Witchmark is entertaining and interesting. Magic takes the place of electricity, which is a cool take on steampunk / weird Victorian lit. Not original, but who cares? The elf-like race is well-drawn and convincing.

I very much like the weather wizards who make the land habitable by redirecting storms. So often in fantasy worlds, national threats are either so abstract as to be invisible or simplistically concrete. Think a dying warlock’s curse versus an army of orcs. (Usually the choice hinges on whether the protagonist is going to be facing the problem alone or not!) A secret society of mages controlling the weather is a nice mix of concrete and abstract.

I’d like to note that the evil national problem in Witchmark is the same as in Tad Williams’ The War of the Flowers. I’ll bet there are others, too. Come to think of it, The Matrix had a similar thing. But I don’t think it detracts from the book at all.

There’s one place where the plot doesn’t quite make sense. Two of the problems contradict. First, the protagonist is hiding his magical power for fear of prosecution as a witch. Second, he’s trying to keep himself away from his famous family. Eventually he fails at this second goal and becomes his sisters’ magic slave. He publicly returns to life as a wizard.

But then he’s still hiding his magic power from his boss. Like, dude. Get the Queen to write you a letter saying, This guy is immune from witchcraft prosecution. Done. Problem solved.

You have to check to make sure your protagonist’s problems don’t cancel each other out. That should happen during the outlining phase.

But other than that small hiccup, the plot moves along convincingly. There’s even a pretty cool twist / revelation at the end.

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David Mitchell maintains a high literary quality while incorporating elements of fantasy. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Bone Clocks and this are his most fantastical novels. But all the novels take place in the same world. There’s even a way to see how Cloud Atlas is the same world. Although Bone Clocks is the real axle that holds them all together.

It’s hard to write a novel that would be worthwhile without any fantasy, and also include fantasy in it.

Psychic vampires; an illusory house; victim portraits on the walls. Ghosts, barely echoes, plotting their vengeance.

Any chapter would be a totally legitimate spooky short story on its own. The serial murders, nine years apart, give Mitchell the chance to flex his ability to weave many separate stories, each told in a different style, into a coherent whole. If you don’t like repetition, it’s not going to work for you. But for me, the repetition is like getting to live the same ghost story over and over without getting bored.

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Children of Blood and Bone 3/5

I may be making the mistake of treating YA as though it’s adult fantasy literature. Maybe I expect different things from a novel than the YA market does. That’s fine. I am not the YA market; I have only my own mind to talk about a book with.

On the good side: The scenes are very cinematic. You can see how Adeyemi pictured each action. The eye of the narrator is the camera of a Hollywood blockbuster. It makes for some compelling moments. The struggles, victories and defeats come to life sometimes in these scenes. That’s genuinely enjoyable, and makes it so the book is worth reading despite my other complaints.

There are three of those complaints. First is that the world is not convincingly built. It’s extremely hard to pin down the level of technology: for instance, they use ‘meters’ to measure distance and ‘moons’ to measure time. But if you’re advanced enough to have the meter, you’re going to have a calendar with a better word than ‘moon’. And if ‘moon’ is just the name in their language for a precise, scientifically-defined unit of time, that fills all the needs that the month does… why didn’t she translate it into English as ‘month’?

It is not believable that Zelie could sell one fish in a city less than a day’s walk away for more than a year’s wages. Or, I didn’t believe it.

It is not believable that a crew of mercenaries, no matter how large, could capture a warship in six minutes. They couldn’t climb aboard in six minutes.

And so on.

Second complaint: There’s a plot device where allies meet for the first time and mistake each other for enemies. This is pretty common to comic books. You want to depict every conceivable fight configuration.

The problem with having allies meet as enemies is that their fight has no bearing on the central conflict. It’s a misunderstanding. So, in Children of Blood and Bone, we had like 3 or 4 big scenes of tense conflict over nothing. It gives the author an excuse for the cinematic moments she wants to create, but it made me lose interest.

