"How do you know when you’ve punished yourself enough?"
Summary
Elisa’s island home is a microcosm of religious tension and human suffering, where faith and isolation collide with dire consequences. Her newfound gift—the ability to grant others’ deepest wishes—sets her on a path fraught with questions of morality and unintended consequences. What does it mean to act selflessly when even good intentions can lead to disaster?
Synopsis
Elisa is a young woman living on an island that has chosen isolation from the mainland to avoid being drawn into the ongoing conflict between Catholics, of which Elisa is one, and Protestants, whom the islanders regard with disdain. But this isolation comes at a steep price. The island is slowly starving itself, and most of its people are deeply unhappy. Elisa dreams of venturing to the mainland with the few merchants allowed to trade there, but her family insists she’s too young.
One day, Elisa discovers she has a miraculous gift: the ability to see others’ deepest wishes and make them come true. After a few small, seemingly successful experiments, she decides to grant everyone’s wishes all at once, hoping to restore the island’s happiness and health. A moment’s thought will show this is a terrible idea. In her desperation to fix what is broken, Elisa’s well-meaning but impulsive choices result in devastating consequences. Her story reminds us how even the best intentions can lead to ruin when wielded without wisdom or show more self-awareness—a dilemma that resonates far beyond the realm of fantasy. The outcome is catastrophic: her wish destroys the island and wipes out everyone Elisa loves, leaving her alone to escape by boat.
Since this is all her fault, what can a good Catholic do but penance?
Review
So begins Elisa’s story—but there is so much more to it than that. Over the course of The Fairy Godmother’s Tale, readers follow Elisa through centuries as she gains and loses friends to the ravages of time. Immortality becomes both her blessing and her curse. As time stretches beyond her grasp, she loses track of the years—at one point, believing just a couple of years have passed, she discovers it’s been over forty.
Elisa’s penance takes her through the German lands, where she becomes the unseen force behind several familiar fairy tales: Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and others. Always, she asks to be left out of the stories, preferring to remain anonymous and humble. But word has a way of slipping out. The facts, though twisted by time and retelling, linger.
Someone else knows the truth, however, and uses it for far less charitable purposes. Clever Gretel, Elisa’s nemesis, complicates the lives of those around Elisa for her own amusement. Unlike Elisa, who can only grant others’ wishes, Gretel has the power to grant her own—and none of them are good. Over time, Elisa learns to work around this limitation by shaping others’ wishes to suit her ends, but it’s a poor match for Gretel’s unchecked power.
Beyond the fairy tales and rivalries, Marks weaves a narrative rich with questions of faith, belief, and forgiveness. Elisa is never certain what God wants from her—or if He wants anything at all. Her quest for penance becomes a meditation on guilt and the nature of redemption. Is forgiveness something we earn, or is it granted in ways we can never fully understand? Elisa’s immortality sharpens these questions, forcing her to grapple with the isolation and disconnection of a life unmoored from time but tethered to her mistakes.
In the latter half of the novel, Elisa encounters love, loss, and war. She befriends the devil and meets the Wandering Jew of legend. These interactions expand the novel’s thematic scope, exploring the intersections of belief, legend, and philosophy. What shapes our destiny: faith, cunning, or human resilience?
Admittedly, the novel’s weakest portions involve the extended time Elisa spends marching across battlegrounds, camping, and moving on. These passages can feel meandering. However, they reflect Elisa’s inner turmoil: a soul wandering in search of purpose as myths fade and the world turns to pragmatic concerns. As the novel progresses, Elisa finds herself less relevant in a world that no longer believes in fairy tales. The same fate begins to befall Gretel. These shifts create a poignant echo of the challenges we all face when beliefs and ideals clash with harsh realities.
Conclusion
Overall, The Fairy Godmother’s Tale is an engaging and thought-provoking novel that delves far deeper than its whimsical premise might suggest. Marks uses Elisa's journey to grapple with profound questions of faith, forgiveness, and the elusive nature of redemption. Against a backdrop that transitions from fairy-tale wonder to the harsh realities of history, the story challenges readers to confront their own struggles with morality, belief, and the consequences of their choices.
This is a book that doesn’t just entertain—it pushes us to examine what it means to atone, to believe, and to strive for grace in an imperfect world. Elisa’s uncertainty mirrors our own, making her fantastical story deeply relatable. show less
Summary
Elisa’s island home is a microcosm of religious tension and human suffering, where faith and isolation collide with dire consequences. Her newfound gift—the ability to grant others’ deepest wishes—sets her on a path fraught with questions of morality and unintended consequences. What does it mean to act selflessly when even good intentions can lead to disaster?
Synopsis
Elisa is a young woman living on an island that has chosen isolation from the mainland to avoid being drawn into the ongoing conflict between Catholics, of which Elisa is one, and Protestants, whom the islanders regard with disdain. But this isolation comes at a steep price. The island is slowly starving itself, and most of its people are deeply unhappy. Elisa dreams of venturing to the mainland with the few merchants allowed to trade there, but her family insists she’s too young.
One day, Elisa discovers she has a miraculous gift: the ability to see others’ deepest wishes and make them come true. After a few small, seemingly successful experiments, she decides to grant everyone’s wishes all at once, hoping to restore the island’s happiness and health. A moment’s thought will show this is a terrible idea. In her desperation to fix what is broken, Elisa’s well-meaning but impulsive choices result in devastating consequences. Her story reminds us how even the best intentions can lead to ruin when wielded without wisdom or show more self-awareness—a dilemma that resonates far beyond the realm of fantasy. The outcome is catastrophic: her wish destroys the island and wipes out everyone Elisa loves, leaving her alone to escape by boat.
Since this is all her fault, what can a good Catholic do but penance?
Review
So begins Elisa’s story—but there is so much more to it than that. Over the course of The Fairy Godmother’s Tale, readers follow Elisa through centuries as she gains and loses friends to the ravages of time. Immortality becomes both her blessing and her curse. As time stretches beyond her grasp, she loses track of the years—at one point, believing just a couple of years have passed, she discovers it’s been over forty.
Elisa’s penance takes her through the German lands, where she becomes the unseen force behind several familiar fairy tales: Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and others. Always, she asks to be left out of the stories, preferring to remain anonymous and humble. But word has a way of slipping out. The facts, though twisted by time and retelling, linger.
Someone else knows the truth, however, and uses it for far less charitable purposes. Clever Gretel, Elisa’s nemesis, complicates the lives of those around Elisa for her own amusement. Unlike Elisa, who can only grant others’ wishes, Gretel has the power to grant her own—and none of them are good. Over time, Elisa learns to work around this limitation by shaping others’ wishes to suit her ends, but it’s a poor match for Gretel’s unchecked power.
Beyond the fairy tales and rivalries, Marks weaves a narrative rich with questions of faith, belief, and forgiveness. Elisa is never certain what God wants from her—or if He wants anything at all. Her quest for penance becomes a meditation on guilt and the nature of redemption. Is forgiveness something we earn, or is it granted in ways we can never fully understand? Elisa’s immortality sharpens these questions, forcing her to grapple with the isolation and disconnection of a life unmoored from time but tethered to her mistakes.
In the latter half of the novel, Elisa encounters love, loss, and war. She befriends the devil and meets the Wandering Jew of legend. These interactions expand the novel’s thematic scope, exploring the intersections of belief, legend, and philosophy. What shapes our destiny: faith, cunning, or human resilience?
Admittedly, the novel’s weakest portions involve the extended time Elisa spends marching across battlegrounds, camping, and moving on. These passages can feel meandering. However, they reflect Elisa’s inner turmoil: a soul wandering in search of purpose as myths fade and the world turns to pragmatic concerns. As the novel progresses, Elisa finds herself less relevant in a world that no longer believes in fairy tales. The same fate begins to befall Gretel. These shifts create a poignant echo of the challenges we all face when beliefs and ideals clash with harsh realities.
Conclusion
Overall, The Fairy Godmother’s Tale is an engaging and thought-provoking novel that delves far deeper than its whimsical premise might suggest. Marks uses Elisa's journey to grapple with profound questions of faith, forgiveness, and the elusive nature of redemption. Against a backdrop that transitions from fairy-tale wonder to the harsh realities of history, the story challenges readers to confront their own struggles with morality, belief, and the consequences of their choices.
This is a book that doesn’t just entertain—it pushes us to examine what it means to atone, to believe, and to strive for grace in an imperfect world. Elisa’s uncertainty mirrors our own, making her fantastical story deeply relatable. show less
This review was written for LibraryThing Early Reviewers.
Review of Fablenoir by Vic Sinclair
I’ll confess upfront: calling this a review feels generous. But that can’t be helped — Fablenoir just isn’t the kind of book I could bring myself to finish. Like many before it, Sinclair’s work attempts to yank those old, dust-covered tales of Mother Goose and the Brothers Grimm into a harder, meaner world — a place where these childhood figures knock shoulders and swap blows in a shared universe, re-imagined for grown-ups who want grit with their fairy dust.
Sinclair’s aim? Classic noir. The gritty, cigarette-stained shadows of the ‘30s and ‘40s where hard-boiled detectives matched wits with a criminal underworld drenched in vice and venom. In that world, moral lines blur like wet ink, good deeds get a bullet for their trouble, and even the best-intentioned hero — flaws and all — winds up covered in innocent blood. Or at least the blood of those innocent enough to catch his eye.
But here’s the rub: Fablenoir wades so deep into the swamp of noir tropes that, by the fifth chapter, there’s no light left to see by. Everything’s thick with the fog of clichés: substance abuse, double-crosses, half-lit conspiracies, and every sordid misstep you can imagine. The protagonist, Jack, is tracing lines on what’s supposed to be a black-and-white canvas, following dots that spell out “noir thriller,” but lead nowhere. The outline’s there, sure, but the substance? Missing in action.
In the end, Fablenoir didn’t feel show more like a story that could hold my attention, much less my respect. I dropped it like a spent cigarette in a puddle and let it fade into a damp, indifferent night of its own making. show less
I’ll confess upfront: calling this a review feels generous. But that can’t be helped — Fablenoir just isn’t the kind of book I could bring myself to finish. Like many before it, Sinclair’s work attempts to yank those old, dust-covered tales of Mother Goose and the Brothers Grimm into a harder, meaner world — a place where these childhood figures knock shoulders and swap blows in a shared universe, re-imagined for grown-ups who want grit with their fairy dust.
Sinclair’s aim? Classic noir. The gritty, cigarette-stained shadows of the ‘30s and ‘40s where hard-boiled detectives matched wits with a criminal underworld drenched in vice and venom. In that world, moral lines blur like wet ink, good deeds get a bullet for their trouble, and even the best-intentioned hero — flaws and all — winds up covered in innocent blood. Or at least the blood of those innocent enough to catch his eye.
