Archives » Fantasy

Newly Arrived

Just in from ParSec is If the Stars Are Lit by Sara K Ellis, published by the Scottish based Luna Press.

The author is another that is new to me.

Of the list ParSec sent to choose from this time this was the only Science Fiction on offer.

All the rest were fantasy. For me that is a depressing trend.

My review of the book will be scheduled for ParSec 14.

 

 

Hex by Jenni Fagan

Polygon, 2022, 112 p

On a cold December night in Edinburgh in 1591 Geillis Duncan awaits execution in the morning for the crime of witchcraft. She is visited in spirit by Iris, a woman from our own time, who calls herself a time traveller and a modern-day witch.

Historically 1591 was the height of the hysteria against witches encapsulated by James VI’s Daemonologie and Geillis Duncan was one of the victims of the North Berwick witch trials.

The scenario gives Fagan the platform to outline the misogyny behind the witch hunts and its prevalence today.

In the conversations between Geillis and Iris the question arises, “How does he” (the King) “fight the Devil?” The answer? “Via teenage girls. Doesn’t everyone?” The rationale back then being, “We go after the Devil via womb-bearers – they are weak for him.” So the targets were women. Women who were alone, or tall, or ugly, or smart; women who inherited, sassy women, women who were healers. If a woman doesn’t exalt men always she is a threat, “a Demon whore, a witch.”

Despite all her efforts to be polite, docile and unthreatening, not to draw attention to herself, still Geillis was picked on: primarily since she was handy, a servant in the household of a man called Seaton but also suspect because, “I helped women birth, I helped calves, I knew the right herbs to cure a headache.” Seaton was jealous of the fact that his sister-in-law, Euphame, had inherited her father’s estate and wanted a legal reason to eliminate her so Geillis was tortured and abused to implicate Euphame and others.

Fagan has her characters try to explain misogyny. Geillis says, “We bring life from our bodies where before there was nothing,” – that being a kind of magic – and Iris tells her, “Men want to know how they got trapped on Earth,” but the real crime is that, “There is no man on this Earth who didn’t get here except by a woman parting her thighs.”

Apart from the conceit of Iris time travelling Fagan’s tendency to indulge the fantastical sees Iris during the night begin to grow feathers and eventually turn into a crow.

Though Geillis’s prior suffering is never in doubt the set up allows Fagan to treat the witch trials almost indirectly but nevertheless underline that misogyny is ever with us.

This is another of Birlinn’s Darkland Tales (see here) and again was borrowed from the local library by the good lady.

Pedant’s corner:- lightening (lightning,) “filed into a tea-room” (in 1591?) “the thing I had that shined” (shone,) a priest comes to hear her confess at the last (a priest? In Reformation Scotland?) the priest uses a pencil to sign in to the jail (suitable graphite for this purpose was discovered in 1560 so it’s possible; but pencils as such would not, I suspect, have been widely available, a scratchy pen is more likely,) smoothes (smooths,) okay (in 1591?) ditto teenage.

Through the Darkness by Harry Turtledove

Earthlight, 2001, 516 p plus 2p Map and 6 p Dramatis Personae.

The third instalment in Turtledove’s Darkness sequence (see here and here) where a version of the European campaigns of the Second World War is carried out in a world where magic is real and used as weapons of war, with unicorns, behemoths, dragons and leviathans taking the places of the mechanical devices of our world, sticks fire beams of sorcerous energy and similarly charged eggs are fired as projectiles or dropped from the sky.

Comparisons are easy to identify. In this book the Kingdom of Algarve’s soldiers’ advance on the city of Sulingen on the Wolter river only to get bogged down in a battle of attrition mirrors the Battle of Stalingrad, various behind the lines activities correspond to those of partisans, the mathematical and practical experiments of the mages of Lagoas and Kuusamo ape the Manhattan project. The Holocaust is not yet quite paralleled, but the Kaunians (hated by Algarvians and other nationalities here – though not by all concerned) are corralled into ghettos (or at least one such) but as yet not extermination camps, though some are being killed en masse to provide sorcerous energy for military advantage.

