2022/110: The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry — Jon Ronson

It is an awful lot harder... to convince people you’re sane than it is to convince them you’re crazy. [p. 43]

A series of comically improbable events lead Ronson, via DSM-IV (the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, from which pretty much anybody can pick a Mental Disorder that fits them), to the Hare Psychopathy Checklist, a 20-item questionnaire for diagnosing psychopathy. Investigating the 'industry' of psychiatry and its treatment, he encounters Bob Hare (of the eponymous Checklist); a prisoner at Broadmoor who claims he pretended to be a psychopath to evade a custodial sentence, and now can't convince his doctors that he's sane; a conspiracy theorist who tries to convince survivors of the 7/7 attacks in London that there were no bombs; a corporate executive who specialises in mass redundancies; a doctor who prescribed massive doses of LSD for inmates of a psychiatric ward ... Some of these men (I think all his subjects are male) can definitely be classified as psychopaths, while others may be simply eccentric. And while Ronson interviews his subjects, and muses on his own anxiety (he says at one point that anxiety is effectively the opposite of psychopathy), he's also interrogating the whole idea of 'madness' -- mental disorder, mental illness and the extremes of human nature -- and whether deviation from some imagined 'normal' is something that needs to be treated as a disorder. On the one hand, some people diagnosed as psychopaths are extremely dangerous to other humans, emotionally or physically or socially: on the other hand, the vast increase in prescriptions of psychiatric drugs seems a disproportionate response to behaviours that would generally be regarded as more or less normal. ('Normal.')

This was an entertaining read (Ronson is an extremely funny writer) but unnerving in places. It's a truism that the rich and privileged will get away with behaviour that would land a poorer person, one without connections, in prison or in a secure unit. Unfortunately, it's all too easy to apply labels like 'psychopath' to the movers and shakers of the world -- politicians, business tycoons, media personalities. Their achievements symbolise success, and their confidence and self-assurance are seen as goals to strive for. And meanwhile, the rest of us struggle towards 'normality', with no very clear idea of what it might look like, while the 'madness industry' regularly expands its definitions of disorder to maximise profit and power.

Fulfils the 'Humo[u]r' category of the 2022 Nonfiction Reading Challenge.

2022/109: The Atlas Paradox — Olivie Blake

How else could one possibly face the prospect of being one-sixth of a dystopian nuclear code if not to simply laugh and go back to sleep? [loc. 1567]

Second in the trilogy that began with The Atlas Six, an intriguing addition to the dark academia shelf. In that first volume, six gifted magic-users were recruited by Atlas Blakely, Caretaker of the Alexandrian Society. By the end of the novel, one of the six had been removed ...

This review will contain some spoilers for The Atlas Six, though hopefully nothing major for The Atlas Paradox. Persons not wishing to be spoilt for the first novel in the trilogy should stop reading NOW.

At the end of The Atlas Six, Libby had been abducted by her mysterious ex, Ezra, who was subsequently revealed to be in cahoots with Atlas Blakely and perhaps also about to change his allegiance. None of the remaining five could locate Libby at all: her absence, on the other hand, made it less urgent for one of them to be sacrificed so that the others could be initiated. And Atlas was adamant that anything taken from the Archive would be returned. Willingly or otherwise.

The Atlas Paradox depicts the gradual unravelling of the remaining students in Libby's absence, how each of them deals with her absence, and who among them is truly determined to find her again. There are also some new viewpoint characters (I was especially charmed by Gideon, though I'd have also liked more Max: there's another new character, though, whose arc I found extremely unsatisfactory, though necessary for the larger story) and some further insights into Atlas's agenda. Each of the five remaining students has a distinctive voice, a different goal and a closely-observed set of interactions with the others: perhaps Reina is the most intriguing, with the theory she develops based on the books that the archive won't let her request. Which makes others wonder what they aren't being allowed to see, in the archive and otherwise: and, of course, whether they are students or objects of study. The five's shifting allegiances, and the different ways in which they pair up, are complemented by Little Chmura's excellent artwork.