But here’s the rub: Fablenoir wades so deep into the swamp of noir tropes that, by the fifth chapter, there’s no light left to see by. Everything’s thick with the fog of clichés: substance abuse, double-crosses, half-lit conspiracies, and every sordid misstep you can imagine. The protagonist, Jack, is tracing lines on what’s supposed to be a black-and-white canvas, following dots that spell out “noir thriller,” but lead nowhere. The outline’s there, sure, but the substance? Missing in action.
In the end, Fablenoir didn’t feel show more like a story that could hold my attention, much less my respect. I dropped it like a spent cigarette in a puddle and let it fade into a damp, indifferent night of its own making. show less
This review was written for LibraryThing Early Reviewers.
Review of The Tailor's Task by Christian Blake
Review Summary: Planned randomness ripe for dissection.
Synopsis: An adventure module in which a tailor sends a party of adventurers off to retrieve a macguffin in exchange for which he promises to use said macguffin on their behalf. The adventure is set in the usual pseudo-medieval fantasy world and, thanks to sliding adjustments, can be run for any level party in any genre appropriate rules set and setting. Or so it says.
Review: The Tailor's Task claims it can be used in a variety of fantasy adventure settings though, clearly, it is intended to be slotted into an ongoing campaign in Dungeons & Dragons above anything else. If a game master wanted to take it into a different rules set, most of the heavy lifting will be left up to them to make any necessary adjustments. Even in D&D there is still a fair bit of adjustment to be made to the NPCs and their abilities, not only in order to provide basic abilities and statistics, but also to adjust them to parties of higher or lower level than the NPC would normally be found in any of the fifth edition monster manuals.
Fortunately, there is a provided "Read Me" text in which the system of adjustment is explained. The primary concern seems to be balancing NPC hit points with damage output per turn. The balance point appears to be the NPC's listed stats in the MM (or where ever they are normally found). Where a lower difficulty is desired, damage per turn is reduced and hit points go up. show more Where a higher difficulty is wanted, the opposite tack is taken. Which means that parties that are not within a couple of levels of the normal level of the NPC meet a creature that soaks damage like a sponge while not itself dishing out the pain to the party, or a creature that nukes one character a turn but folds up like tin foil at the first reasonable hit. Ideally, you'll want your group near the encounters normal level to really feel much of a challenge.
Encounter design is somewhat lacking, though. While maps are provided for each major encounter location — and they’re decently crafted using Dungeon Alchemist — none of the encounters really take advantage of the map’s details. Mostly encounter strategy and NPC tactics are left up to the GM to decide and implement. A solid working knowledge of each NPC's abilities will be necessary as no help is given in the text.
Similarly poorly implemented are motivations for the various encounters. Creatures and adversaries turn up and attack the party in various ways simply because it "is pure evil and will show no mercy" or similar. Granted, this is often a fine enough excuse for some groups to do battle to the death, but any party with players more inclined toward interaction or social role-playing will find themselves without opportunities for negotiation or diplomacy during most of the encounters.
At its core, The Tailor’s Task is a straightforward hack-and-slash fetch quest with multiple steps. The party is given clear instructions at the outset on what they need to do and how to do it, leaving little room for alternative solutions or creative problem-solving. Situations don’t evolve or unfold organically — they simply happen. If your group enjoys this style of play, where the adventure is about checking boxes and following instructions without much exploration or deviation, this might suit them. Just go do the thing, as instructed, and don’t look around too much.
However, groups that favor story and encounter variety, groups looking to exercise their social skills, and groups that enjoy puzzle solving or out-thinking their opponents should probably look elsewhere. There's no real cohesive story to grab onto unless it is provided by the GM themselves. There's no common thread with each encounter that leads logically into the next one until you reach the climax at the end. We're not telling a story here, we're just doing things to get a thing because that thing is a thing someone wants. There's no repercussions to consider here, especially since the reward is just some artificially boosted stats.
All in all, The Tailor’s Task feels like a collection of unrelated encounters the designer had on hand and stitched together into a module without much thought for narrative flow or structure. The fact that some of the most potentially interesting bits are themselves located in random encounter tables throughout the module only serves to reinforce this impression. If you do pick up this module, the best use for it might be to disassemble it and sprinkle the various encounters into your regular campaign as filler when you’re out of ideas or need to kill an extra hour on game night. show less
Review Summary: Planned randomness ripe for dissection.
Synopsis: An adventure module in which a tailor sends a party of adventurers off to retrieve a macguffin in exchange for which he promises to use said macguffin on their behalf. The adventure is set in the usual pseudo-medieval fantasy world and, thanks to sliding adjustments, can be run for any level party in any genre appropriate rules set and setting. Or so it says.
Review: The Tailor's Task claims it can be used in a variety of fantasy adventure settings though, clearly, it is intended to be slotted into an ongoing campaign in Dungeons & Dragons above anything else. If a game master wanted to take it into a different rules set, most of the heavy lifting will be left up to them to make any necessary adjustments. Even in D&D there is still a fair bit of adjustment to be made to the NPCs and their abilities, not only in order to provide basic abilities and statistics, but also to adjust them to parties of higher or lower level than the NPC would normally be found in any of the fifth edition monster manuals.
Fortunately, there is a provided "Read Me" text in which the system of adjustment is explained. The primary concern seems to be balancing NPC hit points with damage output per turn. The balance point appears to be the NPC's listed stats in the MM (or where ever they are normally found). Where a lower difficulty is desired, damage per turn is reduced and hit points go up. show more Where a higher difficulty is wanted, the opposite tack is taken. Which means that parties that are not within a couple of levels of the normal level of the NPC meet a creature that soaks damage like a sponge while not itself dishing out the pain to the party, or a creature that nukes one character a turn but folds up like tin foil at the first reasonable hit. Ideally, you'll want your group near the encounters normal level to really feel much of a challenge.
Encounter design is somewhat lacking, though. While maps are provided for each major encounter location — and they’re decently crafted using Dungeon Alchemist — none of the encounters really take advantage of the map’s details. Mostly encounter strategy and NPC tactics are left up to the GM to decide and implement. A solid working knowledge of each NPC's abilities will be necessary as no help is given in the text.
Similarly poorly implemented are motivations for the various encounters. Creatures and adversaries turn up and attack the party in various ways simply because it "is pure evil and will show no mercy" or similar. Granted, this is often a fine enough excuse for some groups to do battle to the death, but any party with players more inclined toward interaction or social role-playing will find themselves without opportunities for negotiation or diplomacy during most of the encounters.
At its core, The Tailor’s Task is a straightforward hack-and-slash fetch quest with multiple steps. The party is given clear instructions at the outset on what they need to do and how to do it, leaving little room for alternative solutions or creative problem-solving. Situations don’t evolve or unfold organically — they simply happen. If your group enjoys this style of play, where the adventure is about checking boxes and following instructions without much exploration or deviation, this might suit them. Just go do the thing, as instructed, and don’t look around too much.
However, groups that favor story and encounter variety, groups looking to exercise their social skills, and groups that enjoy puzzle solving or out-thinking their opponents should probably look elsewhere. There's no real cohesive story to grab onto unless it is provided by the GM themselves. There's no common thread with each encounter that leads logically into the next one until you reach the climax at the end. We're not telling a story here, we're just doing things to get a thing because that thing is a thing someone wants. There's no repercussions to consider here, especially since the reward is just some artificially boosted stats.
All in all, The Tailor’s Task feels like a collection of unrelated encounters the designer had on hand and stitched together into a module without much thought for narrative flow or structure. The fact that some of the most potentially interesting bits are themselves located in random encounter tables throughout the module only serves to reinforce this impression. If you do pick up this module, the best use for it might be to disassemble it and sprinkle the various encounters into your regular campaign as filler when you’re out of ideas or need to kill an extra hour on game night. show less
This review was written for LibraryThing Early Reviewers.
USS Primis: The First Starship by M. H. Altis
"Two poorly assembled jigsaw puzzles."
Summary: Two half-books come together and attempt to tell a meaningful story that ultimately leaves you wanting a twist that never comes.
Synopsis: The captain of Earth's first extra-solar colonization and terraforming mission assesses his fellow crewmembers and their chances of successfully completing their mission to save humanity from complete destruction. Unsurprisingly, things go badly aboard the USS Primis and, with the mission in danger of utter failure, Captain Davis must decide what sort of victory he is going to claim.
Review: No matter how you approach this book, half of it feels irrelevant. In the first nine chapters, Captain Davis breezily evaluates each of his eleven crew members, detailing their personalities and abilities in his personal log, which we somehow have access to. But this lengthy assessment feels pointless because, in the end, only two of the twelve characters have any bearing on the second half of the book. Alternatively, the second half could be seen as the wasted portion, where most of the characters are permanently sidelined, leaving just two to fight for survival and decide how to complete what little remains of the original mission. The second half hinges entirely on the inevitability laid out by the Captain in the first.
This reads like two novellas awkwardly mashed together in an effort to create a single novel. It's as if two different jigsaw puzzles were show more cut from the same mold — the pieces technically fit, but the final picture is disjointed and unsatisfying.
On one hand, we get an intriguing look at the crew, their motivations, skills, and specialties. They've been chosen to colonize a distant extra-solar planet in a last-ditch effort to save humanity from an Earth that’s on the brink of destruction. Apparently, we sealed our fate by intentionally launching nukes into the sun. Why? It’s unclear and, in the end, irrelevant. The real focus of chapters one through nine isn’t the reason everyone’s desperate to escape Earth but rather the captain's personal take on his crew. It’s key to remember that these aren’t full profiles, just the captain's impressions. So, what we’re really exploring here is the captain’s psychology, not the crew’s.
The disconnect between the two halves of the book becomes obvious in the second half. After hyper-sleep, one of the crew members (no spoilers, but again, it doesn’t really matter) wakes up too early because their sleep pod malfunctions thanks to their own mistake. With centuries of travel still ahead and the realization that they'll be alone in space for the rest of their life, they begin to unravel. Their solution? Wake up another crew member. Instead of owning up to their error, they try to convince the newly awakened Captain that everything is fine, and they’re still on course. Naturally, this fails spectacularly. Once the Captain catches on, a tense game of cat and mouse ensues, with the Captain trying to stop the rogue crew member from sabotaging the entire mission.
Given that part of the game is eliminating the rest of the crew while they’re still in hyper-sleep, it’s puzzling why so much of the first half was spent introducing them. We have no real investment in their fates, except for one, because we’ve only seen them through the captain’s eyes. All we have to go on are his impressions and feelings. Since he’s already told us what he thinks of them, we adopt his perspective by default. As a result, we can't care about the crew any more than Captain Davis does. And Captain Davis definitely does not like all of them.
