Elizabeth Bear

Welcome to a world where the sky changes based on who rules the land. A world where magic is real but requires sacrifices. A world where love, bravery and loyalty guide people's choices - and not always for the best.

In a land based on the empires of the Steppes of Asia, the great Khagan had died and his relatives are yielding a bloody war for control of the empire. The Eternal Sky, their God and the sky above the lands, is keeping track of the relatives by having a moon for anyone still show more alive, allowing everyone to know who is still alive and fighting by just glancing at the night sky. Temur, a grandson of the Khagan has no interest in fighting but when the novel opens he had just survived a war that killed everyone else he ever knew and forced him to run.

And while he runs, he need to find his destiny. On the road he will meet his companions - a Tiger-woman by the name of Hrahima (who is there to give a warning to the people but is also related in an intricate way to Temur), the wizard Samarkar (who left a court life and dreams and sorrows behind to become what she is) and the monk Hsiung (who is not talking and for whom I am still not sure what his role is but I suspect we will learn soon).

This novel, a first of a trilogy, spends some time with each of our travelers before they meet, showing us how they got where they are now and building the back stories and the intricate connections between them and at the same time introducing the intricate world they live in with all its diversity. Of course we also meet the bad guys - with their own world of sacrifices and blood and the bloody ghosts that they can control.

Unlike most fantasy worlds which are based on medieval Europe, Bear's uses exclusively the Eastern empires to base her tribes on - the Mongols and the Chinese, the Muslims and almost anyone else you can think from Asia. You can see the different influences but she also mixes them - the tribe where the women are veiled has the men also veiled most of the time and the main God is in fact a woman; in the world of magic, you need to give up your chance of having children for a chance in getting the gift of magic.

Add to all this young love (well... let's call it that even Temur is not exactly faithful), huge birds (replacing the almost mandatory dragons in this kind of storied), an abducted woman (something need to get Temur off his aimlessness after all), battles and court games, a horse that seems to be more than just a regular horse (or is a very intelligent one). And an intricate world building which leaves a lot to the imagination but at the same time sketches the world exactly as much as it should - building the religions, myths and ways of all of the involved peoples and even succeeding at showing the same legend from more than one side - the way real worlds work.

Somehow a novel that should have sounded tired and known manages to be surprising and fresh - even if the outline can be valid for most of the fantasy novels ever written. It's a very good start of the trilogy and I am looking forward to reading the next novel. show less

I have been a fan of both Elizabeth Bear’s and Katherine Addison’s / Sara Monette’s individual works for a long time, and also loved the Fantasy trilogy they have written together, so of course when I read they had collaborated on another novel, getting that was a no-brainer.

The Cobbler’s Boy is different from both Bear’s and Addison’s previous books in that it contains no fantastical elements at all, but instead is a historical mystery; set in the Elizabethan age and with a show more young Christopher Marlowe as its protagonist, the novel is pitched by the authors as “Kit Marlowe, Boy Detective” and this indeed sums it up very nicely.

Fifteen-year old Christopher Marlowe is living with his parents and his four sisters in Canterbury, and is unsure what to do with his life. He just left another apprenticeship and really feels drawn towards a scholarly vocation but does not have the means to pursue it and may be forced to apprentice with his father. A prospect he dreads, not just because he feels unfit for the profession but also because John Marlowe is a drunkard and violent man who regularly beats both his wife and his son. In addition to that, Kit finds himself developing romantic feelings for his best friend Ginger who happens to be male, making their burgeoning love very much forbidden and dangerous to both of them. And in this highly insecure personal situation, someone is murdered, a man is murdered, a man who had befriended Kit and entrusted a mysterious package to him just before his death, and John Marlowe is arrested for the crime. Everyone, including his own wife, seems to think that Kit’s father is indeed guilty of the crime, so what is a boy to do but to start investigating on his own…

The Cobbler’s Boy is not as deep as the Iskryne trilogy, Bear/Addison’s previous collaboration, and appears to be happy to just chug along the well-trodden paths of genre conventions rather than subverting them as their Fantasy trilogy did. But it does this with so much gusto and and such obvious relish that it easily makes up for this lack of depth with its narrative enthusiasm and by being a damnably fun read. I strongly suspect that both authors were enjoying themselves rather a lot while writing The Cobbler’s Boy, and that joy transmits to the reader. It probably helps that it is a short novel, just under 200 pages – and those pages just flew by, the last coming far sooner than I would have liked, and like most, of not all, readers I am very much hoping for a sequel.

One aspect where its shortness is working somewhat against the novel, however, is that the cast of secondary characters is not very fleshed out. Bear and Addison are far too good writers to give us anything like cardboard-cutouts and their characters are very convincing, but they do confine to sketching them with a few strokes where a fully-realised portrait would have been welcome.

Another minor niggle might be that the central mystery is not really much of one – there really is only a single suspect for the murder, and quite unsurprisingly it turns out that he is the one who committed it. On first sight, that might even appear as a major flaw, but it isn’t really – for the reason that, while it does follow the general outlines of the genre, The Cobbler’s Boy is not really a mystery novel. It is much closer to an adventure novel and indeed the work it reminded most of was Robert Stevenson’s Treasure Island. Admittedly, there (sadly) are no pirates here, and no exotic locales; the novel stays in Canterbury for the whole of its narrative (although, I suppose that, with Bear and Addison both being USians, an English cathedral town might appear as something of an exotic location to them), but it has just the same boyish exuberance, the sense of excitement and adventure that I loved in Stevenson’s novel.

