Blogtour review - The Ten Thousand Doors of January

The Ten Thousand Doors of January
Alex E Harrow
Orbit, 12 September 2019
HB, 371pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance copy of The Ten Thousand Doors of January and to Tracey Fenton for inviting me to take part in the book's blog tour.

The Ten Thousand Doors of January is a book I'd recommend 100%, probably one of my favourite books so far this year (and it's been a good year!)

At times exciting, tearjerking, heart-poundingly tense, and romantic (and sometimes all of these together) this fantasy adventure is both about the urgent need to see, and to cherish, the magic in life, and about growing up, forgiving and living. Every page burns with life, with wisdom and with love.

January Scaller is a young girl growing up in New England in the house of Mr Locke, a gilded age robber baron whose passion is archaeology - or at least, archaeological loot, which he employs January's father to hunt down, sending him all over the world. January's glimpses of Julian grow fewer and fewer, while Locke attempts to mould her into a "good girl" - quiet, well behaved, obedient - with limited success. January is a lonely child but she is comforted by her dog, Bad, by the comics and storybooks shared by the grocer's boy Samuel... and by the strange tokens and gifts which occasionally turn up.

Intertwined with January's story is that of another young women, Ade, who sought adventure, ran away from her childhood home, and found it, at great cost. To begin with it's not clear what the stories have to do with each, nor with the readings January gives us from a strange book she has found. The jumps between these in the early part of the book may seem a bit jarring, but bear with the story, it all makes sense in the end. The point is not the destination but the journey, and Harrow is an excellent guide, leading the reader through a rich, emotional itinerary as January grows up and observes her place in the world. Dwelling within Locke's sphere of wealth and privilege, she has experiences and advantages not available to others of her "mixed" heritage, but she's both aware of how fragile her position is and terribly conscious of loss, of her father seeming to reject her on her endless quests.

A bookish girl, clearly, one prone to seek solace in stories, to dwell in her own imagination, biddable, polite and eager to please.

Well, yes... and NO. As January's life unravels over a few terrifying weeks, and she faces the loss of everything and everyone she knows, she proves to have steel in her, and unsuspected gifts. I don't think I've read anything recently as tense as the pages where January suffers blow after blow - often through being too trusting, just not quite quick enough, too ready to blurt out what she has seen or suspects. Frustrating for the reader at some points, but showing her humanity. January learns some hard lessons, and several time brings disaster on those she loves. While never less than. absorbing there are places where this story is very hard to read - a triumphant token, I'd say, of Harrow's ability to convey the beauty and terror of January's life.

There is a darkness, a destruction, at work in the world, alongside the complacency of the opening chapters - this is 1901, a time of progress, of civilisation, of peace and progress - and January only gradually learns what it may have to do with her and what, unknowingly, it may have cost her. Then she needs to choose her side and question all her assumptions.

In all, this is a glorious book, packed with insights, empathy, humour grim in places) and above all, with the personality, shrewdness and insight - above all, the self-awareness - of this very remarkable protagonist.

January will run. Monsters will follow. Hearts will break...

And remember: "Men are mostly cowards..."

For more about this book, see the publisher's website here.

To buy the book - and you should - you can visit your local bookshop, of course, or use Hive which supports local bookshops - or there is Blackwell's, Foyle's, Waterstones, WH Smith or Amazon.

#Review #Giveaway - The Monster by Seth Dickinson

The Monster (Masquerade, 2)
Seth Dickinson
Tor UK, 19 September
PB, 544pp

I'm grateful to Tor UK for an advance copy of The Monster to consider for review. (Thanks, Jamie!)

The Review

Dickinson's first book The Traitor (or The Traitor Baru Cormorant, depending where published) was a truly different take on fantasy, introducing us to Baru, a young woman in a newly colonised territory now ruled by the Imperial Republic of Falcrest. As well as showing the economic and cultural damage done to Baru's people, the book gave us a determined and ruthless hero who set out, by rising within the Falcresti administration, to destroy the oppressor from within.

