Gollancz, 2012, 309 p. Reviewed for Interzone 245, Mar-Apr 2013.

For the first two-thirds of Redshirts the thought recurs that it’s either the most intriguing piece of SF you have read in a long time or else a sad waste of dead tree. The set-up has replacement crew-members on a starship slowly noticing strange events occurring – especially to those who attract the attention of senior officers and are as a result assigned to accompany them on away missions, where, invariably, one of the minions is at best badly injured, at worst killed. So far, so interesting.

The trouble is that the main characters are barely worthy of the name, being more or less indistinguishable. Moreover we are treated to various mundanities of their lives normally omitted in fiction. Yes, they are supposed to be walk-on parts in a different narrative, a bad Science Fiction TV series from our time, and hence might be expected not to be fully fleshed – but they are the main characters in ours and doesn’t the reader always deserves more? Moreover, dialogue is rendered as “Dahl said,” “Duvall said,” “Hester said” etc making it feel like a shopping list. In addition the prose rarely rises above the leaden and workmanlike.

And yet the text plays games with narrative and with the reader, features characters who become aware of themselves as players in a story and who take steps to alter their fate. There is even a false ending, allowing Scalzi to address the reader directly.

Viewers of a certain 1960s US TV SF series – which bears a superficial resemblance to the scenario here – may have noticed certain … illogicalities. Scalzi clearly enjoys laying out the faults, the playing fast and loose with the laws of Physics, the lack of internal consistency, the black box resolutions, which can plague such an enterprise. It is generally not regarded as a good idea for a Science Fiction novel explicitly to refer to SF, yet given the subject matter here it would be remiss not to. Indeed the plot of Redshirts depends on it.

After the amended ending – and making up the last third of the novel Redshirts as an entity – we have no less than three codas, subtitled first person, second person, third person, each narrated in its subtitular mode, respectively by the writer of, and two of the actors in, the TV series. These comment on, illuminate and extend what has gone before. The writer is not cheered by criticism distinguishing between bad writing and being a bad writer, the two actors find their destiny in life. While the codas’ styles are disparate, and thus a welcome relief, the last still has dialogue framed like a shopping list. Crucially though, the characters in them feel real.

In the main narrative Scalzi shows he can do bad writing very well. (Now there’s a back-handed compliment.) If you don’t know what’s to come in the codas, though; if you’re not, say, reading Redshirts for review, that could be a fairly large hurdle to overcome.

Barricade Books, 1997, 176 p.

This is what it says on the tin – a book of SF by Japanese authors. Whether this is the best of Japanese Science Fiction I can’t say because my knowledge of Japanese SF is restricted – shamefully, perhaps – to this book. This was one of my main reasons for picking it up and handing over money for its contents. Most SF published is written from either a US, a UK, or other Anglophone perspective or else is European. Japanese culture is so distinctive that Japanese SF may be something other.

The book carries on its cover an encomium from Analog, “BUY IT. Buy it in such quantities that the editors and publisher will bring us more.” Sadly people must not have bought it in quantity as I believe no such follow up ever appeared. Below are potted comments on each story.

The Flood by Kobo Abe, translated by Lane Dunlop.
Narrated in the style of a fable, this story features the mass liquefaction of people and the consequences of that transformation.

Cardboard Box by Ryo Hanmura, translated by David Lewis.
Imagine all the existential pleasures and angst of living as a cardboard box that is aware of itself and its surroundings. The joys of being filled; the emptiness otherwise. You don’t have to. This story does it for you.

Tansu by Ryo Hanmura, translated by Shimizu Mitomi, Joel Dames, Stephen Davis and Grania Davis.
A man is driven to distraction by his large family one by one taking to spending their nights on an old wooden chest.

Bokko-Chan by Shinichi Hoshi, translated by Noriyoshi Saito.
Bokko-Chan is a robot in the form of a beautiful woman, built by a bar owner to increase his trade. Her enigmatic responses lead one customer into folly.

He-y, Come On Ou-t by Shinichi Hoshi, translated by Stanleigh Jones.
After a typhoon a seemingly bottomless hole appears where a shrine had been. The hole becomes a dumping ground for unwanted material of all kinds, nuclear waste, incriminating evidence, compromising diaries. An allegory of the dangers of over-consumption. For where does it all go? This is reminiscent of Ted Chiang’s Tower of Babylon but predates it considerably.

