#Review - Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower by Tamsyn Muir

Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower

Tamsyn Muir (narrated by Moira Quirk)

Recorded Books Inc, 30 November 2020

Available as: Audio, 4 hours 9 minutes

Source: Audio subscription

ASIN: B08N2L23D4

I listened to Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower as an audio book.

I have to admit that I listened to Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower because I've been reading Tamsyn Muir's Locked Tomb series as audio (if that makes sense) so it popped up as a recommendation. Keen to see what else Muir had written (and given Quirk's excellent work on those stories) I downloaded it.

The first things to say is that this is a very different - and simpler - story than the Locked Tomb books. It's basically a fairy-story crossed with a D&D session, as Floralinda, abandoned at the top of her tower by a witch, gives up on a prince rescuing her and has to fight her way down to the bottom, overcoming a different monster on every level. She shows great ingenuity doing this and it's fun seeing her outwit worse and worse monsters and accumulate some useful resources.

In doing this Floralinda also meets and befriends a fairy with broken wings, and learns a lot about being practical, strong and un-Princesslike.

Then things turn dark.

Through the progression of monsters, variously despatched by skill, guile and luck, we see a slow transformation of the princess. This is reflected not only in her fights with monsters but in other respects too - her developing relationship with that fairy, and her attitude to her own life. What with injuries, holdups while weapons are honed or resources gathered, and close scrapes with injury or death, there is both time and cause for reflection by Floralinda on what she wants. 

And when she decides what that is, there is nobody who can stop her.

One of the really fun things about this book was seeing Floralinda develop into somebody who can honestly admit that there are bad things she must do, and other bad things that she wants to do and that she is going to do. And then seeing her emerge as a person who can put her own life, and that change, into wider context and decide that perhaps, no, some of those are things she won't do. While she does develop in skill and strength, it's also a moral process, a coming of age, that makes her question who she is and what she wants from life.

If that makes this book sound over solemn and freighted with Messages, it really isn't, it is immensely pacy, enjoyable to read and really funny, if inevitably gruesome in places. While it was a bit of a shock at first to hear Quirk's palate of voices used in a different context from her Locked Tomb readings, and I did initially associate them with the characters form those stories, the personalities here are very different and very quickly came to stand apart.

Recommended, and hearing this made me realise afresh what a wide-ranging and flexible writer Muir is. 

You can get the audio of Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower here.

#Review - Ogres by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Ogres
Adrian Tchaikovsky
Rebellion, 15 March 2022
Available as: HB, 144pp (17 March), e, audio
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9781786185280

I'm grateful to the publisher for a free advance copy of Ogres via Netgalley to consider for review.

In this standalone novella, Tchaikovsky explores a future where genetic engineering has produced a race of monsters - the "ogres" of the title - who oppress and dominate humans.

The main character is Torquell, the son of a village head, who comes across as a bit of a tearaway, reluctant to tug his forelock before the Masters. Good for him I say - the ogres in this book have adopted the role of feudal overlords, taking what they will and treating the peasants abominably. It later becomes clear that they also operate a form of robber-baron capitalism, with the worst aspects the Industrial Revolution gleefully reintroduced. So I'm all for opposition, but it seems doomed.

As an outlaw, Torquell's challenge is then first to understand how all this came to be and then to do something about it. It's a formidable task, as the ogres are not only collectively in charge but individually stronger and much bigger than any given human. But there is more going on here than that, something hinted at by the story being narrated not by Torquell, but to him, in the second person ('You were always trouble' are its opening words) so we sense other actors on the stage, perhaps.

I really enjoyed this one. The world which is seen through other eyes may seem rather alien, and be set in the future, but increasingly I began to see correspondences with our own world. It's explicitly a near future dystopia (I think it's fair to call it that) representing a world which claims to have solved certain problems - environmental and social - but at the pice of introducing others (you'll have to read it to understand which). Tchaikovsky's argument is though, I think, that those "new" problems, embodied in the society that he describes here may not really be that new at all. As with the best SF, the book holds up a mirror to our own society, both to its evident flaws and also to the damage that may be done in trying to correct them. 

In centring on a driven, if originally reluctant, leader figure it also gently satirises the hero tropes of the dystopian genre: that opening passage continues 'Inevitable, really. And you weren't to know it, but you were following a particular trajectory. The Young Prince is always trouble...' The narrator returns to this theme several times throughout the story, comparing Torquell to the protagonist in the Hero's Journey, not always to his credit. The biological determinism of the process that created the ogres therefore hangs over Torquell himself as a sort of plot determinism, asking us what he is, why, and what he might become.

And whether the template will be followed to the end...

For a short book - I read it in a day - this one packs a tremendous amount in, and truly left me thinking.

