2025/073: Sorcery and Small Magics — Maiga Doocy

“How can I stop doing something that I don’t even know I’m doing in the first place? It’s not like I’m sabotaging myself on purpose. The feelings are just there.” [p. 281]

M/M romantic fantasy. Leovander Loveage is brilliant at small magics, his cantrips and charms executed with musical accompaniment. Sadly, Leo's larger spells -- his Grandmagic -- never work out right. He's a student at the Fount, an institution where scrivers (like Leo) write the spells, and are paired with casters who execute them. Unfortunately, in their final year, Leo is not paired with his best friend Agnes but instead with his nemesis Sebastian Grimm, a past victim of Leo's practical jokes, who has little time and less patience for Leo's frivolity.

 When they accidentally perform a forbidden spell (Leo expects it to change the colour of his eyes: it does not) they have to work together to fix the problem. Which entails a trek into the Unquiet Wood, where sorceries and brigands and monsters abound and the Wilderlands, where magic flourishes unchecked, loom close; an encounter with an excellent sorceress named Sybilla; and Leo and Grimm's gradual realisation of the exact nature of that forbidden spell...

Sorcery and Small Magics is told entirely from Leo's point of view, and it takes a while to unravel the trauma behind his determination not to perform Grandmagic, and the true emotions underlying his happy-go-lucky demeanour. He's not altogether likeable: he mistrusts his friends, but is happy to follow advice from shady characters encountered in taverns; he always makes the worst possible choice; he has little respect for the lived experience of others. Yes, there is loss and pain in his past, but he's had years to become a better person. There are definite signs of improvement by the end of the novel, though, and of a more serious and honest Leo.

This is the first in the Wilderlands trilogy, and I'm intrigued enough by the worldbuilding, and by some of the characters, to want to read the next volume.

2025/072: A Language of Dragons — S F Williamson

‘The ones who have hoards don’t need to work, but the ones who don’t, well …’
Hoards. Like piles of gold or money. Why do dragons need money? They don’t shop for groceries or pay bills. It hits me that, in all my years learning dragon tongues, I’ve never questioned how dragons fit into our human society. [p. 180]

London, 1923, where there's a Peace Agreement between the British government and the Dragon Queen; where some dragons fought in the Great War alongside humans, but others massacred the entire human population of Bulgaria; where Vivien Featherswallow, seventeen years old and the daughter of respectable Second Class parents, will stop at nothing to ensure that she can continue her studies in dragon linguistics, and prevent her little sister from ever being demoted to Third Class.

The novel opens with Viv trying to impress the Chancellor of the Academy for Draconic Linguistics -- but it turns out her parents aren't so respectable after all, and by midnight they're in prison, Viv's in custody, and a coup d'etat is in progress.

Then the Prime Minister offers Viv a job at Bletchley Park, at the Department for the Defence Against Dragons (which seems to employ only teenagers with shadowy pasts). Viv's job is in the Codebreaking team, but it's actually more dragon linguistics. One of her colleagues is a former friend who Viv betrayed: another is a would-be priest. Romance! Melodrama! A teenager with a history of bad decisions in a position to affect the lives of thousands! What could possibly go wrong?

I'd have enjoyed this more if Viv had been a more relatable character, though I do applaud the author's portrayal of a flawed, impulsive young woman who's only gradually acquiring the ability to reflect on her actions and take responsibility for their consequences. The intricacies of draconic linguistics and biology were fascinating, and I loved Viv's sheer enthusiasm for learning and discovery. The secondary characters could have done with more characterisation: I found it hard to differentiate or care about most of Viv's colleagues. And the romance was not wholly convincing (and, be warned, does not have a happy outcome). 

I believe it's first in a series -- the end of the novel opens up a whole new set of possibilities -- and I'd like to see where the story goes.

2025/071: The Lost Books of the Odyssey — Zachary Mason

Now every debt is paid, every sin erased and I can begin anew, I who was once Odysseus and now am no one. [p. 145]

The conceit of this novel, or collection of short stories, is that the Oxyrhynchus Papyri contain 'forty-four concise variations on Odysseus’s story that omit stock epic formulae in favour of honing a single trope or image down to an extreme of clarity'. These are those variations, some more credible than others, which are effectively Odyssey AU^*. 