The Road to the Sea by Takashi Ishikawa, translated by Judith Merril and Tetsu Yano.
A boy who has never seen the sea goes in search of it. An old man tells him it is in the sky. He carries on regardless, meeting no-one in his trudge across a desert land. To reveal more would be a spoiler.

The Empty Field by Morio Kita, translated by Kinya Tsuruta and Judith Merril.
Told in a disjointed style with non-standard punctuation and many newly coined compound words this concerns a once green and pleasant field, now empty, where excited children and an old man await the coming – or not – of a flying saucer.

The Savage Mouth by Sakyo Komatsu, translated by Judith Merril.
Using an operating machine a man starts to replace all his body parts with artificial ones. What he does with the removed portions reveals the savage mouth in us all.

Take Your Choice by Sakyo Komatsu, translated by Shiro Tamura and Grania Davis.
A man pays a fortune to choose his future from the three available at a seedy “time travel” shop. Like others before him he chooses the world doomed to destruction. The process is a con but that isn’t the point of the story.

Triceratops by Tensei Kono, translated by David Lewis.
The title rather gives this one away. A father and son see a triceratops on their way home one night and subsequently dinosaurs pop up all over the place. Everyone else seems to ignore the manifestations. To explain the sudden appearances there is mention of dimensional faults and time-lag universes but these seem more of a sop than anything else.

Fnifmum by Tensei Kono, translated by Katsumi Shindo and Grania Davis.
Fnifmum is a creature who grows through time, expanding into the future while contracting more slowly from the past; but he can access all the points along his body. Losing contact with his gene partner in the past he moves to the future and encounters two humanoids. The translation in this story has one awkwardness. What it terms “carbonic acid gas” is more usually known in English as carbon dioxide.

Standing Woman by Yasutaka Tsutsui, translated by David Lewis.
Mammals can be planted in the ground as dog- or catpillars, eventually turning into dog- and cattrees. A writer who has just finished a short story sets out to post it in a manpillar, who used to be a postman, and talks to him/it. Conversations like this are against the law. The writer then goes on to talk to his wife.

The Legend of the Paper Spaceship by Tetsu Yano, translated by Gene van Troyer and Tomoko Oshiro.
An apparently mad woman flies a paper aeroplane while naked. She is Osen, whom all the men of the village come to for sex, even when she has a son. The child, Emon, is burdened with telepathy and eventually blows away the cobwebs in Osen’s mind, discovering the cause of her madness and his inheritance.

Is there anything here that bespeaks difference? That we can point to as Japanese? Well, the style of a lot of the stories tends to parable or fable but that’s not unknown elsewhere. There is a certain distancing, of us being told things rather than shown them but some of this may be due to the filter of translation. What is present is a sense of the slightly altered, the askew, the not-quite-right. By contrast with most US SF the protagonists tend to be reactive or passive rather than proactive. There is also a tendency to take life as being contingent and prone to oddnesses. While no individual story would appear too out of place in any SF anthology, as a whole the collection definitely has a different feel from an Anglophone one.

Corvus, 2012, 404p. This is the novel that has recently won the Clarke Award.

Family (there is only one, hence no qualifying article is required) lives in Circle Valley on Eden, a planet with no external light source save that of the faint Starry Swirl in the sky. The forbidding mountainous surroundings are known as Snowy Dark and no-one has ever climbed over them – nor wanted to. From the founding pair Tommy and Angela, marooned when their companions took the Landing Veekle up to the damaged spaceship Defiant to try to get back to Earth and help, Family has grown to over 500 members. Respect for tradition and its Oldest keep Family’s way of life as it has always been. But life is a continuing struggle. John Redlantern has realised that someday the food will run out. The novel describes the consequences of his actions in breaking Family tradition.

This reworking of the Adam and Eve story could have been a disaster (it is one of the hoariest clichés in SF) and there is a certain inevitability about John’s behaviour; we know it must be so to drive the plot. We also know that someone will eventually climb over Snowy Dark.

However, Beckett has peopled his novel with some compelling characters – not only John Redlantern, but also Tina Spiketree and clever, clawfooted Jeff, who is given to saying, “We are here. We really are here.” (Apart from claw feet the main genetic consequence of the inbreeding unavoidable in Family’s situation is in severe hare-lips, “batfaces.”) Moreover at the conclusion the plot also delivers a twist so that we and the characters are forced to reappraise their situation. And a nice touch is the reworking of the old phrase about Tom, Dick and Harry into a Family profanity.