This has the same weaknesses as previous instalments; characters tend to the two dimensional, there is repetition of information and of characters’ thoughts, the prose is resolutely pedestrian and the misogyny of nearly all the male characters remains stark.

But it’s Turtledove. No point in expecting more.

 

Pedant’s corner:- “by Colonel Broumidis’ beasts” (Broumidis’s,) “King Tsavellas’ men” (Tsavellas’s,) “showing Lagoas’ jack” (Lagoas’s; all names here ending in s were not given an apostrophe s) “Merovec’s men” (Mezentio’s men,) “lèse majesty” (lèse majesté.)  “‘I hadn’t know that’” (known that,) “centered on camels and all the ways it could be cooked” (centred on camel (meat) and all the ways.) “A gust of wing sprang up” (gust of wind.) “As a matter of face, he wasn’t sure …” (As a matter of fact,) “‘who haven’t got the ballocks for that’” (bollocks,) “land crawling up over the edge of the world to mar the smooth horizon between land and sea” (between sea and sky,) “the marchioness’ friend” (marchioness’s.) “The women gave back her garments” (there was only one woman.)

Best of 2024

19 this year; 12 by men 7 by women, 4 with an SF/fantasy tinge (5 if you count Beloved,) 1 non-fiction, 1 fictionalised memoir. Not in any order; apart from of reading.

News of the Dead by James Robertson

The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng

Tomorrow by Chris Beckett

Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Landmarks by Robert McFarlane

Toby’s Room by Pat Barker

Independent People by Halldór Laxness

Confessions by Jaume Cabré

Sparks of Bright Matter by Leeanne O’Donnell

Navola by Paolo Bacigalupi

The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak

Star of the Sea by Joseph O’Connor

Human Croquet by Kate Atkinson

Lizard Tails by Juan Marsé

Creatures of Passage by Morowa Yejidé

Xstabeth by David Keenan

Borges and Me by Jay Parini

Beloved by Toni Morrison (review to appear here soon.)

Reading Scotland 2024

I don’t normally do this year summation thing before Christmas (it offends my sensibilities to do such a thing before the full time span has elapsed) but in this case I don’t think I’ll be adding to the total before New Year.

I seem to have read 26 Scottish books so far this year (the definition of Scottish is loose;) 13 by women and 13 by men. Four were Science Fiction, Fantasy or Fable, two collections of shorter fiction, one was poetry and one was a fictionalised memoir. The links below are to my reviews of those books.

World Out of Mind by J T McIntosh

News of the Dead by James Robertson 

The Little Snake by A L Kennedy 

Love and Zen in the Outer Hebrides by Kevin MacNeil

Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson

The Second Cut by Louise Welsh

Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart

Things We Say in the Dark by Kirsty Logan

Solution Three by Naomi Mitchison

Not to Disturb by Muriel Spark

Dust on the Paw by Robin Jenkins

The Disorderly Knights by Dorothy Dunnett

Queen of Clouds by Neil Williamson

Kitchenly 434 by Alan Warner

An Apple From a Tree by Margaret Elphinstone

Human Croquet by Kate Atkinson

Squeaky Clean by Callum McSorley

The Hothouse by the East River by Muriel Spark

The Other Side of Stone by Linda Cracknell

To the Dogs by Louise Welsh

The Changeling by Robin Jenkins

Aunt Bel by Guy McCrone

Conquest by Nina Allan

Xstabeth by David Keenan

Borges and Me by Jay Parini  

The Silver Bough by Neil Gunn  (review to be posted here soon.)

Navola by Paolo Bacigalupi

Head of Zeus, 2024, 567 p.  Reviewed for ParSec 11.

A lot of fantasy takes as its societal template a mediæval setting, with kings, nobles, church, and so on clearly based on the feudal model. Very few, if any, have employed a late mediæval background based on the Italian city states. That, though, is what Bacigalupi has opted for here: a refreshing choice, and one which offers plenty of scope for intrigue and skullduggery, not to mention vendetta.

