Books read, June 2025
Jul. 1st, 2025 01:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
swan_towerDeath in the Spires, K.J. Charles. An excellent historical mystery, straddling the turn of the nineteenth century into the twentieth. Years ago, an Oxford student was murdered in his room; thanks to one small detail of this case, the surviving members of his group of friends know that one of their number must have done it. But no one has ever been convicted.
The detail in question felt slightly contrived to me, but I accept it as the set-up for what is otherwise an engaging story about personal relationships. The novel proceeds in two parallel tracks, one building up the history of these friends at university, the other showing what's become of them since the murder. It does the thing a dual-timeline novel needs to do, which is keep suspense around the past: yes, we know who's going to get murdered, but the lead-up to that matters quite a lot, first as we see how this group coalesced into such brilliance they were nicknamed the "Seven Wonders," and then as we see how things fell apart to a degree that you can form plausible arguments for basically anybody being the murderer. (I say "basically" because it's deeply unlikely that the protagonist, who is digging back into the case against the advice of everyone around him, is the killer. There are stories that would pull that trick, but this never pretends it's one of them.)
I found the ending particularly gratifying. The past sections do enough to make you like and sympathize with the characters that finding out who's responsible is genuinely a fraught question; once the answer comes out, there's a deeply satisfying sequence that tackles the question of what justice ought to look like in this situation -- for more than one crime. Those who deserve it wind up with their bonds of friendship tentatively healing after years of rift. I got this rec from Marissa Lingen, and she tells me there will be a sequel; I look forward to it enormously.
Voyage of the Damned, Frances White. The writing in this book had me at the first paragraph. The protagonist of this book, for a little while at the beginning, almost put me off it.
I did come around to liking him, don't worry. But when your protagonist's firm goal is to make everybody around him hate him so much he'll never have to attend an event like this one again, it's hard for that not to grate somewhat on the reader as well. Fortunately, the plot steers him toward one person he's less deliberately offensive toward, and from there things improve a great deal.
The setup of the story is bonkers, and the kind of worldbuilding that is unabashedly aiming for "vivid" rather than "realistic." It feels reminiscent of L5R with the saturation turned up high: the land is divided into geographically and ecologically distinct regions (this one's a desert! this one's a swamp! this one consists entirely of frigid mountains!) ruled by animal-themed clans, with a wall closing them off from not only the monsters to the south but the clan that betrayed them all, the Crab. Each clan is ruled by a Blessed, the single person who has inherited a magical power from their founder; the rules around how that inheritance works are tailor-made to be the worst possible version of bloodline-based magic. Now the next generation of Blessed have been put on a giant magical sailing ship to go conduct a special ritual . . . but Ganymedes, heir to the scorned Fish Clan, is hiding a secret: he doesn't have a Blessing. It went instead to one of the many unknown bastards his father sired in direct contravention of the rules for the Blessed. Hence Ganymedes needing to convince everyone to stop (reluctantly) including him in their reindeer games; his best hope is to get himself disinvited from any future events, then cross his fingers that he can live out his life without anyone ever realizing the truth.
Mind you, his life may be shorter than he expects. Because on board this ship where the only passengers are the twelve Blessed and the magical servitors assigned to each one, somebody has started murdering the Blessed. Be prepared for a ton of people to get whacked -- but also, many of those people are extremely terrible, because wow is this society dysfunctional from top to bottom. The ending of the novel promises change in that regard, but don't look for deep exploration of what that's going to look like; the focus here is almost entirely on the narrowing pool of possible murderers and why all of this has been set in motion. Quite enjoyable, if you like the voice and aren't put off by Ganymedes being a deliberate asshole!
A Thousand Li: The Third Realm, Tao Wong. The abrupt cessation of my fiction reading last year in favor of a face-first dive into research put a big pause on my progress through this series, a self-published cultivation saga. I'm not sure if this was a good point at which to pick it back up or not -- I think so? This book (as the author himself notes) is much more episodic in structure, being loosely organized around Wei Ying wandering the land as a Core cultivator, i.e. someone powerful enough that he has to learn to be more thoughtful around when and how he intervenes in other people's conflicts. Dunno what to say beyond that; if you've read up to this point, you already know what to expect from the writing. If you haven't read up to this point, for the love of little fishes, do not start here.