This leads to another issue: the second half is told from the wrong perspective, at least initially. After hyper-sleep, we’re dropped into the offending crew member’s point of view, even though we spent the entire first half in Captain Davis’. Then, once the Captain wakes up, we switch back to his POV, but from there the narrative flips between the two. The problem is that the second half is trying hard to be suspenseful and tense — it wants to be a thriller. But because the POV shifts freely, we always know what’s happening and what both characters are thinking. If we had stayed in the Captain’s perspective, unaware that the other crew member woke up early and was attempting a ruse, real tension could have developed as the Captain slowly pieces together what’s off. Keeping the reader in the dark would have made the earlier psychological focus more relevant, while heightening the suspense as the inevitable conclusion of USS Primis unfolds.
Ultimately, the conclusion of Primis is disappointing, especially for those familiar with The Twilight Zone TV series. The writing led me to anticipate a big reveal at the end — perhaps the crew was all in a simulation, being evaluated for their roles on an upcoming mission. This could have served as a psychological dry run to identify who would succeed and who should be overlooked due to underlying, undetected issues. It needed a big twist at the end to make reading it worthwhile.
Overall, while M. H. Altis' USS Primis: The First Starship includes a few intriguing elements, its two stages feel mismatched, and it ultimately fails to launch. show less
"Two poorly assembled jigsaw puzzles."
Summary: Two half-books come together and attempt to tell a meaningful story that ultimately leaves you wanting a twist that never comes.
Synopsis: The captain of Earth's first extra-solar colonization and terraforming mission assesses his fellow crewmembers and their chances of successfully completing their mission to save humanity from complete destruction. Unsurprisingly, things go badly aboard the USS Primis and, with the mission in danger of utter failure, Captain Davis must decide what sort of victory he is going to claim.
Review: No matter how you approach this book, half of it feels irrelevant. In the first nine chapters, Captain Davis breezily evaluates each of his eleven crew members, detailing their personalities and abilities in his personal log, which we somehow have access to. But this lengthy assessment feels pointless because, in the end, only two of the twelve characters have any bearing on the second half of the book. Alternatively, the second half could be seen as the wasted portion, where most of the characters are permanently sidelined, leaving just two to fight for survival and decide how to complete what little remains of the original mission. The second half hinges entirely on the inevitability laid out by the Captain in the first.
This reads like two novellas awkwardly mashed together in an effort to create a single novel. It's as if two different jigsaw puzzles were show more cut from the same mold — the pieces technically fit, but the final picture is disjointed and unsatisfying.
On one hand, we get an intriguing look at the crew, their motivations, skills, and specialties. They've been chosen to colonize a distant extra-solar planet in a last-ditch effort to save humanity from an Earth that’s on the brink of destruction. Apparently, we sealed our fate by intentionally launching nukes into the sun. Why? It’s unclear and, in the end, irrelevant. The real focus of chapters one through nine isn’t the reason everyone’s desperate to escape Earth but rather the captain's personal take on his crew. It’s key to remember that these aren’t full profiles, just the captain's impressions. So, what we’re really exploring here is the captain’s psychology, not the crew’s.
The disconnect between the two halves of the book becomes obvious in the second half. After hyper-sleep, one of the crew members (no spoilers, but again, it doesn’t really matter) wakes up too early because their sleep pod malfunctions thanks to their own mistake. With centuries of travel still ahead and the realization that they'll be alone in space for the rest of their life, they begin to unravel. Their solution? Wake up another crew member. Instead of owning up to their error, they try to convince the newly awakened Captain that everything is fine, and they’re still on course. Naturally, this fails spectacularly. Once the Captain catches on, a tense game of cat and mouse ensues, with the Captain trying to stop the rogue crew member from sabotaging the entire mission.
Given that part of the game is eliminating the rest of the crew while they’re still in hyper-sleep, it’s puzzling why so much of the first half was spent introducing them. We have no real investment in their fates, except for one, because we’ve only seen them through the captain’s eyes. All we have to go on are his impressions and feelings. Since he’s already told us what he thinks of them, we adopt his perspective by default. As a result, we can't care about the crew any more than Captain Davis does. And Captain Davis definitely does not like all of them.
This leads to another issue: the second half is told from the wrong perspective, at least initially. After hyper-sleep, we’re dropped into the offending crew member’s point of view, even though we spent the entire first half in Captain Davis’. Then, once the Captain wakes up, we switch back to his POV, but from there the narrative flips between the two. The problem is that the second half is trying hard to be suspenseful and tense — it wants to be a thriller. But because the POV shifts freely, we always know what’s happening and what both characters are thinking. If we had stayed in the Captain’s perspective, unaware that the other crew member woke up early and was attempting a ruse, real tension could have developed as the Captain slowly pieces together what’s off. Keeping the reader in the dark would have made the earlier psychological focus more relevant, while heightening the suspense as the inevitable conclusion of USS Primis unfolds.
Ultimately, the conclusion of Primis is disappointing, especially for those familiar with The Twilight Zone TV series. The writing led me to anticipate a big reveal at the end — perhaps the crew was all in a simulation, being evaluated for their roles on an upcoming mission. This could have served as a psychological dry run to identify who would succeed and who should be overlooked due to underlying, undetected issues. It needed a big twist at the end to make reading it worthwhile.
Overall, while M. H. Altis' USS Primis: The First Starship includes a few intriguing elements, its two stages feel mismatched, and it ultimately fails to launch. show less
This review was written for LibraryThing Early Reviewers.
"Everything you think you know has been Monkeyed with".
Summary: A readable and entertaining retelling of the catastrophe that was 2016 to 2020 which will challenge what you think you understand about any of it.
Synopsis After a hard won fight, the animals of City Zoo have their independence. They run the zoo now and the (human) mayor of the city that surrounds them washes his hands of the whole affair.
Then proceed several years of history regarding what happens to the zoo and its occupants. They begin with a grand dream of how life could be and resolve to do their best to make it that way. However, in relatively short order politics rears its ugly head and, even worse, media professionals.
The animals all have their roles to play and play them they do, sometimes to comedic, and sometimes to tragic effect. As things progress, you'd be forgiven for thinking it all starts to sound a bit familiar. Too familiar. Terribly, awfully familiar. Until, eventually, you realize what garden path you are being lead down and where it will all end up.
Review: One has to be careful of the comparisons one draws when pitting themselves alongside, or even against, the classics. Jeff Pedigo squares off against Orwell's Animal Farm right from the back cover with City Zoo.
The novel at first appears to be a light-hearted fictional story about how the animals choose to conduct themselves after their successful revolution with, one assumes, many delightful and humorous comparisons to humans and their show more amusing habits along the way. After all, that's how most of these sorts of novels go. Look at the silly animals and see how so like us they are. Monkeys with sniper rifles notwithstanding.
And, at first, everything seems to be going reasonably well. The animals come up with a constitution, raise a flag, sing an anthem, and develop the symbols of their new autonomy. History carries on a bit, elections are held, every animal has a vote and new Animal Zookeepers are elected through whom the zoo's daily operations are maintained. So far so good. The monkeys set up a means of reporting the weekly news at the zoo so all the animals are informed about the zoo's activities. All the pieces are in place for what feels like might turn out to be the usual talking-animals sort of fairy tale.
And then one of the Animal Zookeepers is assassinated by a mysterious assassin. And so begins a descent into the chaos of a roman à clef about the political events of the years 2016 to 2020 and perhaps beyond.
George Orwell's Animal Farm is another roman à clef. The events of that novel are directly and clearly related to the events of the Russian Revolution and it's aftermath. Orwell was a socialist and deeply upset at the Russians not for being Communist, but for doing socialism wrong. And what was worse, in Orwell's view, was that the British Public, particularly the middle classes and above, all seemed to be okay with it. No one was really allowed to criticize the Russians, particularly because they were allies during World War II. It just didn't seem proper to the press, the publishers, and the general public of the time to go around criticizing these people who had helped the Allies win the war. So they made it very difficult for Orwell, and really for anyone else, to speak out about what was going on in Russia. At the time, if you understood the relatively recent history of Russia, Animal Farm was a "book with a key", and that key was the Russian Revolution.
Similarly, City Zoo is a book with a key. Its particular key is the political cycle of events leading up to the US elections of 2016 and the years following. It's not difficult to unlock the story and see what Pedigo is talking about, provided you are reasonably familiar with the actual events in the first place. Even without a strong working familiarity, a reasonably astute observer should recognize the standard usage of elephant versus donkey, why you would choose to cast the press and media as monkeys of various sorts, why one of the elephant's opponents in the election is cast as a rhino, and so forth. The point of a roman à clef is not to hide its subject matter.
Rather, the point is to take the reader one step away from the actual events so they can, hopefully, assess the events with greater clarity of mind and with less personal prejudice and preconceived notions getting in the way of more clear-headed thinking. You use the device to make it possible for people to see a problem they might not otherwise see if they remain zoomed close in to the original events.
Pedigo doesn't make anything up here — there is very little fiction here. These are the events of those years in that election cycle. He's not lying to you when he tells the story. Just as Orwell was not lying to his audience when he told the story of animals taking over a farm, the pigs taking over the animals and, in the end, becoming just like the original people running the place. It was all true of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, just like City Zoo is all true about the election and presidency it is examining.
But, like Orwell, Pedigo has a particular point of view about those events. One which he wants to get across in the telling of the story. While Orwell thought that Socialism was a pretty neat thing, but that the Russians had screwed it up and were harming their people because of it, Pedigo is in a different place and time. Pedigo believes it was the media that let the people of America down. And that on their shoulders lays the blame for all that followed.
Importantly, he does identify the critical moment at which it became nearly inevitable that what did happen was going to happen. The first sin of the media, according to Pedigo, was not taking the elephant seriously when it announced it was running. Rather than treating it as a serious candidate, the monkeys decry the elephant as a silly, non-serious contender who couldn't possibly challenge the established candidates. The one's everyone knew were going to be the real candidates for Animal Zookeeper. And, as they mock the elephant and his candidacy and treat it as a joke, the ever observing public takes more and more notice of the discrepancies between what the monkeys say is going on and what the animals can see with there own eyes is going on. And the animals start to wonder if maybe not everything is as they are told it is. From there it is all downhill.
City Zoo's warning isn't about the ills of socialism incorrectly applied, it's a warning about the media we are fed, consume, and believe, and the manner in which it is served to us.
