Rebecca Levene

This New Adventure injects some much-needed urgency and focus into Benny's dig-of-the-week stories, with a dangerous secret of the People becoming loose on Dellah. I like the way that this shakes up our status quo: Bernice, Emile (yay!), and Braxiatel are all put through the wringer, both emotionally and physically. It's neat to see the Grel in a more complicated role than goofy baddies (I particularly loved their creation myth). There's also some neat ideas about faith here: I loved Renée show more Thalia's Church of the Grey, for example.

I do wish the series had been a little more coherent up to this point, however: James Harker's heel turn would be more interesting if he hadn't been another longtime friend of Benny's we've just met, and Renée's relationship with Brax would be stronger if we'd ever seen her working for him before. Seeds about the faith explosion seem like they could have been better planted ahead of time, too. And it's not so much a problem with this book in and of itself, but Braxiatel is not quite the man he'll be depicted as later on. show less

The first volume in a series of four high fantasy novels, the story is split into a number of different plot strands, each following a different character: Krish, a young goatherd with a secret past and an impossible destiny; Dae Hyo, a former warrior fallen on hard times; Eric, a male prostitute plying his trade in Smiler's Fair; and Nethmi, a young woman of noble birth who has to leave everyone and everything she knows behind; I would also add Marvan, a drover in Smiler's Fair with a show more dangerous addiction.

The storyline is for the most part engaging and the characters (both major and minor) are well written, if possibly a little clichéd; the author has taken the brave step of making them not always likeable, and sometimes it is not possible to justify or condone their deeds. The imagined world with its populace, flora, fauna and landscapes, as well as its mythology and religions, is impressive, and I hope that some of the questions relating to the origins of the ship- and landborn, the tribes and the wheel will be addressed in subsequent volumes. I enjoyed to see each character thread being woven, pursuing it, and finding it being joined gradually by the others - bar one - though in my opinion they don't quite make up a cohesive whole at the end.

This volume was offered in the Children's Fiction category on Amazon Vine, but this is most definitely a book for adults: there are fairly explicit and graphic depictions (or referencing in detail) of extreme violence and content of a sexual nature, with a coarser language in places than I'm used to seeing in books.

Smiler's Fair is a promising start, and I'm already looking forward to the next book in the sequence, as the ending leaves several possible scenarios open and questions unanswered, while also hoping that the violence will be toned down several notches.

(This review was originally written as part of Amazon's Vine programme.) show less

Ms Jones, the Braxiatel Collection's venerable administrator who made the mistake of falling in love, is gone. Bernice Summerfield is sent out to track her down in an anthology that, like A Life in Pieces, is made up of three closely-linked novellas.

Well, sort of. The collection is bound together by some typically strong writing from Simon Guerrier, who writes a four-part story that precedes and follows each of the novellas. This leads into the first, "The Serpent's Tooth" by Rebecca Levene, show more where Bernice finds herself on an out-of-the-way planet where Ms Jones has been sighted-- a planet where women are required to cover themselves up completely and hide from sight. So, she disguises herself as a man and soon finds herself involved in a quest to win the hands of the daughters of the king. As you do. Levene writes a story that does what the best Bernice stories do, moving between light humor and dark implications, sketching in a commentary on gender relations that almost seems worthy of Ursula K. Le Guin. Levene was the editor of the New Adventures for much of Bernice's run in the title, and she clearly gets what makes the character work.

As in A Life in Pieces, the middle novella features Adrian and Bev Tarrant on their own adventure. "Hiding Places" is the prose debut of Stewart Sheargold, who wrote two crazy Bernice audios (The Mirror Effect and The Masquerade of Death), and his experimental tendencies turn out to be fantastic in novella format. As Adrian and Bev try to find Ms Jones in a strange hotel, he gives us great prose, terrifying events, and some great characterization for these two oft-underused leads. Between this and Sutton's novella in A Life in Pieces, these characters are being handled very well, and I hope the line keeps this up-- and that we get to see some of this depth given to the actors playing the characters in the audio dramas.

Lastly we come to Dave Stone's "Jason and the Bandits; or, O, Jason, Where Art Thou?" I wanted to like this story, I really did. It features Jason trying to catch up with Benny when he's heard of what's going on, but a series of increasingly unlikely events keep him away. It's a good idea and a really fun story, but it conflicts completely with the tone of the other two novellas and the linking material-- much as happened with Dave Stone's contribution to A Life in Pieces. You can have one oddball story in an anthology of dozens of short stories, but I don't think it works in a collection of novellas, where it means that a whole third of the book is off on a weird tangent. Especially when it it's the last novella in the book, coming just before the incredible climax.

For incredible it is. Guerrier once again shows his depth of understanding of Bernice and her supporting cast, and that last line is oh-so-sad, to boot... show less

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3060779.html

A delightful romp of zombies taking over Rome and bringing about the end of the reign of Caligula, with only a plucky young British barbarian woman, a slave and a debauched pratrician to prevent them Taking Over The World. Zombies not so much my thing, but I have an affection for Roman history and enjoyed this.