The Monster - published today - picks up right where The Traitor [etc] left off. To earn a place in the hierarchy of Falcrest, Baru fomented a rebellion (destroying a Falcresti fleet to demonstrate her bona fides to the rebels) which she then betrayed. As a coup de grace, she executed her lover, the duchess Tain Hu, by drowning her, a powerful scene repeated at the start of The Monster. Now Baru has the "in" she wanted to the élite of Falcrest and she can do as she wishes.

If only life were so simple.

The Monster pulls off the awesome feat of being, if anything, even better than The Traitor. While the latter was superb in demonstrating the rottenness of colonialism, and the corruption of Baru in her quest for its overthrow, it was very preoccupied with strategy, tactics and war. The present book, on the other hand, takes the struggle every much into Baru's soul and visits its consequences on her. The betrayals she has made have unmade her; the injuries she suffered have cut off part of her sight (or is that, too, an outworking of guilt?)

And what she did has set enemies on her. The Falcresti Navy, whose ships Baru burned and whose sailors she murdered as an agent provocateur,  has not forgiven. Nor have the erstwhile rebels. But it also turns out that far from being a disciplined, orderly polity, the powers in Falcrest are effectively warring barons, contesting as much among themselves as with their external enemies. Wielding different powers and representing different interests - navy, secret service, science, church, Parliament - they blackmail, bribe and scheme in the name not only of Falcrest but of different, longer term goals. Masks are worn in the Empire of Masks, loyalties unclear, and politics is a great game.

In The Monster the apparent central question is whether or not there will be war with the Oriati Mbo, a southern power very different and very alien to Falcrest. This potential conflict between two mighty opponents seems to hold the seeds of world chaos, yet there are those who would plan exactly that.

The real question is, I think, slightly different. As these devious cryptarchs play their game, I found myself asking, what does winning mean? Falcrest itself is, interestingly, not portrayed except through it agents: we don't meet its people at home while we see a lot of its rivals and subject peoples and their lands. What even is Falcrest? is it real at all? I wondered.

In contrast to that mystery, loved the Oriati Mbo and its people. Here Dickinson gives us a very different culture from those in the previous book, a world revolving around the idea of trim, something never exactly defined but which seems to be a mixture of fate, luck and being in good spiritual standing. In a couple of flashbacks we see the impact of this on the lives of characters who will be important later on - and eventually, when Baru collides with an Oriati ambassador, we also see their horror at the spiritual knots she has bound about herself through her actions in the first book.

It's, in many ways, a grimmer read than The Traitor, focussing on a wounded Baru who is no longer manipulating events but rather being driven by them; drink sodden, fleeing enemies who are able to strike and strike again. The fact that Dickinson still makes this compelling and at times even funny illustrates his eeriest knack for producing writing that gets under your skin - or perhaps inside your mind - and continually comes back with pithy asides and observations about power, human nature and human frailty.

I was also impressed by the range of characters here - represented as from a teeming mix of races and cultures, with non-binary people very visable and women in many active roles, especially in the Falcresti Navy. (There is a running joke of these Navy women assuming that men will be impulsive and emotional).

This is the sort of book that cannot be rushed, each conversation, each scene, reveals and conceals new layers of meaning with the relationships between old allies and new enemies bringing whole new dimensions even to events I thought I'd understood.

A great read, with a rollicking sense of life whether in its depiction of the Falcresti navy women, of the scheming Cryptarchs or the teeming world of the Oriati Mbo. Don't deny yourself, get it now.

The Giveaway

And I might be able to help with that... due to the generosity of Tor and the fact that I found a bookshop that already had The Monster on sale, I have a spare copy. So I am declaring this GIVEWAY season.

Share this review on Twitter (I'm old-fashioned, I don't have other social media) and tag me @bluebookballoon (yes, @ me!) and on Sunday 22 September at 6pm I'll pick someone at random to get the spare copy. (UK and Ireland only I'm afraid).

You don't even have to follow me, though if you would like to, that's fine too.

