2021/041: The Outside -- Ada Hoffmann

She remembered dimly what it was like to be Ev. Constantly seeing and feeling the Truth. Constantly punished for saying so. Shocked, slapped, drugged, trained like a dog until she denied her own reality at every opportunity. Because what she naturally saw and felt, what she couldn’t have escaped from if she tried, was a heresy. [p. 323]

Yasira Shien is a scientific prodigy, working on a new type of reactor that will free the Pride of Jai space station from reliance on technology provided by the AI Gods. Yasira has a horrible feeling that something's going to go wrong, but she can't articulate it. She's anxious that, after all, she didn't understand everything her mentor, the vanished Dr Talirr, tried to teach her. And she's right: disaster strikes, lives are lost, and Yasira is held responsible. The Gods are angry, and Yasira is spirited away by an Angel of Nemesis, Akavi.

The angels, of course, carry out the will of the Gods: and the Gods are especially down on heresy, which can be defined as 'encroaching on the technologies of the Gods'. (There is an economic aspect to this. The Gods feed on human souls, or what they term souls: and humans can pay in souls for Godly technology.) There is another aspect to heresy, though: dealing with, and understanding, the eponymous Outside, a place separated from normal space-time by 'ways of being which defied all rational thought'. The term may also apply to entities, or consciousnesses, which inhabit that realm. Yasira's neurodivergence (she's autistic, as was Dr Talirr) may be to her advantage in understanding the Outside: but even attempting such an understanding is heresy, a capital crime.

Yasira hypothesises that Dr Talirr's work related somehow to the Outside: but does that mean that Yasira herself has invited its attention? Akavi, forcing her to seek out her lost mentor, surely does not have Yasira's interests at heart, and he regards heresy as a contagion, something that must not be passed on to others.

Yasira is tremendously relatable as a young woman with a certain degree of imposter syndrome and a burning desire to fulfil the promise she's always been told she has. She depends on her girlfriend Tiv (short for Productivity) for love and support, but when Akavi abducts her she's left without anyone who understands her unique blend of vulnerability and brilliance.

Yasira is also very clearly neurodivergent -- I think she uses the term 'autism' -- and her experiences of sensory overload, her coping strategies and her unusual perspective are vividy written. Yasira's neurodivergence is an integral part of her character, and her story arc: the novel begins with her difficulties in communicating what she believes or knows, and concludes with her facilitating communication between opposing forces.

Fulfils the 'By a neurodivergent author' rubric of the Reading Women Challenge 2021 -- it's an #ownvoices book.

2021/040: The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again -- M John Harrison

Sea change precludes the single cause, is neither convulsive nor properly conclusive: perhaps, like anyone five fathoms down into their life, he had simply experienced a series of adjustments, of overgrowths and dissolvings – processes so slow they might still be going on, so that the things happening to him now were not so much an aftermath as the expanding edge of the disaster itself, lapping at recently unrecognisable coasts. [loc. 1829]

Shaw is fiftysomething, emerging from an indeterminate crisis, washing up at a lodging house by the Thames. He encounters an odd fellow, Tim, in a graveyard, and ends up working for him -- though the work makes no sense, involving deliveries to empty premises and, later, visits to a medium named Annie. Tim runs a blog called 'The Water House' and is the author of the nigh-unreadable The Journeys of our Genes. On the wall of his houseboat office is a map of the world with land and oceans inverted.

Shaw has a laid-back sort of affair with a woman named Victoria, a 'high-functioning romantic' who sees things rather more clearly than does Shaw: after a while she heads to Shropshire, to a market town on the Severn gorge and the house she has inherited from her dead mother. There, she befriends (or at least encounters) a waitress named Pearl and her father Chris: but she slowly begins to realise that in this small-town setting she is out of her depth.

The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again overflows with watery similes and metaphors, references to the sea and to rivers. (For example, Victoria's mother left a plethora of random possessions with oceanic echoes: 'nacre-buttoned denim shirts, an air freshener that claimed to smell of a coastal walk'.) Houses are damp; rivers run everywhere; there are stories, some more credible than others, of green children appearing in drains and toilet bowls. Coincidence that the road from Victoria's house to the river is named Woolpit Road? I do not think anythink in this novel is coincidence.