The Kings in Winter, Cecelia Holland. I've known about Holland's historical fiction for ages, but this is the first time I've picked it up. The story here leads up to the Battle of Clontarf, which pitted one Irish king and his Viking allies against other Irish kings, but the actual vector of the narrative is the chief of an invented clan that nearly got wiped out some years ago, who cannot seem to convince anybody that all he wants is for his people to be left in peace in the new territory they're occupying. He has a very clear-eyed understanding that pursuing vengeance for past slaughter will only result in more slaughter going forward, and he would very much rather stay out of the impending war. Unfortunately for him, this is a society in which social ties and the actions of others may drag you into conflict whether you want it or not. The book is short and the narration is fairly sparse; it is, overall, not a very happy book. It's good, though, and I'll certainly look up more of Holland's work.
A Crane Among Wolves, June Hur, narr. Greg Chun and Michelle H. Lee. In general I like Hur's Korean historical novels, but for some reason this one didn't work as well for me as the others I've read. Some of it was that I felt like the side characters latched onto and helped the protagonist a little too readily, but mostly I think it comes down to the elements of the plot not cohering well enough.
Hur seems to have a fondness for setting her novels during the eras of Korea's worst royalty; in this case, that's Yeonsangun, during the period when he's become a murderous tyrant. The protagonist, Iseul, has come in search of her sister, one of the countless women taken by force to be a concubine. Her first plan for rescue is to figure out the identity of a mysterious killer, called Nameless Flower, who's targeting royal officials, since Yeonsangun has promised a boon to anybody who solves that puzzle. Everybody else assures her, though, that the king will never actually let her sister go, so Iseul instead winds up joining forces with a rebellion that seeks to overthrow him, by way of a prince (a fictional one, I think) with whom there is of course a romance.
The problem here is that the focus is all over the place. The Jungjong coup, while a real event, is mostly being driven by historical personages, so while Iseul and Prince Daehyun do things, that part of the plot ultimately doesn't hinge on them. Meanwhile, Iseul remains determined to identify Nameless Flower, even though that's . . . kind of irrelevant? He kills one sympathetic character, but in general it's hard to be invested in unmasking a guy who's targeting royal officials -- until eventually he targets Iseul and Daehyun, but he only does that because Iseul has figured out who he is. So I felt zero urgency around the resolution of that mystery. Possibly I would have cared more if I'd been better able to follow the backstory behind who the killer is and why he's doing this, and possibly I would have followed it better in print rather than in audiobook, but overall my reaction that plot -- which takes up a significant portion of the book -- was "meh."
I recommend Hur's books overall, but I wouldn't start with this one. It felt much more YA in its tropes (Iseul and Daehyun start off very tsundere) and much less well-knit than the others.
The Oleander Sword, Tasha Suri. That big hiatus in my fiction reading put a more significant dent in this series than A Thousand Li, because this story is far more politically and culturally intricate, and I'd forgotten quite a bit since reading The Jasmine Throne. I persevered, though, and I'm glad I did, because I do enjoy this trilogy. The romance dynamic between Priya and Malini doesn't quite hook me (the emphasis on "I'm not a nice person"), but I am absolutely here for the rest of it, especially everything going on in Ahiranya. A shallower series would say, look at these oppressed people and their religion which the empire has tried to stamp out of existence; now they get their religion back, yay! This series says, yay, they got their religion baOH CRAP THIS ISN'T GOOD. You get vibes in the first book that the yaksha are not warm fuzzy nice nice: well, here those vibes become very in-your-face plot. I am keenly interested to see how the various religions of this setting shake out in the finale, and what path the characters manage to chart through the threats they face.
Forget the Sleepless Shores, Sonya Taaffe. Disclosure: the author is a friend.
This is not a collection I could zoom through; the prose is too dense with imagery for that. The pieces collected here are less intensely sea-focused than As the Tide Came Flowing In, but that's still very much present. Some of them I'd read before, like "The Dybbuk in Love" and "The Trinitite Golem," but many were new to me. There's a lot of folklore and mythology woven in here, too; I wouldn't have minded author notes to unpack the references I didn't catch on my own, as I'm sure there were some.