The family central to this story, though, is not descended from nobility. For three generations the di Regulai have built up their banking business in the city of Navola, using their money to thwart the encroachment of the nearby Empire of Cheroux on the city. That bank now has branches in every land with which Navola trades, its power and worth dependent on the bedrock of financial stability – not its gold but its promises. By its ever-growing influence through the years, its head, narrator Davico de Regulai’s father Davonico, is the de facto leader of Navola, its nominal ruler, the Callarino, sidelined, the ancient nobility’s domination of the forum of government, the Callendra, diminished, with rights granted to the ordinary people known as the vianomae.

The tone in which the book is written could easily be mistaken for a work of historical fiction, albeit history disguised, were it not for the fact that we start with a fossilised dragon’s eye. An eye with feather-like but sharp-edged tendril-like nerve remnants, an eye which sits on Davonico’s desk and draws attention to itself, seeming to follow you about the room with its gaze. Davico feels the eye’s power, and that of the dragon consciousness within it.

As the only heir to the di Regulai house Davico is being trained in the essence of banking, the art of governance, the necessity for faccioscuro – explained here as hidden face (though the apposite term in English would be poker face) – as opposed to clear face, facciochiaro. Faccioscuro is the signature trait of the Navolese whose rivals say, “‘The minds of the Navolese are as twisted as the plaits of their women’s hair.’” This is exemplified in the card game cartalegge, which requires a high degree of deception for a player to win. Davonico’s fixer and spymaster, the stilettotorre, Cazzeta, is an adept, as is Davico’s adopted “sister” Celia, taken in by Davonico when he disgraced and exiled her family, the di Basculi, to bring her up as if she were a di Regulai.

Unfortunately Davico has too open a heart to be able to dissemble much, is too burdened with conscience to accept without qualms the occasional need for harsh measures. Celia has a much keener appreciation of the ways of this world. Due to its constraints a woman has to be so much more aware than a man. Fiaccioscuro, she says, is “the weapon of the woman. The sharpest weapon a woman can wield.”

We see Davico’s growth from boy to man, his initial confusion over the feelings puberty invokes in him, his unease at the constant need to play his part in the game of life, all against the backdrop of intrigue, realpolitik and his father’s plans for him and Celia both. The dragon’s eye fades into the background somewhat until Davico’s naming day, when an attack on his life forces him, Celia and Cazzeta to use the secret passage behind his father’s library. Davico’s affinity with the dragon and its perceptions save their lives, but there are still twists to come.

This is an environment in which paranoia is justified. Even with eyes in the back of your head you might still not see danger approach. Fortunes can turn on an instant, loyalties suddenly evaporate. As one character reflects, “We are all flotsam in the maelstrom. To swim at all is triumph.” With the aid of the dragon’s eye Davico learns to swim. But it costs him.

In Navola, Bacigalupi has constructed a detailed image of a cut-throat world which would not be at all comfortable to live in. It is a very good novel indeed.

The following did not appear in the published review.

Pedant’s corner:- “I had seen thieves hung” (hanged,) another instance of ‘hung’ for ‘hanged’, “she lay down the black castello” (laid down.) “‘Trust is a vice a women can ill afford’” (either ‘a woman’ or just ‘women’,) “her her” (only one ‘her’ needed,) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech, another missing at the end of one. “There was a collected intake of breath” (‘collective intake’ is the more usual phrasing,) “that our family, who was so deeply tied to Navola” (our family, which was so deeply tied,) octopi (the singular is not Latinate so; octopuses, or – in the extreme – octopodes.)

Sparks of Bright Matter by Leeanne O’Donnell

Eriu, 2024, 314 p, plus 2 p Author’s Note and 2 p Acknowledgements. Reviewed for ParSec 11.

Sometimes a book just hits the spot, the reader can tell from the first paragraph – even the first sentence – whether the author is one to follow trustingly, whether her book will appeal. Word choices, sentence construction, details of description and subject matter all come into this but the sense of an author in control of her story, doling out information sparingly but tellingly, leading the reader on and in, is more important. Sparks of Bright Matter had me from that first paragraph.

