Fourteen or so books

[firstfrost]

When the Moon Hits Your Eye (by John Scalzi)

One part XKCD "What If?" and one part "Don't Look Up". Premise: The moon turns to cheese. What happens next? It's unapologetic about not giving an explanation for how it happens, but then sticks somewhere within throwing distance of science after that. We see a handful of characters more than once, but a lot of it is one-shot vignettes of how different people react to Things Changing Weirdly, or how they react to Potential End Times. Also thinly disguised asshole space billionaires. The snarky humor is fairly standard Scalzi popcorn, and characters tend to all snark with the same voice, but there's also sweet bits that feel more worthwhile. There's an afterword that basically says "before you quibble about the science, it's about the moon turning to cheese", so I do not feel like I can write about my Science Quibble. Three and a half stars made of cheese

One Day, All This Will Be Yours (by Adrian Tchaikovsky)

This is the second Tchaikovsky work that has reminded me of Douglas Adams - if you took all the surreal madness and poetry out of This Is How You Lose the Time War and rebuilt from the bones up as black humor. Tchaikovsky is also still a really nice audiobook narrator, though I think he does not have as much chance to shine as he did in Service Model, in part because this is Quite Short (I think it's novella-ish length compared to modern book size).

 

Orb of Cairado / A Theory of Haunting (by Katherine Addison / Sarah Monette)

I put these together because I am puzzled by why I like Katherine Addison so much more than Sarah Monette. They're the same person, the author doesn't intentionally write differently between the two, she just got a different pen name because her newer books would sell better under a new name. (Not criticizing! Do what you need to do!). Orb of Cairado is a novella adjacent to the Speaker for the Dead series; A Theory of Haunting is a haunted house book. (Orb looks like it is officially a novella and Haunting a book; Orb is 120 pages and Haunting 146 pages, but novellas are officially by word count, and I don't want to count the words.). Maybe it's just that I enjoy the world-building for Goblin Emperor and the rest? Orb of Cairado features Ulcetha Zhorvena, who is Indiana Jones if he were a shy disgraced historical researcher (like if Maia was Alexander the Great if he were a shy kind young man with imposter syndrome). There's some lost stuff that belongs in a museum, and some Treachery which is resolved via conversation and the legal system. The horror story also features a shy researcher, and a number of ominous, even deadly things going bump in the night, but it never quite felt scary?

 

The Vengeance (by Emma Newman)

The cover of this book says it is Book One of the "Vampires of Dumas" series. That's really a spoiler, though - we don't see any vampires until nearly the end of the book - and the brief appearance of a werewolf at over halfway is the first hint of the supernatural. Possibly for the best? A late genre shift might be more jarring than wondering when we will get to the vampires (though there is quite a lot of foreshadowing about who they are going to be). Other than the vampires, the book is aiming for Dumas's genre - swordfights and revenge and French aristocracy, plus pirates - but it doesn't aim for Dumas's style at all, which is a shame. The main character, Morgane, starts as junior pirate and daughter of Captain Anne-Marie, until Anne-Marie is mortally wounded in an ambush. Anne-Marie confesses that she stole Morgane from her actual mother, Anne-Marie's sister. There is also a chest with more exposition in it suggesting that Actual Mom needs rescuing from Actual Dad, who might be the person who arranged the ambush? But the ambush brought the Exposition Chest with it... anyway, it's clearly complicated, and Morgane charges off to Rescue Actual Mom and Revenge Previous Mom and Kill Actual Dad, except that not only do things not go according to plan, nobody is who Morgane expects them to be. During the swashbuckling parts, it's fun, but the pacing drags a lot in the middle with a lot of being captured by various teams and running away. Maybe three stars; I cared a little about Morgane (and especially Lisette, once she joins the party), but there's less wit or thoughtfulness than I might have liked.