The Novice’s Tale, Margaret Frazer. Historical mystery, and the good news is that the series is seventeen books long! I can keep reading about Sister Frevisse for quite some time, if I choose to -- and I probably will for a good long while, because I quite enjoyed this.
These are set in the fifteenth century, with a Benedictine nun as the protagonist. (The internet tells me about a third of the books actually take place at her convent; the rest find reasons for her to be out in the world at large.) As with Death in the Spires, this is not a mystery you read for the mechanics of the crime and its investigation. Instead you're here for other things, like the exploration of life in medieval England, especially but not limited to religious life, and the ways in which the specifics of the culture at the time shape both what kind of investigation you can conduct and why someone might commit murder in the first place. I was mildly frustrated with how long it took the characters to ask a couple of fairly obvious questions, but I will accept that as the price for scenes like the nuns holding the line against a bunch of armed men by singing the "Dies Irae" at them until half of them slink away in shame.
Killers of a Certain Age, Deanna Raybourn, narr. Jane Oppenheimer and Christina Delaine. This was not as fun as I was hoping it would be.
It must be admitted up front that I'm always iffy on assassins as protagonists, even when they're assassins for a good cause. In this case, the "Museum" -- that being the euphemistic name for the organization our murderous protagonists belong to -- was founded to hunt down Nazis who had gone into hiding after World War II; when the supply of surviving Nazis began to dry up, they shifted their attentions to arms dealers, sex traffickers, and the like. But, y'know, history and (unfortunately) the present moment are full of people who were convinced they were killing for a good and righteous cause, hence me being iffy on the whole thing.
However, when you tell me the assassins in question are a bunch of women in their sixties about to retire from their careers, I do perk up and decide to give it a try.
Things I liked: the continual attention to the fact that, while these characters are in good shape, aging is leaving an increasing number of marks on them. (The touch of the central character, Billie, taking a moment for some repair stretching after winding up in an unexpected bout of hand-to-hand combat was very nice.) The tour of interestingly scenic locations in which to kill people. The fact that the women all had distinct personalities, and they didn't always get along despite generally being friends.
But although the review where I heard about this book led me to believe there was going to be a good amount of "get revenge at last for all the sexism you've battled throughout your career," that featured much less than I expected. The events that led to the Museum suddenly deciding to off the protagonists on their retirement cruise turned out to hinge not on them, but on internal Museum politics that -- because they've largely been offstage -- I didn't much care about. I thought the story would show the characters attempting to clear their names as they dodge assassins sent to take them out; instead they pivot very quickly to "I guess we have to kill all the people in charge of the Museum" and only after several murders do they attempt to make a bid for exoneration, at which point it rings rather hollow. And I think I got wrong-footed with the book when two of the characters stand around complaining that their target (who can hear them) is taking too long to die, because that tipped it way too far over into unsympathetic territory for me, rather than fun murder caper times. By the time I got to the final act -- wherein the change of audiobook narrator meant a character who'd had a nice voice in the flashback segments suddenly acquired a bad cockney accent and vocal fry -- I was willing to finish it out, but not much more than that. I wanted this to be lighter on its feet than it was, and more ferocious on the topic of feminism, and I didn't quite get either.
The detail in question felt slightly contrived to me, but I accept it as the set-up for what is otherwise an engaging story about personal relationships. The novel proceeds in two parallel tracks, one building up the history of these friends at university, the other showing what's become of them since the murder. It does the thing a dual-timeline novel needs to do, which is keep suspense around the past: yes, we know who's going to get murdered, but the lead-up to that matters quite a lot, first as we see how this group coalesced into such brilliance they were nicknamed the "Seven Wonders," and then as we see how things fell apart to a degree that you can form plausible arguments for basically anybody being the murderer. (I say "basically" because it's deeply unlikely that the protagonist, who is digging back into the case against the advice of everyone around him, is the killer. There are stories that would pull that trick, but this never pretends it's one of them.)
