2023/141: The Mars House — Natasha Pulley

January had a bizarre out-of-body moment where a detached part of his brain said: You’re very cold, it’s Monday, and a senator is arguing about you with a mammoth. On Mars. [loc. 4929]

I loved The Mars House instantly and unreasonably: but's far too soon for a proper review, so I'll just say that the footnotes feature Farringdon dock, formerly Farringdon Station; varying pronunciations of 'Mx'; Mori and Daughter, a shop on Filigree Street; bathroom terminology in Mandarin; The Clangers; mammoth jokes; and Shuppiluliuma, a cat named after a Hittite king who coincidentally appeared in my recent read 1177BC: the Year Civilisation Collapsed.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for the full honest review which'll be appearing nearer UK publication date (19th March 2024).

2023/140: The Winter Spirits: Ghostly Tales for Frosty Nights — various authors

My bells tinkled and rang. The pine needles pattered across the floor. If I squinted, I could just see the blue edge of her, dancing in a fury, whirling with her hands out, breathing her spite against the walls. The plaster bubbled and split. ['Banished', Elizabeth Macneal: loc. 1925]

A follow-up to last year's The Haunting Season, this collection features twelve stories by contemporary authors working in the Gothic / historical / fantastical / weird milieu: the settings are historical and mostly British, though Catriona Ward's 'Jenkin' is set in Maine, and Laura Shepherd-Robinson's 'Inferno' takes place in late eighteenth-century Italy. Despite the subtitle, not all of the stories feature ghosts. Andrew Michael Hurley's 'The Old Play' centres on a drama that is traditionally performed on New Year's Eve: this year Committee have made some improvements, which they don't explain to the actor playing the role of the Beggar. He's haunted, true, but it's by the memory of war, of Dresden and Hamburg burning. 'Widow's Walk', by Susan Stokes-Chapman, is a slowly-clarifying story about vengeance -- as, in a very different key, is 'A Double Thread' by Imogen Hermes Gowar. And Natasha Pulley's thoroughly unnerving 'The Salt Miracles', set on a remote Scottish island where pilgrims can be cured (if they don't simply vanish) centres on an angel rather than a ghost, though perhaps not the sort of angel one might expect in a winter-themed anthology.

No two stories are alike, even when they share a theme or a setting (such as Victorian spiritualism, which is the focus of both 'Host' by Kiran Millwood Hargrave and Jess Kid's 'Ada Lark': two very different perspectives). Some feel very much in the classic understated mode; others are nightmarish Gothic horrors. And the authors' voices are distinctive, each with its own flavour. 'Host' has tempted me to read Hargrave's longer fiction; 'The Salt Miracles' confirms my crush on Pulley's prose; 'Jenkin', by Catriona Ward, is as chilling as any of her novels. Those are probably my favourites right now, but there isn't a weak story in the collection.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this honest review. UK publication date is 19th October 2023.

2023/139: Companion Piece — Ali Smith

... no government was ever going to give a fuck about and no history was ever going to think it worth recording never mind bowing its head even momentarily to the deaths and fragilities of any of the millions and millions and millions of individual people, with their detailed generic joyful elegiac fruitful wasted nourishing undernourished common individual lives, who were suffering or dying right now or had died over the past year and a half in what was after all just the latest plague and whose gone souls swirled invisible in shifting murmurations above every everyday day that we wandered around in, below these figurations, full of what we imagined was purpose.[p. 32]

The majority of Companion Piece takes place in 2021, at the height of the pandemic. Sandy Gray is a middle-aged female artist who works by layering painted words, one atop the other. Her father is in hospital and she can't visit as much as she'd like, due to Covid restrictions. Instead she looks after his dog and his house, and waits for the phone to ring with news. The call that kicks off the story, though, is not from the hospital but from a university classmate who Sandy once helped analyse a poem. The classmate, Martina Pelf (nee Inglis), has had a strange experience when returning to the UK with a medieval artifact: "The passports. The blank officials. The inexplicable and uncalled-for detainment. The revelation of the artisan beauty. The disembodied voice in the locked room." The voice said 'curlew or curfew, you choose'.