 

Quill and Still (by Aaron Sofaer)

This was fascinating. Sophie is a burned-out lab tech when she bumps into the Goddess Artemis while hiking, and is banished to the dimension of her choice. She chooses (in more words) 'somewhere structured around people being nice to each other'. (I'll come back to that particular phrasing). She ends up in Kibosh, a village situated on top of a dungeon; said dungeon is where adventurers go to adventure and level up and get loot and so forth. This is the story of Sophie's first week in Kibosh; village society assigns her a First Friend to help her acclimatize over the next year, and assigns her an empty house (the local stone mages have a bunch of practice houses standing around). There's a lot of descriptions of amazingly tasty refectory meals. There's a lot of thoughtful engagement with Sophie's new System, which keeps track of her Attributes and Classes and Tier-Ups and such (and also is configurable so it isn't quite as rhapsodically over the top in describing her stats).

Your Divine Flame Deepens In Hue!

 

In Your Heart, One Faith Rings True: Pantheism
To Him, Your Fathers Looked, And Their Fathers Before Them
The Paths Before You Grow In Number: Class Unlocked (Apprentice Alchemist)
And Lo, Upon Your Boons Is This Added: Hearty Breakfast, Strong Foundation
These Maluses, Vanquished, Have Faded: Hunger (Moderate)
Behold, The Injuries Of Your Experimentation: Chemical Burn (Least) (Tongue)

 

In Every Experience, Our World Grows Brighter

 

It's a village on top of a dungeon. This serves as a plot point in that Sophie meets some adventurers, and the village economy ties into selling to / buying from them, and that one of the first things she learns is the alarm and drill for what happens if the dungeon tries to get them - but it never does. It's a litRPG with no combat, written by someone who wanted to get into the nuts and bolts of how you build a utopia out of mechanics and procedure rather than inspirational speeches. I said I'd come back to "somewhere structured around people being nice to each other" and "structured around" is key. Cozy-utopia can easily fall back on people being generally decent and kind; mechanics-hacker-utopia thinks about UBI and ways to get other abundance into the system (magic clearly helps there), and how a society might set up people to deal with interdimensional refugees at any moment. Interestingly, this is the first time my three-part rating kind of fails me - I cared about (and liked) the characters, it had a lot of humor, and it made me think quite a lot. And it's beautifully written! But I only liked it, I didn't really love it - I think, deep down, I wanted something to happen, and that is more to my failure as a reader for this particular book, than a failure of the book.

 

 

The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels (by Janice Hallett)

There's one book by Hallett in each of my previous two posts; here's another. It's another sort of "found footage" story - texts and news excerpts and pages from other books and above all audio transcripts, surrounding an author (well, two authors in semi-competition with each other) writing a story about cult murders from twenty years back. What was public at the time: two teenagers and a baby under the sway of a charismatic cult leader who convinces everyone that they're angels preventing the Antichrist (the baby) from coming to power. It ends with most of the cult dead, the leader in jail, and the kids and baby... where? Well, that's part of what the authors are interested in finding out. So, at first, reading the book was like reading a horror novel that starts with slow spookiness - the protagonists don't realize that there's supernatural going on, but there are weird coincidences and things that don't seem right. (Did I ever see The Omen or have I just absorbed it through the cultural gestalt?) But Hallett is a mystery novelist, not a horror novelist, so... it's probably not actually the supernatural? This sort of tension is lovely - it's the same thing that I imagine characters in a horror novel feel when the little things start getting weird. This is the real world, so ... it's probably not actually the supernatural?

I'm also still really impressed by the way the author plays with truth / lies / what isn't said. In a normal mystery/thriller, the reader knows that the characters lie. The narrator and/or the detective doesn't lie to the reader, at least, not in a fair play mystery, but it's expected that when the detective is talking to suspects, at least some of them (and quite possibly all of them!) are lying about one thing or another. But reading transcripts of text messages, fair play says that those are the actual text messages that were sent at the time. The people texting could be lying for their own reasons, of course, but that they happened seems like it should be true. Or voice transcripts - those should be presumed to be a faithful account of the recording of what happened. Otherwise it's a cheat. In The Appeal some of the tricks were: not everyone's texts are "recovered" as part of the story. So some dialogues and things that happened are completely left out - which is not the same as not happening. And sock puppets also play a role. In The Twyford Code, everything is an audio recording, but the person making the recording is a very unreliable narrator for many reasons. This book plays around with those sort of things, and it still feels fun and new and tricky in a way that I imagine people first felt reading some of Agatha Christie's rule-breakers like And Then There Were None and Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Once the book got going properly I had a hard time putting it down, and I made notes on a couple of my theories as I went (I should do more of this for personal score-keeping). I figured out several major reveals before they happened, yay me! Call this one four and a half stars; it's maybe overly complicated by the time it finishes, but tons of fun and nicely atmospheric.