This is a difficult book to review (though see below for more intelligent commentaries) because, on the surface, very little happens. Victoria sees a woman walk down into a shallow pool as though descending a staircase into the London Underground. Shaw, trying to piece together some sense of himself and his family, visits his mother, who's suffering dementia and calls him by various names he denies: the one that seems to stick is Lee. Hat-tip to Patrick O'Brian and the 'impervious horror of a lee[ward] shore'? Or coincidence? But see above regarding coincidences.

Harrison's prose is as sharp and astonishing as ever. There are unfamiliar terms (dérive, induviae, goaf, jitty ...) and unusual similitudes ("her cushions and covers, though they remained dull and even a little grubby-looking, took on the pure painterly values and eerie depth of the objects on a Virago book cover in 1982" [loc. 1434] -- I love the specificity of that). I found it all too easy to be distracted from the plot, or the scenario, by the sensory richness with which it was conveyed. But there is a plot, though it's meandering and discursive and inconclusive. Or perhaps that description applies to Shaw and Victoria, who see but do not understand what they are seeing.

There is a lot packed into this short novel: Brexit, Thatcher, climate change, genetics, Charles Kingsley, civil wars, the inland cities ... I am looking forward to rereading: but not yet.

Review by Nina Allan

Review by Gary K Wolfe

Review by Paul di Filippo

Review by Olivia Laing

2021/039: The Poisoned Crown -- Amanda Hemingway

‘In summer, magic is all sparkle and fun, and the spirits come to us dressed in their best, scattering smiles and flowers. In the winter, you get down to the bone, and the true nature of things is revealed.’ [p. 19]

The culmination of the Sangreal trilogy, in which Nathan's dreams take him to the landless world of Widewater in search of the eponymous crown. He's fifteen now, hoping to help the Grandir -- ruler of Eos, the last bastion of life in a dying cosmos -- perform the Great Spell to save his universe. Readers may have realised, as Nathan has not, that Nathan has not been randomly selected for this role.

Widewater is ruled by the goddess Nefanu, a water deity who hates air-breathing, warm-blooded life: she has engineered a war between the selkies and the merfolk, and Nathan -- with the help of a rebellious mermaid aristocrat and a brave, grieving albatross, must somehow negotiate his way through Nefanu's watery lair to the air-filled cavern which houses the final treasure. This isn't helped by his recent near-drowning experience, or his conflict with the smaller-scale, yet still antagonistic, water-spirit Nenufar.

Meanwhile in the village, Riverside House has been sold: the new owner is fascinated by Nathan's mother Annie, who experienced some unpleasant moments there. Turns out there's a leak somewhere, for the floor in one room is always wet ... Hazel, Nathan's best friend, is still experimenting with witchcraft, and still convinced that the Grandir is a supervillain. ... Bartlemy is questioning spirits about Nathan's destiny, but the answers he receives are incomplete: though that doesn't stop him guiding others in the ways of divination ... and Inspector Pobjoy, having elicited various accounts from Nathan, Hazel, Annie and Bartlemy, thinks they are all 'on Planet Zog'.

One can sympathise.

This novel felt somewhat unbalanced: the scenes on Widewater felt more climactic, more vivid, than the actual denouement of the series, which takes place on the ominously-named Scarbarrow Hill. There were some fairly adult scenes here, too, including a vial of milky fluid brandished by a man saying his seed is precious and he needs it; a foul-mouthed witch whose broken Franglais is parodically exaggerated; Annie's disclosure of Nathan's parentage, and his (typically teenaged) response; and, right at the beginning, the lingering death of a pleasant character.

I was hoping for more about Bartlemy, but apart from vague hints at his history there's no real revelation. Perhaps I need to read the author's other trilogy, beginning with Prospero's Children?

Overall, the Sangreal trilogy was an entertaining and engaging reading experience, with some unexpected twists and some satisfyingly predictable ones: but I did feel that The Poisoned Crown was less well-paced than the other two books in the series.