The plot is both complex and subtle, and it's by no means clear which (if any) of the narrators, or their perceptions, is reliable. There is a lot going on -- plot threads about the nature of gods, about climate change, about the Society's foes, about magical technology and its effect (or lack thereof) on the mortal world, about death and fate and love in its various forms -- but it's hard to grasp hold of any one thread and find resolution. That said, there are some very satisfying developments. I am looking forward immensely to the finale, in which I hope all will eventually be made clear(er).

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK publication date is 25th October 2022.

2022/108: Billie's Kiss — Elizabeth Knox

... He won't ask 'why am I alive? why has God preserved me?' because he regards his life as a temporary difficulty. He’s alive because he wants to know who took you from him. But he won’t ask “Who meant to kill me?” in case the question makes him jealous of his life and desirous of living. [p. 148]

Billie Paxton has survived a rough sea voyage aboard the Gustav Edda, tending her heavily pregnant sister Edith: Edith's husband Henry is due to take up a post with Lord Hallowhulme on the remote Scottish island of Kissack and Skilling. As the ship nears the dock, Billie leaps ashore -- and behind her the ship explodes, with several lives lost and many injured. Billie, and her flight from the deck, catches the suspicious eye of Murdo Hesketh, a minor aristocrat and a cousin of Lord Hallowhulme: he's lost his friend and servant Ian Betler in the disaster, and he thinks Billie may be to blame.

I've attempted Billie's Kiss several times over the years and not engaged with it, but a recent trip north inspired me to try again. I think it may be that rare thing, an Elizabeth Knox novel that I don't (yet?) love: perhaps because of the lack of fantastical elements, perhaps because of the slowness of most of the narrative (though time speeds up in the last couple of chapters, taking us from 1903 to 1916 in a few pages), perhaps because Billie -- who is illiterate, and whose sensorium I found at once fascinating and frustrating -- didn't always seem aware of her own feelings, perhaps because Murdo was chilly and prickly. That said, the gradual revelation of the two protagonists' histories and characters is beautifully done. I found Billie's love of sea-swimming -- remarkable for the time, and splendidly evoked -- especially resonant: '...being borne up on the steep peak of an unbroken wave or rolled about in the chilly fizz of a smashed one'.

Billie's Kiss is partly a murder mystery, partly a Gothic romance, and partly a portrayal of an aristocratic family with a plethora of secrets. Lord Hallowhulme, amiable and philanthropic, is surely modelled on Lord Leverhulme. His half-Swedish wife Clara is also cousin to Murdo (there are a lot of doubled relationships in this novel) and grew up with him. Murdo's own past is fraught with loss and deceit, as well as with the exuberant exploits of his youth. Even the children -- Hallowhulme and Clara's offspring, and a boy from the town named Alan -- have distinct and complex personalities. (I became very fond of Alan, who knew what he wanted and was not afraid to ask for it.) And the Betler brothers, Ian drowned and Geordie come to assist Murdo Hesketh, felt like a strong and solid presence throughout the novel: their letters to one another are both lucid and profound.

Thinking again about this novel, I think it'll merit a slower reread some time soon. I feel there's much I'm missing -- not least the connections with Shakespeare's The Tempest that are mentioned, but not discussed, in a couple of reviews.

2022/107: When Women Were Dragons — Kelly Barnhill

I thought that the general aversion to dragons was stupid. It was just a thing that happened. There was no reason to get embarrassed about it. Still. I didn’t like looking at it. I didn’t like the attention that Beatrice had given it. It was too embarrassing. Too female. I felt ashamed in ways that I couldn’t explain. It was as though she had drawn pictures of naked breasts. Or soiled sanitary napkins. [p. 151]

When Alex (not Alexandra, thank you) is four years old, the little old lady down the road turns into a dragon. Of course Alex doesn't initially understand what's happened: dragoning is a shameful, feminine thing, no more a topic of polite conversation than menstruation. True, dragoning -- the transformation of woman into dragon -- has been happening since at least the 1890s, and it's becoming more frequent in 1950s America. (I am not sure whether it also happens elsewhere in the world: the focus of this novel is small-town America.) And then comes the Mass Dragoning of 1955, in which more than six hundred thousand American women are transformed in a single day. This imense metamorphosis is also known as the Day of Missing Mothers, though -- according to a scientist quoted later in the novel -- many of the women were not mothers, and some 'were women by choice, and by the great yearnings of their hearts, and were not labeled as such at birth, and yet are women all the same.' [p. 247].