Pedigo does an excellent job creating the world of City Zoo and casts his animals appropriately. The story zips along like the best light fiction does. You're carried from moment to moment and event to event with alacrity. If it seems unbelievable that these things would happen to animals, imagine how much more unbelievable it will all be to a future reader years removed from the original source when they realize that everything in the book actually happened to real people in a real world. And that they let it happen to them.
Regardless of your point of view, City Zoo should be an interesting read, if for no other reason that to have the opportunity to really think about what went on, what is still going on, and how it has all been allowed to happen. For that alone it should be on your reading list. show less
Summary: A readable and entertaining retelling of the catastrophe that was 2016 to 2020 which will challenge what you think you understand about any of it.
Synopsis After a hard won fight, the animals of City Zoo have their independence. They run the zoo now and the (human) mayor of the city that surrounds them washes his hands of the whole affair.
Then proceed several years of history regarding what happens to the zoo and its occupants. They begin with a grand dream of how life could be and resolve to do their best to make it that way. However, in relatively short order politics rears its ugly head and, even worse, media professionals.
The animals all have their roles to play and play them they do, sometimes to comedic, and sometimes to tragic effect. As things progress, you'd be forgiven for thinking it all starts to sound a bit familiar. Too familiar. Terribly, awfully familiar. Until, eventually, you realize what garden path you are being lead down and where it will all end up.
Review: One has to be careful of the comparisons one draws when pitting themselves alongside, or even against, the classics. Jeff Pedigo squares off against Orwell's Animal Farm right from the back cover with City Zoo.
The novel at first appears to be a light-hearted fictional story about how the animals choose to conduct themselves after their successful revolution with, one assumes, many delightful and humorous comparisons to humans and their show more amusing habits along the way. After all, that's how most of these sorts of novels go. Look at the silly animals and see how so like us they are. Monkeys with sniper rifles notwithstanding.
And, at first, everything seems to be going reasonably well. The animals come up with a constitution, raise a flag, sing an anthem, and develop the symbols of their new autonomy. History carries on a bit, elections are held, every animal has a vote and new Animal Zookeepers are elected through whom the zoo's daily operations are maintained. So far so good. The monkeys set up a means of reporting the weekly news at the zoo so all the animals are informed about the zoo's activities. All the pieces are in place for what feels like might turn out to be the usual talking-animals sort of fairy tale.
And then one of the Animal Zookeepers is assassinated by a mysterious assassin. And so begins a descent into the chaos of a roman à clef about the political events of the years 2016 to 2020 and perhaps beyond.
George Orwell's Animal Farm is another roman à clef. The events of that novel are directly and clearly related to the events of the Russian Revolution and it's aftermath. Orwell was a socialist and deeply upset at the Russians not for being Communist, but for doing socialism wrong. And what was worse, in Orwell's view, was that the British Public, particularly the middle classes and above, all seemed to be okay with it. No one was really allowed to criticize the Russians, particularly because they were allies during World War II. It just didn't seem proper to the press, the publishers, and the general public of the time to go around criticizing these people who had helped the Allies win the war. So they made it very difficult for Orwell, and really for anyone else, to speak out about what was going on in Russia. At the time, if you understood the relatively recent history of Russia, Animal Farm was a "book with a key", and that key was the Russian Revolution.
Similarly, City Zoo is a book with a key. Its particular key is the political cycle of events leading up to the US elections of 2016 and the years following. It's not difficult to unlock the story and see what Pedigo is talking about, provided you are reasonably familiar with the actual events in the first place. Even without a strong working familiarity, a reasonably astute observer should recognize the standard usage of elephant versus donkey, why you would choose to cast the press and media as monkeys of various sorts, why one of the elephant's opponents in the election is cast as a rhino, and so forth. The point of a roman à clef is not to hide its subject matter.
Rather, the point is to take the reader one step away from the actual events so they can, hopefully, assess the events with greater clarity of mind and with less personal prejudice and preconceived notions getting in the way of more clear-headed thinking. You use the device to make it possible for people to see a problem they might not otherwise see if they remain zoomed close in to the original events.
Pedigo doesn't make anything up here — there is very little fiction here. These are the events of those years in that election cycle. He's not lying to you when he tells the story. Just as Orwell was not lying to his audience when he told the story of animals taking over a farm, the pigs taking over the animals and, in the end, becoming just like the original people running the place. It was all true of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, just like City Zoo is all true about the election and presidency it is examining.
But, like Orwell, Pedigo has a particular point of view about those events. One which he wants to get across in the telling of the story. While Orwell thought that Socialism was a pretty neat thing, but that the Russians had screwed it up and were harming their people because of it, Pedigo is in a different place and time. Pedigo believes it was the media that let the people of America down. And that on their shoulders lays the blame for all that followed.
Importantly, he does identify the critical moment at which it became nearly inevitable that what did happen was going to happen. The first sin of the media, according to Pedigo, was not taking the elephant seriously when it announced it was running. Rather than treating it as a serious candidate, the monkeys decry the elephant as a silly, non-serious contender who couldn't possibly challenge the established candidates. The one's everyone knew were going to be the real candidates for Animal Zookeeper. And, as they mock the elephant and his candidacy and treat it as a joke, the ever observing public takes more and more notice of the discrepancies between what the monkeys say is going on and what the animals can see with there own eyes is going on. And the animals start to wonder if maybe not everything is as they are told it is. From there it is all downhill.
City Zoo's warning isn't about the ills of socialism incorrectly applied, it's a warning about the media we are fed, consume, and believe, and the manner in which it is served to us.
Pedigo does an excellent job creating the world of City Zoo and casts his animals appropriately. The story zips along like the best light fiction does. You're carried from moment to moment and event to event with alacrity. If it seems unbelievable that these things would happen to animals, imagine how much more unbelievable it will all be to a future reader years removed from the original source when they realize that everything in the book actually happened to real people in a real world. And that they let it happen to them.
Regardless of your point of view, City Zoo should be an interesting read, if for no other reason that to have the opportunity to really think about what went on, what is still going on, and how it has all been allowed to happen. For that alone it should be on your reading list. show less
This review was written for LibraryThing Early Reviewers.
"In which a classic Sci-Fi novel critiquing modern society is attempted but can't be bothered to tell much of a story while doing it."
Synopsis:
Intrepid but emotionally damaged war correspondent Ailia Bax is sent to Mars to report on the emerging situation there. She's expected to maintain an Earth-centric bias in her reporting but ultimately does not, instead giving up her ties to Earth and falling in with the residents of Mars. Somewhere along the line, she finds the culprit in a series of terrorist bombings.
Review:
Read that synopsis again. That is, quite literally, all that actually happens in Emergent Mars. It is inevitable that it will happen and that it will happen exactly as it does in this "novel". I put novel in quotes on purpose.
Generally speaking, a novel requires about 70 - 100 thousand words to be truly considered a novel. Along the way there should be plot, characters, growth and hopefully, interesting things happening. Unfortunately, Emergent Mars fails, at a minimum, the word count test. To be sure, there are well more than 70,000 words inside the covers of this book, but very, very few of them are actual story. And, when it comes to the other requirements for a novel, they are mostly there only to create some space between what amounts to lengthy political rants about the state of things today and how much better things would be if only we would adopt the author's recommendations for how things should be. Emergent Mars is a long series of political essays show more carried out as dialog between two people, one of whom is always completely versed in whatever theory they are currently espousing while the other sits in the chair opposite and nods agreement without ever putting any real thought into any potential points of contention. They're just there to act as audience surrogates, and not particularly astute ones at that.
I'm not even going to discuss the actual politics on display here. It just doesn't matter when considering whether the novel is good or not. Depending on your point of view of the world as it currently stands, you'll either agree or not agree as you see fit. Which is part of the problem. There's nothing here to convince you one way or the other to carefully consider your own assumptions about how the world works. Unlike classics of the genre such as Animal Farm, Brave New World, or 1984 , there's no real story here to help you see why these things need to be rethought. We're told a lot of things are going on to make all this mass of politics necessary but never really shown anything that is at all helpful in translating what we are being told is the way things should be into something useful. It's like sitting through an endless series of university lectures on a subject you have no real interest in, just for the course credits. After a few minutes, it all becomes a series of droning noises you can easily ignore in favor of whatever it is you are doodling in your notebook.
After the first 100 pages, the book becomes a slog as you try to work your way to the end of it. Were it not for the need to review it, I'd have put this down at that point and never even felt bad about it. The only interesting element left to me at that point was reading to see if my initial guess as to the culprit behind the bombings was what I thought it was going to turn out to be. It was. So, a completely unnecessary reading.
The fact that this is a Science Fiction novel is curious as well. There's no real reason for it to be so. The planet Mars is a sort of painted backdrop against which a variety of characters come on stage, deliver their political speeches, and move off again, turning up at the end for the end-of-play cast party. For all the use the characters make of it, the setting could as easily be a remote tropical island, an isolated wilderness settlement, or even an underwater research facility. None of which would have made any difference at all to what Klyford did with this novel. Mars is of no more consequence than the font used to type the story.
If you're into lengthy political diatribes, with a vaguely Martian-red color theme, then by all means, try to get over it before you're reduced to picking up Emergent Mars. show less
Synopsis:
Intrepid but emotionally damaged war correspondent Ailia Bax is sent to Mars to report on the emerging situation there. She's expected to maintain an Earth-centric bias in her reporting but ultimately does not, instead giving up her ties to Earth and falling in with the residents of Mars. Somewhere along the line, she finds the culprit in a series of terrorist bombings.
Review:
Read that synopsis again. That is, quite literally, all that actually happens in Emergent Mars. It is inevitable that it will happen and that it will happen exactly as it does in this "novel". I put novel in quotes on purpose.
Generally speaking, a novel requires about 70 - 100 thousand words to be truly considered a novel. Along the way there should be plot, characters, growth and hopefully, interesting things happening. Unfortunately, Emergent Mars fails, at a minimum, the word count test. To be sure, there are well more than 70,000 words inside the covers of this book, but very, very few of them are actual story. And, when it comes to the other requirements for a novel, they are mostly there only to create some space between what amounts to lengthy political rants about the state of things today and how much better things would be if only we would adopt the author's recommendations for how things should be. Emergent Mars is a long series of political essays show more carried out as dialog between two people, one of whom is always completely versed in whatever theory they are currently espousing while the other sits in the chair opposite and nods agreement without ever putting any real thought into any potential points of contention. They're just there to act as audience surrogates, and not particularly astute ones at that.