For more about The Monster and to buy the book, see the publisher's website here.

Blogtour review - The Penny Black by Rob Parker

The Penny Black (Ben Bracken, 3)
Rob Parker
Endeavour Media, August 2019
E-book, paperback (225pp)

I'm grateful to the author and publisher for a free advance copy of The Penny Black and for inviting me to take part in the book's blogtour.

This is Parker's third thriller featuring ex soldier and ex con Ben Bracken, following A Wanted Man and Morte Point. I'm interested how Parker is developing the series. While Bracken (under a variety of aliases) remains centre, in this book he feels rather more detached from the conspiracy themes of the first two (though some familiar and unwelcome faces still pop up).

Bracken is hiding out in the remote village of Horning on the Norfolk Broads. I last read about Horning in Arthur Ransom's Swallows and Amazons children's series, about forty years ago and as one might expect Bracken's experience of it is rather different from how it is portrayed there! Behind the idyllic seeming English village with its boatyards and quaint pubs, there are dark goings-on. Bracken ought to leave well alone - he's hunted by an entire alphabet of acronymed law enforcement agencies, crime syndicates ands spooks and should be keeping his head down.

Needless to say, being Ben Bracken, he doesn't, and thus begins a fast-paced and tension-filled story. It isn't, though, perhaps quite as relentless as Morte Point with more time for Bracken to reflect on who he is, where he has been and on his responsibility to those around him. Put simply he is a target and those hunting him have shown that if he appears in their sites they won't be too fussy about who else gets hurt. That's part of the atmosphere of these books - it's not a question of who Bracken can trust or the lengths they are prepared to go to, it's a matter of how bad things will get and what he might have to do. That's what triggers his sense of guilt and responsibility.

I wouldn't have it any other way but that didn't stop me almost shouting "don't do it!" several times as he stuck his neck out.

So, all in all, another fun and tense episode with some deeper themes beginning to emerge. A couple of details seemed a little far-fetched, perhaps, but the think that's inherent in this genre (go back and re-read The Thirty Nine Steps if you want proof of that).

Ideal reading, I'd say, if you're off for that boating holiday on the Broads...

To connect with Rob on Twitter, go here. His website is https://robparkerauthor.com/.

Review - Bone China by Laura Purcell

Cover design by David Mann

Bone China
Laura Purcell
Raven Books, 19 September 2019
HB, e, 448pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for a free advance e-copy of Bone China via NetGalley.

'You would never dream of what goes on behind those walls.'

This latest of Laura Purcell's spooky historical thrillers, following from The Silent Companions and The Corset,  opens with young Hester Why squashed into a stagecoach, travelling into the West Country. Apart from the difficulties caused by six people being crammed into space for four, she suffers from an early version of a very modern problem ('a brute beast of a man is spreading his legs') and thirsts for her gin flask. It's a bit of a nightmare, which ends when another passenger is hurt and Hester is the only one who steps forward to care for him.

Which isn't the right thing for a woman travelling alone to do, in the early 19th century, and only draws attention to her, which is worse. Hester needs to keep a low profile, for reasons we will discover later - but first we see her introduced to Morvoren House, a chilly clifftop residence where she will care for a mistress in declining health, Miss Pinecroft, and a strange younger woman, Mis Pinecroft's ward, Rosewyn.

Purcell lays on the Gothic touches with delight when it comes to Morvoren House. There are mysterious sounds in the night, superstitious locals, a self-absorbed, almost speechless old woman - and Rosewyn, who spends her time tearing up Bibles to make protective charms. There are surly servants and there are secrets - those belonging to the house, and those Hester brings with her. Above all, there is the threat of the fairies, and the fear that they will carry off a young woman in the night.

The mysteries of Morvoren House can only be understood if we go back 40 years, to the arrival of Louise and her father, Ernest. The rest of the family have died of consumption: a double blow for Ernest who, as a doctor, was unable to save his own. It becomes clear that Ernest is haunted by guilt,  and he sets out to defeat the disease, performing experiments on convicts in caves deep below the house.