The main viewpoint narrators are John and Tina but others also have the odd chapter. The frustrations John and his fellow youngsters feel at the restrictions and boredom of the AnyVirsies and Strornies where Family’s past is mythologised (mentions of telly vision, kee boards and lecky-trickity serve only to confuse the youngsters) or where disputes are resolved, are well articulated and so is the point of view of the adults who cling to what they know. The young count in wombtimes rather than years and are upbraided for it. The transition of the matriarchal, consensual, more or less cohesive Family life where even the concept of rape is unknown – there is nevertheless a lot of relatively guilt free sex – to a more confrontational, male dominated future of strife, of events allowing the domineering to take over, is a key one.

Beckett’s story telling brio overcomes any nagging doubts at the scenario. (There can be no photosynthesis here, so what kind of carbohydrates would be available? Would the local flora and fauna really be compatible with humans? Would they be comprised of the same amino acids as on Earth, allowing them to be eaten successfully? Would the necessary vitamins be present? Who is this story being told to? These have to be discounted, for without these conditions there would be no story for us to read – and the last applies to any work of fiction.)

While the characters frequently repeat adjectives for emphasis – cold, cold; dark, dark etc – the issues of inadequate proofreading which slightly marred the readability of Beckett’s previous novels Marcher and The Holy Machine are more notable by their absence here.

Whether read as Science Fiction or simply as fiction Dark Eden is good stuff, well worth its Clarke Award. I suspect it will stay with me a long time.

Jonathan Cape, 2011, 375 p.

Sumptuously produced with embossed boards, gold leafing, patterned endpapers and page edges in a blue so deep it’s almost purple this is a consciously literary endeavour. It makes frequent reference to your book, the book you are reading, and also has unconventional upper pagination (the numbers at the bottom of the page are in the normal sequence.) It also explicitly mentions the fact that it has three pages numbered 7 – with a page 18 well out of sequence. In addition The Blue Book has three pages numbered 9, two 8s,10s and 27s as well as 0s and 1s towards the end; not forgetting a 666, a 676, a 678, a 798, an 888, a 919 and a 934 in a book with only 375 pages. (There may be some of these I have missed.) Numbers are an important means of communication for the two main characters and Kennedy has toyed with this notion and with us. Quite how necessary it is to do so is another matter. A further notable feature was the repetition of phrases, “Because he was young,” “A man standing in a doorway,” etc. The narration is not straightforward, sometimes describing aspects of a man’s life in detached third person, at others the internal thoughts of Elisabeth Barber as well as the ongoing narrative. There is also a rather high count of a certain expletive.

One of the scenes tells us of a boy being told about girls by his father. Girls, he says, will not be gorgeous like Dusty Springfield, whom the boy rather likes. Or if they are this will not be good news. Which seems like sound advice.

The meat of the novel is compressed into the time scale of a cruise across the Atlantic to New York but there are various flashbacks to earlier incidents in the two main characters’ lives. Elisabeth is taking the trip with her boyfriend Derek who is on the brink of proposing. In the queue to embark they encounter a man who engages them in conversation. This man’s question to Elisabeth later that day when Derek is absent seems shocking but it turns out Elisabeth used to be his partner, not only in life but also on stage in a show which was basically a con where he claimed to have messages from the dead to their loved ones in the audience. The disintegration of Elisabeth’s relationship with Derek and her renewal of that with Arthur Lockwood – implicit from that encounter in the queue – drives the novel.

A flaw for me though was the fact that The Blue Book depends for its emotional impact largely on the late revelation of a crucial piece of information up till then withheld. To be fair it is withheld from one of our duo of characters but it felt too much like a deus ex machina.

The Blue Book is not one to be read lightly, nor with lack of attention.

Gollancz, 2008, 321 p.

Unlike the previous volumes in Baxter’s “Time’s Tapestry” series which were spread over several centuries and as a result had a disjointed feel, the action in this one is spread over only a few years in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The tale is tighter and more cohesive as a consequence.

The prologue features an Irishman called O’Malley who at MIT has invented a machine he calls a “loom” with which – with the contribution of the dreams of an Austrian Jew called Ben Kamen – he has managed to send a message back to pre-Roman Britain. It isn’t long before both the loom and Kamen have been snatched by the Nazis and incorporated into their greater plan of altering history to ensure the triumph of the Reich.