2021/038: The Traitor's Sword -- Amanda Hemingway

Children had wandered into the past and explored the dimensions of magic since the days of E. Nesbitt and Puck of Pook’s Hill, or so Annie reasoned: it was a vital part of their experience. [loc. 3037]

Second in the trilogy that began with The Greenstone Grail. As well as his trips to Eos, the city at the end of time, Nathan is now visiting a desolate medieval castle in his dreams, trying to acquire the Traitor's Sword: there, he has to contend with demons, a king with a wound that won't heal, and a very practical princess. Meanwhile, Hazel is experimenting with witchcraft (and not being very intelligent about it) and, in the daytime world of school and home, Nathan is being bullied. And poor old Detective Pobjoy is starting to realise that ongoing events in Eade -- a burglary, a kidnapping -- make no sense in the framework of the world he knows.

This did suffer somewhat from 'middle volume' syndrome, but the new setting was interesting, and more of the backstory, including some of Bartlemy's past, was shaded in. Nathan and Hazel's arcs in this volume both involve loving and losing, though they approach romance in very different ways. (Nathan is too sensible, and rather too mature, for his own good.)

Onward to the finale!

2021/037: The Greenstone Grail -- Amanda Hemingway

Do children in your world usually perform such tasks?’ Nathan thought of all the books he had ever read, of the Pevensies, Colin and Susan, Harry Potter, Lyra Belacqua and a hundred others. ‘All the time,’ he said. [loc. 5250]

Nathan lives with his mother Annie above a bookshop. He never knew his father. Annie tells him stories about Daniel, her partner, who died in a car crash the day that Nathan was conceived: but she's beginning to wonder if Daniel was Nathan's father, because Daniel and Annie are both white and Nathan looks as though he might have Indian forebears. Their friend Bartlemy, who took in Annie when she was fleeing invisible, but terrifying, pursuit with her baby son, has his suspicions too, and he keeps a close eye on the boy.

Nathan loves to roam the woods with Bartlemy's dog Hoover, but one day he discovers a buried chapel and a cup that's filled with blood. He wants to tell his mother and 'Uncle Barty', but he's unable to speak of it. He can speak of the peculiarly vivid dreams he's been having, in which he seems to travel to another world and talk to people there -- but would anyone believe that he's managed to rescue a drowning man and bring him back?

Meanwhile, Nathan's best friend Hazel resents her grandmother's presence in the attic, not least because she knows the old woman is a witch and that she herself has the Gift. And there's something lurking in the river, and a convergence of interested parties as the Greenstone Grail, believed lost for centuries, surfaces again...

I was reminded of James Treadwell's Advent trilogy (which The Greenstone Grail, first in the Sangreal trilogy and published in 2005, predates by some years): perhaps it's the age of the protagonists or the vaguely Arthurian setting. The Greenstone Grail combines fantasy, science fiction and horror, with hints of secret history (just how old is Bartlemy, and is Hoover merely a dog?) as well as a murder mystery which brings old-fashioned, dedicated Detective Pobjoy onto the scene.

This was a quick and enjoyable read: I fancied a solid, satisfying fantasy trilogy and this delivered, with all those extra flavours mixed in. At times the authorial voice was a little intrusive ("Nathan could not know it, but the whole incident had been wiped from Hoover’s mind") but at others it was sheerly gleeful, and though there is plenty of darkness lurking in the story there is also humour, beauty and joy.

2021/036: The Time of the Ghost -- Diana Wynne Jones [reread]

“We may call it Monigan and think it’s a game, but I don’t think it is. I know there really is a dark old female Something, and whatever it is we’ve woken it up and brought it stalking closer. And we mustn’t go on. It’s not safe.” [loc. 1464]

Reread: I can't remember the last time I read this novel, and it's not one of my favourite works by Diana Wynne Jones, but I recalled the queasy, panicky feeling, and the ghost-speaking. I'd forgotten enough that the twists of plot -- and especially the ghost's identity -- were fresh and surprising.

The ghost spends a lot of time working out who she is and trying to reconstruct the elements of her life. She's one of four sisters, who are left more or less to their own devices while their parents run a school. I was quite shocked by just how unpleasant their father ('Himself') is; he calls his daughters 'bitches', refuses them money for essentials, can't remember their names, and almost definitely hits them. (His wife, Phyllis, is sweet but ineffectual, though she does come into her own later in the book. On the whole, though, she's as neglectful as their father, though in a less brutal way.) This is worthy of comment because when I first read the book -- probably some time in the 1980s -- I think I regarded Himself's behaviour as fairly normal: not common or usual, by any means, but on the bell-curve of parental styles. This is certainly not how I read it now.