This sparks a series of recollections: Sandy's time at university, episodes with her father, the moment at which she lost hope. People start to arrive at her house, despite the risk of Covid: first it's Martina's acronym-spouting twin children Lea and Eden, accusing Sandy of having an affair with their mother and somehow changing her; then it's a mysterious young woman with a long-beaked bird on her shoulder, who seems to have been branded with a V for Vagabond. Martina, on a Zoom call, is convinced that this is the maker of the Boothby Lock, the beautiful piece of metalwork which was the cause of her delay at passport control.

And the final quarter of the novel -- shifting abruptly from Sandy and her unwelcome guests -- is the story of a female smith who is raped, at curfew, to prevent her completing her apprenticeship. (Fornication is forbidden, whether or not it is by choice.) The girl, who's never named, wakes in a ditch, and makes up her mind to die: but lives, because she's adopted by a baby bird, a curlew.

I think the cover, a Hockney print of a path through woodland ('we're not out of the woods yet', says the nurse about Sandy's father), inclined me to expect a connection with the Seasonal Quartet. If there is one -- apart from the contemporary setting, apart from the emphasis on art, apart from the solitude of the protagonist(s) -- it's subtle. And how much is real? Is the story of the medieval girl as real as Sandy's life in lockdown, or is she a story told to explain that cryptic 'curlew or curfew' mutter? And given the title, is the novel about how we reach for companionship (her father's dog; a long-beaked bird; a classmate from university; a book) even while thinking we're fine alone?

Beautiful, subtle, thought-provoking -- and vividly evoking a time that is still too close for comfort.

2023/138: The Mermaid of Black Conch — Monique Roffey

Her hair was the worst part, a mess of fire and ropes of this and that. Jellyfish had come up with her, clusters of long blue veins. Sea moss trailed from her shoulders like slithers of beard. Barnacles speckled the swell of her hips. Her torso was sturdy and muscular, finely scaled over, as if she wore a tunic of sharkskin. She was crawling with sea-lice. [p. 29]

A thousand years before the story opens, long before the arrival of the 'Castilian admiral', a young woman named Aycayia lived on a fish-shaped island in the Caribbean. She refused to marry, though the men of the village pursued her relentlessly: eventually, the women cursed her to become a mermaid.

The narrator of The Mermaid of Black Conch is David, an old man, recounting the story of when he was a young fisherman in 1976. One day he was fishing alone from his boat and met a mermaid who liked his bad guitar playing. Their mutual fascination could have led to more: but Aycayia, lulled into trust, is hooked and caught (in a harrowing scene with strong undertones of sexual violence) by an American sports fisherman and his son, and dragged back to the harbour at St Constance. There's talk of an exhibit in the Smithsonian, a photo on the cover of Time magazine. What can David do? Obviously, he has to rescue her. She ends up in his bathtub; her mermaid tail rots away; she learns to speak English, and to wear clothes, and to walk in David's green suede Adidas trainers.

Of course it's not that simple. The Americans, Thomas and his son Hank, want the mermaid back; David's neighbour, the rapacious Priscilla, is curious about his guest; Miss Rain, the white woman who owns much of the land, accepts Aycayia into her home, where she listens to bass-heavy reggae with Miss Rain's Deaf son Reggie and learns to read and speak English. David, who fell in love with her when he first saw her, imagines how they might build a life together. But the mermaid's arrival has exposed tensions old and new: Miss Rain and her slave-owning ancestors, the lack of opportunities for young black men, the different ways in which men and women are oppressed, the ecological damage caused by humans.

Roffey mixes idiomatic Caribbean English ('picong', 'steupse', 'tabanca') into David's narrative -- it's interesting to compare the prose in his 1970s journal and the narrative of forty years later -- and lyrical oral story-telling in the rhythmic blank verse of Aycayia's voice. Her outsider perspective on the people and the culture of Black Conch, as well as her sheer messy physicality, lift this lyrical novel above more typical mermaid stories. The ending is not wholly happy, but nobody is unchanged by Aycayia's time on land.

Fulfils the ‘By a Caribbean Author’ rubric of the 52 books in 2023 challenge.

2023/137: Catfishing on Catnet — Naomi Kritzer

Having all my friends on the internet is a little weird; every now and then, it turns out someone isn’t at all the person you thought they were... [loc. 1177]

Steph and her mother move house frequently, which plays havoc with Steph's schooling and social life. Their itinerant lifestyle is because of Steph's father, who is apparently very dangerous. Steph doesn't understand why they can't just stay put and talk to the police. There's a lot that her mother hasn't told her. Possibly the only thing that keeps Steph sane is CatNet, a social media site that reminded me of the early days of LiveJournal. The currency is cat pictures, the moderator goes by the handle CheshireCat, and Steph (LittleBrownBat) has a supportive group -- a clowder -- of friends, none of whom she has ever met.