The meat of the book is set in and after the invasion of Southern England by German forces once the BEF had been destroyed on the shore at Dunkirk. A hasty (and to my mind unlikely) deal by Churchill with the US sees them given military bases – US sovereign territory – south of London. As Hitler is seeking to avoid war with the US the German advance halts when they encounter these. This struck me as more of a sop to possible US readers of the book than something that would have occurred in such a scenario. The presence of a female US newspaper correspondent and her son in the cast of characters also points in this direction. A demarcation line cutting off South-East England is where the war situation settles down.

Off-stage Churchill falls as Prime Minister, to be succeeded by Lord Halifax who nevertheless continues the war – which goes on more or less as in our timeline; Barbarossa, Pearl Harbor, Stalingrad, El Alamein all get a mention, Japan’s invasion of Australia is new though. Again it may be more likely that Halifax would have sued for peace, but perhaps that would have been unthinkable with a substantial part of the UK – not just the Channel Islands – under German rule.

While Weaver can be read as a one-off with no detriment to the reading experience there are several nice touches where Baxter has his characters travel to locations which appeared in earlier books in the series; places like Birdoswald on Hadrian’s Wall and Richborough in Kent (Roman Rutupiae.)

This is the sort of thing that Harry Turtledove essays so frequently. Baxter’s characters are more rounded than Turtledove’s generally are and the extra twist of the loom makes for an added commentary on the contingency of historical events.

Dedalus, 2012, 378p. Translated from the Italian, Nuova Grammaticae Finlandese, by Judith Landry.

To someone like me – obliged to learn Latin at school, and enjoyed it, then dabbled very slightly in German and who subsequently learned the Finnish noun has umpteen cases (I remembered it as nineteen but it’s only fifteen) the attraction of a novel entitled New Finnish Grammar was irresistible. The fact that it was written by an Italian made it even more interesting. Diego Marani has himself invented an international auxiliary language, Europanto, perhaps partly as a joke.

Notwithstanding that, this is a very good book by any standard. It manages to overcome the disadvantage of a substantial lack of dialogue – dialogue is normally a leavening and character revealing aspect of a piece of fiction, diluting the thickness of the prose. To restrict it is a brave decision for a novelist.

Pietri Friari, an exiled Finn working as a doctor for the German army in Trieste in 1941 has brought to him an injured sailor who has the name tag Sampo Karjalainen sewn on to his jacket and a handkerchief with the initials S K embroidered on it in his pocket. The sailor’s wounds have affected his memory and he does not know who he is nor even his nationality. Doctor Friari assumes his patient must be Finnish and sets out to teach him the rudiments of that language. The framing device has Friari find in Helsinki in 1946 the notebook where Sampo had written down his experiences since his time in Trieste. The main body of the text contains these reminiscences – edited for clarity: occasional sections in italics relate Friari’s thoughts and comments on them.

Throughout the early part of the book the thought kept nagging; in what language does Sampo think and why doesn’t Friari ask him? This would be a large clue to Sampo’s origins but the question is never asked in the novel. This is a minor quibble, though. Sampo’s predicament is intriguing enough to see us through.

I wasn’t expecting the book to be about Finnish grammar but in many ways it is, aspects of the language are mentioned frequently. It is also a short history of Finland in the mid-twentieth century and a primer on Finnish myths/legends. Arguably this is necessarily so as anyone learning to be a Finn, as Sampo is, would need that backgrounding. The translator has had to cope with this too. She does it admirably but at one point puzzlingly used the German term panzer for a Russian tank.

While eschewing love and sex – two of the three perennial literary concerns; the third is death – New Finnish Grammar deals with another important aspect of humanity, belonging – or in this case not belonging, struggling to fit in. As such it is not merely about being Finnish but about being human.

Perhaps oddly for a novel whose driving force is memory loss this may be the most memorable book I’ll read all year.

Orbit, 2013, 378p.

Brookmyre’s oeuvre has up to now been the crime/thriller novel, albeit tinged with humour. Bedlam is his first foray into Science Fiction. I came across an as yet unlent copy in my local library so thought, why not?