Alex remains human, as does her mother. But her Aunt Marla -- big, bold, trouser-wearing, auto-mechanic Aunt Marla -- has become a dragon, and Marla's baby daughter Beatrice becomes Alex's 'sister'. 'We were adjusting to the loss of my aunt while also pretending that I had no aunt. This sort of thing gets exhausting after a while.' It's not Alex's first encounter with adult attempts to reshape memory: when she was younger, her mother disappeared for months, and Alex was never really told why. When her mother returned she was a stranger, and Alex was too young to understand illness, surgery, cancer ...

I read When Women Were Dragons on two levels, and (unlike Barnhill, who balances the personal and the broader stories impeccably) I can't keep both in focus at the same time. Firstly there's a story about the transformative power of rage, about misogyny and prejudice in 1950s and 1960s America, about Alex (a brilliant mathematician, like her mother) being castigated for making the boys in her class look bad, about some of the dragons coming back from wherever they've been to help with civil rights and disarmament. But secondly, there's a story about a little girl whose memories are assailed on all sides by adults who won't or can't talk about what happened, who expect her to forget fear and trauma. "I learned to be silent; I was given no context, no frame of reference, no way in which to understand my experience, and the adults in my life hoped I would forget, and by doing so, nearly forced me to forget." [p. 272] Reading that sentence brought tears to my eyes, because that was also my experience when my mother was seriously ill during my childhood.

When Women Were Dragons is full of rage, but also full of humour: full of misogyny, but also full of women helping those who need help, paying it forward. (One of my favourite characters was the redoubtable librarian, Mrs. Gyzinska.) The monsters here are men, including Alex's father, though there are of course exceptions. The love affairs are, I think, all between women. And there's a sensibility that I associate with the dreams of the 1960s, the hopes for love and peace and an end to war, the idea that peaceful protest can change the world. (Oh, the placards they carry: 'MY BODY, MY CHOICE declared the sign held by one dragon. OUR LIVES ARE BIGGER THAN YOU THINK read another.' Hmm, sounds familiar ...)

Kelly Barnhill's afterword is an inspiration: "I, along with the rest of America, listened with horror and incandescent fury to the brave, stalwart testimony of Christine Blasey Ford... I thought I was writing a story about rage. I wasn’t. There is certainly rage in this novel, but it is about more than that. In its heart, this is a story about memory, and trauma. It’s about the damage we do to ourselves and our community when we refuse to talk about the past. It’s about the memories that we don’t understand, and can’t put into context, until we learn more about the world." [p. 337] Barnhill has previously published fiction for younger readers: I hope she is moved to write more for adults, too. I believe we need more joy, more rage, more humour, more hope. And more dragons.

2022/106: Airborne — Robert Radcliffe

Life’s routines and rhythms – eating, sleeping, washing, thinking – all cease except as sort of splintered fragments of their recognized forms. Existence evolves into a book hacked to shreds by a madman with an axe. The words are all there, somewhere, but any order, any sense, any narrative structure, any meaning, is gone. [loc. 386]

Having enjoyed Radcliffe's Under an English Heaven, I kept him in mind as an evocative and articulate writer of fiction about military and civilian life during WW2. When Airborne showed up at a bargain price, I bought it, and elements of the Sayers / Paton Walsh A Presumption of Death inspired me to read it. I think I was hoping for more RAF: I was certainly hoping for more than the first third of the story.