What if Odysseus were a coward? a sorcerer (making the golem Achilles)? What if he returned home but found Penelope dead? or remarried? or aged in some 'malevolent illusion'? What if Agamemnon, after the war, hired a master assassin to kill the overly-cunning Odysseus, but that assassin was Odysseus himself? What if Odysseus is the author of the Odyssey? What if the Odyssey is actually a chess manual?

There are a couple of stories about side-characters, too, such as Polyphemus. And the Cyclops' remains are shown to one Odysseus: "a huge skeleton embedded in a cliff-face. The skull had a single wide orbit flanked by fearsome tusks nearly half as long as its body" [p. 223]. The footnote to this scene references the excellent The First Fossil Hunters by Adrienne Mayor. Mason provides thorough footnotes throughout, explaining real or imagined theories underlying each story, and tantalising me with the goddess Quickness, with Egyptian colonies, with Helen's veils.

I bought this book several years ago, but the time to read it fell after seeing The Return (which I enjoyed very much): it was a perfect complement. The prose is powerful, the tone and style varied, and though not every story hit the mark there were some truly memorable variants on the myth.

I fear global replace has corrupted this text in an attempt to anglicise it: 'prizes' become 'prises', 'seize' becomes 'seise', 'sizes' becomes 'sises'.

^*AU: 'alternate universes': a fanfic term. I note there is no gender-swap variant here.

2025/070: Hy Brasil — Margaret Elphinstone

Sometimes I seem to recognise things, as if I’d dreamed it all already. Like ... this road through the orchards. The apple trees. Meeting you like I just did. The way the sun makes patterns on the gravel.I keep having the feeling that it isn’t new. People say autumn is melancholy, but I find it’s the spring that feels so old. [p. 153]

Hy Brasil is a group of volcanic islands in the mid-Atlantic: a former British colony, a former NATO base, a former pirate kingdom. It's hard to find due to magnetic and meteorological anomalies, and for centuries its actual position was a matter of debate. Travel writer Sidony Redruth (whose career is founded on the lie of her prize-winning article about Ascension and St Helena, researched solely in her local library) is commissioned to write a book about the islands. Hy Brasil incorporates her working notes for Undiscovered Islands, along with the narratives of some of the islanders: Lucy Morgan, in love with a dead man, rattling around in ancient Ravnscar Castle; Colombo MacAdam, a reporter for the Hesperides Times; and Jared Honeyman, who's trying to fund a dive to raise the Cortes, a 17th-century Spanish galleon, from where it sank near the small Ile de l'Espoir. 

Hy Brasil is geologically, politically and economically unstable. There seems to be plenty of money for new swimming pools and the Pele Centre volcanic observatory, but for some reason President James Hook (one of the four men who sparked the Revolution and won Hy Brasil's independence from the UK) is oddly reluctant to approve a grant for Jared's research. Could his history with Jared's father, another revolutionary, be the reason? Or is there something about the Ile de l'Espoir -- commonly known as Despair -- that he'd prefer remained secret?

There are echoes of other islands: references to The Tempest ('Caliban's Fast Food Diner', Mount Prosper), to Odysseus (Hook's wife waited ten years for his return, weaving) and to Tennyson's Ulysses, to Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe. There are references to St Brendan, to Vikings, to the Matter of Britain (those treasures in the Metropolitan Museum in New York: a chalice, a spear, a cauldron...) Yet Hy Brasil is also a part of the modern world -- well, the world of the late 1990s, which feels astonishingly remote now: no internet, no mobile phones.

The novel was first published in 2002 and I think I read it fairly soon after that, certainly before 2005. Very little felt familiar, except the mythic element of the treasures: I'd completely forgotten that it is also a story about political corruption, a thriller, and a romance. This time around, I found it as delightful as it is in my vague distant memory: and I think I appreciate Elphinstone's prose, and her characterisation, more than I did when I first read it.

2025/069: The Only Good Indians — Stephen Graham Jones

“Why are you doing all this?” If you tell him, he would get to die knowing it was all for a reason, that this has been a circle, closing. Which would be more than you ever got, that day in the snow. [p. 247]

Four young Blackfeet men once went hunting in winter on restricted ground, breaking an important tribal code. Ten years later, Ricky dies in a brawl outside a bar; Gabe is an alcoholic who seldom sees his daughter Denorah; Cass is planning to propose to his girlfriend Jo; and Lewis is married to a white woman. But Lewis starts to hallucinate a dead elk, and then his dog dies horribly.