Medical technology company Neurosphere’s employee Ross Baker, shortly after discovering by chance his girl-friend is pregnant and without talking to her about it, has a new type of brain-scan and wakes up inside a computer game which he quickly recognises as he was an avid gamer in his past. Not long after this he is killed there but immediately “respawns” to start all over again. He soon finds a way out into a series of virtual worlds which are in the process of takeover by an organisation dubbed the Integrity which is citing a phenomenon known as “corruption” to seek by force to keep these worlds forever separate one from another. In these digital adventures Baker adopts his former multiple game-player name of Bedlam. There are, though, occasional chapters set in the “real” world where Baker is/was in conflict with his boss over the rights of digital consciousnesses.

My reservations about stories set within virtual worlds were set out in the third paragraph of my comments on Iain Banks’s Surface Detail. Briefly, if there is no real jeopardy, if there is no danger of death, what threat is there? Beyond tedium of course.

Unfortunately most of Bedlam is set within the virtual worlds and as such is seriously unbalanced. I could not suspend my disbelief and found myself longing for the “real” world. In this regard the pregnancy element is a rather transparent way to try to enlist our sympathies with the digitally trapped Baker. Moreover Brookmyre’s style at times jars badly with the scenario. SF and humour are notoriously ill-matched bedfellows. A successful amalgam of the two is very difficult to achieve. Brookmyre has made little or no concession to the peculiar demands of writing SF and has adopted a similar tone to that in his thrillers. There were also signs of the book being pitched towards the US market (tic-tac-toe, medieval, asshole.)

Brookmyre’s typical readers may enjoy the virtual scenes – or not – but as SF Bedlam is perfunctory at best. Perhaps gamers will take to it.

Whippleshield Books, 2013, 80p.

This is the second in the Apollo Quartet, the first of which, Adrift on the Sea of Rains, has just won the BSFA Award.

Once again we have an Altered History. Here, Alexei Leonov was the first man on the Moon but the Russians quickly gave up going there to concentrate on Space Stations. Our hero, Brigadier General Bradley Elliott, USAF, though, was the first – and only – man on Mars, in 1979. What he found there drives the plot as he is recalled to NASA twenty years later to undertake a faster than light trip to Gliese 376 to investigate what has happened to the colony there.

As in Adrift, there are two strands interleaved with each other (which is not unusual) and tricks with typography but again the Glossary which follows rounds out the tale – even if one part of it appears to contradict a piece of dialogue in the text. That latter could have been a deliberate misdirection, though and a Coda explaining the central conception and the FTL drive is a less successful addition to the formula.

With his utilisation of the glossary Sales seems to have found a new way to tell the space exploration story. It is of course a species of info dumping but he has arguably turned the necessity into a strength.

He is very good on the nuts and bolts of space travel, especially if you can thole the alphabet soup of NASA terminology. A list of abbreviations is given to help with this. Elliott is a complex enough figure though the other characters are less fleshed out; but in an 80 page book only 47 of which are actual story it could hardly be otherwise.

Faber and Faber, 2011, 504 p.

Preamble:-

I was moved to read this as it features scenes set at the International Exhibition, Glasgow, 1888, in which I have been interested for decades now. Maps of the centre of the Glasgow of 1888 and of the Exhibition site are provided immediately after the title pages. Curiously the cover – not only on this hardback edition (above) but also the different one on the paperback (below) – has a representation of what looks like the main building for the later Glasgow International Exhibition of 1901 rather than that of 1888. Both of these buildings had domes but the structures flanking them were quite different in appearance, the ones of 1888 being slender and steeple-like, those of 1901 more ornate with the dome surmounted by a sculpture of a winged figure. The gondolier on the back cover is fine. Both Exhibitions had those.

1888 Exhibition

1901 Exhibition

paperback cover

Review:-

Gillespie And I is the story of Londoner (of Scottish extraction) Harriet Baxter’s friendship with the family of up and coming Glasgow artist Ned Gillespie from their first chance meeting up to and beyond the tragedy around which the tale eventually unfolds.

The book is narrated by Baxter from the perspective of her old age with short sections set in her present day of 1933 interspersed with longer ones in 1888-90. At first it seems to be a tale of friendship and possible attraction with comical interludes but later veers off into one of crime/mystery. The narrative voice is flat, with strange choices of word at times. The prose is curiously prone to cliché as well as to repeating information unnecessarily. In addition the narrative’s approach to foreshadowing is unsubtle – it can feel more like being beaten around the head with what’s going to happen. To attribute this to unreliability in Harriet Baxter’s account of events would be the charitable course. Another interpretation would be hthe narrator’s lack of awareness of how her actions might appear to others. Despite the injunction early on to ignore a Mr Kemp’s recent (in 1933) writings about her past, Baxter’s unreliability is, however, not foregrounded strongly enough – the reference on page 356 to another old – though younger than the narrator – woman’s “ramblings …. as though they were facts” comes rather late.