Medical Officer Captain Daniel Garland arrives in the Netherlands just in time for the Battle of Arnhem, his first battle and a test of his professional skills as well as his mental resilience. One of his patients is a young paratrooper named Theodore Trickey, so dreadfully injured that he's not expected to survive. Garland is determined to do his best for his patient: "You may think it inconvenient he’s still alive, but that’s his choice. Our job is to help him until he decides otherwise." Between chapters of Garland's (present-tense, first-person) account of imprisonment, escape attempts, and negotiations with German doctors, we learn more of Theo's (past-tense, third-person) story: born in South Tyrol, he speaks multiple languages, never knew his father, and has attracted the attention not only of the British military but of Field Marshall Rommel, who seems to have an interest in Theo.

Unfortunately, as mentioned above, this is only the first part of a three-part story: we don't find out what the connection between Rommel and Theo truly is, or how Theo ended up in what passes for intensive care in Stammlager XIB. I'd also like to know more about Garland's history: so far he's somewhat of a cipher, but though his story is less action-packed and daring than Theo's, he too acts heroically.

Radcliffe's prose is very readable, the story (so far) well-paced, and there is humour as well as horror in his depictions of battle and war. I hope to read the rest of the trilogy some time soon...

2022/105: A Presumption of Death — Jill Paton Walsh / Dorothy L Sayers

...with wry amusement she remembered how appalling to her in prospect had been the wealth and privilege of being Peter’s wife... and how brief in the event had been the enjoyment of wealth and comfort, how swiftly the war was levelling everyone, casting down the mighty so that not even crowns and coronets got you more than four ounces of butter a week, and a large house with space and air meant you got strangers billeted on you, and an end of peace and privacy. [p. 156]

Second of Paton Walsh's continuations of Sayers' Wimsey novels: this one is founded on The Wimsey Papers, a series of letters that appeared in the Spectator during the early years of WWW2. The novel opens with Harriet at Tallboys, the couple's country residence, bravely tending her children and their cousins. (Well, she has the housekeeper, the cook, the house-maid, another maid, and a nursery-maid to help.) Peter is off doing intelligence work somewhere abroad, and Harriet finds life during wartime both boring and frustrating. Then a young woman, one of the Land Girls, is murdered during an air raid practice, and Harriet investigates -- discovering all manner of rural oddities including a pig club, an RAF pilot with a broken ankle, and the mysterious nocturnal ramblings of Miss Agnes Twitterton. Peter's nephew Gerald, here 'plain Jerry Wimsey', is also on the scene, and wows the children (and this reader) with a truly poetic account of what it's like to fly a Spitfire.

This is a perfectly reasonable murder mystery, with the typical historical-fiction flaw of relating events to our own present ('when this war is long over there will be people still alive in the next century who will bear the psychological marks of all this. War damage, so to speak' [p. 108]) and a recognisable facsimile of the characters and relationships created by Dorothy L. Sayers. Harriet felt more convincingly Sayers-esque than Peter or Bunter. Some nice details of rural wartime life, but slightly too much rushing around the countryside at a time when people were asked to consider whether their journey was really necessary. A pleasant read, but ... not Sayers.

2022/104: The Tiger's Wife — Tea Obreht

When your fight has purpose — to free you from something, to interfere on the behalf of an innocent — it has a hope of finality. When the fight is about unraveling — when it is about your name, the places to which your blood is anchored, the attachment of your name to some landmark or event — there is nothing but hate, and the long, slow progression of people who feed on it and are fed it, meticulously, by the ones who come before them. [loc. 4056]

Natalia is a young doctor, travelling with her childhood friend Zora across a new border to administer vaccines to orphans created by the recent war. En route, she learns of her grandfather's death: not unexpected, as she was one of the few who knew he had cancer, but mysterious because he'd claimed to be on his way to visit her, but died in a remote village that neither she nor her grandmother has ever heard of. As she pieces together the truth of his death, she recalls the tales he told her, of the deathless man and of the tiger's wife. Meanwhile, in the village where she and Zora are staying, a group of travellers are digging busily in the vineyard for the bones of a cousin left buried there during the war: “Doesn’t like it here, and he’s making us sick. When we find him we’ll be on our way.” [loc. 1333].