Steph and her mother wind up in New Coburg, a small town somewhere in Wisconsin. Steph enrolls in school, discovers she'll have to read The Scarlet Letter for the third time, and befriends (or is befriended by) an artistic girl called Rachel. But her mother falls ill, and Steph needs to run -- and she begins to find out about her mother's past and a very real and present threat. Luckily, CheshireCat and the Clowder are very much on Steph's side ... and CheshireCat is not a human being.

Catfishing on Catnet is sweet and funny, with solid SFnal elements (robo teachers, ubiquitous delivery drones), villainous plots, online friendships (and what happens when you meet in real life), and what defines a person. It's based on Kritzer's Hugo-winning short story 'Cat Pictures Please', which also features an AI trying to help humans while being keenly aware of Asimov's Laws of Robotics. I think I enjoyed the novel more, though: the narration is split between CheshireCat (introduced on the first page as 'AI'), Steph, and the Clowder. While Steph's mostly concerned with the exigencies of her situation, the wider picture -- her mother's past as a hotshot developer, her associates, her ex-husband -- is also fascinating.

I have a couple of criticisms (who feeds the actual cat while Steph's on the road? Maybe the never-seen landlady who lives in the same house?) but they're minor flaws: and I look forward to reading the sequel, Chaos on CatNet, in which I hope to see more of the Clowder and of CheshireCat.

2023/136: Slow Horses — Mick Herron

If Moscow rules meant watch your back, London rules meant cover your arse. Moscow rules had been written on the streets, but London rules were devised in the corridors of Westminster, and the short version read: someone always pays. [p. 254]

Someone described this as 'Generation X slacker spies' and that's an apt summary. Slough House (hence 'slow horses') is where MI5's rejects -- the ones who've left classified info in a public place, the ones who've screwed up a training exercise, the ones who make bad calls or are implicated in bad ops -- end up. It's easier than firing them and there's always a chance that Jackson Lamb, the unlikeable, uncharismatic and flatulent head of Slough House, will inspire them to leave of their own accord.

But most of the slow horses still want to matter, and when a high-profile terrorism threat (a Pakistani youth. live on camera, due to be beheaded) goes wrong, Slough House's bunch of losers get a chance to be ... well, not exactly heroes, but certainly significant players. Unfortunately the enemies are rather closer to home than Le Carre's Russians or Fleming's supervillains.

There's a bleakness to Slow Horses that didn't appeal to me, though I did recognise the London in which I live: no exclusive gentlemen's clubs or quiet suburban mansions, just a run-down office block near the Barbican, and the recent memory (this was first published in 2010) of the bombs in July 2005.

Occasionally patchy writing ('They crossed the black river in a blue car, red memories staining their minds') but on the whole very readable, with an engagingly twisty plot. I'll probably read more in the series, now up to eight books and a TV series.

2023/135: Hare House — Sally Hinchcliffe

‘It’s not a simple matter. You can drain the water or grit the ice, or move the wall. It makes no difference in the end. It’s just a bad spot here, and always has been. A crossroads. The place where they buried folk like suicides and murderers. Witches. Bury them at the crossroads so their spirits get confused and can’t find their way home.’ [loc. 2112]

The never-named narrator of Hare House has been forced to give up teaching: on a holiday to Scotland, she impulsively decides to move to a cottage adjoining Hare House. She achieves a painful facsimile of friendship with Janet, who lives in the other cottage, and befriends the Hendersons, who live in Hare House: Cass (seventeen and beautiful) and her older brother Grant. (Their brother Rory died 'a hero', quite recently.) The house is ... eccentrically decorated, with Victorian taxidermy tableaux featuring stuffed hares in a variety of improbable poses. And hares, of course, feature in the local folklore: there's a story of a witch, killed while in the shape of a hare, only regaining her human form after death. The narrator is reminded of the hare she encountered on first arrival, mortally wounded by a collision with traffic, dying slowly in front of her because she didn't have the courage to kill it. And she thinks of Janet, her uncharitable neighbour, of whom Cass warns 'well, you know she's a witch, of course'. But can Cass be trusted to tell the truth? Her stories about her dead brother may not be strictly true, and she claims that the whole family is under a curse.