O’Donnell has taken as a starting point here the last true alchemist, Peter Woulfe, and let her novelistic imagination run. Her story of his life, told in a compelling present tense, begins in the London of 1780 before ranging back at various points to Woulfe’s younger days as an apprentice to Mr Sweetnam in 1744, his late childhood in 1739 in Mount Gabriel, Cork, Ireland, and his infancy in 1726. O’Donnell’s Woulfe is an avid believer in the goal of alchemy and its divine trappings but his search for the Elixir is doomed to failure by “want of piety and charitable acts.”

O’Donnell has Woulfe born in Ireland 1726 as a sickly child, helped to survive by the local folk healer, Bridey Leary, a woman with secrets of her own and with whom as an older child Woulfe has a wary friendship.

In 1780, frustrated by his assistant, Mal Burkiss, not keeping his furnaces warm enough he throws the lump of quartz he was holding at the lad and seems to kill him, necessitating the bringing in of Robert Perle to dispose of the body, giving the latter a hold over him. Unbeknownst to Woulfe, and possibly Perle, the boy, however, is not dead and is found naked in the street and revived by Sukie Bulmer, a woman who now collects dog shit from London’s thoroughfares to sell to the tanneries. The pair form an unusual partnership as Burkiss has healing powers and Sukie acts as his procurer, a double act suspect to the authorities.

Back in 1744 Woulfe was tasked by Sweetnam with delivering a mysterious book, the Mutus Liber, to a Baron Swedenborg, but in his efforts he is delayed by an encounter with a streetwalker and misplaces the book. In perhaps a coincidence too far that woman is a much younger Sukie Bulmer who then sets about trying to sell the book, eventually coming to the shop of pawnbroker Shapsel Nicodemus Stein, whose wife Katia she beguiles. The failed delivery of the Mutus Liber is a problem for Sweetnam – and therefore Woulfe – as concealed in its spine was a communication between plotting Jacobites. Many authors would have made this strand their book’s focus, it is 1744 after all, rebellious undertakings are afoot, but to O’Donnell it is merely incidental. Such worldly matters are not Woulfe’s concern. However, the contents of the book are.

In the Mutus Liber Woulfe discerns “a complex, sacred procedure, not evident to the uninitiated, not laid out clear and simple for anyone to understand,” but with time, with work, with prayer, all there to be understood, along with “how the processes, the combination of the materials, the grinding, the careful combining, the firing, the sparks of bright matter will bring his soul closer to God.” Later he realises, “This book demonstrates how to purify and make order out of chaos. How to put things back as they should be.” A life’s work, then. “Surely,” he thinks, “there is something true and beautiful underneath all this chaos … something golden and good that can emerge when things are put in the right order, when the right method is applied, when the divine energy is channelled?”

The book teems with well-drawn characters, Sukie Bulmer when troubled escapes to roofs, Burkiss treats a howling young girl with uncontrollable movements (and whose father has questionable motives,) Shapsel Nicodemus is considerate and fair but also wary, his wife Katia astounded at her response to Sukie, Sweetnam is full of repressed anger, Bridey Leary treads the line between being accepted or persecuted.

Full of gritty detail about Georgian London, street toughs, bawdy encounters and an incident set during the Gordon riots of 1780, the writing is nevertheless tinged with an air of weirdness, of things unseen, never quite delineated, never explicit, ending with Woulfe’s vision on his return to Ireland of a group of young women attending cattle on their journey up to their summer pastures – something that had ceased twenty years before.

Though there are occasional acts of violence in O’Donnell’s story fans of action-packed adventure will need to look elsewhere. For those of a more philosophical bent, interested in character interaction and reflection, Sparks of Bright Matter does the job to a tee.

 

The following did not appear in the published review.