The Tiger's Wife is a fable about war, death, superstition and reparation. The chapters each tell a different story, past and present: the grandfather's childhood in the small village of Galina, and the tiger that escaped from the city zoo and came to live in the forest nearby; the deathless man, who claimed to be Death's nephew and proved his immortality not once but several times; the resistance of the gypsies to modern medicine; the legacy of centuries of war, from Ottoman incursions to the civil war that divided the country; the marriage of Luka, the butcher of Galina, to a deaf-mute Muslim girl. Kipling's Jungle Book is a durable connection between Natalia and her grandfather, between the tiger ('it's Shere Khan!') and the deathless man: in a sense this is a novel about stories and how they shape lives as much as, if not more than, the plain facts upon which fables are built.

This is Serbian-American author Tea Obreht's first novel, published when she was just 24. I loved the prose and the vivid imagery, and the zoo animals' pitiable experience of war: the grandfather's tales of his youth, and his memories of the people he knew, felt more rounded and more real than Natalia's occasionally tepid narrative. There are elements of magic realism, and the names and geographies are invented: but this novel is firmly rooted in the history and culture of the former Yugoslavia.

2022/103: The Mermaid, the Witch and the Sea — Maggie Tokuda-Hall

“We don’t just read to imagine better lives. We read to be introduced to all kinds of lives. Any kind. Not just for ourselves, but for everyone around us. To understand others better. It’s escape, and it’s also a way to become more connected to everyone around you. There’s power in that, you know. In understanding. It’s like magic.” [p. 56]

Lady Evelyn Hasegawa, the daughter of noble parents, is contracted to marry a man twice her age on the other side of the world. Her possessions are packed in her coffin, and she embarks on the Dove for the long voyage. Little does she realise that (a) the Dove is a pirate ship (b) the pirates are also slavers. Befriending young Florian, who is assigned as her guard, she begins to teach him to read.

Flora and her brother Alfie were street urchins before they became part of the Dove's crew. Flora redefines herself as Florian, while Alfie bears the brunt of the crew's vicious and abusive 'hazing'. The siblings (the only Black crew members on board) become inured to violence and cruelty, but Flora -- despite her loathing for the privileged Imperials -- is drawn to Evelyn's soft beauty and kindness. Then the crew captures a mermaid -- an act prohibited by the Pirate Supreme: mermaid blood is a powerful and addictive hallucinogen -- and Flora and Evelyn mount an audacious rescue / escape attempt.

Flora/Florian's dual nature was thoughtfully and evocatively portrayed, though I am not sure why they almost always used female pronouns even when performing the masculine Florian identity. I also liked the non-binary Pirate Supreme, and the witch Xenobia: the novel's emphasis on non-heterosexual relationships was refreshing. While Evelyn and Flora carry most of the story, there are also scenes from other viewpoints: first mate Rake (an intriguing character in his own right, who I'd have liked to hear more of), and the Sea herself. The Mermaid, the Witch and the Sea has a strong theme of the importance of story: of shaping and reshaping one's own story, of magic being a way of looking at the world and changing the course of the story so far.

On the other hand, there is a lot of violence and abuse, mostly but not wholly off-page, which felt weightier than the rather shallow romance between Flora and Evelyn. The worldbuilding also felt somewhat two-dimensional: the Nipranese Empire encompasses most of the Known World [sic]; the Floating Islands have witches, savagery and magic; the Red Shore is where the slavers hang out. The novel's pacing was uneven, with the last chapters feeling rushed and inconclusive.

Some really intriguing ideas and characters here, but they didn't engage me: this may be a function of having read the novel whilst unwell.