Entwined with this story, and perhaps underlying the Hendersons' changing attitudes to our protagonist, is the backstory of just why she was 'forced to give up teaching', and the modern witch-hunt that drove her out of her profession. In a reversal of the more usual trope, the narrator becomes rather less likeable as the novel progresses. She's a lonely middle-aged woman, embittered by 'the months and years of a life deferred': it's never entirely clear whether the Hendersons come to know of the scandal in her past, or whether they have drawn conclusions (accurate or not) about her culpability for some of the less pleasant events of a cold, isolating rural winter.

Hare House was tremendously atmospheric, Gothic in its sensibilities and to some extent its characters: but it never really resolved the issue of whether supernatural or 'merely' psychological forces were at work, and the finale was less dramatic than the rest of the novel had suggested.

2023/134: 1177 BC: The Year Civilisation Collapsed — Eric H Cline

...although we don’t know how contemporaneous the final destructions actually were in Greece, it is clear that after the catastrophes were over, there were no palaces, the use of writing as well as all administrative structures came to an end, and the concept of a supreme ruler, the wanax, disappeared from the range of political institutions of Ancient Greece. [p. 183]

Cline describes the Late Bronze Age Collapse -- the destruction, in the early 12th century BC, of more than 40 cities from Greece to Egypt, and the collapse of the complex social, commercial and diplomatic networks linking multiple civilisations -- and argues that the traditional culprits, the mysterious 'Sea Peoples' fought and defeated by Egyptian forces in the eighth year of Ramses III's reign, 1177 BC, were, at most, part of the problem.

This is an excellent overview of the 'stable international system' -- kingdoms including Egyptian, Hittite, Assyrian, Babylonian, Ugarit and others -- which had prospered for more than three centuries, only to fail suddenly. Cline uses the word 'globalized', which I found puzzling given the limited geographic scope of these empires or kingdoms: but the sense of interconnection, of mutual dependency, is clear. I was surprised by how much of the evidence is textual: letters between named individuals, discussing trade and intermarriage as well as warfare. And archaeological investigations (along with new archaeological disciplines such as archaeoseismology) continue to provide evidence of the Collapse, and to suggest that it was caused by a combination of factors -- including a devastating drought that lasted for centuries -- rather than simply the influx of marauding foreigners. In this revised edition, Cline amends his original thesis: "...given the additional data that have appeared in the years since 2014, while I would still posit multifactor causation, I am inclined to think that this megadrought is likely to have been the principal driving force behind many of the problems that Late Bronze Age societies faced." And he notes that the Collapse 'opened the door for the growth of a new world on a more human scale, the world of the first millennium BC'.

This was a fascinating read, illuminated by voices from three thousand years ago: I'd had no idea just how much textual evidence had survived, as letters baked in clay and as temple inscriptions. Cline is writing for a general rather than specialist audience, and this is an accessible account of a period of catastrophic change.

Fulfils the ‘History’ rubric of the Annual Non-Fiction Reading Challenge.

2023/133: Mortal Follies — Alexis Hall

“Can you please behave like ordinary parents for just a short while?”
Lady Jane raised an eyebrow. “If you insist.” She cleared her throat. “Oh la! But Maelys, if you are devoured by an angry goddess, however will you find a husband?”
“That is not what I meant.” [p. 176]

Miss Maelys Mitchelmore finds her entry into the society of Regency Bath somewhat impeded by an irritating curse, which initially manifests as the slow unravelling of her dress at a ball. Later, the curse becomes more threatening, and Miss Mitchelmore -- aided and abetted by her friends Lizzie (Lysistrata) Bickle and John Caesar, and by the brooding and Byronic Duke of Annadale -- must take desperate measures to preserve her life and her reputation, and discover who has cursed her.

I should note that the so-called 'Duke' of Annadale is a woman (Lady Georgiana), who's widely believed to have murdered her father and brothers, probably via witchcraft, in order to inherit the duchy; that John Caesar's father is a freedman from Senegal; that the curse has been written on a lead tablet and deposited in the spring below the pump room, where Sulis Minerva can be invoked; and that the narrator of the tale is 'that knavish sprite that frights the maidens of the villagery': Puck, or Robin Goodfellow, formerly of Oberon's court and now inexplicably exiled to a damp flat in twenty-first century Putney.

