He employs her as governess for his orphaned nephew, at a remote Bavarian Schloss. Robson's writing is sublime, the language pitched perfectly for the mood and setting, and the horror nicely grotesque.


I particularly like that the protagonist's sexuality - in the manner of the era we should say show more she is (gasp!) a Sapphist - while it is part of her disreputability, is in no way a cause of her predicament, as it would once have been (and all to often still be) written; the sense is far more that she has been entrapped and her fate is very much in keeping with the kind of bleak inevitability found in all the best Gothic horror, and that we now associate with Lovecraft. show less

Two octogenarians and a twenty-something pursue and win a contract to time travel from a post-apocolyptic 23rd century to 2024 BC to do an environmental study the ancient Tigris & Euphrates region as a baseline to its reconstruction. The world building and characters were engrossing, the writing didn't annoy me, and the incidents and action were well handled. I found the bad guy just too bad and not that interesting, but his role and character did fit. But the set up didn't make sense to me show more - why pick that time period, when there was no reason given for not going earlier? It isn't as if the region could be restored to any specific time period or the rivers to any previous flow channels. But the inter-generational reveals are the heart of the book and they were what I hope Kelly Robson deals with in future stories. show less