I'm not even going to discuss the actual politics on display here. It just doesn't matter when considering whether the novel is good or not. Depending on your point of view of the world as it currently stands, you'll either agree or not agree as you see fit. Which is part of the problem. There's nothing here to convince you one way or the other to carefully consider your own assumptions about how the world works. Unlike classics of the genre such as Animal Farm, Brave New World, or 1984 , there's no real story here to help you see why these things need to be rethought. We're told a lot of things are going on to make all this mass of politics necessary but never really shown anything that is at all helpful in translating what we are being told is the way things should be into something useful. It's like sitting through an endless series of university lectures on a subject you have no real interest in, just for the course credits. After a few minutes, it all becomes a series of droning noises you can easily ignore in favor of whatever it is you are doodling in your notebook.
After the first 100 pages, the book becomes a slog as you try to work your way to the end of it. Were it not for the need to review it, I'd have put this down at that point and never even felt bad about it. The only interesting element left to me at that point was reading to see if my initial guess as to the culprit behind the bombings was what I thought it was going to turn out to be. It was. So, a completely unnecessary reading.
The fact that this is a Science Fiction novel is curious as well. There's no real reason for it to be so. The planet Mars is a sort of painted backdrop against which a variety of characters come on stage, deliver their political speeches, and move off again, turning up at the end for the end-of-play cast party. For all the use the characters make of it, the setting could as easily be a remote tropical island, an isolated wilderness settlement, or even an underwater research facility. None of which would have made any difference at all to what Klyford did with this novel. Mars is of no more consequence than the font used to type the story.
If you're into lengthy political diatribes, with a vaguely Martian-red color theme, then by all means, try to get over it before you're reduced to picking up Emergent Mars. show less
This review was written for LibraryThing Early Reviewers.
Summary: Five stand out tales of mystery and suspense in a group of thirteen offerings from a selection of different voices.
Review: It’s always a little tricky to review anthologies. Do you review each story presented in a detailed fashion that may or may not be warranted, bearing in mind the theme and intent of the anthology? Do you just review the anthology as a whole giving an overall impression of the collection and discussing how well it met its stated goals? Or do you attempt to do both in one review?
Instead of all that, let’s take a look at the purpose of the anthology and which stories within best represent it and make it most worth reading.
Born from the pandemic, the original Festive Mayhem brought together writer’s looking for a creative outlet. Such fun was had that the anthology came back for three more installments, this being the fourth. Each installment after the first has featured a mix of new and returning authors and each features original works by those authors which have not been published anywhere else prior to appearing in these collections. I’ve not read the previous installments, so this fourth volume will be judged solely on its own merits.
This most recent collection, Festive Mayhem 4, is unique among the four for having been first supported via Kickstarter with the intention of producing physical copies for the first time, previous editions being available as e-books only. Rapidly and successfully funded, the collection is as you see it show more now.
As with any anthology collection, the writers all come from diverse backgrounds and experiences although these authors in particular all come under the heading of writers of color. The thirteen included stories cover a gamut of tales and fall under both the mystery and thriller genres and feature a variety of settings and time periods. If you are expecting pure mysteries throughout, though, you are in for some disappointment, especially since several of the stories fall more into the crime/suspense/thriller genres rather than the more traditional whodunits you might expect.
And, while there are some decent inclusions in that combination genre, they do tend to be the weaker offerings in the book. The mystery stories don’t get off scot-free however and a few of those also miss the mark. All in all, of the thirteen stories, the following are the one’s that stood out as best representing the value and mission of the book, that of presenting diverse view points and experiences with an eye toward a winter holiday setting.
In Valentine’s Vengeance: A Cozy Cat Caper Mystery by Paige Sleuth, a young man talks his friend into going on a double date with him and his new love interest. She is initially reluctant to do so, but once she gives in she swiftly finds herself involved in the murder, right before their eyes, of the man she has been paired with. The observational nature of the solution to the crime is well done and the obvious solution to the dateless situation of the protagonists is neatly side-stepped to keep this from being a more stereotypical, and therefore predictable, offering. It’s a well-built mystery that avoids cliché.
Appalachia Kidnappings by Lavelle Andrew Miller sees a pair of mystery enthusiasts exploring the snow covered wilderness where numerous unsolved murders occurred several years before. With a snowstorm on the way and a park ranger urging them to seek shelter and get to safety ahead of the storm, things soon take a turn for the worse when the ranger’s pickup crashes into a snowbank as they head down the mountain. Probably the best suspense tale in the book, the expected and obvious ending seems inevitable right up until the double and triple twist ending, which makes it all worth it.
The Case of the Missing Body: A Lara’s Detective Agency Mystery by Stella Oni is set in Nigeria and is among the first in the book to take the reader to a genuinely foreign (if you assume America is your “normal”) place, with distinctly foreign manners, patterns of thought, and modes of speech. It accomplishes all this extremely well. The mystery in question isn’t a murder but, as the title suggests, the disappearance of a body from a morgue. Not just any body of course, but that of a tribal chief. It is delightfully well put together and a pleasure to read. The various interpersonal dynamics involved are what makes it all work and draws the reader in.
The trick of Sweeten: A Naomi Sinclair Short Story by Ashley-Ruth M. Bernier lays in the mirroring of each of the main characters’ lives in the central mystery of the story. It’s not deep and revelatory, but rather quiet and personal showing each character the cost of their choices in their personal lives if they keep going as they are. Of particular enjoyment in this story is the patois on display in the language and speech of the St. Thomas islanders. Frequently, dialect speech rendered “as-is” in prose is… well, not in the best taste, let’s say. Here though, it adds a richness and flavor to the story that would be conspicuous in its absence rather than a distraction by its presence. Bernier should be congratulated for making the setting come alive just by having the characters talk the way they talk. A well done fair-play mystery with deeper ramifications for each of the participants.
Carolyn Marie Wilkins’ Delilah and the Dangerous Diva sets itself squarely at the very end of the 19th century in Boston. Delilah is her lawyer uncle’s almost but not quite secretary, given the job out of pity for her prospects. That she and her uncle, Philip, are both black at a time when, even in Boston, these things are prominent problems, plays a central role in the eventual solution to the murder mystery at hand. One of the country’s only black opera singers is in town to give a cultured performance at a local venue but soon finds herself in trouble and drags Uncle Philip and Delilah into it. Fortunately Delilah turns out to be a lot smarter than everyone gives her credit for, especially the man running the minstrel show who has brought blackface and prejudice with him from the south. Only through Delilah’s keen observation and sense of story is she able to extricate herself from difficulties and put the finger on the killer. Navigating the attitudes and prejudices of those around her feels authentic and telling and adds depth to a well constructed mystery.
Overall, Festive Mayhem 4 presents five tales well worth reading out of 13 included. Not that the remainder are bad, just that the majority of them fail to rise to the level of those mentioned above. If you are looking for some quick-to-read mysteries to fill a gap in your day and want to hear different points of views and experiences themed around holidays in one form or another while doing it, this is not a bad way to go. show less
Review: It’s always a little tricky to review anthologies. Do you review each story presented in a detailed fashion that may or may not be warranted, bearing in mind the theme and intent of the anthology? Do you just review the anthology as a whole giving an overall impression of the collection and discussing how well it met its stated goals? Or do you attempt to do both in one review?
Instead of all that, let’s take a look at the purpose of the anthology and which stories within best represent it and make it most worth reading.
Born from the pandemic, the original Festive Mayhem brought together writer’s looking for a creative outlet. Such fun was had that the anthology came back for three more installments, this being the fourth. Each installment after the first has featured a mix of new and returning authors and each features original works by those authors which have not been published anywhere else prior to appearing in these collections. I’ve not read the previous installments, so this fourth volume will be judged solely on its own merits.
This most recent collection, Festive Mayhem 4, is unique among the four for having been first supported via Kickstarter with the intention of producing physical copies for the first time, previous editions being available as e-books only. Rapidly and successfully funded, the collection is as you see it show more now.
As with any anthology collection, the writers all come from diverse backgrounds and experiences although these authors in particular all come under the heading of writers of color. The thirteen included stories cover a gamut of tales and fall under both the mystery and thriller genres and feature a variety of settings and time periods. If you are expecting pure mysteries throughout, though, you are in for some disappointment, especially since several of the stories fall more into the crime/suspense/thriller genres rather than the more traditional whodunits you might expect.
And, while there are some decent inclusions in that combination genre, they do tend to be the weaker offerings in the book. The mystery stories don’t get off scot-free however and a few of those also miss the mark. All in all, of the thirteen stories, the following are the one’s that stood out as best representing the value and mission of the book, that of presenting diverse view points and experiences with an eye toward a winter holiday setting.
In Valentine’s Vengeance: A Cozy Cat Caper Mystery by Paige Sleuth, a young man talks his friend into going on a double date with him and his new love interest. She is initially reluctant to do so, but once she gives in she swiftly finds herself involved in the murder, right before their eyes, of the man she has been paired with. The observational nature of the solution to the crime is well done and the obvious solution to the dateless situation of the protagonists is neatly side-stepped to keep this from being a more stereotypical, and therefore predictable, offering. It’s a well-built mystery that avoids cliché.
Appalachia Kidnappings by Lavelle Andrew Miller sees a pair of mystery enthusiasts exploring the snow covered wilderness where numerous unsolved murders occurred several years before. With a snowstorm on the way and a park ranger urging them to seek shelter and get to safety ahead of the storm, things soon take a turn for the worse when the ranger’s pickup crashes into a snowbank as they head down the mountain. Probably the best suspense tale in the book, the expected and obvious ending seems inevitable right up until the double and triple twist ending, which makes it all worth it.
The Case of the Missing Body: A Lara’s Detective Agency Mystery by Stella Oni is set in Nigeria and is among the first in the book to take the reader to a genuinely foreign (if you assume America is your “normal”) place, with distinctly foreign manners, patterns of thought, and modes of speech. It accomplishes all this extremely well. The mystery in question isn’t a murder but, as the title suggests, the disappearance of a body from a morgue. Not just any body of course, but that of a tribal chief. It is delightfully well put together and a pleasure to read. The various interpersonal dynamics involved are what makes it all work and draws the reader in.
The trick of Sweeten: A Naomi Sinclair Short Story by Ashley-Ruth M. Bernier lays in the mirroring of each of the main characters’ lives in the central mystery of the story. It’s not deep and revelatory, but rather quiet and personal showing each character the cost of their choices in their personal lives if they keep going as they are. Of particular enjoyment in this story is the patois on display in the language and speech of the St. Thomas islanders. Frequently, dialect speech rendered “as-is” in prose is… well, not in the best taste, let’s say. Here though, it adds a richness and flavor to the story that would be conspicuous in its absence rather than a distraction by its presence. Bernier should be congratulated for making the setting come alive just by having the characters talk the way they talk. A well done fair-play mystery with deeper ramifications for each of the participants.