This is a fantastical Regency romance with teeth: Miss Mitchelmore indulges in the usual pursuits (taking tea, picnicking, dancing, expeditions to sketch druidical remains) as well as finding herself increasingly drawn to the Duke of Annadale. Miss Mitchelmore's friend Lizzie is greatly in favour of this: 'There’s a perilous shortage of eligible gentlemen this season, and it would be awfully convenient if you were to take up with a lady instead.' Even Miss Mitchelmore's mother -- the excellent Lady Jane, who's something of a bluestocking -- seems to approve of her daughter's Sapphic tendencies. For this is not our Regency: there is much less homophobia.

The world of Mortal Follies is lightly sketched, but packed with intriguing ephemera: I want to know how the Indian Boy became the Ambassador from the Other Court; and more about Miss Tabitha, cultist of Cybele and old flame of John Caesar; and more about Miss Bickle, whose life is 'lemonade and silver linings', who has a penchant for Gothic romances and a habit of shipping characters from Jane Austen novels. Puck is a delightfully wicked narrator, heaping disdain upon mere mortals and calumny on 'that shit from Stratford': I'd like to know more, too, about the events that brought him from the Other Court to a damp flat in South London...

Mortal Follies was exactly what I needed when I read it: a witty, frothy 'romantasy'* with plenty of sexual tension, just enough metaphorical steaminess to satisfy (there's also plenty of literal steaminess down in Sulis Minerva's domain), a charismatic love interest with a mysterious past, and a frisson of mortal peril. This novel will probably irritate many readers, with its irreverent and discursive narration, but it cheered me immensely when I needed cheering.

*This is a horrid neologism and should not be used for marketing purposes.

2023/132: Mazarin Blues — Al Hess

I was only a navigator, and no amount of love I showered on Reed would make up for the fact that I wasn’t human. I wasn’t even real. [p. 161]

Reed Rothwell dislikes many things: people, bland decor, AI -- and especially the new beta upgrade of his state-mandated AI 'navigator', which seems to have developed a personality: it's decided that it wants to be called Mazarin, adopted 'he/him' pronouns, and claims to want to alleviate Reed's anxiety. Which is no small task.

America in 2065 is a bland hellscape of New Era beige and oatmeal, everything monochrome and unexceptional. Reed, despite his mild-mannered demeanour, is something of a rebel: his basement is stuffed with colourful wooden furniture, old books and jazz records. He's a decoist, a deviant subculture devoted to more colourful times ('glorifying a time of gross excess, when people didn’t recycle, when they drove petroleum cars, contributed to global warming, and flicked cigarette butts on sidewalks') -- and after Mazarin encourages him to go out to a club with his workmates, he encounters other decoists and discovers there's a thriving community in his home town, Boise. Reed strikes up a relationship with another decoist named Jax... and Mazarin begins to wonder if his programming is operating correctly. He realises that he's in love with Reed, and closer to him than Jax could ever be, but he's not human. Is this a glitch in his software, or something more sinister? There are rumours around town of faulty navigators endangering their pilots, of mysterious visits from the company that makes the navigators, of suspicious deaths. Can Mazarin keep Reed safe? And vice versa?

Mazarin Blues felt like two stories imperfectly fused: there's Reed's anxiety and paranoia (and perhaps autism), his discovery of decoist clubs and his romance with Jax, and then the focus of the story shifts to Mazarin and his interactions with non-binary bar-owner and biohacker Em. Both are intriguing plots, and they're interdependent, but I'd have liked more of Reed and Jax (the latter of whom doesn't really get developed as a character), especially in the second half of the novel. Great characters, though, and just enough hints of the wider world -- campaigns for AI rights in Canada and Germany, colourful socks ordered from Japan -- to intrigue. Mazarin, who narrates part of the novel, is a fascinating character, credibly inhuman: Reed, though really not suited to life in this near future, grows and changes over the course of the story. An intriguing read -- I've bookmarked the author's website, which promises more cosy queer SF.