 

Dogs of War (by Adrian Tchaikovsky)

This is what you get if Murderbot was a cyborged dog instead of a cyborged human, and the control module was at least in part the compulsion to be a Good Dog. Rex is a Good Dog, who serves a mercenary commander in the war against the anarchistas in Mexico - as well as against all the civilians who get caught in the crossfire. Rex's Master is not a nice guy, but Rex is a Good Dog. Luckily for Rex and the plot, some of the other members of Rex's squad are a little smarter than Rex, and Rex eventually has to make some of his own choices. I really liked the first half; the second half spends maybe a little too long inside Rex's head.

 

The Hexologists (by Josiah Bancroft)

This was a Kindle Unlimited book, and a reasonably worthwhile one. The Wilbys are hexologists - a less-prestigious sort of magic user in the steampunk/shadowrun setting - and are hired to investigate the trouble that the King is cursed and wishes to be baked into a cake. While they are generally anti-monarchists, they are prevailed upon to look into it.

The world-building is interesting, the sort that only explains as needed rather than giving a big exposition dump - so it's hard to predict well enough to solve a mystery, but it works fine as a Magician Procedural. Interestingly, there is one aspect of the mystery-solving that I was really baffled by: why the focus on what seemed the most boring aspect of the curse? But there was a reason, and it was even a good reason that explained both from plot reasons and character reasons. The main best thing about the book, though, is the dynamic between the Wilbys. It was a good example of Andrea's romance where the two characters are very different and rely on their differences; Warren is a steady, romantic bear; Isolde is more of a workaholic risk-taking ferret. I noted this bit as a lovely combination of both their romance and their very different outlooks. Warren has been drained by a wraith, and is now home and in bed, unconscious:

Warren would never have left her side. He would've loomed over her day and night, yielding his post only to bolster her spirits with the smell of cardamom tea or lemon cake or frying back fat. He would've made himself her blanket, her bolster, her mattress; he would've summoned every doctor, quack, and conjurer in a hopeless effort to assist her revival. He would never have accepted that there were some wounds that only time and the spirit could heal.
If they could be healed.
Whatever happened, and for however long it lasted, War would've carried on reading her the morning edition, and mocking the book reviewer who never liked anything, and filling out the daily puzzle with exaggerated dramatism, and invigorating his culinary incenses while he slowly but surely lost his mind.
She had been much quicker in that regard.
After mere hours alone with his alternately wheezing and moaning form, she had begun to follow the furrows of thought that flowed down the byzantine clefts and ravines of her active mind, all draining down to the same hole: If he were already walking the Gray Plains of the Unmade, should she not join him? Should she not greet him there? Should she not hurry out ahead?
It was a character flaw -- one of many -- that she loathed in herself, but she was not equipped for vigils. She had to do something.
When she had told Morris that she was leaving to find "someone who might be able to help," Isolde had left it to her father-in-law to suppose she alluded to assistance for his son rather than the advancement of their ongoing investigation -- which was the truth of it.
If Warren awoke, and she were not there, he would understand. Isolde wondered if Morris, who was a good and decent man, would feel as charitably about his son's wife abandoning him to chase down a lead.

I also highlighted this - one character speaking about her terrible adopted father - as a really evocative scene. (Sorry the quotes are so long - there is the occasional pithy quote, but both of these take a lot of sentences to bloom.)

"[W]hat I remember most are the early breakfasts in the great hall, my brothers and sisters and I all sat in a row across from him at the big table. And at our back, through the gallery of windows, rolled his jade lawn and his prized bosk of firs and the sun rising over the cusp of the world. All alone on his side of that horizon, Papa would poke his yolks and eat his soldiers and gaze at the view behind us and declare, 'The nation's greatest painters could not compete with the exhibition of a Berbiton sunrise!' And we, made to watch the dawn by the gray mirror of his face, would gasp like witnesses of creation itself." Ms. Morris beat her glasses back up her nose. "The privations of a narcissistic parent are sometimes subtle but rarely unimaginative."