Appalling parenting aside, this is a dark story about 'inventing' the worship of a made-up deity, which turns out not to be invented at all, and which is accustomed to sacrifice. Whoever the ghost is -- and for a long time she can't be sure which of the sisters she is, or was -- she owes a debt, and it's being called in ...But the Melford sisters, however much they squabble and rage among themselves, are a force to be reckoned with, both in the 'now' of the ghost, and the time seven years later when the debt falls due. (The sisters are much nicer people as adults. I blame the parents.)

As usual for DWJ, there are lots of excellent characters, not only the sisters but the boys at the school; there are echoes of a mythic past debased into folklore and superstition; and there is a loveable animal -- Oliver, the dog, who can sense the ghost.

The Time of the Ghost ends abruptly, perhaps too abruptly: there is closure, but there's no sense of anything getting back to normal, or of what the ghost might do next now that she's learnt a few things about herself. Still, this is one of Diana Wynne Jones' more unsettling novels, and a sweet light epilogue wouldn't suit the mood.

2021/035: In Other Lands -- Sarah Rees Brennan

“We’re shown all this stuff we were trained to want, shown the great adventure, and we jump at it like the dazzled fools we are. We’re too young to know any better, to know that we won’t triumph and be heroes, that we won’t be returned to the other world as if no time had passed, that the lies in the stories aren’t about mermaids or unicorns or harpies—the lies are about us. The lies are that we might be good enough, and we might get out." [loc 3840]

Elliot Schafer is thirteen when, on a 'school trip', he turns out to be able to see things that his classmates can't perceive, and is invited to continue his education in the Borderlands. Elliot is short, red-haired, prickly, and intelligent. As many of us can attest, these would not confer benefits in the contemporary world -- and they don't magically make him popular or successful in the Borderlands, either. He takes an instant dislike to blond, charismatic Luke Sunborn, and falls instantly in love with elven warrior-maiden Serene (full name 'Serene-Heart-in-the-Chaos-of-Battle'). 

Luke and Serene are the two constants throughout the five school years covered by In Other Lands -- not least because Elliot and Luke team up to help Serene succeed in her council studies (diplomacy, politics et cetera) as well as her warrior training. Luke grew up as part of a family of legendary warriors; Serene is accustomed to a matriarchy where 'gentlemen' are treated as sweet silly things; Elliot likes to read, self-defines as a pacifist, and is far from athletic. Somehow the three of them become ... well, Elliot has never had friends before, and he's insistent that he and Luke are just pretending to get along for Serene's sake. And Serene is, clearly, the love of his life. (Elliot has already decided on names for their children.)

The Borderlands are home to a variety of sentient non-humans: harpies, elves, dwarves, trolls, dryads, mermaids. (Notably, there's no actual magic, at least among the humans.) Elliot is desperate to meet mermaids, and he's fascinated by the various treaties drawn up between different species. What he's not prepared for -- and not prepared to accept -- is human duplicity, double-dealing, corruption and nepotism. And although Luke and Serene manage to improve his physical fitness, it's his intellect and creativity that enable him to make a real difference.

So: magic school, tensions between the physical and the intellectual, crushes and friendships and the school play ... and every year Luke goes back to his father's house, grey inside and out, and realises that his mother is never coming back for him, and his father doesn't care whether he's there or not. The sharp contrast between Elliot's increasing maturity and the static, smothering dullness of his former home is powerfully conveyed: for all the danger and loss that Elliot experiences in the Borderlands, it was the scenes with his parents that really wrenched me.

But then, insidiously, Elliot had already become a character I cared about. I enjoyed his snarky commentary, his awareness of fantasy tropes (some pointed asides on the Narnia books in particular), and his love of reading: I admired his courage, his refusal to be miserable about his own nature, and his curiosity about the Borderlands and its people. (He persuades people of several species to become his pen-pals, which I found utterly charming.) Yes, I did also sometimes want to shake him and yell at him about his attitudes and preconceptions regarding Serene and Luke and his other friends. But I liked -- like - him, and I missed him when I finished reading.