2022/102: The Black Witch — Laurie Forest

“Real education doesn’t make your life easy. It complicates things and makes everything messy and disturbing. But the alternative, Elloren Gardner, is to live your life based on injustice and lies.” [loc. 5397]

Elloren Gardner has been brought up in seclusion by her beloved uncle. She's the spitting image of her dead grandmother, a national hero, and although she has shown no signs of magical ability, her relatives seem sure that it's only a matter of time. Then her Aunt Vyvian arrives unexpectedly, and whisks her off to the city and thence to Verpax University. Aunt Vyvian has an agenda: she wants Elloren to 'wand-fast' to attractive and powerful Lukas May -- and she's not afraid to fight dirty when Elloren protests that she barely knows the man. Elloren ends up in squalid university residences, sharing with winged Icarals ('demonic, monstrous, winged'), studying with Lupines ("savage" and lewd) and working in the kitchens with Kelts ('accepting of intermarriage ... mixed'). She is bullied mercilessly, both by members of the 'impure' races (everyone who isn't Gardnerian: selkies, werewolves, elves, Fae) and by fellow Gardnerians, such as her aunt. She's grown up believing that the Gardnerians have been oppressed for centuries, until the time of her grandmother: brought up to regard herself as a deserving member of a pure-blooded elite, and to require ritual cleansing after meeting the eyes of an Icaral. But gradually Elloren begins to question her perspective and her culture...

I was discussing various fantasy-academia novels with a friend, and she mentioned The Black Witch, which it turned out I'd purchased a while back. I decided it was time to read it -- and after a few chapters I remembered / realised why I'd bought it: because it was targetted as toxic, racist, homophobic and elitist on Twitter a few years back. In general, I prefer to make up my own mind about such accusations, and my conclusion is that this is indeed a novel about toxic, homophobic, elitist, misogynist racists, at least one of whom -- Elloren, our viewpoint narrator -- is capable of overcoming her prejudice. This level of cultural baggage isn't easily or quickly overcome, but Elloren and her brothers are on the path to redemption by the end of this novel, first in a series. The Black Witch depicts bigotted behaviour: it does not endorse it.

Controversy aside, this is a very readable YA novel that reminded me in places of L J Smith's great unfinished Night World series: the pairing-up of unlikely couples, the diversity, the sense of world-views being adjusted to fit a wider reality. I didn't find Elloren very relatable, and for at least a third of the book she was really quite whiny (as well as racist, elitist, ignorant et cetera). But she changed: people do.

On Disagreement

2022/101: MythWorld Book One: The Festival of Bones — James A Owen

“This, as far as I can tell, is the Prime Edda — a completely unknown work of Snorri Sturluson’s. What’s more, this manuscript apparently belonged at one time to Franz Liszt, who worked on the translation before giving it to a young companion of his whom he referred to as ‘Dearest Friend’.
..."Wagner," breathed Galen. "It's Wagner." [loc. 875]

Alexandra David-Neel! Trepanning! Wagner and Liszt! A lost Edda! Absinthe! A magician going by the stage name of 'Obscuro', whose name is actually Jude!

All so promising. But also: very few female characters, none of them with any significance to the plot; not much in the way of characterisation (our three protagonists are all white male academics); a sprawling, convoluted and sometimes repetitive plot full of conspiracies and ancient wisdom; some clunky writing... Despite being published in 2002, I suspect this was written a lot earlier ('Yugoslavian Airlines'?). And despite my acquiring it in 2012 (!) it's taken me a decade to get around to reading it. (Or so I thought: see below.) Luckily I wasn't hooked -- 'luckily' because the rest of the series seems to be currently unavailable, and has possibly never been published in English.

Come for the Norse myth, stay for the trepanned zombie students roaming the streets of Vienna, but don't expect resolution.

...Oh, for heaven's sake: turns out this was another accidental reread. My original review from 2012/13.

2022/100: Husband Material — Alexis Hall

...the reason I'd needed to date someone like him to begin with was that I’d needed to distance myself from the parts of queer culture that looked bad to a certain kind of rich straight person. And while I’d come to realise that Oliver was more than a respectable job and a wholesome jumper, it still weirded me out that he found so little value in what I’d always instinctively thought was our community. [p. 140]