I found the ending particularly gratifying. The past sections do enough to make you like and sympathize with the characters that finding out who's responsible is genuinely a fraught question; once the answer comes out, there's a deeply satisfying sequence that tackles the question of what justice ought to look like in this situation -- for more than one crime. Those who deserve it wind up with their bonds of friendship tentatively healing after years of rift. I got this rec from Marissa Lingen, and she tells me there will be a sequel; I look forward to it enormously.
Voyage of the Damned, Frances White. The writing in this book had me at the first paragraph. The protagonist of this book, for a little while at the beginning, almost put me off it.
I did come around to liking him, don't worry. But when your protagonist's firm goal is to make everybody around him hate him so much he'll never have to attend an event like this one again, it's hard for that not to grate somewhat on the reader as well. Fortunately, the plot steers him toward one person he's less deliberately offensive toward, and from there things improve a great deal.
The setup of the story is bonkers, and the kind of worldbuilding that is unabashedly aiming for "vivid" rather than "realistic." It feels reminiscent of L5R with the saturation turned up high: the land is divided into geographically and ecologically distinct regions (this one's a desert! this one's a swamp! this one consists entirely of frigid mountains!) ruled by animal-themed clans, with a wall closing them off from not only the monsters to the south but the clan that betrayed them all, the Crab. Each clan is ruled by a Blessed, the single person who has inherited a magical power from their founder; the rules around how that inheritance works are tailor-made to be the worst possible version of bloodline-based magic. Now the next generation of Blessed have been put on a giant magical sailing ship to go conduct a special ritual . . . but Ganymedes, heir to the scorned Fish Clan, is hiding a secret: he doesn't have a Blessing. It went instead to one of the many unknown bastards his father sired in direct contravention of the rules for the Blessed. Hence Ganymedes needing to convince everyone to stop (reluctantly) including him in their reindeer games; his best hope is to get himself disinvited from any future events, then cross his fingers that he can live out his life without anyone ever realizing the truth.
Mind you, his life may be shorter than he expects. Because on board this ship where the only passengers are the twelve Blessed and the magical servitors assigned to each one, somebody has started murdering the Blessed. Be prepared for a ton of people to get whacked -- but also, many of those people are extremely terrible, because wow is this society dysfunctional from top to bottom. The ending of the novel promises change in that regard, but don't look for deep exploration of what that's going to look like; the focus here is almost entirely on the narrowing pool of possible murderers and why all of this has been set in motion. Quite enjoyable, if you like the voice and aren't put off by Ganymedes being a deliberate asshole!
A Thousand Li: The Third Realm, Tao Wong. The abrupt cessation of my fiction reading last year in favor of a face-first dive into research put a big pause on my progress through this series, a self-published cultivation saga. I'm not sure if this was a good point at which to pick it back up or not -- I think so? This book (as the author himself notes) is much more episodic in structure, being loosely organized around Wei Ying wandering the land as a Core cultivator, i.e. someone powerful enough that he has to learn to be more thoughtful around when and how he intervenes in other people's conflicts. Dunno what to say beyond that; if you've read up to this point, you already know what to expect from the writing. If you haven't read up to this point, for the love of little fishes, do not start here.
The Kings in Winter, Cecelia Holland. I've known about Holland's historical fiction for ages, but this is the first time I've picked it up. The story here leads up to the Battle of Clontarf, which pitted one Irish king and his Viking allies against other Irish kings, but the actual vector of the narrative is the chief of an invented clan that nearly got wiped out some years ago, who cannot seem to convince anybody that all he wants is for his people to be left in peace in the new territory they're occupying. He has a very clear-eyed understanding that pursuing vengeance for past slaughter will only result in more slaughter going forward, and he would very much rather stay out of the impending war. Unfortunately for him, this is a society in which social ties and the actions of others may drag you into conflict whether you want it or not. The book is short and the narration is fairly sparse; it is, overall, not a very happy book. It's good, though, and I'll certainly look up more of Holland's work.
A Crane Among Wolves, June Hur, narr. Greg Chun and Michelle H. Lee. In general I like Hur's Korean historical novels, but for some reason this one didn't work as well for me as the others I've read. Some of it was that I felt like the side characters latched onto and helped the protagonist a little too readily, but mostly I think it comes down to the elements of the plot not cohering well enough.