I liked Serene, too, though many of her best moments were when she expressed a particularly egregious elven assumption ("you people expect women to tear apart their bodies and then go to all the bother of raising the children? That takes years, you know..."): she did, however, learn to question those assumptions as the book progressed and she became accustomed to the ways of non-elvish gentlemen. And Luke, golden heroic Luke, no doubt suffered from being seen through Elliot's eyes: I was as surprised as Elliot when Luke's mother, the marvellous Rachel, described him as her 'shy boy'.

And there is so much more here. It's a vastly enjoyable and often very humorous read that also encompasses queerness (Elliot is bisexual or possibly, given some of his flirtations, pansexual, and several other characters experience same-sex attraction); the emotional damage of a loveless childhood; courage expressed in many different ways; learning to love and be loved. I had a major book hangover after reading In Other Lands -- didn't want to read anything else, kept thinking about these characters -- and I'm still recovering. A delight.

2021/034: Elatsoe -- Darcie Little Badger

An animal crawling from her elbow to her shoulder. She opened her eyes and glimpsed a flash of shiny exoskeleton. An impression of the trilobite’s ghost. However, it had been dreaming so long, its drowsiness lingered. The trilobite shimmered, faded, and slipped back to the underworld. But for a moment, she’d brushed a little soul that had lived on Earth five hundred million years ago. [loc. 1207]

Ellie lives in Texas. She's seventeen, Lipan Apache, uninterested in dating, and has two close friends: Jay, who is White and a descendant of Oberon, and Kirby, who is a ghost dog.

Ellie has grown up with tales of 'Six Great', her six-times-great-grandmother, who fought monsters and called ghosts. Ellie has inherited this talent, and with it the warnings of what might happen if a human ghost is called. This becomes highly pertinent when her cousin Trevor dies -- and subsequently comes to Ellie in a dream to tell her that he was murdered, and give the name of his killer. Trevor's grieving wife Lenore wants her husband back: everyone in the family wants justice, and supports Ellie (who is, after all, the one who received Trevor's message) in her attempts to solve the mystery of her cousin's death.

I liked the alternate America depicted here: it's reminiscent of the early Anita Blake books, with cars and cell phones and ice creams but also vampires and faeries and ghosts (oh my). Elatsoe differs, though, in that it centres indigenous traditions and shows those European nasties as invaders: there's a lovely scene where Ellie's mother Vivian banishes a vampire because he's in her ancestral lands. “I know what Apaches were—” “Were? This land is still our home, and Euro-vamps can’t occupy a home when they’re unwelcome.” [loc 1985]. Later, Vivian notes that this 'raises uncomfortable facts about dispossession and colonization'.

Ellie's parents are an integral part of the story: it was really refreshing to read YA fantasy where, instead of being absent or dead, older family members are very much present, and support Ellie in her endeavours. They recognise her unique abilities, and her agency, and they respect her as a gifted individual.

I was charmed by Ellie's ghost-dog Kirby - 'her best friend for seventeen years — twelve alive and five dead' -- and her adventures with other animal ghosts, especially the trilobite. ("despite the eons that separate humans and prehistoric critters, we are all earthlings, you know?") She is a very likeable heroine, confident in herself but aware that she's still young and has a lot to learn. Her story also echoes parts of her illustrious ancestor's -- and her full name is Elatsoe, like Six Great. This helped to anchor the story within a rich cultural tradition, rather than present Ellie as a solitary heroine.

Elatsoe is an easy read, though sometimes unevenly paced: the prose is deceptively simple, with short sentences and a plainspoken feel. I was slightly disappointed that there wasn't more of Ellie's asexuality, but it wouldn't have improved the story and wasn't relevant to her everyday life. (Nice that family and friends were so accepting, though!)

I'll definitely look out for more by this author: her writing is honest, authentic, truthful.