For more information about Ogres, see the publisher's website here.

 

#Review - What Big Teeth by Rose Szabo

Design by Julia Lloyd

What Big Teeth

Rose Szabo

Titan, 6 July 2021

Available as: PB, 352pp, e

Source: Advance copy from publisher

ISBN(PB): 9781789097818

I'm grateful to Titan Books for an advance copy of What Big Teeth to consider for review.

Titles can misdirect, and the suggestion from this one that Szabo's horror-novel-with-feelings is a modern take on a fairytale rather undersells what the book actually does. It is I think rather more complicated. Yes, there are wolfish creatures here, and a grandmother (in fact, two). Yes, those creatures can and will eat you, and yes, in a sense Eleanor Zarrin is an innocent when she returns to her family home after years of exile, and she does risk ending up a morsel. 

BUT

I found myself comparing the setup here with other, perhaps less likely, forerunners. What Big Teeth is in some respect I think also a clever twist on - of all things Cold Comfort Farm (and of course the breathy rural romances it was parodying). Young Eleanor, who has been out in the wider world, arrives home without a role or place in the family and the one she eventually adopts is of taking on responsibilities, offering help, and putting things right. She has a real sense of duty, impressive given she was sent away to a Roman Catholic boarding school her time at which has washed her memory of most of what she knew about her family. The separation was, it emerges, not accidental but engineered - a puzzle and cause of guilt to Eleanor.

One might actually think that Eleanor is very ill-suited to manage, and in her eyes save, the ragged family she encounters when she arrives home, and indeed things don't work out well at all. The family is a collection of grotesques, inhabiting a tumbledown house above Winterport, on the coast of Maine. Grandma Persephone, who earns the family's living growing poisonous bulbs in her greenhouse. Older sister Luma. Cousin Rhys and Grandpa Miklos. Eleanor's mother, who spends most of her time submerged in a variety of tubs and baths, lest her skin dry out. And close family friend Arthur, who comes and goes as he wishes but seems under some kind of constraint or control (there are things he literally can't talk about).

It is from one perspective, a family of monsters, a real Addams Family, feared by the town, living in a big spooky house full of hidden passages and apt to go howling through the woods on a whim. From another perspective, they're a big, slightly dysfunctional, combative group of eccentrics with many secrets who have to hold their ground against a hostile modern world.

As she tries to come to terms with what, and who, she is, and to discover how the family works, so she can save them, Eleanor finds that she actually knows very little - even taking account of what she forgot. Feeling obliged to take on a central role after an untoward death, she reaches out for help, but may just have made things worse...

I loved this book. A mystery wrapped in a horror story inside a coming-of-age novel, and exploring themes of being different, of responsibility and of confronting guilt for what those who came before us did, it delicately paints a whole world. There are hints and references to wider genre themes - those townsfolk are perfectly capable of breaking out the pitchforks and torches, right? And Grandpa Miklos's origin story back in the silent Old Country has distinct echoes of classic horror. But Szabo doesn't let themself be tied down by fussiness over types of monster or that urban fantasy thing where there is an established and known order to magic and mystery. Everything here is vague, raw, dangerous and an untamed. 

In What Big Teeth, some characters know things. But they don't know as much as they think, and some of it is wrong. Any broader supernatural society is mysterious, and likely as much a threat as the townsfolk. There's a reason for the Zarrins being hidden away in a remote settingt, far from the world. Even the year is unclear - there was been a War in Europe but I'm not sure if it was the First or the Second - we are in a cultural space which could fit almost any year from 1920 to 1955. The vagueness reinforces the feeling of isolation, of having nothing and nobody to resort to or trust, leaving Eleanor very much on her own in trying to put right what's happened.

An entertaining, creepy and satisfying slice of horror, genuinely different and great fund to read.

For more information about What Big Teeth, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - Near the Bone by Christina Henry

Design by Julia Lloyd

Near the Bone

Christina Henry

Titan Books, 13 April 2021

Available as: HB, 363pp, audio, e

Source: Advance e-copy via Netgalley

ISBN(HB): 9781789095951

I'm grateful to Titan Books for an advance e-copy of Near the Bone via NetGalley to consider for review.

Near the Bone is an exciting and absorbing, if at times harrowing, read.  Above all it's a MEGA page turner - if you pick this one up, you'd best clear your diary for a few hours because you won't want to put it down again until the last page.

We first meet Mattie, out in the woods where she lives with her husband William on a remote mountain in the US, on an errand. Mattie discovers something new and strange. Mattie debates what to do. Should she stop and investigate, at risk of making herself late? Or should she hurry on? We soon see that her dilemma is framed entirely in terms of what William would want her to do.

She's terrified of getting it wrong.