Hur seems to have a fondness for setting her novels during the eras of Korea's worst royalty; in this case, that's Yeonsangun, during the period when he's become a murderous tyrant. The protagonist, Iseul, has come in search of her sister, one of the countless women taken by force to be a concubine. Her first plan for rescue is to figure out the identity of a mysterious killer, called Nameless Flower, who's targeting royal officials, since Yeonsangun has promised a boon to anybody who solves that puzzle. Everybody else assures her, though, that the king will never actually let her sister go, so Iseul instead winds up joining forces with a rebellion that seeks to overthrow him, by way of a prince (a fictional one, I think) with whom there is of course a romance.
The problem here is that the focus is all over the place. The Jungjong coup, while a real event, is mostly being driven by historical personages, so while Iseul and Prince Daehyun do things, that part of the plot ultimately doesn't hinge on them. Meanwhile, Iseul remains determined to identify Nameless Flower, even though that's . . . kind of irrelevant? He kills one sympathetic character, but in general it's hard to be invested in unmasking a guy who's targeting royal officials -- until eventually he targets Iseul and Daehyun, but he only does that because Iseul has figured out who he is. So I felt zero urgency around the resolution of that mystery. Possibly I would have cared more if I'd been better able to follow the backstory behind who the killer is and why he's doing this, and possibly I would have followed it better in print rather than in audiobook, but overall my reaction that plot -- which takes up a significant portion of the book -- was "meh."
I recommend Hur's books overall, but I wouldn't start with this one. It felt much more YA in its tropes (Iseul and Daehyun start off very tsundere) and much less well-knit than the others.
The Oleander Sword, Tasha Suri. That big hiatus in my fiction reading put a more significant dent in this series than A Thousand Li, because this story is far more politically and culturally intricate, and I'd forgotten quite a bit since reading The Jasmine Throne. I persevered, though, and I'm glad I did, because I do enjoy this trilogy. The romance dynamic between Priya and Malini doesn't quite hook me (the emphasis on "I'm not a nice person"), but I am absolutely here for the rest of it, especially everything going on in Ahiranya. A shallower series would say, look at these oppressed people and their religion which the empire has tried to stamp out of existence; now they get their religion back, yay! This series says, yay, they got their religion baOH CRAP THIS ISN'T GOOD. You get vibes in the first book that the yaksha are not warm fuzzy nice nice: well, here those vibes become very in-your-face plot. I am keenly interested to see how the various religions of this setting shake out in the finale, and what path the characters manage to chart through the threats they face.
Forget the Sleepless Shores, Sonya Taaffe. Disclosure: the author is a friend.
This is not a collection I could zoom through; the prose is too dense with imagery for that. The pieces collected here are less intensely sea-focused than As the Tide Came Flowing In, but that's still very much present. Some of them I'd read before, like "The Dybbuk in Love" and "The Trinitite Golem," but many were new to me. There's a lot of folklore and mythology woven in here, too; I wouldn't have minded author notes to unpack the references I didn't catch on my own, as I'm sure there were some.
The Novice’s Tale, Margaret Frazer. Historical mystery, and the good news is that the series is seventeen books long! I can keep reading about Sister Frevisse for quite some time, if I choose to -- and I probably will for a good long while, because I quite enjoyed this.
These are set in the fifteenth century, with a Benedictine nun as the protagonist. (The internet tells me about a third of the books actually take place at her convent; the rest find reasons for her to be out in the world at large.) As with Death in the Spires, this is not a mystery you read for the mechanics of the crime and its investigation. Instead you're here for other things, like the exploration of life in medieval England, especially but not limited to religious life, and the ways in which the specifics of the culture at the time shape both what kind of investigation you can conduct and why someone might commit murder in the first place. I was mildly frustrated with how long it took the characters to ask a couple of fairly obvious questions, but I will accept that as the price for scenes like the nuns holding the line against a bunch of armed men by singing the "Dies Irae" at them until half of them slink away in shame.