The mysteries of Hester Why can only, similarly, be understood if we go back several months to a house in Hanover Square, London, where young Esther Stevens takes up a new post as nurse to Lady Rose Windrop. A sympathetic character, Esther nevertheless has a whiff of the dark about her, and Sir Arthur Windrop soon has cause to ponder the series of deaths that seems to follow her... in many respects I found this section of the novel the most absorbing. There is a real tension between Esther and Lady Rose's severe mother-in-law, a real issue around Esther's (and her mother's) knowledge of midwifery and their rivalry with (masculine) medicine. Esther's somewhat brooding, obsessive nature is piqued by her closeness to Lady Rose and the reader senses many currents just below the surface. This part of the story could, in fact, almost stand as a novel in itself and I thought it was a slight shame that it needed to be truncated so that it could serve as Hester's backstory.

The same is true, though to a lesser degree, of Ernest and Louise's story. More wholeheartedly Gothic, and more of a piece with the "present day" narrative, theirs in nevertheless a tale of loss, grief and Romantic 19th century obsessiveness.

Yet I wouldn't, I think, see these stories unplanned and presented one by one. That would be like cutting up a book of Blake's poems to present each alone on the wall. Read together, the impact of these related episodes is more than their sum. We see, for example, in Esther and Louise, two capable young women who in a different age would be doctors. ('You were born to the wrong sex, my dear'). Indeed, Louise has surpassed her doctor father. We also see, ion different forms, the effects of grief and (if I'm not wrong) post-natal depression (perhaps more than one example of the latter). The metaphor of china also appears, slyly, here and there. It's something Purcell will make a great deal of in the concluding section where the rather unique collection displayed in Miss Pinecroft's sitting room seems to have a life of its own, but earlier we see Lady Rose as '...a porcelain figure... a wife was prized for smoothness and lustre'. In the selection or rejection of china as a gift Purcell encodes relationships: something given to a daughter but clearly chosen for a dead wife, or a service rejected when it offends the mystical tenets of class and taste.

And the bone china, too, has its dark secrets...

I loved this story, the darkness in each part, the hint, almost, of sulphur attaching to Hester, her combination of both a vulnerable and wronged young woman and a person who knows things, who brings her own will and her own plans with her. Miss Pinecroft was an enigma, seems ugly a slight character manipulated by others but one whom again, ultimately has inner strength and power. But almost every character here is strongly drawn and complex (apart perhaps from the clergyman, but there's a bit of humour in that!)

Strongly recommended. Get your copy now and read it when the wind gets up and the nights are dark...

For more about the book, and to order it, see the publisher's website here.

Blogtour review - The Girl the Sea Gave Back by Adrienne Young

The Girl the Sea Gave Back
Adrienne Young
Titan Books, 3 September 2019
PB, e, 320pp

I'm grateful to Titan for a free advance reading copy of The Girl the Sea Gave Back and for inviting me to take part in the blogtour.

Set in the same universe as The Sky in the Deep, The Girl the Sea Gave Back takes place ten years later and follows both Halvard as as an adult and leader of his, now united, people - with flashbacks to his earlier life - and a new character, Tova (the "girl" of the title).

Tova is an exile from her own clan, the Kyrr, who has a valuable talent - the ability to cast runes and predict the future. She was given grudging sanctuary by the Svell, a people who sense opportunity in the losses that befell the Nãdhir, but she is neither welcomed nor loved: rather, blamed for any misfortune that occurs and shunned as a witch, she is tolerated only so long as she is useful.

I found the story of this self-possessed yet haunted young woman both captivating and sad. Tova believes herself cast away for some dreadful crime, taint or feud - but she was too young at the time to understand what. Young's imagined world - clearly based loosely on Norse culture - is a place of clan warfare and deeply held blood feuds, one where an exile is unlikely to survive long with no-one to shelter them or avenge their death. It's a poetically imagined country of forests, mist-wracked fjords and stoutly fortified villages where violent death can be ill afforded but is nevertheless common. And Tova has to face her own responsibility for this spiral of destruction and revenge: the Svell are finely balanced between those who want to slaughter their weakened neighbours and those who prefer peace. There's no perception of any morality in this - it's all about what will benefit the clan in the long run, and Tova's prophecies may affect this balance, especially as interpreted by the ambitious Jorrund, the closest that Tova has to a guardian among the Svell.