Pedant’s corner:- “of the most discrete kind” (context demands ‘of the most discreet kind’; ie  ‘unobtrusive’, and definitely not ‘separate’.) “He is sure than the young man’s presence” (sure that the young man’s presence,) “laughter of crowd” (of the crowd,) “he crosses to the hearth clears the charred wood” (ought to have a comma after hearth.) “There are a host of characters portrayed” (There is a host…,) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech, “the dark brown aureole of her nipple (dark brown areola of her nipple.) “He nods at the man the brown coat” (the man in the brown coat,) “carrying Peter bulging satchel” (Peter’s,) “none of the men spare her a second glance” (none of the men spares her a …,) “to dwell on over much” (overmuch,) “eats only a very little of mutton chop” (of the mutton chop,) “sometimes awkward his mouth” (awkward in his mouth,) “taping the compass” (tapping,) spaces missing either side of a dash. “He is not just a boy. He is man” (He is a man,) “four hours, sleep a night” (no comma needed between hours and sleep,) “in a glass tubes” (‘in a glass tube’ or ‘in glass tubes’,) “says in shaky voice” (in a shaky voice,) “that has fallen a from a height” (no ‘a’ after fallen,) “as tight as drum” (as a drum,) “none of the people in the book labour alone” (none of the people … labours alone,) “building to a consuming crescendo” (building to a consuming climax,) “feeling a tightness his in lower back” (a tightness in his lower back,) “the sounds of thousand man and women” (of a thousand,) “the gate way” (gateway.)

Creatures of Passage by Morowa Yejidé

Jacaranda, 2021, 310 p, including 2 p Map.

I was attracted to this by its cover which reminded me of the Trylon and Perisphere at the New York World’s Fair of 1939-40 but having now read it there’s nothing in the book which links to that at all.

It is set in 1977 in a fantasy area called Anacostia whose geography actually corresponds to part of Washington DC. Many of the references are to contemporaneous places in our world to which in most respects Anacostia corresponds. However, it is surrounded by the various Kingdoms of Delaware, Maryland and Virginia so clearly not our world.

Nephthys Kinwell drives a Plymouth round town as a kind of taxi service where she just seems to turn up where- and whenever she is needed. Every so often the text mentions the white girl in the boot (Yejidé uses the term trunk) thumping on the tyre or otherwise making a noise. The girl is a ghost. A pointer to the fact that strange happenings are in store is that Nephthys’s domestic life is plagued by the mysterious moving of bottles and other objects.

Nephthys was a conjoined twin and where they were separated she and her brother Osiris both have/had a half finger which sometimes glows but Osiris died in the local river some while ago; thought to have been killed by a shark due to the teeth marks on his body.

His daughter Amber is the author of the lottery, a newspaper column which predicts odd deaths and other occurrences. On his sojourns to the river Amber’s son Dash sees and converses with someone he calls the River Man. A schoolmate witnessed him there apparently talking to no-one and goads him about it. His response gets him in trouble.

Dash also is concerned by an act of molestation he thinks he saw committed by his school caretaker, Mercy Ratchet, on a girl in his class. Ratchet of course has a long history of such acts including on Rosetta, another viewpoint character, whose life’s trajectory he precipitated, as his was by his own experiences at the hands of a priest.

Osiris exists in the book’s main timeline as a ghost, though flashbacks show how he actually died. His travels in the realm of the dead, his name and that of Nephthys reflect ancient Egyptian mythology and the book’s five sections are titled according to the five ways creatures of passage die: moving through spaces; staying in one place; resigning life to another; surrendering one’s life; entering the void.

The writing style is fluid but often non-standard, frequently omitting commas in lists, “Where signs omens bones transpired in infinite ways and indefinite outcomes …… Each hour was a day year decade,” the continued (over?)use of the phrase “Many years later” perhaps meant to invoke Gabriel García Márquez. A flavour of the novel’s interests lies in the invocation of the Conundrum of Three, where the mind sought the memory of a body long gone, and the body withdrew from the mind and the spirit, and the spirit chased the echo of the other two.

There is a lot going on here, some of which I may have missed as my knowledge of Egyptian myth is sketchy but Yejidé brings all the strands together. Creatures of Passage‘s portrayal of the humans involved, their flaws and dilemmas is convincing. Though it looks at life from an odd angle it is one that illuminates.