2021/033: Light Perpetual -- Francis Spufford

Something is moving visibly, though, even with time at this magnification. Over beyond the table, by the rack of yellowed knitting patterns, something long and sleek and sharp is coming through the ceiling, preceded by a slow-tumbling cloud of plaster and bricks and fragmented roof tiles. Amid the twinkling debris the tapering cone of the warhead has a geometric dignity as it slides floorward, the dull green bulk of the rocket pushing into sight behind, inch by inch.... they can’t see it. Nobody can. The image of the V-2 is on their retinas, but it takes far longer than a ten-thousandth of a second for a human eye to process an image and send it to a brain. Much sooner than that, the children won’t have eyes any more. [loc. 61]

I very much enjoyed Spufford's first novel, Golden Hill, set in 18th-century New York: this one was less engaging for me, perhaps because the period it spans -- 1944 to 2009 -- encompasses much of my own lifetime, though not necessarily my own experience. That said, Spufford's prose is often intoxicating, and he has a knack for showing us the littleness of human lives against the history of the great city of London.

The novel opens in 1944, with a tour-de-force account of the sudden arrival of a V2 rocket in a branch of Woolworths in the fictional London Borough of Bexford. (Reading this scene was enough to persuade me to buy the novel.) Spufford was inspired by the 1944 V2 strike that destroyed Woolworths in New Cross, killing 168 people including 33 children. He imagines the lives of five of those children if the bomb had had a very slightly different course.

Light Perpetual gives us vignettes of Vernon, Alec, sisters Jo and Val, and Ben, at fifteen-year intervals: five working-class Londoners living through years of social and personal change. Vernon is a rapacious (though not very competent) property developer, somewhat redeemed by his love of opera; Jo is synaethetic, seeing music in colour, but her musical career is blighted by her lack of confidence; Val takes up with a beautiful but violent young man who turns out to be a far-right activist; Alec achieves a career in newspapers, only to find himself obsolete after the technological advances and industrial disputes of the 1970s; Ben is plagued by mental health issues, but finds peace.

These are all very ordinary people living through times that, with hindsight, are extraordinary. Our five protagonists are not paragons: their happinesses seem to happen at random, though perhaps likelier with a degree of open-mindedness, of willingness to seize opportunities. And their miseries, whether personal or professional -- they all work: their jobs matter to them -- are equally random. It's not just character that shapes a life.

I was reminded, at times, of Kate Atkinson's Life after Life, though that's much more about a single life reiterated. Light Perpetual did have a particular appeal to me, living within a couple of miles of fictional Bexford; I was fascinated by the snippets of history, and the sweeping sense of social change that the area has undergone over the last three-quarters of a century. However, I didn't find the protagonists especially likeable or relatable (I'm not a real Londoner) and, though there's an underlying sense of the numinous, it didn't counteract the bleakness of these unlived lives.

2021/032: The Mortal Word -- Genevieve Cogman

‘... humanity is indeed weak, and we mortals are creatures of the moment. Yet humanity has created works of art, works of literature, philosophical structures and stories that last. The Fae do not create – they merely imitate. And from what I have seen, the dragons collect what humans have made.’ [p. 373]

Fifth in the Invisible Library series. At first it seems that the major change in circumstances at the end of The Lost Plot has had little or no impact on Irene, but it's soon plain that things are not as they were. And in the greater multiverse, changes are also afoot: in a momentous development, a series of peace talks between dragons and fae -- opposite sides in the great balancing-act of order and chaos -- has begun. Kai's relatives are part of the dragon contingent: the Fae muster a number of powerful archetypes, including the Princess (she's so good), the Cardinal (he schemes) and the Blood Countess (based on Elizabeth Bathory). Unfortunately, one of the factions also hides a murderer. Irene's friend Peregrine Vale, an instance of the Great Detective, is recruited to discover the killer of a dragon diplomat, and Irene -- together with Kai, and also Lord Silver, a rakish Fae -- accompanies him as a representative of the Library.

The setting for this novel is an alternate Paris, covered in snow (possibly a side-effect of the murder: dragons influence weather) and home to a Grand Guignol theatre and a number of scruffy urchins, et cetera. We don't get to see much of the city, though, for most of the action takes place in the hotels occupied by the two factions. Of those, the Fae are more engaging to me, though I was stirred to annoyance by a new Librarian character who seemed to have swallowed a few volumes of contemporary management training. Irene, I am happy to say, had little time for him, not least because he lacks competence.