Carolyn Marie Wilkins’ Delilah and the Dangerous Diva sets itself squarely at the very end of the 19th century in Boston. Delilah is her lawyer uncle’s almost but not quite secretary, given the job out of pity for her prospects. That she and her uncle, Philip, are both black at a time when, even in Boston, these things are prominent problems, plays a central role in the eventual solution to the murder mystery at hand. One of the country’s only black opera singers is in town to give a cultured performance at a local venue but soon finds herself in trouble and drags Uncle Philip and Delilah into it. Fortunately Delilah turns out to be a lot smarter than everyone gives her credit for, especially the man running the minstrel show who has brought blackface and prejudice with him from the south. Only through Delilah’s keen observation and sense of story is she able to extricate herself from difficulties and put the finger on the killer. Navigating the attitudes and prejudices of those around her feels authentic and telling and adds depth to a well constructed mystery.
Overall, Festive Mayhem 4 presents five tales well worth reading out of 13 included. Not that the remainder are bad, just that the majority of them fail to rise to the level of those mentioned above. If you are looking for some quick-to-read mysteries to fill a gap in your day and want to hear different points of views and experiences themed around holidays in one form or another while doing it, this is not a bad way to go. show less
This review was written for LibraryThing Early Reviewers.
Read this prior to finally seeing the movie. Not entirely certain what all the fuss is about and definitely not convinced I need to read more of the series. Not bad, just not.... impactful?
Perhaps the movie goes some way to helping it out.
The problem is... Well, it's all been done before, hasn't it? And with much more meaning and depth. Strange in a Strange Land for one. Though you can argue there are different themes at play and they aren't identical characters with identical missions, it still comes down to someone says they're an alien visitor, the complain bitterly about the way we do things here, and then in the final act they ambiguously turn out either to be maybe, or not to be definitely, an alien. Brewer even name checks a few similar ideas in the final pages.
It just feels like he could have gone harder and written more meaningfully.
Perhaps the movie goes some way to helping it out.
The problem is... Well, it's all been done before, hasn't it? And with much more meaning and depth. Strange in a Strange Land for one. Though you can argue there are different themes at play and they aren't identical characters with identical missions, it still comes down to someone says they're an alien visitor, the complain bitterly about the way we do things here, and then in the final act they ambiguously turn out either to be maybe, or not to be definitely, an alien. Brewer even name checks a few similar ideas in the final pages.
It just feels like he could have gone harder and written more meaningfully.
“Baseball is like life, but is life like baseball?”
Two great baseball writers come together in one and don’t write about baseball.
Harold Fungo is not, particularly, a name that will stick with you unless you already know something about baseball. Which is fine, because Harold Fungo, the person, is not, at first, the sort of person who is going to stick out in a crowd. He’s a janitor at a minor league baseball park somewhere in the mid-west. It’s not a particularly good park nor is it home to a particularly good team, but all that is about to change because Harold Fungo can hit a baseball. Every time. A fact which is just waiting for the team to discover and launch Harold’s baseball career.
Partly this is due to the hours and hours he spent hitting a ball up against the side of his home as a kid, occasionally interrupted by his deaf mother telling him not to hit it out of the yard. The only other activity Harold engages in as a child, is reading, or being read to from, the extensive library of books his mother has collected. Harold’s background is complicated and he has no aspirations to play baseball. He only invests so much time in ping-ponging the ball off the house because there is little else he is allowed to, or wants to, do. He’s never been to school, he doesn’t know who his father is, what his last name is, or even how old he is. When his house burns down with his mother in it, Harold falls in with the firefighters who come to extinguish the blaze show more and his life opens up a bit more. He discovers a dog and a boy and takes up residence in the firehouse for a time. But he still isn’t much of anything. Just a really nice guy with a huge base of knowledge thanks to his eidetic memory and not much actual experience of life.
Which is okay, because he doesn’t actually exist. He is a figment of the brain of Joe Skelton and Joe is dying of brain cancer. Something about the progress of the disease is triggering sleep talk that illuminates the story of Harold Fungo which Joe’s dutiful wife Katherine writes down and records every night. What the source is, how Joe knows these things, and why Joe is stringing it all together into a story is a complete unknown, but, as Joe slowly begins dying, the story of Harold unfolds. As does the story of the kind of life Joe has lead. Quiet, unassuming, reserved, and filled with not much more than his love of Katherine and the desire to avoid as much other human contact as he can. Joe is, in many ways, the polar opposite of Harold. Half the fun of the novel is finding out how these two have come to be so entangled in one another.
When it comes to writing about baseball there were, generally speaking, two acknowledged masters of two different types of baseball writing.
The first was Roger Angell who wrote about the game as it was played for much of his sportswriting career. His perspective was often that of an eager and interested fan seated somewhere in the stands watching the game play out in front of him. The gift of his writing was being able to put the reader in the seat right next to him so that not only could you read the real facts about the game as it was played, you could feel the game being played around you and what it was really like to be there watching it. Angell’s personal insights on the game and it’s players became your personal insights. He made lovers of baseball out of people who had never even seen the game played just with his writing alone. He spanned the modern era of baseball, from 1962 to his passing in 2022 during which time he took interest in every aspect of the game and brought them to the reader. There were few others who wrote about the real game the way it was really played so well and so eloquently.
The second luminary in the field wrote about baseball a different way. W. P. Kinsella didn’t write about the actual game as it was so much as the game as it existed in the imaginations of its millions of fans. If you’ve seen the film Field of Dreams or read the book it was based on, Shoeless Joe you will immediately grasp what I mean. Kinsella wrote the book and had a hand in writing the movie. There isn’t a bit of real baseball in either of them, but they feel exactly like the sort of baseball things that could and should happen. They are what baseball was like in your head, the ideal mix of magic and skill and represented what it felt like to play without actually being what baseball is, if you see what I mean.
And so we come to Morris Hoffman and Pinch Hitting. A book which, much to my surprise and delight, manages to combine both Angell and Kinsella into one story. And then gives us something which is more than the sum of its parts.
I presume it was done with a great deal of study of the works of both writers. Chapters often close with quotes from Angell’s writing that don’t actually exist because he never wrote them, yet they are pitch perfect replicas, containing all the tone, style, and heart of Angell’s real works. And the story itself is so quintessentially Kinsella that you could be forgiven for thinking it was some lost manuscript of his which Hoffman was asked to complete.
Yet, the story is entirely Hoffman’s. A masterfully handled tale, not of baseball, but of a man dying of cancer told through the lens of baseball. Joe doesn’t know why he has this story, doesn’t know what it means or where it all comes from, has never had a huge interest in baseball, nor been privy to the inner workings of minor league teams, firehouses, or anything else that comes up in this tale about the run to the end of his own life. His wife Katherine keeps pressing him for answers, but he has none. He just has the story which slips from between his lips every night while he sleeps.
In many ways it reminds me of Kinsella’s The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, Joe’s strange knowledge of Fungo’s career echoing Gideon’s unexplained knowledge of an entire minor league and all its players which no one else will acknowledge exists as told in that novel. But Hoffman and Pinch Hitting, whose ending you will not see coming, has drawn a life that is more important than the imaginings of the man telling us about it. This is not really a baseball book. It’s an examination of Joe Skelton’s life right to the very end of it.
It’s low-key and rhythmic, pacing out Joe’s life and the beauty of it that has, to a large extent, been hidden from Joe himself. It draws characters to fill that life with color and a style all their own so that each one contributes their part to the whole big picture of who Joe is and what he means. But it never becomes maudlin and never feels as if Hoffman is trying to force a particular feeling on to you. Pinch Hitting just tells its story the best way it knows how and lets you feel what you feel naturally as would anyone who lived a life with or near Joe.
Oh, and just in case you have Joe-like levels of baseball knowledge, pinch hitting is when another player comes to the plate to hit for the scheduled batter, either because the scheduled batter isn’t very good, or because the pinch hitter offers some particular advantage against a particular pitcher. And, as the story of Harold and Joe comes to what can only be an inevitable end, you’re forced to consider: If baseball is a metaphor for life, what is life a metaphor for? show less
Two great baseball writers come together in one and don’t write about baseball.
Harold Fungo is not, particularly, a name that will stick with you unless you already know something about baseball. Which is fine, because Harold Fungo, the person, is not, at first, the sort of person who is going to stick out in a crowd. He’s a janitor at a minor league baseball park somewhere in the mid-west. It’s not a particularly good park nor is it home to a particularly good team, but all that is about to change because Harold Fungo can hit a baseball. Every time. A fact which is just waiting for the team to discover and launch Harold’s baseball career.
Partly this is due to the hours and hours he spent hitting a ball up against the side of his home as a kid, occasionally interrupted by his deaf mother telling him not to hit it out of the yard. The only other activity Harold engages in as a child, is reading, or being read to from, the extensive library of books his mother has collected. Harold’s background is complicated and he has no aspirations to play baseball. He only invests so much time in ping-ponging the ball off the house because there is little else he is allowed to, or wants to, do. He’s never been to school, he doesn’t know who his father is, what his last name is, or even how old he is. When his house burns down with his mother in it, Harold falls in with the firefighters who come to extinguish the blaze show more and his life opens up a bit more. He discovers a dog and a boy and takes up residence in the firehouse for a time. But he still isn’t much of anything. Just a really nice guy with a huge base of knowledge thanks to his eidetic memory and not much actual experience of life.
Which is okay, because he doesn’t actually exist. He is a figment of the brain of Joe Skelton and Joe is dying of brain cancer. Something about the progress of the disease is triggering sleep talk that illuminates the story of Harold Fungo which Joe’s dutiful wife Katherine writes down and records every night. What the source is, how Joe knows these things, and why Joe is stringing it all together into a story is a complete unknown, but, as Joe slowly begins dying, the story of Harold unfolds. As does the story of the kind of life Joe has lead. Quiet, unassuming, reserved, and filled with not much more than his love of Katherine and the desire to avoid as much other human contact as he can. Joe is, in many ways, the polar opposite of Harold. Half the fun of the novel is finding out how these two have come to be so entangled in one another.
When it comes to writing about baseball there were, generally speaking, two acknowledged masters of two different types of baseball writing.
The first was Roger Angell who wrote about the game as it was played for much of his sportswriting career. His perspective was often that of an eager and interested fan seated somewhere in the stands watching the game play out in front of him. The gift of his writing was being able to put the reader in the seat right next to him so that not only could you read the real facts about the game as it was played, you could feel the game being played around you and what it was really like to be there watching it. Angell’s personal insights on the game and it’s players became your personal insights. He made lovers of baseball out of people who had never even seen the game played just with his writing alone. He spanned the modern era of baseball, from 1962 to his passing in 2022 during which time he took interest in every aspect of the game and brought them to the reader. There were few others who wrote about the real game the way it was really played so well and so eloquently.