The ethics of self vs clan, survival against consequences, are at the heart of the story, Young taking her time to set up the complex dilemma Tova faces - a matter not only of humanity but of the mysterious Spinners of fate and of the gods themselves. It's a situation that also draws in Halvard, struggling to accept his destiny as leader and doubting his ability. Surely he was chosen for peace, not a time of conflict? Both protagonists are complex, believable people struggling with the hand that Fate has dealt them. They are not experienced in the ways of the world, both stumbling and failing and aghast at the results of that.

I just loved this book. Apart from the flashbacks, events unfold pell-mell over a few days with little room for error among the contending groups and little prospect of mercy when things go wrong. My heart was in my mouth as things came to a head - things are kept at a high pitch of tension right to the end.

Excellent, and strongly recommended.

You can buy The Girl the Sea Gave Back from your local high street bookshop, including via Hive; or from Blackwell's, Foyles, Waterstones, WH Smith or Amazon.

For more about the book please see the Titan website.

Review - The Silver Wind by Nina Allan

Cover by Julia Lloyd

The Silver Wind
Nina Allan
Titan Books, 10 September 2019
PB, 366pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance copy of The Silver Wind to consider for review.

The Silver Wind feels to me like a key to Allan's writing.

Over the past couple of years I have loved her novels The Race, The Rift and most recently, The Dollmaker. In these (mostly) earlier stories loosely following the career of Martin Newland and of a group of characters round him whose histories, identities and lives shift, merge and overlap, I can see foreshadowings of themes and features of those other books.

The devastated south coast of England that is the backdrop to parts of The Race.

The theme of loss and abandonment central to The Rift.

Andrew Garvie, the marginalised (dwarf) protagonist of The Dollmaker, that book's quest for an elusive creator, Ewa Chaplin, and the intertwining landscape of her stories that forms the background to the story (including the alternate, militaristic England in which a famous actress departs or dies, and perhaps the germ of the "court dwarf" theme itself.

More fundamentally there's Allan's forensic, yet tender, sense of place - demonstrated in Garvie's journey through Reading to the West of England and in The Silver Wind through an almost passionate exploration of the Streets of Southwark, of the woods of Shooter's Hill, of South Coast towns. In her writing you almost know these places, you feel your feet wandering down alleys and lanes and you feel the strangeness when a step takes you out of your way.

I'm in danger of. dissolving into mere vapid praise. It's hard to write this review because my usual go-to move - lightly summarise the plot and draw out memorable incidents - just won't work. This is less a single story than a collection, but a collection in which every new story reworks, reinterprets, deconstructs or comments on the others.

The same characters recur but with drastically different histories. In the first, "The Hurricane" apprentice watchmaker Owen Andrews travels to London from Devon to take up a new post, leaving Newland and his sister Dora behind and remembered but peripheral. In another, set in that militaristic alt-world, Andrews is a master craftsman, holed up in a remote wood (hints of fairytale) who Newland, an estate agent, seeks out. In other stories the relationship between Newland and Dora is explored and Andrews is a marginal figure.

Yet behind these differences at the same time these are the same people, the stories are the same stories. Explanations in one story sometimes cast light on the others, sometimes not. We never learn what became of Andrews after he flees at the end of "The Hurricane", set seemingly in an alternate 1920s (but apparently warping to the present day at the end). Never, that is, unless the call back at the beginning of "Rewind" (which is surely looking back to the, or a, 19th century?) is the answer.  Motifs recur - the Circus Man on the beach in a South Coast seaside town, the lesbian "Aunts", an Uncle Henry who plays different roles. Most of all, perhaps, a sense of loss, of mourning a dead sister, a dead wife, a dead lover.