It's a novel of three parts: Lewis' descent into madness and paranoia; the story of a young woman who becomes interested in a sweat lodge ritual that Gabe and Cass are planning; and Gabe's daughter Denorah, star basketball player, fleeing something terrible. The characterisation is subtle, and the events of a decade ago are revealed only gradually. Themes of family, cultural heritage, alcoholism, racism, the environment...

... and, oh yes: violence against women (and other females). It all starts with that hunting trip, and the age-old prohibition against killing a pregnant animal. The vengeance enacted on those who slew her is one matter, but they aren't the only victims: the women close to them, uninvolved in the original slaughter, also meet horrific fates. It's not really fridging: it's not a motivation for the male protagonists. It's just ... collateral damage.

This, I suppose, is folk horror in an American context, or a Native American context: Jones, like his protagonists, is a Blackfeet Native American -- and an elk hunter, apparently, which might be why that scene is so very vivid. I loved the prose, and the dialogue, and the little details: I hated the deaths of the innocent. And I'd like to read more of Jones' work, but I shall be wary of collateral damage.

2025/068: Bonds of Brass — Emily Skrutskie

I’m watching out for him, and no matter where he goes, I’ll be there to defend him. Even if it’s wrapped in layers upon layers of deception. Even if it can never last. [loc. 2515]

Ettian, as a child, survived the brutal invasion of his world (and the massacre of his family) by the Umber Empire. Seven years later, he's the star pilot at Rana's Military Academy -- until the day when his classmates attempt to assassinate Ettian's BFF, Gal, because Gal is the heir to ... the Umber Empire.

Oops.

Ettian doesn't think twice before saving his friend, but there's plenty of time for second thoughts later when the two of them are on the run, trying to get Gal to safety. Can Gal single-handedly transform the Umber Empire from the merciless juggernaut it's become under his mother's rule? Will he continue her quest for galactic domination? Or will he join the rebellion and fight to save Ettian's home world? (Also, will Ettian ever get to kiss him?)

First in a trilogy, this was great fun, though I did occasionally wonder why Ettian remained so devoted to Gal, who often seemed rather shallow. Much more interesting as a character was Ettian's new friend Wen, a con artist who he meets when trying to buy a used spaceship. Wen is chaos incarnate, clever and competent, a survivor to the core. She might be the most likeable person in the novel.

Huge twist at the end which was foreshadowed, but certainly not inevitable. I'm still trying to decide whether I want to read the rest of the trilogy: on the one hand, Bonds of Brass was well-written and well-paced (though everything speeded up and got twistier in the final few chapters) and the world universe-building was intriguing. On the other hand, Gal and Ettian's relationship didn't ring true for me -- though, again, that might be just me and my bad cold. (Which you will be pleased to hear has now faded away.)

2025/067: The Girl from Everywhere — Heidi Heilig

“The age of exploration is long over, amira. Now it’s the age of globalization. And once everyone agrees something is one way, all the other ways it could have been disappear.” [loc. 958]

Nixie Song is sixteen years old and lives aboard her father's pirate ship, the Temptation. This is not your usual pirate scenario, though, for the Temptation can sail to any place or time, as long as Nixie's father Slate has a hand-drawn map to that place. And given the fantastical nature of some cartography, their voyages are not limited to the mundane. Nix's best friend, Kash (short for Kashmir) seems to have originated in an Arabian Nights-flavoured city, while the ship is illuminated by glowing fish from a mythical land named Scandia. 

Nix is as much at home (or as much a stranger) in 21st-century New York as in 18th-century India. But her father, opium-addicted and probably bipolar, is obsessed by a single place and time: Honolulu, 1884, where Nix's mother died giving birth to her. He's determined to find a way back to save his lost love -- but then what will become of Nix?

I loved the mechanics of Navigation, the piracy, the ancient tombs, the tiger-smuggling and the sense of danger in the margins of the maps. (And Swag, the miniature dragon.) I liked Nix's pragmatism and competence -- she's the one in charge of trading, and she really wants to learn Navigation so that she can have a ship of her own --  though was less impressed with some of her more stubborn decisions. I liked the twisty and evolving plot, and the secondary characters, and the audacious heist in 19th-century Hawai'i, and the vividness of Heilig's locations. The romantic triangle, however, left me cold.

That said, my recollection of The Girl from Everywhere (which I bought in 2017!) is somewhat blurred by the bad cold I was enduring when I read it. I'd like to reread before embarking on the sequel, The Ship Beyond Time.