Pedant’s corner:- “boys hung in jail cells” (hanged,) “found a remnant of indigo cloth that their mother had made in her closet” (to avoid ambiguity this is better phrased as ‘found in her closet a remnant of indigo cloth that their mother had made’,)

Plus points for areolae and for the subscripts in C16H14N2O.

Darkness Descending by Harry Turtledove

Earthlight, 2001, 596 p, plus 5 p Dramatis Personae and 2 p Map.

With Harry Turtledove you know what you’re going to get. No-nonsense utilitarian prose. An episodic narrative seen from many points of view. Actions telegraphed long before they happen. Reminders of information previously revealed (in that respect it’s as if Turtledove may himself have needed reminding.) Characters not acting for or as themselves but there simply to make a point or progress the plot. Not great literature certainly, perhaps not even literature at all.

And yet somehow it doesn’t seem to matter. His grand sweep carries you along. Even when his inspiration is ridiculously obvious – as it is here in an allegory of our Second World War, with the Kingdom of Algarve standing in for Germany as the baddies and its main opponent, the Kingdom of Unkerlant, a Soviet Union analogue; still baddies (or at least its ruthless ruler is,) as was true in our 1940s. There is no true counterpart to the US however, the other countries here (all political entities in this scenario are Kingdoms) are all too small – and none parallel the British Empire either.

The feature of this series, an exotic flourish, is the fantastic elements; ley lines, dragons, unicorns, behemoths, leviathans, magic; all pressed into military service. Apart from that the war follows a familiar pattern.

In this episode the hitherto always victorious Algarvians are held before the Unkerlant capital, Cottbus; the magical equivalent of the Manhattan Project trundles on slowly in this world’s southern regions; Kaunians are already suffering the early stages of a Holocaust, being herded into ghettos, transported to the front to be killed so that mages can use their deaths to unleash sorcerous energies on the enemy; and it seems as if one of the characters may be destined to become a counterpart of Anne Frank – though I admit her prior experiences have been fairly different.

Sourcing cinnabar, a mineral necessary for dragons to breathe fire, is being set up to be the main Algarvian military objective of the next book, precursorily promising a battle to emulate Stalingrad.

This society of Turtledove’s is, however, almost relentlessly sexist and misogynistic.

Pedant’s corner:- “Pantilo swept off his heat” (his hat,) “for Brivibas’ sake” (Brivibas’s. Most names and words ending in ‘s’ here are treated by Turtledove as if they were plural rather than singular,) Unkerlanter (used several times when Unkerlant was meant,) “the eastern back of the stream” (bank of the stream,) “he hadn’t know” (hadn’t known,) “because he obviously did not care about what happened to the Kaunians” (the character thought the opposite; ‘he obviously cared about what happened to the Kaunians’,) “hauled him to the feet” (to his feet,) “making certain she’d not a spy” (she’s not a spy.) “Hearing Kaunian spoke inside the Algarvian Ministry” (Hearing Kaunian spoken inside…) “Even the Forthweg would have been better off if King Penda hadn’t gone to war” (that sentence doesn’t make sense in the context,) “now they kept spring into his head all unbidden” (they kept springing,) “who know no more than he did” (who knew no more,) “had proclaimed him his cousin Raniero King of Grelz” (had proclaimed his cousin,) “a teamster might have envied” (these societies do not have teamsters,) “They know what happened to a village” (They knew what happened to.) “‘Nonsense, my dead,’ Siuntio said’” (‘Nonsense, my dear’.) “But no: Now his name was on the list” (a colon is not usually followed by a capital letter,) receiving more than a curtsy from some of the, but that” (from some of them, but that,) “a couple of more soldiers” (no need for that ‘of’,) “‘were farther from Trapani than we are from Cottbus’” (we’re farther from,) “might try to settle a score that had simmered, unavenged but forgotten, for half a dozen generations” (context demands ‘unavenged but unforgotten’,) “towards the other Algarvians” (there was only one other Algarvian.) “The soldiers would have known nothing” (again there was only one,) “seeing more or you” (more of you,) “it was narrow, twisting, altogether, unpaved” (ought not to have that comma between altogether and unpaved,) “even the women who yelled” (the woman.)