Complex, multilayered, multithreaded, this is less a collection of stories than its own mythology - in that respect it reminded me of M John Harrison's Viriconium stories - both unified and driven by the theme of time, time lost, regained, altered, of clocks and watches, of the mysterious tourbillon mechanism and i's creator, Breuget. Often introduced into the story as gifts (often from Uncle Henry) and referred to as "time machines" (a nice pun) the watches and clocks which Andrews constructs have abilities that go beyond merely marking time. They are active, though we never know the exact rules: it's as though the stories here are the same story, running through permutations and alternatives yet influencing each other as though different worlds overlap, a whole litter of Schrödinger's cats running round the house with different balls of wool, always separate , always entangled.

This book makes for rich, significant storytelling, storytelling where every word matters, every story is complete but the collection as a whole is also complete, adding whole levels of meaning. It's a book you can come back and reread, with new insights, where every different part adds much to the rest.

Very enjoyable, very thought-provoking and like a glimpse into an entirely new world. Finally, look at that glorious cover by Julia Lloyd - truly a thing of beauty!

Strongly recommended.

For more about this book, see the publisher's website here. You can buy it from your local bookshop, including via Hive Books, or from Blackwell's, Waterstones, Foyle's, WH Smith or Amazon.

Review - The Nightjar by Deborah Hewitt

The Nightjar
Deborah Hewitt
Tor (Pan MacMillan), 5 September 2019
PB, e, 459pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for a free advance copy of The Nightjar to consider for review.

In Hewitt's debut novel, Alice Wyndham, an unremarkable young woman living and working in London, discovers that she has unsuspected abilities and a place in a magical and unseen world, another version of London. This knowledge brings not only wonder - Alice can see the birds which accompany all humans and which safeguard their souls - but danger too; danger to her, and danger to her family and friends.

I love the premiss of this kind of fantasy.

The secret, alternative world, with its own rules and society.

The possibility of escape from the banal, the ordinary, the constricting (Hewitt is rather good on Alice's awful, sleazy boss and her dreadful workmates).

The process of denying, then considering, then accepting the staggering reality - and then of trying to reengineer one's life to include the new while holding on to loved ones, familiar things and what's seen as safe. Hewitt pitches things just right here - too much resistance and the reader wants to shake the protagonist by the shoulders and tell them to get on with things, too little and there's no tension.

And the world she describes - a place called the Rookery, an echo of past London full of disappeared buildings and quaintly old-fashioned scenes - is real, vivid and interesting, as are the people in it. This is clearly the first in a series and the author sets up plenty of stuff for the future: four distinct schools of "legacies" (what we might call varying magical gifts), a police service for the Rookery, a death-cult, necromancers, gangsters, spies. Not all of it is explored fully but that's fine, I'm sure we will get there!

There's also a potential smouldering romance. To my mind this didn't work quite so well as the world building. It's difficult to say a great deal about this without giving away plot and this is one book where plot secrets matter. I will just say that the character to whom Alice is attracted (plainly to us, less so to her) is very mercurial and there are reasons for this - but it makes the idea of there being a relationship between them somewhat daunting. Another factor that impedes this is the sheer flow of events. Once Alice discovers the Rookery, Hewitt doesn't give her any time to acclimatise, things begin to happen to her and she's on a deadline, driven by a crisis back at home. This leads her into a series of scary encounters. For me, things crossed the line from being exciting into just too frenetic - I'd have liked more time to admire the scenery and get to know Jude, Sasha and the other residents of Coram House - but this is very much a personal preference: if you like your fantasy really busy and action filled, The Nightjar should be just what you want.

Overall this is a solid beginning to a series and left me wanting to know more and wondering what will happen next. I'd like a bit more breathing space in future books, possibly, and some exploration of the Rookery and its relation with our world but I will look forward to what Hewitt has coming.

For more information about The Nightjar, and links to buy the book, see the publisher's website here.