I liked it all the way through, and it ticked all three of the think/laugh/care boxes. I'm having a hard time putting my finger on why I didn't love it, but I think it's that I never fully submerged in any of the characters. The first excerpt above - it's a really angsty scene, Warren could be about to die and Isolde can't take it - but it's at a distance, the emotions are through a pane of glass. Dunno, maybe I'm overthinking it (the book lends itself to that). I don't have to love everything that's good. I'll give it four stars but I'm unsure whether the last half a star is real or not.

Direct Descendant (by Tanya Huff)

I may not have read any Tanya Huff since the previous century, but I think 'cozy horror novel' caught my attention and I found it kind of endearing. It's kind of like one of the T Kingfisher paladin romances, if the paladin were a hereditary intercessor with/against the Darkness and part-time baker in a small town in Canada. The plot (the part with the antagonists, that is) isn't very complex, but there's enough of it to keep things moving, and it's obfuscated enough to have a sense of mystery. But it's really less about the plot than the charm of the cozy-horror setting. There are Girl Guides armed with silver skewers who gleefuly compete for the most shadows skewered. There's a shoggoth in the lake named Alice.

Brief digression - writing about the shoggoth (not called such in the book, but it's what I was thinking of it as) named Alice - sometimes I run into what I think of as Mad Libs humor, where it's funny because it's jamming two non-matching things together. There is a [monster] in the [location] named [girl's name]. That tends to leave me cold. But this isn't that; it's sincere. It's fun and sweet popcorn (makes me care, makes me laugh, doesn't really make me think). Three and three quarters stars.

I'm Afraid You've got Dragons (by Peter S. Beagle)

Robert is a dragon-catcher/exterminator, getting rid of the small poisonous or fire-breathing vermin that are endemic to his middle-of-nowhere fantasy village. He doesn't want to be a dragon-catcher, as he likes dragons, but it's the family business. He has aspirations of becoming a valet. There's a headstrong princess, and a charming prince. It sounds silly, but this is Peter S. Beagle, so it's wistful and melancholy instead. (How have I only ever read The Last Unicorn and not any of Beagle's other books? He may have been out of print for a while due to his evil agent). It's not a very complicated story, but it's sweet, and feels a lot like The Last Unicorn but with dragons instead. Everyone, even the smaller parts, is a little bit more complicated than their original archetype, which is nice.

 

The Adventures of Mary Darling (by Pat Murphy)

I had not realized that Pat Murphy was also the author of The City, Not Long After, which I'm pretty sure I read from MITSFS and the Internet tells me came out in 1989. It's like all the people surprised that Martha Wells wrote something before Murderbot, except now I'm them. :) Anyway. Mary Darling's children, Wendy, Michael, and John, vanish one night, leaving only an open window. Mary's uncle, John Watson, gets his friend to investigate. Based on the children's mother's odd behavior and association with known disreputable types (and the impossibility of the children having flown out the window), Holmes suspects a complicated misdirection on Mrs. Darling's part, while the family doctor (not Watson) prescibes a forced rest cure for neurasthenia. However, Wendy is not the first girl of the Darling family to have been kidnapped by Peter (nor will she be the last), and Mary knows what she is about.

I mostly prefer my Holmes spinoffs to have a competent Holmes; it seems a little unfair to dump him into a setting with the supernatural and then insist that he be unwilling to see it. And it seems bonkers to me that "their mother arranged to have them kidnapped halfway around the globe and is now dragging everyone after them for her own nefarious reasons" is the best he can do. But having an arrogant patriarchal Holmes is pretty appropriate for the story that Murphy is telling. Also, Mr. Darling exiles himself to the doghouse and has people carry the doghouse to and from his office every day? That's in the original? I don't blame Mary Darling for wanting to be the center of a anti-patriarchal novel. (And, like almost all Peter Pan spinoffs in text rather than movie, Peter is terrifying and evil. Also in the original. "The boys on the island vary, of course, in numbers, according as they get killed and so on; and when they seem to be growing up, which is against the rules, Peter thins them out.". The book also sources the "red indians" as leaving the Canadian residential school genocide, to mix fantasy horror with the real. Anyhow, this was a generally darker book than it looks from the cover, and I was not sure how much I liked it; I'll leave it at that.