Killers of a Certain Age, Deanna Raybourn, narr. Jane Oppenheimer and Christina Delaine. This was not as fun as I was hoping it would be.
It must be admitted up front that I'm always iffy on assassins as protagonists, even when they're assassins for a good cause. In this case, the "Museum" -- that being the euphemistic name for the organization our murderous protagonists belong to -- was founded to hunt down Nazis who had gone into hiding after World War II; when the supply of surviving Nazis began to dry up, they shifted their attentions to arms dealers, sex traffickers, and the like. But, y'know, history and (unfortunately) the present moment are full of people who were convinced they were killing for a good and righteous cause, hence me being iffy on the whole thing.
However, when you tell me the assassins in question are a bunch of women in their sixties about to retire from their careers, I do perk up and decide to give it a try.
Things I liked: the continual attention to the fact that, while these characters are in good shape, aging is leaving an increasing number of marks on them. (The touch of the central character, Billie, taking a moment for some repair stretching after winding up in an unexpected bout of hand-to-hand combat was very nice.) The tour of interestingly scenic locations in which to kill people. The fact that the women all had distinct personalities, and they didn't always get along despite generally being friends.
But although the review where I heard about this book led me to believe there was going to be a good amount of "get revenge at last for all the sexism you've battled throughout your career," that featured much less than I expected. The events that led to the Museum suddenly deciding to off the protagonists on their retirement cruise turned out to hinge not on them, but on internal Museum politics that -- because they've largely been offstage -- I didn't much care about. I thought the story would show the characters attempting to clear their names as they dodge assassins sent to take them out; instead they pivot very quickly to "I guess we have to kill all the people in charge of the Museum" and only after several murders do they attempt to make a bid for exoneration, at which point it rings rather hollow. And I think I got wrong-footed with the book when two of the characters stand around complaining that their target (who can hear them) is taking too long to die, because that tipped it way too far over into unsympathetic territory for me, rather than fun murder caper times. By the time I got to the final act -- wherein the change of audiobook narrator meant a character who'd had a nice voice in the flashback segments suddenly acquired a bad cockney accent and vocal fry -- I was willing to finish it out, but not much more than that. I wanted this to be lighter on its feet than it was, and more ferocious on the topic of feminism, and I didn't quite get either.
no subject
Date: 2025-07-01 11:56 pm (UTC)Oh, good! Thank you for passing that on. I liked the novel very much, still think it could have used more prose, would absolutely follow the characters into their next adventure even if it contains no murder.
I wouldn't have minded author notes to unpack the references I didn't catch on my own, as I'm sure there were some.
I had notes in my first collection and everyone said they were pretentious and unwarranted and I have never had them in a collection again! Do you have any specific questions?
no subject
Date: 2025-07-02 07:18 pm (UTC)I can't say I recall noticing the prose except for once, which certainly supports the theory that it was on the thin side. (The one moment I noticed was "Never inflict a sentence like that on me again.") Since there are books where I've noticed the prose being flat and thin, I can only conclude that I got sucked into the characters fast enough to crowd out other considerations.
Agreed with the comments in the post you linked (thank you for that!) that, by process of identity elimination, it was easy to guess who was going to be the villain. But the nice twist there, at least for me, is that I didn't foresee gur ivyynva naq gur zheqrere orvat qvssrerag crbcyr. Abg gung jung Avpxl qvq jnf n tbbq qrrq, bs pbhefr, ohg ur jnf qrsraqvat uvzfrys naq frireny bguref, jurernf Uhtb jnf whfg na ragvgyrq qvpx. That made for a nice . . . I'll call it a swerve, I think, since "twist" implies a certain gotcha effect that I don't feel really applies here.
I'm curious, since your wording over there was ambiguous, whether you liked Spectred Isle and then nothing after it, or didn't particularly like Spectred Isle either. I'm with many of the commentators over there in being far more of a mystery reader than a romance reader, so I've been on the fence about trying Charles' other work, purely on genre grounds. I am wired to be far more compelled by romances that happen in the course of other plot than romances that are the plot.
I had notes in my first collection and everyone said they were pretentious and unwarranted and I have never had them in a collection again!