Complaint three. I feel like the first draft of this novel had only boring verbs. And then an early reader or editor said, “Hey, you should spice up the verbs some. So the author went through with a thesaurus and picked bigger, more colorful verbs. Buuuuut, these big verbs aren’t always quite right. As a result, some of the great cinematic scenes are marred by amateurish verb choice.

And here’s a bonus complaint: She breaks Sanderson’s Law.

So. Fun scenes in an unconvincing fantasy world, described using somewhat clunky verbs.

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Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is a fantastic novel! Everything magical is as real as any physics. When you first encounter Staryk magic, it seems arbitrary. But that’s because it’s foreign. It actually follows concrete rules, which not even the king of the Staryk can break.

It’s like Brandon Sanderson’s first law: An author’s ability to solve conflict with magic is directly proportional to how well the reader understands the magic. Spinning Silver could be a textbook in a class on Sanderson’s First Law. There’s even magic that’s not well-understood, which only solves small problems. I’m thinking of the absent witch’s leftover cottage. It’s in two world’s at once, so it can solve some minor character-location plot problems. But we don’t know how or why it works. So when we’re confronted with a major character-location issue, in the very climax, it’s no help. The magic that does help, in that instance, is the magic of self-sacrifice. The rules of which Novik has been busy establishing from the first page.

But that technical excellence is only part of the picture. It’s one thing to construct a perfect plot and a perfect world for it to happen in. Few novelists succeed at that, as it is. But to make it a plot worth reading and a world worth living in! Magnifique!

The obvious fairy tale analogue is Rumpelstiltskin. But what moved me more than that was the shadow of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. The Staryk king somehow knows from the beginning that what he needs is the girl who can spin silver into gold. So he takes her. But he doesn’t understand that he needs her as a true wife and true queen; that is, an equal. And his pride and sense of superiority almost leads to the loss of his kingdom. Only when he humbles himself is he saved. Yet without sacrificing his honor or the trust his people put in him.

I also love that Jewish religion and culture has a ‘magic’ of its own that’s equal to that of the Staryk. There’s a wonderful scene where the protagonist uses fairy magic to give a little girl her true name. And it’s a Jewish name. I also love the idea of a Jewish ice fairy dynastic line.



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In the House in the Dark of the Woods by Laird Hunt

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is a lovely scientific treatise on the life cycle and development of the witch. It comes, of course, in three phases. You don’t realize at first that that’s what you’re reading. Because the various witches at various points in the cycle appear very different. It’s only at the end of the novel, when we see the metamorphoses from phase to phase, that it all comes together.

So if you start reading In the House in the Dark of the Woods and it seems mixed-up and confusing, don’t worry. It all comes together in the end. It’s a big picture with a lot of complex emotional valences, and the author can only show a bit at a time. A lot of different clues have to be in place before the big reveal can happen.

And if you read somewhere that it’s a fairy tale, and you want the swineherd to marry the princess at the end, well… It’s not going to be like that. It’s true that it’s written very much like a fairy tale. Very much in the Neil Gaiman mode. There’s a Brothers Grimm style of diction that it does a good job adhering to.

But it doesn’t quite have the same kind of plot as a fairy tale. The plot is much more like going to the zoo. You pass a series of animals that, at first, seem like they don’t have anything to do with each other. But if you have a good guide–and Laird Hunt is a good guide–you’ll see, by the end, that it’s all one ecosystem.



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For some reason I never really connected with The Rook. I particularly wasn’t convinced by the secret organization. The amnesiac protagonist has to go to work there, having forgotten all about it.

This lets the author insert biographies of the new characters she meets as she looks them up in her notes. But she had a whole weekend to study these notes, so it makes her look dumb. When she’s supposed to be a bureaucratic genius.

It would have been bad to give the reader this information when the character would have learned it. One big block of exposition without any action. But to make your character dumber, so that she has to learn it twice, is not the solution. He solved a structural problem in a way that requires the protagonist to act uncharacteristically. I consider that a serious flaw that his editor should have caught.

Further, this bureaucratic genius never seems to manifest. I saw martial prowess and advanced spycraft. Is exposing a shadowy conspiracy / coup a heroic act of org chart restructuring? Maybe there’s a blurred line between spycraft and bureaucracy.