 

The Emilie Adventures (by Martha Wells)

These were originally two shorter books (Emilie and the Hollow World / Emilie and the Sky World) but have recently been republished together, so they showed up on my "Hey, you buy Martha Wells, here's a new book!" radar. The setting is old school steampunk; Emilie is a more modern YA adventure girl, who can be both scared and brave at the same time. They were... perfectly fine? I expect they'd be grand, were I fifteen. Murderbot (argh! I realize I have name-checked Murderbot twice already, but this is actually a book by Wells! And I can't be bothered to rewrite it at this point) has a plot of running around rescuing people and having fights which is perfectly fine, but what makes those stories grab me is the emotional plot of someone who is learning to people while simultaneously refusing to admit that they want to people at all. Emilie is running around helping rescue people and being helpful on the periphery of fights, but her emotional arc is of learning confidence and reconciling with her brother, which is... again, it's fine. I highlighted this bit, as part of the "reconciling" arc:

"I'm fine." Emilie struggled to disentangle herself. She knew she was lucky not to have bashed her head in. "Efrain..." It hit her suddenly, what Daniel had said about how dangerous this all was, and how her last words to Daniel were some- thing inconsequential, and now she might never get a chance to say anything else to him in his right mind. "Efrain, I suppose we'll always argue but you're my brother and I'm very fond of you."
"Oh." Efrain, trying to stand, hesitated. "Are we going to die?"
"I don't really know. I just thought I'd take the chance to say it." Emilie sat up, wincing at all the new bruises.
"I see." He nodded in relief. "I'm fond of you, too. And I don't think anybody else has a sister who can do things like you do."
"They do," Emilie assured him. "You just never hear about it."

Made me smile, made me care a bit, didn't make me think super hard.

 

The Witch Roads (by Kate Elliot)

I stalled for a bit trying to figure out where to start in the "what is the book about?" question. The culture (brutally hierarchical)? The characters (layered and interesting)? The physical setting (perilous and also there are witch roads...)? There's too much, I just throw up my hands and point at the author's blurb. Of course, that doesn't help in how to start the review...

We start out following the end of a courier circuit with deputy courier Elen and her teenage nephew Kem. This gets us some exposition about the world, the Pall and the Spore (the fungal menace), some family backstory (late lamented sister/mother Aoving), introduction to the hierarchy, and then the First Plot Hook, at the Spires, all before the title credits roll. The exposition is dense but never dry, and I already love the characters. Elen has clearly Lived Some Terrible Stuff, but she's gotten to a tough-but-much-better life now and cherishes it. Kem is too young to remember the terrible, and swings between grumpy know-it-all and drama about having to pick a permanent career shortly. He'd be annoying if he weren't so teenager. After the plot hook (mysterious haunt!) we head back home to Orledder Halt - where there are Imperial Carriages arriving. Here, we get to see quite a lot more hierarchy, and quite a bit more plot starts coming out of the woodwork. Eventually, we leave the Shire head out on the main journey quest, with Elen as the extremely-low-status but only-one-who-knows-anything-about-the-area guide. Hilarity, peril, heart-to-heart-talks, hierarchy/politics, and flashbacks ensue.

Elen said, "We can't take the carriages into the Moonrise Hills. The path is only passable on foot, with pack animals if you need to haul goods beyond what a person can carry."
Hemerlin gave her a long look meant to wither her spirit. "No one has spoken to you, Deputy Courier. You'll be informed when your opinion is requested."

A lot of the books earlier in this list were things I wanted to love but didn't. I did love this one - it made me smile (dry and wry, not comedic), made me think (some thoughts on the gender worldbuilding that are too long for a parenthetical comment), and made me care (I adore Elen, who is world-weathered but not -weary, who struggles with her inability to connect with her nephew, who despite everything can stay "sunny").

Life is so brief, the wind murmured. Let your heart swell to fill the moments you have.