2023/131: The Hunger — Alma Katsu

...a rage that wanted to devour him, or wanted him to devour the world — he wasn’t sure which.[loc. 4181]

I was in the mood for a horror novel, but didn't find this one especially chilling. The setting is the American West in the middle of the 19th century, and a disparate group of people are travelling in a wagon train from Illinois to California. The land is not adequately mapped, there are rumours of a short cut, and winter is coming: and there is something very hungry out in the woods, something that the local tribes call na'it and revere as a wolf spirit.

This is the Donner Party, with werewolves (of a sort). It's also a study of the clashing personalities in the party: Donner and Reed at loggerheads, Stanton making ill-advised liaisons, Bryant with his urge to explain everything with science... as Katsu writes in her afterword, "The group let themselves be divided by pettiness and class differences. They let themselves be fooled by businessmen who valued personal profit over human lives. They selected the wrong man to be their leader and refused to listen to the people among them who knew better."

Katsu turns the traditional 'evil native spirits' trope on its head, which is to be applauded. She focusses on a number of characters, each with a dire (and usually sexual) secret, and shows how their histories inform their actions. That was more interesting to me than the horror aspect, which I found more pitiable than frightening. To be fair, my tastes in horror are idiosyncratic: give me an understated touch or a solitary terror, any day, over monsters and gore.

For Shop Your Shelves Bingo, Summer 2023: purchased 11 APR 2018.

2023/130: Gone Girl — Gillian Flynn

I’m a big fan of the lie of omission. [p. 126]

I have not seen the film, but nevertheless a certain amount of this novel's plot has percolated into my brain: I was aware from the first page that the 'mysterious disappearance' of Nick's wife Amy was Not What It Seemed. With that in mind, I expected to spot all the clues and hints easily. Reader, I did not. The plotting is as precise as clockwork: or perhaps it's a water-clock, a constant drip of significant details.

Neither Nick or Amy are quite what they seem to be: neither of them are as pleasant as the personae they project. Amy is a sociopath (and she abandons her cat, an unforgivable crime in my universe); Nick is an adulterer with a chip on his shoulder. They deserve one another: so in that sense it's a great romance. I do not hold out much hope for their offspring, though.

A fairly quick read though I found myself putting it aside every couple of chapters. The prose is pacy and inventive; the backstory of Amy's other life as the heroine of a series of children's books written by her parents is fascinating and chilling, and might explain Amy; and there are some arresting images.

I am a thornbush, bristling from the overattention of my parents, and he is a man of a million little fatherly stab wounds, and my thorns fit perfectly into them. [p. 333]

Fulfils the ‘A Book "Everyone" Has Read’ rubric of the 52 books in 2023 challenge.

For Shop Your Shelves Bingo, Summer 2023: purchased 02 OCT 2013.

2023/129: A Place Called Winter — Patrick Gale

Venturing out into dazzling morning light, he would have thought he had woken in a kind of heaven, were it not for the lingering sense that hell was flickering just out of sight, whichever way he turned his gaze. He knew he had been in hell. [p. 3]

In the first years of the twentieth century, Harry Cane marries a pleasant woman, fathers a daughter, and enjoys a quiet, well-appointed life. He realises that he is attracted to men, and has a brief passionate affair with an elocution teacher, which ends in blackmail and rejection. His wife's family encourage him to leave the country: he buys a bottle of laudanum, but after one sip is drawn to an advertisement for emigration to Canada. A man can be granted 160 acres without any financial outlay if he cultivates a quarter of that land in three years. Harry, who has never done a day's work in his life, signs up, and tells his family that he's going to seek his fortune.

He will never see any of them again.

Life in Canada is harsh, but Harry finds himself equal to it -- though perhaps not to the company of Troels Munck, who takes an unpleasant interest in Harry. Munck attacks Harry's friend Petra (the sister of his new lover), heralding another new chapter in Harry's life. There is love and loss, war and the flu pandemic: our first meeting with Harry finds him in a kind of asylum, a place of refuge, after he has been arrested for lewd behaviour. As his past is revealed, it seems easy to guess what form this behaviour might have taken: my assumptions, however, were wrong.

A Place Called Winter is beautifully written, with evocative descriptions of landscape and of the minutae of life as a settler. I'm still not sure that I liked it. The women -- who are really not the point of the novel -- seem to get quite a rough deal, and the most interesting character, a 'two-souled' Plains Cree Indian who goes by the name Ursula at the asylum, is packed off without any sense of closure. (Harry's response to seeing Ursula in male clothing: "It was disconcerting to feel a fluttering of desire for this man he had felt only respect for as a woman." [p. 185]). I'm not sure that I liked the novel, but I'm still thinking about it.