Boo! A pox upon their houses! I like author notes, and anybody who doesn't like them can simply skip them. Whereas those of us who want to read them cannot make them magically manifest where they aren't.
Do you have any specific questions?
Hmmm, none that leap to mind -- it was more a feeling of, I don't know what I don't know, can't spot where there's a reference I'm not getting because then the odds are high I don't even realize a reference is happening. I would totally have gone for translations of the bits in other languages, though, as e.g. my Greek is only about 80% competent at transliterating the alphabet and can't begin to parse the meaning of the words. I wouldn't want the stories disrupted by the translation, but having those off in the back matter somewhere would have been great.
no subject
Date: 2025-07-02 08:53 pm (UTC)(Tragically I do wish to know which sentence it was.)
Since there are books where I've noticed the prose being flat and thin, I can only conclude that I got sucked into the characters fast enough to crowd out other considerations.
Fair! I certainly have my share of characters whom I care about more than their delivery mechanism. In this case it kept snagging at me because the novel seemed to alternate between passages of intensely descriptive introspection and then dialogue with minimal tags and I would have liked the information more evenly infused. It would have mattered less to me if the novel had been more sparely written throughout. As it was, any time people started talking it began to feel under-described. Every now and then a really striking piece of someone's hair or hands or shadows would get through and then vanish again.
That made for a nice . . . I'll call it a swerve, I think
Yes. I like that the cold case of the murder has been concealing another crime; I like that it locks directly into the question of what justice looks like; I like that it is frankly an easier question to answer in the case of the present than the past crime and everyone has to live with that.
I'm curious, since your wording over there was ambiguous, whether you liked Spectred Isle and then nothing after it, or didn't particularly like Spectred Isle either.
Apologies for the ambiguity! Option A: I was surprised and pleased by how much I liked Spectred Isle, waited like everyone else for its f/f sequel that never materialized, tried some other books of Charles' in the meantime and went spang even off the ones third parties had personally recommended. I was willing to take a chance on Death in the Spires because the parts of my friendlist that got to it before me all stressed how much of a departure it was from her usual thing. Spectred Isle itself also feels to me slightly outside of her usual thing, which I had no way of telling when I first read it: closer to secret than alternate history in that its world appears to have had our World War I, but the facts of the War Beneath the War are not known to the general public even though they are the explanation for the wartime and post-war boom in spiritualism, theosophy, other varieties of the occult—the veil between this world and the other side really was rent irreparably and the consequences just leak in now. One of the protagonists deals with these consequences professionally, the other just puts his foot into the uncanny and the next thing he knows his life is suddenly filled with escalating weirdness and the potential for romance, both of which differently frighten him. I recommend it! Both men were soldiers, but took very different kinds of damage from their wars. Their romance evolves in pursuit of unraveling the mystery, which has good, eerily mythic roots and a superb piece of sympathetic magic at the climax. Structurally it's much less polished than Death in the Spires—and it does have the modern historical romance problem where every now and then someone sounds more like 2017 than 1923, especially in bed—but its old weird worldbuilding appealed to me and so did its twin-engined occult thriller and romance which gave me more to work with than the latter alone. I really was looking forward to further books in the series, as I liked its main cast very much. I was told she got hung up in trying to envision a version of World War II that would not just destroy reality and remain uncertain why she was even planning to leap that far forward in time.
Boo! A pox upon their houses! I like author notes, and anybody who doesn't like them can simply skip them. Whereas those of us who want to read them cannot make them magically manifest where they aren't.
Thank you. I actually find that very supportive. It was another experience that helped to convince me that people will like my art only if they don't get close enough to have to interact with me.
Hmmm, none that leap to mind -- it was more a feeling of, I don't know what I don't know, can't spot where there's a reference I'm not getting because then the odds are high I don't even realize a reference is happening. I would totally have gone for translations of the bits in other languages, though, as e.g. my Greek is only about 80% competent at transliterating the alphabet and can't begin to parse the meaning of the words. I wouldn't want the stories disrupted by the translation, but having those off in the back matter somewhere would have been great.
Filed away for future reference.