There seems little reason for Baxter’s interest in the Gillespie family. Notwithstanding the book’s title Ned Gillespie is mostly an offstage figure, his wife Annie distracted and naturally suspicious while his mother Elspeth seems to be present to provide humour (but fails.) Their children are also portrayed curiously flatly, the younger daughter never being more than a plot enabler.

The spelling of Timbuktu is odd for a memoir supposedly written in 1933 when it would have been rendered in English as Timbuctoo. The narrative also asserts that Glaswegians call ice-cream “hokey pokey,” which is a new one on me. (“Pokey hat” for an ice cream cone, yes; but never hokey pokey, which is apparently a New Zealand term for puff candy.) It also has women attending a burial. In Scotland, in 1889? That sort of thing was still regarded askance as late as the 1970s. The scene with the Christmas presents also didn’t ring true: until 1958 Christmas was a normal working day in Scotland. That the – relatively expensive – presents were a plot device, that Harris as the author required them, does not outweigh their implausibility.

You may have noticed that when a narrative starts to bug me its infelicities loom large. This is not nit-picking. (Well, it is; but the nits are there.) Such things destroy trust in the author. As they are the author’s rather than the narrator’s responsibility they do not underline any narrative unreliability, instead they fatally undermine the story.

In Gillespie and I Harris has attempted a difficult task. For me, she failed to convince.

Sandstone Press, 2011, 240 p.

It’s nearly Clarke Award time again so I thought I’d sample last year’s winner.

While having some of the trappings of Science Fiction and a scenario which would appear to be genre The Testament of Jesse Lamb doesn’t read like SF. The experience is more like that of a literary novel, the treatment focuses on Jessie rather than on the Maternal Death Syndrome (MDS) that is the SF element. While there is no sense of wonder here it is nevertheless easy to see why the Clarke judges might choose it. And the Clarke Award has a history of rewarding the “bordering on SF.”

The viral disease MDS – an apparently terrorist-disseminated sort of hybrid of AIDS and CJD for which no-one has claimed responsibility – has spread all over the world and means pregnancy is a sentence of death for the mother, whose brain spongifies over the nine months gestation. Despite there being those who think humanity should accept its fate various avenues are being tried to find a cure or remedy in an attempt to ensure live births but the main one focused on in the book has volunteers known as Sleeping Beauties kept in a coma throughout their pregnancies, incubating frozen embryos which have been vaccinated against MDS. But, of course, these hosts will die after the birth.

Narrator Jessie Lamb is a teenager with bickering parents and the usual adolescent angsts. Her fretting about whether her friend Baz likes her or not and her fears about his dealings with another girl called Rosa are well handled and utterly convincing. This feels like the memoirs of a teenager in a terrible time.

We first meet Jessie while she is being held captive, this segment being printed in a sparse sans-serif typeface. While incarcerated she starts to write down her backstory, the chapters of which are rendered in a more reader friendly font. The reasons for Jessie’s plight become apparent long before they are revealed in the narrative. Captivity segments and their typeface pop up irregularly throughout her story until the envoi.

The ramifications of MDS for society and the future are explored through Jessie’s father, a scientist at a Research Clinic, her Aunt Maddy, lovelorn and childless, and her relationships and interactions with her friends and those she meets.

The circumstance of Jessie’s father being a scientist at a clinic researching into MDS and its alleviation was a bit too pat. There was a sense of targets being set up only so they could be knocked down, tinged with more than a dose of anti-Science.

There was a “Scott” free. Isn’t that normally rendered with one “t”? (It is apparently from the old Norse skot, a tax, via Middle English scotfreo, exempt from royal tax.) Rogers also has a habit of writing “to not” rather than “not to.” And she renders email as e mail. Also strange in a book so otherwise steeped in Britishness is the use of the Usian “different than” at one point rather than the more usual “different from.”

Notwithstanding these quibbles, Jessie herself and her feelings, the awkwardnesses of adolescence, are beautifully conveyed. This is undeniably a superior read.