In spite of not having a villain of Long John Silver`s calibre (not to mention its deplorable lack of pirates), The Cobbler’s Boy manages to magnificently capture the spirit of a classic boy’s adventure tale (and does spice it up with some not-quite-so-classic male/male romance), making it an immensely gleeful and utterly squee-worthy read. And I really, really hope that Bear and Addison will return to “Kit Marlowe, Boy Detective” (and maybe even add some pirates next time). show less

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Abigail Irene Garrett drinks too much. She makes scandalous liaisons with inappropriate men, and if in her youth she was a famous beauty, now she is both formidable and notorious! She is a forensic sorceress, and a dedicated officer of a Crown that does not deserve her loyalty. Sebastien de Ulloa is the oldest creature she has ever known. He has forgotten his birth-name, his birth-place, and even the year in which he was born, if he ever knew it. But show more he still remembers the woman who made him immortal. In a world where the sun never sets on the British Empire, where Holland finally ceded New Amsterdam to the English only during the Napoleonic wars, and where the expansion of the American colonies was halted by the war magic of the Iroquois, they are exiles in the new world - and its only hope for justice!

My Review: This delicious book is one helluva good read, and quite entertainingly thought-provoking as well.

The title city, New Amsterdam, is the former Dutch colony on Manhattan Island, only captured by the British in the Napoleonic Wars of the early 19th century. Now THERE's an alternate history that's fun to imagine! Bear doesn't imagine it, though, which I consider to be a flaw; but I forgive her because Abigail Irene the forensic sorceress is such a delight as a character! She is an aging beauty, a madcap heiress in her day, and now that middle years impinge upon her beauty, a lot more of a woman than most men can handle. Her liaison with her boss is very well portrayed as the comfort-and-convenience of middle-aged lovers, not some fun but ephemeral passion of earlier life. This alone makes the book worth reading.

The crimes Abby Irene is called upon to solve are of more mysterious origins than mere "bang-you're-dead" murders that our blah little world provides. She has to wonder if her murderers are inadequately controlled demons summoned from Hell by fools in over their heads. She is ably, if unwelcomely, assisted by the oldest creature she's ever met: Don Sebastien, the Spanish wampyr, whose reputation in Europe was that of the Great Detective. After he saves Abby Irene's life, she grudgingly accepts that he's got the chops to help her in her vitrtually single-handed attempts to control the supernatural crimes that New Amsterdam presents in abundance.

Don Sebastien is over a thousand years old. He's long since forgotten the name of the village in Christian Spain where he was born before the turn of the millennium (the FIRST one, that is); he's been undead so long that he's emptied the last reservoirs of companionship, camaraderie, and seeks true death at last.

His teenaged ward, Jack, has no truck with this. He is in love with Sebastien, and will not give up his connection to this marvelous, fascinating, and quite lively corpse. Jack was a child in a club for visiting wampyrs to feed on locals when Sebastien found him; he was purchased from his parentally made indenture to the vampire version of an IHOP and subsequently freed by Sebastien. Their relationship since then has been more equal than either really knows, and each is very much lovingly dependent on the other.

Bear makes *no* point of their respective genders. Their love is presented as fully as can be; they are persecuted because of prejudice against wampyr-human relationships.

Handy dodge, eh?

Well, this is a collection of stories that tells good mysteries solved by very richly drawn characters in an alternate version of Earth that I would like to visit if I could figure out a place to apply for a visa. Recommended for anyone who isn't completely dead inside. show less

NEW AMSTERDAM is a series of six interconnected novellas about an amateur detective and a forensic investigator in early twentieth century America. The catch is that the detective is a vampire and the forensic investigator uses magic instead of science. And they live in a gorgeously realized alternate world in which the American colonies have yet to revolt, New Amsterdam was ceded to the British not quite a hundred years ago, and the supernatural is an accepted part of everyday life.

It's show more bloody brilliant.

This is one of those books that's so good you almost want to quit reading lest the rest of it let you down. You figure that Bear can't possibly maintain this level of quality, that's she's going to bungle it somehow. And yet, she never does. This is fantastic from the first story to the last.

There's a lot to love here; a lot to gush about, really. To begin, the characterization is superb. Bear shows us how these people feel about one another, what tensions exist between them, how their relationships drive their actions and inform their choices. Their interactions define them. It’s beautifully done; it drew me straight in and made me feel for them.

The plotting is equally good. In crafting each mystery, Bear has found the perfect blend of carefully distributed clues, political discord and personal impact. I wanted to know how each investigation would play out, sure, but it was my desire to see how the results would affect the protagonists that really kept me reading.

And the world building? Damn, is it ever good. I love alternate histories, and I find it just fascinating to see how particular authors structure theirs. Bear's alternate world is similar to our own in many respects, but the addition of the supernatural has shifted things in some surprising ways. I was particularly impressed with the lasting impact magic has had on this society. New Amsterdam isn’t just New York with a different name; it’s situated within a different political milieu dictated by the impact magic and the supernatural have had on the world. I found the territorial stuff particularly interesting, and the technological differences were great. Motion pictures in 1899? Zeppelins across the Atlantic? Broadcast electricity? Forensic magic? Darlin', you can bet I was all over it.

There were also a couple of little details that I reacted to on a personal level. Garrett's little dog stands out the most. I believe that everything's just a little bit better if a dog is involved. Mike may not add anything to the plot, but he definitely made me smile.

And I feel a bit strange, mentioning it in an offhand way at the very end of the review, but I also appreciated Bear's take on vampirism. She picks and chooses from the old legends to produce something that feels very real.

I'll say it again: this was bloody brilliant. I was always eager, even desperate, to read more. It blew me out of the water, delighted the hell out of me and, in the end, ripped my heart straight out of my chest.

You need to read this. Seriously, don't even argue with me. Just go get yourself a copy.

(A slightly different version of this review originally appeared on my blog, Stella Matutina). show less