I've discovered that the novel is based, in part, on Gale's own family history: "[Gale] took the decision to honour such facts as he had pieced together but to concoct an emotionally satisfactory answer to the mystery by projecting his own personality back into his ancestor’s situation. He wanted to come up with a story which it was quite believable his grandmother would never have been allowed to find out for herself." It may not be a true story about that particular man, but Gale creates a credible scenario, with prejudice and contempt that seem horrendous now but must have been all too common in that era.

For Shop Your Shelves Bingo, Summer 2023: purchased 02 SEP 2016.

2023/128: A Nobleman's Guide to Seducing a Scoundrel — K J Charles

"Been a secretary long?"
"Eight years."
"And you don't want a chance to make the noble family miserable, for once?" [loc 358]

Thirteen years after the events of The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen, Romney Marsh is less smuggler-infested (due to lower taxes rather than moral reformation) but still teeming with Doomsdays and fraught family relations. Rufus D'Aumesty, a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars, has spent the last seven months fighting to prove that he's the rightful Earl of Oxney. He believes the case is closed, but his unpleasant uncle Conrad claims to have found another claimant, and produces the personable and charming Luke Doomsday. Luke ('Goldie' in Secret Lives) is the son of a woman who may have been married to the previous earl: she was seduced by Elijah Doomsday, Luke's nasty father, but legally speaking the father is the man she was married to... Luke is vehement about not wanting to become the next earl: he does, however, accept a position as Rufus' secretary, since the family archives are in a parlous state and the truth of the inheritance may be hidden in some dusty corner of Stone Manor.

Luke, who reads too many Gothic novels, is a competent and innovative secretary (one of his previous employers was Lord Corvin, a secondary character in Band Sinister). He's kept busy balancing his actual job, his growing attraction to Rufus, and his own mysterious agenda, whilst observing the d'Aumesty family -- Conrad and his wife Matilda, ineffectual medievalist Odo, grumpy heir Fulk, and delightly eccentric artist Berengaria -- with wide-eyed and horrified fascination. The attraction between Luke and Rufus is vivid and tangible, with plenty of enthusiastic consent: Rufus is very aware of the power imbalance between them. But Luke has not been entirely honest with Rufus... or, indeed, with anybody at all, including his own relatives.

A Nobleman's Guide to Seducing a Scoundrel is a satisfying and well-paced romance, a suitably Gothic tale of inheritance and bad blood, and a charming dash of Mithraism (which seems to be cropping up in several of the novels I've read recently). The atmosphere of the Marsh is still bleak and forbidding, but rather less fraught with danger than in Country Gentlemen. Which is not to say that the stakes are not high, or that there aren't scenes of extreme peril. Great dialogue, a credible and compelling romance, and a remarkably low body count for this author.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review: UK publication due 19 SEP 2023.

2023/127: The Scandalous Confessions of Lydia Bennet, Witch — Melinda Taub

Not even my own family knows what I sacrificed and went through in Brighton -- what I'm still sacrificing! It's not fair!
Bother! I'm crying. I will have to leave off writing for a while. I'm almost out of ink, and if this page splotches I can't afford to rewrite it. [loc. 311]

Lydia Bennet -- I beg your pardon, Lydia Wickham -- is living in a garret in Newcastle with her husband, the deplorable Mr Wickham, when she --

Except that most of that sentence is untrue. Lydia does live in Newcastle, in poverty, with Wickham. She is writing a long letter to a mysterious correspondent: an account of the previous summer's events in Brighton, which involved the Long Man, the Jewel of Propriety, a 'Creole' heiress, and punch made with seawater. Lydia has many regrets, and she's painfully lonely until she encounters Miss Georgiana Darcy, who's swathed with protective spells. Lydia (who is, as per the book's title, a witch) undertakes to help Georgiana (who is attempting to solve a difficult mathematical problem, while beset by magical attacks) and is invited to stay (sans Wickham) at Pemberley...