 

Hemlock & Silver (by T Kingfisher)

One part fairy tale spinoff, one part paladin romance, a dash of really disturbing horror thrown in, and also some hints of Lions of Al-Rassan, of all things. Here's the first line: "I had just taken poison when the king arrived to inform me that he had murdered his wife." Well, then!

Anja is a, well, poisonologist isn't a word. Healer is a word, but Anja isn't really a healer, though it's what most people think she is. Healer Michael (who is a healer), explains:

"Your problem," Healer Michael had said to me once, pouring out a measure of agave liquor, "is that people aren't real to you."
It had been so late that it was early again, and we had actually managed to save someone's life, through no fault of our own. It was a rough one. Charcoal at both ends for nearly six hours, until their breathing evened out and their heart stopped fluttering at every third beat. Then we went back to the temple and drank heavily. It's strange how winning can be more jarring than losing sometimes.
"People are real," I protested. "I'm not a monster."
Michael sighed. "Not like that. Look, a patient is a person with a problem, right?"
I took another slug of agave and allowed as how this was so.
"Right. Except that for you, a patient is a problem with a person inconveniently attached. If you could just have the problem without the person, you'd be much happier." There are truths that you can say, drunk, in the small, gray hours of morning, that you can't say at any other time. I grunted as that truth lodged in me like a cactus spine and began working its way inward.
He wasn't wrong. Michael was one of the kindest people I knew, and it's easy to forget that kind doesn't mean stu- pid. That was why I wasn't really a healer. A good healer wants to help the person. Whereas what I wanted was to solve the problem.

The king (you know, the guy who came in before the big quote) has a problem for Anja - his daughter, Snow, is mysteriously being poisoned. Can Anja help? Anja may or may not be able to help, but one doesn't say no to kings. Hemlock & Silver is not set in the White Rat-verse, nor is it the more generic castle-strewn renfaire setting that some of Kingfisher's other books happen in. Four Saints Mountain is very place- ful, Anja is kind of Emily Wilde-ish in her awkward brusqueness, and despite all my references to other books, the mystery/plot goes off in entirely unexpected and marvelous directions. Here, here's a long bit about Four Saints Mountain; it nails down the setting early on and then the desert infuses the entire rest of the book.

The streets of our city -- Four Saints Mountain, more commonly just Four Saints -- are lined with white stucco walls. In richer neighborhoods, there are decorative tiles, and in poorer neighborhoods, there is graffiti, but the walls themselves are the same everywhere.
Set into the walls, every few yards, is a gate, and on the other side of that gate is a courtyard. The gates stand open during the day, and you can catch glimpses of the court- yards beyond. At the moment, anyone looking through the gate at our two-story house would see Javier standing guard, and they'd probably wonder what we had done to bring the king's guard down on our heads.
The wealthier houses have their own courtyards, but in most of the city, three homes will share, one to each side, with the courtyard as a communal space in between. It's the place where you put anything that wants to live almost-but-not-quite outdoors-clotheslines and potted plants and the sturdier sort of children's toys. (And the rain barrels, of course. In the desert, everyone has rain barrels.) Our courtyard held potted citrus trees and herbs and a row of pepper plants that our cook guarded jealously. The house I'd grown up in had a fig tree, which meant that we were overrun with pigeons when the fruit ripened, and the ground underneath became a treacherous landscape of overripe fruit and bird crap.
Most of Four Saints follows the courtyard design in one way or another. Houses are built around courtyards, shops are built around plazas, temples are built around cloisters, and the entire city is built around the palace, which stands on a hill and shines savagely down at the rest of us.