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Date: 2025-07-02 09:31 pm (UTC)My turn (I think) to apologize for ambiguity: that was not me complaining but rather me directly quoting the book, Nicky objecting to Jem saying "You were who you were because he was who he was." I liked Nicky's riposte because it felt like this sudden, vivid glimpse into the life of Professor Rook, who has no doubt suffered through some truly terrible undergraduate sentences.
(Also, it felt like a line that might have wandered over from Pamela Dean's Tam Lin.)
One of the protagonists deals with these consequences professionally, the other just puts his foot into the uncanny and the next thing he knows his life is suddenly filled with escalating weirdness and the potential for romance, both of which differently frighten him.
Hmmm, I can't imagine why that one landed in the zone of your interests. Nope, it's an insoluble mystery . . .
Thanks for the detailed rec! I will give that one a try, because I really liked Death in the Spires and want to enjoy more of Charles' work, if I can find the bits that will appeal to me similarly.
It was another experience that helped to convince me that people will like my art only if they don't get close enough to have to interact with me.
A POX UPON THEIR HOUSES, I SAY.
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Date: 2025-07-02 10:36 pm (UTC)Yes! Sorry. Oddly, I didn't recognize it as a quote partly because I was thinking of description rather than dialogue. I really did appreciate about Death in the Spires that you could believe the amount of time that had passed as well as the way everyone had remained in their own way frozen in the aftermath of the murder.
(Also, it felt like a line that might have wandered over from Pamela Dean's Tam Lin.)
(True.)
Thanks for the detailed rec! I will give that one a try, because I really liked Death in the Spires and want to enjoy more of Charles' work, if I can find the bits that will appeal to me similarly.
You're welcome! Spectred Isle really is the only other one I've got, but I will hope that more thorough readers of her work could give you others. I am also not designed for the romance novel, so tend to slide off even highly recommended authors if there isn't something else in there to get hold of.
A POX UPON THEIR HOUSES, I SAY.
*hugs*
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Date: 2025-07-02 11:05 pm (UTC)And on reflection, I think I didn't notice the lack of description because I found the dialogue itself fairly engaging. None of it struck me quite as vividly as that quoted line, but it succeeded in expressing personality instead of just conveying informational content -- which, sadly, is not true of every book -- and, as you say, it managed to balance both "time has passed and trauma has changed me" and "I have not quite gotten past who I was all those years ago."
I am also not designed for the romance novel, so tend to slide off even highly recommended authors if there isn't something else in there to get hold of.
About the only romance series I've ever really gotten into was Joanna Bourne's novels where all the lead characters are spies during the Napoleonic era. The first one took a little while to hook me because for structural reasons it had to lean heavily on "we have the immediate hots for each other" (after the opening sequence, the female lead is the prisoner of the male lead for much of the book, so attraction had to be established very rapidly before that power dynamic entered the picture), and the second one failed hard at its mystery component because there was literally only one person who could be responsible, but I still had enough momentum to continue on into the third etc., and I quite enjoyed them. Because they do the thing I like, where the romantic leads fall in love in the course of doing something they're both deeply invested in -- to wit, spying for their respective countries -- rather than falling in love while something else happens in the background. If you ever find yourself interested in trying out such a thing, I do recommend them. (The fourth one even does a better job than I think I've seen anywhere else of using a sex scene as therapeutic healing for a character who has in the past been sexually traumatized.)
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Date: 2025-07-03 04:49 am (UTC)Agreed the dialogue was successfully doing much of the character lifting, to the point where unattributed dialogue could in fact be correctly assigned, and it seems to have worked just fine for many readers! I just notice the other thing. It felt like a drop-out in the mix of a track.
Because they do the thing I like, where the romantic leads fall in love in the course of doing something they're both deeply invested in -- to wit, spying for their respective countries -- rather than falling in love while something else happens in the background. If you ever find yourself interested in trying out such a thing, I do recommend them. (The fourth one even does a better job than I think I've seen anywhere else of using a sex scene as therapeutic healing for a character who has in the past been sexually traumatized.)
That's very cool. I don't think I have ever heard anything about this series and I appreciate the heads-up! I am not automatically allergic to romance in a narrative, I just can't find much purchase on the category conventions.