The second luminary in the field wrote about baseball a different way. W. P. Kinsella didn’t write about the actual game as it was so much as the game as it existed in the imaginations of its millions of fans. If you’ve seen the film Field of Dreams or read the book it was based on, Shoeless Joe you will immediately grasp what I mean. Kinsella wrote the book and had a hand in writing the movie. There isn’t a bit of real baseball in either of them, but they feel exactly like the sort of baseball things that could and should happen. They are what baseball was like in your head, the ideal mix of magic and skill and represented what it felt like to play without actually being what baseball is, if you see what I mean.
And so we come to Morris Hoffman and Pinch Hitting. A book which, much to my surprise and delight, manages to combine both Angell and Kinsella into one story. And then gives us something which is more than the sum of its parts.
I presume it was done with a great deal of study of the works of both writers. Chapters often close with quotes from Angell’s writing that don’t actually exist because he never wrote them, yet they are pitch perfect replicas, containing all the tone, style, and heart of Angell’s real works. And the story itself is so quintessentially Kinsella that you could be forgiven for thinking it was some lost manuscript of his which Hoffman was asked to complete.
Yet, the story is entirely Hoffman’s. A masterfully handled tale, not of baseball, but of a man dying of cancer told through the lens of baseball. Joe doesn’t know why he has this story, doesn’t know what it means or where it all comes from, has never had a huge interest in baseball, nor been privy to the inner workings of minor league teams, firehouses, or anything else that comes up in this tale about the run to the end of his own life. His wife Katherine keeps pressing him for answers, but he has none. He just has the story which slips from between his lips every night while he sleeps.
In many ways it reminds me of Kinsella’s The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, Joe’s strange knowledge of Fungo’s career echoing Gideon’s unexplained knowledge of an entire minor league and all its players which no one else will acknowledge exists as told in that novel. But Hoffman and Pinch Hitting, whose ending you will not see coming, has drawn a life that is more important than the imaginings of the man telling us about it. This is not really a baseball book. It’s an examination of Joe Skelton’s life right to the very end of it.
It’s low-key and rhythmic, pacing out Joe’s life and the beauty of it that has, to a large extent, been hidden from Joe himself. It draws characters to fill that life with color and a style all their own so that each one contributes their part to the whole big picture of who Joe is and what he means. But it never becomes maudlin and never feels as if Hoffman is trying to force a particular feeling on to you. Pinch Hitting just tells its story the best way it knows how and lets you feel what you feel naturally as would anyone who lived a life with or near Joe.
Oh, and just in case you have Joe-like levels of baseball knowledge, pinch hitting is when another player comes to the plate to hit for the scheduled batter, either because the scheduled batter isn’t very good, or because the pinch hitter offers some particular advantage against a particular pitcher. And, as the story of Harold and Joe comes to what can only be an inevitable end, you’re forced to consider: If baseball is a metaphor for life, what is life a metaphor for? show less
This review was written for LibraryThing Early Reviewers.
***Please Note: This review reflects an earlier version of the work which has since been amended.***
“The Magic of a Great Premise and the Delusion of Insufficient Rewrites”
A great fantasy premise set in a world not unlike Dungeons and Dragons let down by poor execution which ultimately takes you nowhere for no particular reason.
Karnest Connel is a down on his luck farmer in a backwater village on the edge of an empire full of danger. You can tell it is full of danger because there are adventurers everywhere. So many that they may, in fact, constitute a plague of Adventurers. When one such group, composed of adventurers of the ham-fisted type, blow through town, it is inevitable that Karnest will lose everything of what little he has left. See, his kid died and his wife left him for an adventuring bard because Karnest just wasn’t fun anymore.
With the loss of his farm, all Karnest is interested in is revenge. Except, he also takes a great interest in the bottom of a beer mug at the local tavern and getting to it as often as he can. So much so that he never really gets started on the whole revenge thing until one evening when the tavern door bangs open and an Arch Mage falls in, literally dead on his face.
Well, it’s all a bit much for the drunken Karnest to take in given his present state, but he decides that it wouldn’t hurt to pick the newly made corpse’s pockets and make off with any money he might have about his person because, after all, arch mages count as show more adventurers and maybe he can buy his farm back into existence.
Of course, things quickly get out of hand and Karnest equally quickly finds himself in possession of not only the mage’s money, but his bigger-on-the-inside coin purse, all its many potions, the mage’s wardrobe, and his staff. Named Stave. Because it is intelligent, you see. Or so it is claimed.
As set ups go, this is pretty interesting. Karnest knows nothing at all about magic and Stave is very little help, frequently and conveniently falling asleep just when he would be most useful. And, since Karnest sees an opportunity to get repaid for his losses when he discovers a note outlining the Arch Mage’s current mission to train some unruly adventurers for a princely sum of money, ‘most useful’ is practically all the time.
You can sort of see the shape of the story. The premise is intriguing. You want to know how this loser sort of guy is going to pull off being an Arch Mage when all he’s got is a magic stick that is as thick as two short planks. And some potions. And some magic robes with magic enchantments that make it so he can’t be hurt. And doesn’t get tired. And is comfortable at all times. Here is where the problems with the storytelling start in.
He encounters no trouble getting to the city. Has no trouble finding the adventurers guild and is whisked straight in to a meeting where he is given more gold than originally promised for taking on the Arch Mage’s mission with no problems at all.
No one really questions Karnest or reacts to his inability to answer basic questions or his odd behavior. In fact, most of the trouble Karnest faces—that is, actually has to deal with—is entirely minor and inconsequential stemming from his own internal monologue or his occasionally dickey stomach in moments of stress.
No one questions why they have to explain basic magic knowledge to an Arch Mage, why he never actually seems to know what he is doing, or even why it is that he doesn’t seem to do much actual magic. The world is just sort of smoothed over for Karnest and his pack of miscreant adventurers as they cruise along mostly not having any adventures at all. Even meeting one of the adventurers that burned his farm to the ground doesn’t cause more than the merest of social faux pas.
And that is, essentially, one of the biggest problems with this book. Nothing really matters. We’re not playing for any stakes. Anything that could, or even should, be major obstacles to the successful carrying out of the ruse, just isn’t. They’re written away as if someone knew there should be problems to overcome, but didn’t know the characters in the book should be the ones overcoming them. Even the stakes you want to be stakes aren’t really stakes because, well, they just aren’t. It would be too inconvenient to have any. They’re introduced in one sentence and written off two sentences later and nobody ever really deals with anything that matters.
Even the best scene in the book has this problem. Two characters who have taken a great dislike to each other suddenly discover that they share a similar situation in their lives that might serve to bond them together if they could just take the time to come together on it. This common thread is introduced in one paragraph while on the road and in that moment you’ll say to yourself, “Ah-ha! Here is the heart of the book. This is what it has all been about and for. At last there are things that matter here.” And then a couple paragraphs later it’s done and over and fine. Never, ever explored further. No depth is given to it, no exploration of what it might mean. It’s just a thing that momentarily happened and, while it does serve to lighten the mood between the two, even the characters never want to talk about it again. So it goes with everything of consequence in this book. By the time you get to the end, every difficulty has been dealt with by a wave of the proverbial hand.
But, you could argue that there is a reason for this. See, the book is holding its cards very close to its chest. So close that it forgets to do things like foreshadowing, or dropping hints, or even subtly suggesting that anything other than what is happening in front of your eyes is anything more than what is happening in front of your eyes.
And then, suddenly, the last ten chapters just explode in improbably deep and complex plots and machinations that come from literally nowhere. It’s hard to even call them twists because they’re just so poorly executed that it is almost like the ending of an entirely different and far more interesting book than the one you’ve been reading for the last 30 chapters. They don’t fit with the story or the characters as they have been established up to that point. It’s a bolt from the blue and it makes no sense. They just get plopped in and you’re expected to believe that this quivering mass of plot has been there all along seething away. Unless you think that something so glibly executed by such poorly developed characters explains why the whole rest of the novel has had all the difficult bits sanded off, that is. I don’t, but you might.
The other major problems with the book is it’s lack of style, flow, and editing. This novel is not an uncorrected proof. It’s not marked as such and is currently actively available and for sale at all the usual places. But I was almost convinced this was an AI generated book because it read so poorly from beginning to end. Sentences are awkwardly written, pronouns underused, and the language stilted and clunky. Take, for example, this selection that occurs about two thirds of the way through the novel:
Set aside, just for a moment, that a character’s name hasn’t been capitalized (that’s how it appears in this section of text) focus instead on the overuse of the word shore. That’s three shores in a row. Surely the passage could be restructured and rewritten to more effectively describe the action without causing the word ‘shore’ to take over the paragraph. I can think of at least three. Problems like this occur all over the book and basic proofreading errors, like missing the capitalization of the character name, happen more often than not. At more than one point houses are described as having wooden coverings over the windows. You and I know them as shutters, but somehow the word ‘shudder’ has been allowed to creep in at least twice and go unchallenged, making the windows almost as uncomfortable as the reader. There should have been more editing to correct errors and more rewriting to improve style, tone, flow, and story done before this book went to press.
Which highlights my overall impressions of The Magic of Delusion. I love the premise. I’m very interested in the premise. I’m even interested in the story that potentially could come from such a premise. I want to explore it and get to know the characters better. But the book just doesn’t allow me to do that. There are more obstacles to the reader’s enjoyment of the book than there are to the character’s adventure. I wanted to be pulled along by this story of a farmer pretending to be more than he is, but ultimately I had a harder time getting to the end than the characters did. show less
“The Magic of a Great Premise and the Delusion of Insufficient Rewrites”
A great fantasy premise set in a world not unlike Dungeons and Dragons let down by poor execution which ultimately takes you nowhere for no particular reason.
Karnest Connel is a down on his luck farmer in a backwater village on the edge of an empire full of danger. You can tell it is full of danger because there are adventurers everywhere. So many that they may, in fact, constitute a plague of Adventurers. When one such group, composed of adventurers of the ham-fisted type, blow through town, it is inevitable that Karnest will lose everything of what little he has left. See, his kid died and his wife left him for an adventuring bard because Karnest just wasn’t fun anymore.
With the loss of his farm, all Karnest is interested in is revenge. Except, he also takes a great interest in the bottom of a beer mug at the local tavern and getting to it as often as he can. So much so that he never really gets started on the whole revenge thing until one evening when the tavern door bangs open and an Arch Mage falls in, literally dead on his face.