All is, of course, resolved to some extent: yet I can't help wondering, with Irene, what would become of the Library -- which maintains the balance between order and chaos by 'borrowing' unique works of fiction -- if dragons and Fae kept to their own ends of the multiverse. Yet do I wonder enough to rush into reading the two remaining published novels in the sequence? I do not. They will wait...

2021/031: The Lost Plot -- Genevieve Cogman

'You co-opted a mob boss to blast a couple of dragons out of the sky with bootleg alcohol!’ Evariste growled.
‘We do the best we can with the materials available to us,’ Irene said. [p. 299]

Fourth in the Invisible Library series (previous reviews here, here and here), featuring Librarian Irene Winters, her associate Kai (a dragon, mostly in human form) and an interdimensional Library which sits between the worlds, cementing its links to those worlds -- and their places in the balance between order and chaos -- by 'borrowing' works of fiction.

In The Lost Plot, Irene and Kai find themselves involved in a political race between two dragons. One of those dragons has enlisted the help of another Librarian in fulfilling a challenge: but the Library must remain neutral, and cannot be seen to ally with the dragons (agents of order), especially by the Fae (agents of chaos). It's up to Irene and Kai to investigate the rivalry between the two dragons, and to negotiate an alternate New York that's strongly reminiscent of 1920s Prohibition, where the police believe Irene is actually a powerful British mob boss ...

This was a fun read but didn't really engage me, though there was plenty of swashbuckling action, cinematic scene-setting and clever use of the Language, the method by which Irene persuades reality to do what she wants. I'm not sure if this lack of engagement is an artefact of hindsight: when I'd finished this I immediately skimmed the first three novels again (to ensure that I understood the impact of a major development late in the book) and then went on to the next in the series. So I must've liked it, right? But it hasn't stuck, for whatever reason. Possibly the highly formal, mannered society of dragons -- which Irene negotiates elegantly, though with considerable effort -- is less appealing to me than the indulgent chaos of the Fae.

2021/030: Paladin's Strength -- T Kingfisher

“Galen, I’ve never tested how many rabbits I could fight off at a time. It just hasn’t come up.” [loc. 1025]

When Istvhan (former paladin of the Saint of Steel and now muscle-for-hire) meets Clara (former lay sister of the Order of Saint Ursa, now functionally a slave), he is surprised to encounter a woman almost the same height as him, blonde and heavily built, and remarkably level-headed for someone who has effectively just been awarded to a strange warrior as forfeit after he killed a youth who challenged him.

Clara is heading east to find the nuns of her order, who have been abducted by raiders, the convent burned to the ground. She has a Dire Secret: but that's okay, so does Istvhan, and in fact their Secrets are (at least etymologically) the same. And conveniently, Istvhan and his party are heading east too, though at first they only give her vague explanations and ask seemingly-casual questions about decapitated corpses.

As with the first in the series, Paladin's Grace, this is a sweet and often humorous romance with some darker elements. Also like that novel, it's a romance between equals. Clara is more than capable of holding her own in a fight, making the first move, or dealing with unsettling bunnies. (Really. There are also some rather sweet amphibians, including a toad named Maude, and some mules: the mule driver is Brindle the gnole, who also featured in Swordheart.)

There was a little too much vacillation ('he/she wouldn't want me if he/she knew the Awful Truth') amid the UST: but there was plenty of actual plot, some of it quite horrific and some of it rather sad, to balance the romantic elements. The villains were deeply unsettling, but that wasn't entirely their fault... and their justification for villainy was unsettlingly reasonable.

I do love the world-building, too. The Order of the White Rat, who are effectively social workers; the gnoles, who don't do pronouns; the ways in which queer and trans people are simply accepted. There's a fascinating exchange near the beginning of the novel, when Clara is telling Istvhan that one of the sisters of the young man he killed will 'swear as a son, and then he will take up the sword' -- and warns Istvhan against doing something that might mean he has to fight 'his brother who had been his sister the day before ... [who] would have had about twelve hours to learn to use a sword'. [loc. 206].

A very enjoyable read with characters I hope to encounter again in this series: my only reservation is that the story ended suddenly, which made perfect sense but still jolted me.