Either way, she’s not saving the day with paperwork.

What I liked was the bad guys. They’re creepy. Also, they’re just as confused about what’s going on as the good guys are, which is a nice touch.

The American supernatural spy felt tacked on. I’m not sure what purpose she served except to enable witty repartee. With a character from whom I do not expect witty repartee. A character who’s supposed to be shy and scared.

I’m afraid, in my opinion, this needs a rewrite, after a good solid re-working of the outline.

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This is a fine fairy tale. Niel Gaiman does these somewhat better.

I didn’t believe that the protagonist would behave as he did.

“Hello, sir, I would like some books.”

“Here they are. You have to read them in the library reading room. Do so now, or else I’ll be angry at you.”

“Okay, I guess. But only for half an hour.”

“Now follow me into the depths of this dark labyrinth.”

Real boy: “Nope. Here are your books back, bye.”

Haruki Murakami protagonist: “Okay, I guess.”

Other than that, I enjoyed the mysterious, fairy tale feel of it. Good atmosphere.

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There are four levels in the spiritual ecosystem in The Ocean at the End of the Lane. The smallest are humans. Fleas play with humans like a cat plays with a mouse. Varmints consume fleas. And the elder Hempstock ladies deal with varmints off-screen, with no trouble. Most of the time.

So you don’t realize at first how much more powerful Lettie is than the protagonist. But Lettie is a predator who eats the predators that eat the predators that eat human beings.

This is a fantastic technique. It reminds me of Lovecraft. The vastness of the vistas that open up is what Kant would call sublime. I attempt this in my own stories. I can get 3 levels: a monster that the monster is afraid of. I haven’t found it easy to get to 4.

There’s also the hat tip to Tom Bombadil. Although he takes the form of the weird sisters. Or the Norns; they do literally sew and snip thread, each of them doing a different part of the magic.

But Gaiman is doing that Sandman thing where he makes his own gods. The weird sisters are his jumping off point. He’s not bound to them. He has a particular talent for that. Common to great fantasy writers, but most of them take hundreds of pages to get there. Gaiman gets there very, very quickly.

Love the jar of shadows dissolved in vinegar. Love the broken toys. Love the funeral scene (which is an homage to Final Fantasy 7 or to whatever the FF7 funeral scene was an homage to).

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Penric and the Shaman by Lois McMaster Bujold

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The best thing about the Five Gods world is the gods. There’s a way Bujold has of making them a very present concern for her characters that reminds of me of animism, or the religions of the ancient world, the mystery cults and whatnot. And yet you can’t imagine that this world could possibly have folk stories where the gods get tricked, or fall in love with mortals; they’re far too powerful, serious and alien for that. They use human beings as tools, and they care about the disposition of human souls, but they really, really do not have to.

The shamanic magic is pretty cool, too.

I like Bujold better when she has room to stretch her wings in full novel form. I want to live in this world for a while, but a novella just doesn’t give enough space for that.



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Prince of Annwn by Evangeline Walton

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is pretty fun. I don’t know the Mabinogion at all, so I can’t say how accurate or not it is. It’s definitely a great adventure though! I particularly like the severed heads flying around; the language, which is thoroughly salted with good description; the titanic moral struggles; the prevalence of virtue and honor (although of a peculiar kind I wouldn’t personally recommend); and the liberal use of capital letters, as for the words ‘Shadow’, ‘Beginning’, ‘Fate’ and ‘Illusion’.

A couple things: I would say that Zelazny’s Nine Princes in Amber owes a debt of some kind to this book, except that that came out in 1970 and this in 1974. So maybe it’s the other way around? Or more likely they were both getting inspiration from the same mythology. Particularly the way the characters pass between worlds is very similar, and I like it.

One notices the author on several occasions taking a time-out from the actual story to have the characters philosophize, and it breaks the immersion pretty badly. You just can’t have your legendary medieval druid-hero-king argue modern US politics without making him look like a puppet. Those of us who write novels should take notice; we will look just as corny in 40 years if we’re not careful.



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