Well, it’s all a bit much for the drunken Karnest to take in given his present state, but he decides that it wouldn’t hurt to pick the newly made corpse’s pockets and make off with any money he might have about his person because, after all, arch mages count as show more adventurers and maybe he can buy his farm back into existence.
Of course, things quickly get out of hand and Karnest equally quickly finds himself in possession of not only the mage’s money, but his bigger-on-the-inside coin purse, all its many potions, the mage’s wardrobe, and his staff. Named Stave. Because it is intelligent, you see. Or so it is claimed.
As set ups go, this is pretty interesting. Karnest knows nothing at all about magic and Stave is very little help, frequently and conveniently falling asleep just when he would be most useful. And, since Karnest sees an opportunity to get repaid for his losses when he discovers a note outlining the Arch Mage’s current mission to train some unruly adventurers for a princely sum of money, ‘most useful’ is practically all the time.
You can sort of see the shape of the story. The premise is intriguing. You want to know how this loser sort of guy is going to pull off being an Arch Mage when all he’s got is a magic stick that is as thick as two short planks. And some potions. And some magic robes with magic enchantments that make it so he can’t be hurt. And doesn’t get tired. And is comfortable at all times. Here is where the problems with the storytelling start in.
He encounters no trouble getting to the city. Has no trouble finding the adventurers guild and is whisked straight in to a meeting where he is given more gold than originally promised for taking on the Arch Mage’s mission with no problems at all.
No one really questions Karnest or reacts to his inability to answer basic questions or his odd behavior. In fact, most of the trouble Karnest faces—that is, actually has to deal with—is entirely minor and inconsequential stemming from his own internal monologue or his occasionally dickey stomach in moments of stress.
No one questions why they have to explain basic magic knowledge to an Arch Mage, why he never actually seems to know what he is doing, or even why it is that he doesn’t seem to do much actual magic. The world is just sort of smoothed over for Karnest and his pack of miscreant adventurers as they cruise along mostly not having any adventures at all. Even meeting one of the adventurers that burned his farm to the ground doesn’t cause more than the merest of social faux pas.
And that is, essentially, one of the biggest problems with this book. Nothing really matters. We’re not playing for any stakes. Anything that could, or even should, be major obstacles to the successful carrying out of the ruse, just isn’t. They’re written away as if someone knew there should be problems to overcome, but didn’t know the characters in the book should be the ones overcoming them. Even the stakes you want to be stakes aren’t really stakes because, well, they just aren’t. It would be too inconvenient to have any. They’re introduced in one sentence and written off two sentences later and nobody ever really deals with anything that matters.
Even the best scene in the book has this problem. Two characters who have taken a great dislike to each other suddenly discover that they share a similar situation in their lives that might serve to bond them together if they could just take the time to come together on it. This common thread is introduced in one paragraph while on the road and in that moment you’ll say to yourself, “Ah-ha! Here is the heart of the book. This is what it has all been about and for. At last there are things that matter here.” And then a couple paragraphs later it’s done and over and fine. Never, ever explored further. No depth is given to it, no exploration of what it might mean. It’s just a thing that momentarily happened and, while it does serve to lighten the mood between the two, even the characters never want to talk about it again. So it goes with everything of consequence in this book. By the time you get to the end, every difficulty has been dealt with by a wave of the proverbial hand.
But, you could argue that there is a reason for this. See, the book is holding its cards very close to its chest. So close that it forgets to do things like foreshadowing, or dropping hints, or even subtly suggesting that anything other than what is happening in front of your eyes is anything more than what is happening in front of your eyes.
And then, suddenly, the last ten chapters just explode in improbably deep and complex plots and machinations that come from literally nowhere. It’s hard to even call them twists because they’re just so poorly executed that it is almost like the ending of an entirely different and far more interesting book than the one you’ve been reading for the last 30 chapters. They don’t fit with the story or the characters as they have been established up to that point. It’s a bolt from the blue and it makes no sense. They just get plopped in and you’re expected to believe that this quivering mass of plot has been there all along seething away. Unless you think that something so glibly executed by such poorly developed characters explains why the whole rest of the novel has had all the difficult bits sanded off, that is. I don’t, but you might.
The other major problems with the book is it’s lack of style, flow, and editing. This novel is not an uncorrected proof. It’s not marked as such and is currently actively available and for sale at all the usual places. But I was almost convinced this was an AI generated book because it read so poorly from beginning to end. Sentences are awkwardly written, pronouns underused, and the language stilted and clunky. Take, for example, this selection that occurs about two thirds of the way through the novel:
“I am just going to go into the water,” holly said. They were close to shore, after all. Her feet were facing the shore, and she pushed down with her powerful arms, making a leap for the shore.
Set aside, just for a moment, that a character’s name hasn’t been capitalized (that’s how it appears in this section of text) focus instead on the overuse of the word shore. That’s three shores in a row. Surely the passage could be restructured and rewritten to more effectively describe the action without causing the word ‘shore’ to take over the paragraph. I can think of at least three. Problems like this occur all over the book and basic proofreading errors, like missing the capitalization of the character name, happen more often than not. At more than one point houses are described as having wooden coverings over the windows. You and I know them as shutters, but somehow the word ‘shudder’ has been allowed to creep in at least twice and go unchallenged, making the windows almost as uncomfortable as the reader. There should have been more editing to correct errors and more rewriting to improve style, tone, flow, and story done before this book went to press.
Which highlights my overall impressions of The Magic of Delusion. I love the premise. I’m very interested in the premise. I’m even interested in the story that potentially could come from such a premise. I want to explore it and get to know the characters better. But the book just doesn’t allow me to do that. There are more obstacles to the reader’s enjoyment of the book than there are to the character’s adventure. I wanted to be pulled along by this story of a farmer pretending to be more than he is, but ultimately I had a harder time getting to the end than the characters did. show less
This review was written for LibraryThing Early Reviewers.
A strongly built world in which a cast of well developed characters have numerous and often distinctly interesting adventures. It's a typical fantasy novel developed in untypical ways as the author makes it clear that yes, fantasy is fantasy is fantasy but _this_ fantasy is going to be something different.
An entertaining read that kept me guessing to the last page about whether or not I was going to enjoy it. Turns out, I did.
An entertaining read that kept me guessing to the last page about whether or not I was going to enjoy it. Turns out, I did.
The Maid: The Sunday Times and No.1 New York Times bestseller, and BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime pick by Nita Prose
Offbeat mystery whose main point is not the easily solvable mystery but the importance of connections and support. Not the world breaker it has been hailed as, but not the misguided attempt at veneer many would have you believe either.
Sometimes workmanlike, sometimes moving, always entertaining and informative journal of the goings on for a full year in Monty Don’s home gardens. Read to get a feel for the little joys and tribulations of a well functioning garden.
You won’t be any worse a gardener than you already are if you don’t read this book. Nor any better if you do.
Forty-second Mason. Lawyer nitpicks poorly thought out case to death.
Twenty-second novel in the Mason series. Mason shoots himself in the foot for 200 pages. Some of the shine wearing off.
Unsatisfactory mysteries “solved” by an unnecessary gimmick with an untwisty twist.
This Perry mason is distinctly, and frequently unpleasantly, unlike the TV one. Read anyway.
Once popular authors, many at the turn of the last century, turn out to still be interesting.
Good read up to the last couple of chapters where much happens off screen.
Read Lewis on Lewis before you hate on Lewis. It’s only fair.
1700 very naughty limericks. You wouldn’t want to know about a more complete collection.
When I was in grade school there were basically two lines of mysteries you could read. One was the Hardy Boys / Nancy Drew and the other was Encyclopedia Brown. The chief advantage of one over the other was that while HBND were novel length stories, Encyclopedia Brown tended to have a collection of shorter mysteries which had all the clues laid out in front of you. You’d read them and then turn to the back of the book where the solutions were explained, and some little-known fact given that helped explain how young Leroy “Encyclopedia” Brown had worked it out. Almost all of them were written by Donald J. Sobol starting in 1963. Several years later, however, I discovered that this was not where Sobol had started. Instead, in 1959, he began by writing a syndicated series called Two-Minute Mysteries which starred someone called Dr. Haledjian. They took a couple minutes to read and followed much the same pattern as the Encyclopedia series. In fact, many of the plots and key clues were reused for Encyclopedia. All of which is to say that Kwik Krimes is exactly the same sort of thing except written for adults by a variety of different authors. And it was fun to read.
The gimmick for this one is that all the mysteries revolve around some form of the book. Whether that be canny editors, perceptive writers, or just a book as catalyst makes no difference. They’re all delightful short little mysteries designed to appeal to book lovers whose most loved books are mysteries.
There’s a certain satisfaction to a good Locked Room mystery. From the original example of Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue in 1841 which ushered in the modern era of the detective story to the examples contained in this book which play with the basic concepts of a room which it would either be impossible to escape or impossible for the murderer to have entered -- even up to playing with the concept of “room” itself – working it out ahead of the detective has almost always been the point. Therefore, it was a delight to read through these and see the artform well executed and still be able to beat them to the punch at least a few times.
The third part of the Thursday Murder Club series does an excellent job of not only promoting its own plot, but of also advancing the characters in new directions while remaining true to those characters as established. A fun, quick, enjoyable read about old people who have no business doing what they are doing except that some of them do and they’re actually quite good at it. Old people and Crypto currency. How delightful.
Look, I’m already in trouble for not finishing this book with someone else, so it is unnecessary for anyone else to add to my shame. This is the sequel to 2020’s [[Murder in Old Bombay]] which I very much enjoyed and highly recommend especially if you want a taste of what 19th century India was like while also having a mystery to solve. It’s good stuff and I was really looking forward to this sequel. Really, I was. But this feels terribly amateurish and very poorly plotted with all the notes of the story very out of place and people behaving in ways entirely uncharacteristic to those established in the first book. In fact, almost every person encountered in the book up to where I stopped reading failed to act like a real person at all. I stopped before all the core characters of book one were ruined forever. I liked them too much.
I will never, ever finish The Silmarillion. I know because over the years I have tried no less than five times to read the thing cover to cover and I just cannot do it. There are so many characters to track and so many people running in one direction or another and it isn’t as if the whole thing is really a cohesive story. It’s more like a collection of short stories except that they are all intertwined with each other and you, the reader, are supposed to be able to track it and make sense of it all so as to really, really understand the whole world Tolkien created and really, really, appreciate the depth behind The Lord of the Rings. And I suppose part of the problem must be that I just didn’t feel as if I didn’t understand the world and appreciate the depth in the first place. So, I send this book into the West to its deserved rest.