And she will get it wrong. Because William is a manipulative abuser who has Mattie at his mercy. ('She wasn't going to think of how strange it was, because William told her what to think and she was sure he wouldn't like her thinking on this'). 

I won't give much more detail on that, because it would be spoilery. Henry reveals the detail of what has happened to Mattie slowly, layer by layer, building up a picture and showing us Mattie's unenviable life, every detail calculated to keep her under William's sway: starved, beaten, denied any warmth or humanity ('That's why William was always starving you, always working you when you were exhausted. Without food and sleep you couldn't think, couldn't fight him...') Much of her own history is lost to her, and it is only revealed as we learn about it, over a harrowing and desperate period of two or three days which turns her life inside out. 

I also do not want to be too specific because there are some really dark themes here - themes of abuse and control - which may be triggering for some. For me, it was a mark of how good Henry is at spinning a story that even in the darkest moments I wasn't tempted to put this book aside. I had to know what would happen. It helps that, alongside the tense drama between Mattie and William, there is another strand here - that discovery of Mattie's leads to glimpses of something strange and deadly in the woods. Something that has been killing the local game. Something with uncanny grace and strength, and a greater than animal cunning. 

William becomes obsessed with this thing, whatever it is, seeing it almost as a supernatural test of him. That might have given Mattie some respite except that is short-lived as other complications come into her narrow world. And the one things she has learned in her life with William is that complications are trouble, and trouble is HER FAULT.

This story was creepily, scarily believable, William a true monster but one who seems, increasingly, familiar, his attitudes those of men that we all know about, his sense of entitlement and dominance recognisable from tragedies that happen aria and gain. The comparison of man and monster is explicit: William in the cabin is bad, the beast outside apparently worse, and Mattie is trapped between the two of them. For other writers that dilemma might seem overdone, but Henry's writing gets under the skin of both Mattie and William so well that it just seems, well, true.

This is both a cracking good read and a real exploration of human darkness. Not a dark fairytale, despite the overtones of big-bad-monster-in-the-wood, but much more uncomfortable, closer to home and raising urgent questions.

Finally, they say never judge a book by its cover but... that cover! 

For more information about Near the Bone, see the Titan website here.

Review - Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse

Trail of Lightning (The Sixth World, 1)
Rebecca Roanhorse
Hodder & Stoughton, 28 November 2019
PB, 304pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy of this book via NetGalley.

I love a book with a big, bold premise. Trail of Lightning certainly delivers this - Maggie Hoskie is a Native American monster hunter in a post-apocalyptic world where climate change ('the Big Water') has inundated much of the US and left the Diné (Navajo) people clinging to a precarious existence on part of their ancestral land, albeit (and ironically) subject to endless drought.

Maggie herself is an orphan, rescued and raised by the god Neizgháni - who trained her as an apprentice hunter before disappearing. Put baldly that sounds a lot of backstory in a short book (and there is more) but Roanhorse very skilfully parcels it out, only revealing details and facts as they are needed and allowing the reader to piece things together. The setup gives Maggie a degree of vulnerability - she is alone and mortal, facing supernatural threats that don't pull their punches, and her past has left her unpopular among the cops ('Law Dogs'), gangs, mercenaries and trade bosses who vie for power in Dinétah. There's sexism, too, highlighted when she's negotiating with a family over the price for monster-hunting job when their daughter has been snatched away by a 'tsé-naayéé'. ('Maybe they don't want to pay because I'm a woman').

I was impressed by the gritty reality of the world that Roanhorse describes, the impoverishment and general air of scrabbling for existence in a hard world. Of course it's not too much of a stretch to suggest that for Native Americans that is less an awful dystopian future than a version of their present lives and that they are already living in a post-apocalyptic world. Indeed, as described here the Big Water and its aftereffects have brought benefits such as independence ('Dinetáh risen') and - for some - even wealth. That's not a point overtly made - the story is really too fast paced to allow much time for such comparisons (though nor does the book gloss over injustices and marginalisation, past or present). Indeed it is pretty much contentious action from introducing Maggie on that first monster hunt to a final, awful confrontation with gods, monsters and vigilantes.

In between she's basically on the run, collecting a ragged assortment of allies who (of course) have their own agendas and trying to work out what's going on. Something really bad is at large, slaughtering people in the towns and leaving that trail of lightning. Even the best organised places aren't immune.

To solve the mystery, Maggie has to dig deep into her people's traditions, telling us in the course of that of a fantastical collection of gods and heroes from the old stories who are now, it seems, all to real in Dinetáh (I loved that Roanhorse makes no concessions to the English speaker, or indeed, review writer or typesetter, using spellings that I literally can't find the symbols for - for example, a word like 'wóshdee' where the two final "e"s ought to have both an acute accent é and a little mark underneath ę. My keyboard will allow one or the other but not both at once.) I loved this sense of thinness between two worlds, of the inhabitants of story walking this world, and it's done very plausibly (one god, Ma'ii/ Coyote, is a particularly natty dresser).