This is a surprisingly difficult book for me to review: I enjoyed it a great deal, but discovered something about myself while reading, which is that I don't especially like 'staying together' romance. Or, perhaps, that I don't find it as relatable as 'getting together' romance. This tells you more about me than about Husband Material, though: the latter is a sequel to the adorable Boyfriend Material (in which embittered Luc finds true love with straightlaced Oliver), and begins two years later. Alexis Hall has echoed the structure of a well-known romantic comedy (can you guess which one?) in this tale of multiple weddings -- some heterosexual, some not -- and an unexpected death. Luc is nearly (gasp) thirty years old, and all his friends are settling down, with more or less drama. (Bridget, naturally, experiences more drama than anyone. But she works in publishing -- we get more fleetingly-mentioned anecdotes, each of which'd make a splendid story in its own right -- and should be accustomed to improbable coincidences by now.) Luc is blissfully happy with Oliver, and he thinks it's mutual: but the two are very different, with Luc embracing queer culture and Oliver preferring podcasts and straight friends, alienated by flamboyance and rainbow balloon arches. They're both gay men, and they've both grown up in the UK, with marriage (not to mention giving blood) having been an impossible dream for most of their lives: but do they have enough in common to make a commitment?

This was such an entertaining read, with very much the same cast as the first novel (plus the intriguing Tyler, who's apparently going to get a novel of their own) and entirely credible developments in the lives of each. There are also new characters, and new locations (outside London, OMG), and very definitely new developments. The final chapters put a big smile on my face (as did the scene where Luc, about to give a speech, realises that fountain-pen ink and sweat don't mix too well. I feel your pain, Luc).

Frivolous and funny but also insightful, this novel doesn't flinch from the difficult moments -- a couple of which brought tears to my eyes -- and is very much in favour of emotional honesty, as well as surprising sweetness. My sourness is my own!

2022/099: Notorious Sorcerer — Davinia Evans

”All any of us can do is make the best of the cards we are dealt.”
Why? Why can’t we —“ Zagiri waved her free hand wildly. “Draw blade on the dealer, seize the deck. Make the best better. For everyone, not just us.” [loc. 3220]

Siyon Velo comes from the wrong side of town, Dockside, but he's built a successful business retrieving alchemical supplies from the other planes -- the Empyreal, the Abyssal, and the Aethereal -- and selling them to various alchemical practitioners. His clients are mostly azatani, or aristocrats: Siyon is well aware that they have privilege he can't even imagine. But when he commits an impossible act in a crowded square, he finds himself attracting the attention of several well-connected individuals. And maybe, just maybe, he can pull off another impossible feat...

Notorious Sorcerer contains an abundance of my favourite things: opera, alchemy, queer romance, card games, mannerpunk, swordfighting, women chafing at social mores, friendships between men and women. The worldbuilding is intriguing, though lightly drawn: hints of the lands beyond the city of Bezim, which is the only place in the world where the planes can be accessed, and characters from those other lands with their distinct customs and culture. There are a lot of likeable characters here, too: the azatani sisters Anahid and Zagiri Savani, who want very different things from life; Siyon, who’s reinvented himself but is still a product of his experiences; Izmirlian, who’s voyaged extensively but yearns for further horizons; even Anahid’s husband Nihath, stubbornly adhering to the classical methodology of alchemy as laid out centuries before. Alchemy colours every aspect of life in Bezim, from the suits of cards (each with their Power) to the plots of popular operas, from the concordances of emotions to the City itself, divided by the geological consequences of an alchemical endeavour. That it's technically illegal is just one more way in which social class manifests: the alchemists of the Summer Club (to which Siyon yearns to be admitted) can get away with rather more than a street-wise supplier of infernal kelp and phoenix feathers.

This is a novel about alchemy, about balance, about draconian policing and social negotiation: but at heart it’s a story about finding one’s place in the world, and the importance of living in one’s own life. I liked it immensely — perhaps even more on second reading, when I could see how cleverly the plot had been constructed. [Disclaimer: I should confess that I've known the author (mostly online) for lo these many years. Nevertheless, I was fully prepared to nitpick like mad: but I didn't need to, because this is a brilliant, engaging, emotional whirlwind of a novel, which made me laugh out loud and also reduced me to tears.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this honest review. UK publication date is 13 September 2022.