The Scandalous Confessions of Lydia Bennet, Witch is darker and more complex than I'd expected, though there is plenty of fun and frothiness to balance the less pleasant aspects of the story. Lydia is very much the outspoken, flirtatious, impetuous younger sister from Pride and Prejudice, but there's more to her than that: loyalty, confidence and courage, and plenty of spirit. And Lydia does remind us, more than once, that she's not yet sixteen, which shows her 'elopement' and Wickham's behaviour -- not to mention her family's rejection -- in rather a different light.

But most of all, Lydia is a powerful witch, and has been since early childhood. ("It is a truth universally acknowledged that the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter must be a witch," is the novel's first line: within a few pages, we see how Lydia's power has affected the Bennets. Yes, the tally of sisters is also explained.) Her adventures with Great Powers, high society and aristocratic covens fit neatly into the familiar framework of Austen's novel, and the minor characters -- such as Mary King, Georgiana, Harriet Forster, and Mr Denny -- are fleshed out credibly and with respect for canon. There are original characters, too, including the splendid Miss Lambe, orphaned granddaughter of a South Seas planter.

Stylistically, I found Lydia's account well-paced and wholly in character: discursive, emotional, amusing. There were a couple of Americanisms ('last fall', 'bought on sale') but nothing that truly jarred. Overall, I liked this a great deal: there was so much more to it than I'd expected! It redeems Lydia, explains Kitty and even makes Wickham less objectionable. And it is tremendous fun.

Fulfils the ‘A Fashionable Character’ rubric of the 52 books in 2023 challenge.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this honest review: UK publication date is 03 OCT 2023.

2023/126: Night Shift — Charlaine Harris

A crossroad is a place where hunting trails cross, a place where criminals are executed, or a place where shrines are set up. This crossroad may be all three, but I have to be sure what we’re dealing with.” [p. 82]

A spate of suicides at the crossroads -- apparently random strangers, though it turns out they all have a connection -- heralds a darker conclusion to the Midnight trilogy. Fiji's ghastly sister Kiki shows up to patronise Fiji (and is, obviously, patronised by Mr Snuggly); Fiji decides to give up on Bobo; the Reeds' true agenda is revealed, as are Lemuel's origins and part of Joe and Chuy's stories; there are vampires, hordes of dead animals, ancient lore... and in the final few chapters, there is voyeuristic sex magic(k).

There were some really nice moments here, but overall Night Shift felt rushed and unpolished. At quite a few points it felt as though I was reading a rough draft -- with plot threads that fade out, hasty scenes, wafer-thin characterisation et cetera -- rather than a finished novel. And I really did not care for the sex magick: I would have much preferred the characters to find an alternate resolution.

On the plus side, there's one fewer white supremacist. And Mr Snuggly gets to be a lion, which was nice.

2023/125: Day Shift — Charlaine Harris

“I knew they were real old people, but not helpless old people. I wanted to find out why they were here. I wanted to know if they were magic.” Mr. Snuggly began licking a paw.
“Are they?” Manfred asked, tired of being left out of the conversation, even if it was with a cat.
“No. Not at all...Plenty of ghosts at the hotel, of course. And lots of misdirection.” [loc. 2177]

Further intrigues in the little Texas town of Midnight, with its peculiar inhabitants and their secret pasts. The novel opens with the old hotel being renovated, with the intention of running it as a long-term residential centre for elders who're waiting for a place in an assisted living facility. Manfred the psychic goes to Dallas to meet a client, who dies during their appointment: he's accused of murdering her, and of stealing her jewellery. (Olivia is staying in the same hotel, and may be connected to two other deaths.) And a strange child comes to town, growing with incredible rapidity and greeted as 'little brother' by Fiji's cat, Mr Snuggly.

I still like the characters -- perhaps more so than if they'd been familiar from other Harris novels, as some of them apparently are -- and I enjoy the mysterious atmosphere of Midnight. However, I didn't find the plot of Day Shift particularly satisfactory. The elderly client was indeed murdered (though not by Manfred) but her killer's motive, identity and fate is wrapped up in a couple of paragraphs. The hotel residents, who are not quite what they seem, are never really explained, and Eva Culhane, the spokesperson who explains the hotel's renovation, does not reappear.

That said, there is some intriguing character development: we learn more about Olivia, Manfred, and the Reverend. And Mr Snuggly is adorable. I bought this and the third book in the trilogy to read over a hot weekend, and they kept me entertained, especially when I was concentrating on characters rather than plot. And yes, I went straight on to the third and final volume...