2021/029: Rawblood -- Catriona Ward

To see her is to know the vast terror that lies outside the circle of firelight, beyond man’s ideas. The curtain has been torn back, to reveal the gaping chasm in the world. Nothing endures. All is blackness. Horror. We are falling through the dark. We never cease. We never land. We drift in the endless void, suffering. There is no morning light. [loc. 2626]

Rawblood, Iris Villarca's sprawling ancestral home, has stood for centuries on Dartmoor. The house's name means 'the house by the bridge over flowing water': it's not nearly as gruesome or gory as it sounds. The Villarcas are bound to Rawblood, and vice versa. Iris' father tells her that Rawblood is 'written into' the Villarcas, as is a mysterious disease which he calls 'horror autotoxicus'. To avoid this disease, Iris must not have friends, or go among many people. She must live quietly and avoid strong feelings, to protect herself and those around her. Her childfriend companion, Tom Gilmore (whose father has a quiet, longstanding feud with the Villarcas), is appointed as her groom, so that she must treat him as a servant rather than a friend.

But Iris, fascinated by medicine and anatomy, gradually realises that the disease is a fiction, and demands to be told the truth. The tale Alonso Villarca tells, of a hereditary contagion -- a malevolent entity passed down in the blood -- seems eccentric to the point of madness. But then, he's an opiate addict, who takes his 'medicine' to protect himself from the force he refers to only as her.

This is a snowglobe of a novel: no way in, no way out. I reread it looking for the point where the evil, the curse, the illness begins, and couldn't find it. There are intimations, in the stupendous final scenes, that the bad things have been happening for a very long time. It's not just the Villarcas, not only Iris and Alonso, not limited to the voices that tell the story.

On rereading I also began to appreciate the deftness of the multiple narratives, and the distinctive voices that Ward chooses to tell the story. At first there is Iris, growing up at Rawblood in the years before the First World War. Then we have, from 1881, the diary entries of Charles Danforth, Alonso's friend and former lover, the man who made him an opium addict: twenty years after their parting, Charles visits his old friend to help with some rather gruesome medical experiments. (Caution: cruelty to animals in this section.) It's Charles who pens some of the most evocative, atmospheric descriptions of the countryside: "I could see England spread before me, in dense bright fields, bound by ancient hedgerows of rowan and hawthorn, in high bare moors and cushions of heather, in little cobbled towns where the mills still turn in the old way, and carts make their way to market in the morning under the early stars; in dark lakes and high peaks, where red kites circle..." [loc. 899]. And Charles, too, who is haunted by something terrible that he cannot write about with any clarity: who sees, and then cannot see (or forget), the fresh-dug grave beneath the cedar tree.

Back another generation to 1839, and a leisurely account of Mary Hopewell, despatched to Italy with a Miss Brigstocke for the sake of her health. She's consumptive, and has resigned herself to her death: but she finds herself strangely drawn to a mysterious Spanish nobleman, Don Villarca. Miss Brigstocke does not approve. And later, we have the first-person narrative of Meg Villarca, née Danforth, who marries Alonso after the death of her brother Charles. Meg, who's grown up in poverty amid brutal folk, is a witch. She has more agency than some of the other narrators, but perhaps not as much as she believes she has.

Iris' own narrative resurfaces throughout the novel: incarceration in an asylum, experimental medical treatments, return to Rawblood. It's impossible not to pity her. She is trapped by her heritage, by her home, and by the stories she has been told: the cave where she and Tom talked and kissed, the grave under the tree, the blood-borne contagion of her, the madness that runs in the Villarca line. (And possibly also in the Hopewells.)

I bought this book in 2016! I think I'm glad I waited to read it until now: it's a book that rewards calm consideration and leisurely rereading. (My rating rose from 3* to 5* after rereading.) Rawblood does very much make me want to go back to Dartmoor, which I love: and it does make me worry that, as in this novel and in Little Eve, Ward's new book The Last House on Needless Street (publication this week! [18 March 2021]) will include something horrible about eyes. I've pre-ordered, though: I'm certain that it will be a fascinating, immersive and unsettling read.

Fulfils the 'rural setting' rubric of the Reading Women Challenge 2021.