 

The Prefect, Elysium Fire, and Machine Vendetta (by Alastair Reynolds)

I listened to the first of these fifteen years ago, but never got to the other two. So I listened to the whole set now. John Lee is still a lovely narrator, though I have come to appreciate more naturalistic or actorly narrators more now. The Prefect is still a fast-moving noir thriller/mystery/space opera with a badly underpowered police force. I wonder more this time around how the lines are drawn, that any form of government, including oppressive torture totalitarianism, is okay, as long as the population gets to referendum everything. There was an explanation of how some people sign on for authoritarianism because then they don't have to worry about the decisions (and yes, it has been made abundantly clear that people will vote for authoritarianism), but does Panoply's mandate allow you to vote to permanently give away your votes? Well, I guess it's the premise. I usually try not to argue with the premise. Elysium Fire is a similar blend; there's a demagogue "secede from Panoply!" character who has some very compelling speeches, but they never really address why you need independence from the voting mandate in order to... hire your own security? There's also some shenanigans around which characters in the flashbacks turn into which characters in the main plot, but really, I didn't care that much whether the bad guy or the other bad guy was the bad kid or the less bad kid. In Machine Vendetta, though, I spent way too long shaking my fist at the characters who seemed completely unable to notice that one character was OBVIOUSLY NOT WHAT SHE SEEMED. It turns out she was also not what I thought either - but by the time she finishes the reveal, I was just exasperated with everyone within range of her. Okay, okay, I seem to have digressed into just ranting, which does a dis-service to the books. All three of them really do a good job of starting with a small mystery and snowballing into something much bigger. I generally like Dreyfus, especially his fanatic loyalty to his deputies - in book three he gets to be badly wrong about a thing or two, which is a nice change from being the one who is always right. I did care, and smile, and think, for all of them, even if I also grumbled a bit.

 

The Magician of Tiger Castle (by Louis Sachar)

What springs to mind as a description of this book is: in the style of The Princess Bride but if Miracle Max were the main character. Anatole is the rather put-upon court magician in the court of Esquaveta, a tiny kingdom embattled with the slightly larger Oxatania. The King has brokered a marriage between Princess Tullia, and the generally odious Prince Dalrympl of Oxatania; when Tullia is believed to have fallen in love with apprentice scribe Pito, Anatole is told to Fix This, prior to Pito's execution at the wedding. Much plot ensues. It's lovely, and light-hearted without being overly slapstick. Also, it does a really nice job with the alchemy, in which Anatole starts with simile and intuition but then distills with rigorous scientific method.

Back in my workshop, I carefully extracted the scales from the length of eel skin. Unlike fish scales, eel scales aren't on the surface but are embedded within the skin.
I put the scales into a clay pot and added fourteen freshly picked daisy petals. For this potion, I wanted an even number. He loves me not.
I recorded everything in my logbook, for which I'd devised my own set of cryptic symbols. This wasn't so much for security. Words alone couldn't describe my methodology or the quality of the ingredients. Only symbols could capture the smell and intensity of color, the feel and the essence.
I removed the cork from Tullia's vial and, using my pipette, added this final ingredient to the clay pot. Then I attached the pot to stiff metal wires and suspended it over an array of candles. The placement of each candle, along with its size and shape, was also recorded in my logbook.
I would need to get up many times in the night to change the candles. Different candles needed to be replaced at different times. All that would have to be recorded as well. As each candle burned lower, the temperature inside the pot would also slowly lower. When a candle is replaced, the temperature rises a little bit.
A potion is alive. The gentle rising and falling of temperature is how it breathes. If a potion boils, it dies.

I keep coming back to The Princess Bride (at least it's not Murderbot again) - it's got the same sort of stylized medievalness, and characters who are neither overly complicated nor overly simplified. And the same combination of joy and cynicism ("Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.") Here's a bit of that:

She shrugged, and wistfully added, "I suppose I'll never experience true love." She lay back on the bed. "It's my duty," she said.
I was confused. "Did you mean Prince Dalrympl is hideous?"
She murmured something I couldn't make out.
"But I've watched the two of you together," I said. "The way you smile and touch his hand. You seem enchanted by him."
"Oh, Natto," she said as she closed her eyes. "Sometimes I think you forget. I'm a princess. That's what a princess does."
[ ... some pages later ... ]
"And then she'll shake his hand," said Pito. "Unless she decides to betray you."
"Why would she do that?" I asked.
"Oh, Natto," he replied mockingly. "Sometimes I think you forget. She's a princess. That's what a princess does."

I don't remember where I got the recommendation for this book, but I had forgotten any details by the time I read it, so I was joyfully surprised by it. Four and a half stars, and it ticks all three of the new boxes.