Maggie herself is a wonderful character - resourceful, slightly bitter in a way that's almost noir ('I lean back and start at the ceiling of the truck, asking the heavens for help dealing with men with their heads up their assess. I'm pretty sure no help will be forthcoming, but I feel the need to ask anyway') and always, always, slightly disappointed by those around her but carrying on anyway. She doesn't know everything, she's not always right (for example, she misjudges one young man she meets - he's handy with a gun, and she's surprised when her turns out to be gay) but is always ready to admit that and do better. Is she perhaps a bit overfamiliar with present day cultural references and technology? perhaps - but who knows what's current in 2030+ Dinetáh and that's intrinsically more plausible than gods and monsters anyway.

Overall then: I loved this book. I galloped through it, enjoying the buildup to the finalé, caring about the characters, refreshed by its not being another Western European strongmen in furs type of fantasy, and thoroughly liking the plot, characters and setting.

Best of all there is a sequel coming (the e-ARC had an extract in it, hopefully the publishers books does too) and I am keen to read that.

Review - Down Among the Sticks and Bones by Seanan McGuire

Jacket design by FORT

Down Among the Sticks and Bones (Wayward Children, 2)
Seanan Mcguire
Tor, 2017
HB, 187pp

I'm continuing to review some books that have been on my shelves far too long, having taken the chance of a lengthy car journey to listen to the audiobook of Down Among the Sticks and Bones. (I bought a physical copy of this book from Wallingford Bookshop and the audiobook from Audible via Amazon. The audiobook, read by McGuire herself, is excellent, although Dr Bleak's signature whisper of a voice does at times make him a little hard to follow when driving!)

In this, the second part of her Wayward Children series, McGuire tells the other side of the story she began in Every Heart a Doorway (my review here). I won't say too much about that in case you haven't read it, but EHAD featured twins Jacqueline and Jillian - Jack and Jill ("because our parents shouldn't be allowed to name children") and their adventures at Eleanor West's School for Wayward Children. Down Among the Sticks and Bones tells more about the two and about their time in the world known as The Moors, under the care, respectively, of the strange Dr Bleak and the commanding Master. It forms a whole with the earlier book and I think the two are best read together.

McGuire has written more recent books about the Home and the Wayward Children, but moving onto other characters and with a slightly different focus. Here, though, we have an almost clinical dissection of lives, of parenting and of the weight of expectations, the story going back to Jack and Jill's parents, Chester and Serena Wolcott. Despite a disclaimer that the story hasn't actually started yet, McGuire devotes nearly a third of the book to this complacent, insufferable pair, showing how their sheer conventionality, their refusal to admit wonder to their kids' lives, above all their sheer stuffiness, warps and forms the two girls, laying the foundations for what will occur after. There are perhaps shades of the Dursleys here though I think McGuire writes with much more psychological grip.

Indeed, she writes wisely throughout and shows, I think, a deep understanding of children: appropriately, the atmosphere reminded me of writers such E Nesbit and CS Lewis who - whatever their other failings may be - understand and glory in the differences between adults and children/ young adults, and take the latter seriously. This book is, McGuire is, on their side (something that shines through all the books in this series).

I'm not going to try and précis the book because it speaks for itself, but while telling an exciting story (you find a hidden doorway in your house and go through it to a world of monsters! A world of werewolves, vampires and mad scientists! A world where you can be yourself!) McGuire also teases out the damage done by expectations and just how hard that may make finding "yourself". While the Moors may ostensibly be a place of freedom from a certain sort of adulthood, there is Authority there and it happily, greedily, feeds on what is presented to it. So Jack and Jill are set on their way well before they cross that threshold, past that notice saying "BE SURE". The story thereafter is one of McGuire teasing out how the little faults and fractures between the sisters grow, are worked on by events and undermine their relationship, their unity, until... well, until things happen.

It's a short book - all of the books in this series are - and McGuire impressively draws on our knowledge of genre conventions to save having to spell out what could otherwise take a great deal of space. In a sense the Moors (like the others worlds visited by the Wayward Children) are narrative come alive, the book referencing films, novels, poems and art to give a much clearer impression of the place than mere words might but also to prefigure how things may go in the story. This saves a lot of explanation, yet the book remains novel, fresh and compelling.

After reading Every Heart a Doorway it's good to explore one of the worlds in more detail. In the next book, Beneath the Sugar Sky, McGuire develops this idea in a very different sort of world, also making a major theme of this series - diversity - more explicit.

But that's for another review: watch this space.