The Phoenix Keeper by S A MacLean

Gollancz, 2024, 474 p. Reviewed for ParSec 11.

Aila Macbhairan has been besotted with exotic birds, in particular the Silimalo phoenix, since she was eight years old. Now, having been through zoo college, she is, along with other responsibilities, the keeper of the Silimalo phoenix at San Tamculo zoo, which specialises in magical animals. The Silimalo is critically endangered but her zoo’s breeding facilities have been in abeyance for over ten years and the exhibit houses only one specimen, a female called Rubra.

Aila’s other main charges are an archibird, somewhat unimaginatively dubbed Archie, a kind of superannuated magpie, with an eye for shiny objects and whose spit is a superglue for metals, and, oddly, (birds and sea creatures tend to be somewhat different,) the zoo’s kelpie, Maisie, a carnivorous aquatic horse usually wreathed in mists.

Aila is socially awkward, tongue-tied in public, shy of contact with others, but can be voluble when she is talking about phoenixes. The only people with whom she feels at ease are her parents, who encouraged her youthful enthusiasm, and her friend Tanya, the girl with whom she shared a room at college, who always took her for who she was and now looks after the zoo’s Bix phoenix.

Others of the zoo’s employees are the impossibly accomplished, perfectly groomed Luciana, with whom Aila shares a dislike having its origins at college, which Luciana seemed to breeze through with effortless grace and who puts on the zoo’s popular show starring her peacock griffins, while the “gorgeous” Connor looks after its diamondback – and other – dragons.

Aila’s main trouble is her interest in and concern for animals overrides any she might have for humans. I note, though, that she shows no distress for the mice Luciana feeds to her griffins or the goat carcases the kelpie is fed. It seems empathy can only go so far. But, of course, these animals have to eat.

Plot kicks in when a break-in at Jewelport Zoo in the South Coast area of Movas sees its recently hatched phoenixes stolen without trace. Within hours Aila has emailed the directorate of the International Magical Wildlife Service, in charge of the phoenix breeding programme, to put forward San Tamculo as the ideal site for the transfer of Jewelport’s remaining male phoenix. There follow anxious times waiting and preparing for the IMWS inspection, the further wait for its decision and the inevitable (without it there would be no story) arrival of that male, Carmesi.

Minor plot tension comes from whether the pairing of Rubra and Carmesi will be successful and if any chicks hatched will be safe from theft but there is also a gradual development of both Luciana’s and Aila’s characters.

So far so fine, if not particularly remarkable, and it is pleasing to read a fantasy eschewing the default mediaeval setting, but on the level of the writing there are some reservations.

The planet this is set on is clearly not Earth and there is no mention of it being a colony world yet the people are referred to as humans. While the planet’s geography is sketched out in terms of its different climates, and the zoo (map provided just before chapter one) has exhibits from the various regions, Kenkaila, Vjar, Fen, Ziclexia, Ozokia, the creatures depicted – vanishing ducks perhaps aside – are not noticeably magical, as opposed to Earth-mythical, unicorns and dragons for example. It does come across as odd, though, that among all this fancifulness the vegetation – olives, cypress, eucalyptus and so on – is not exotic, characters’ names, Connor, Tanya, Teddy, Patricia, Tom etc, are profoundly quotidian, and the societal trappings here, mobile phones, an internet, live camera feeds, would not be out of place in the twenty-first century of the reader. MacLean’s inventiveness has clearly gone into what she considers to be the interesting aspects of her story, including cod illustrated zoo information plaques for the Silimalo phoenix, the archibird and the peacock griffin, but this lack of attention to incidentals nags at suspension of disbelief. (Or is this asking too much of a debut novelist?)

There is a problem, too, with pacing, most of the background information has been front-loaded rather than drip-fed through the book. To be fair, though, the information MacLean has let us know about her creatures and the compounds in which they are held comes into play in the dénouement, in which Aila is faced with a pair of (rather cartoonish) villains along with their insider accomplice.

There is overuse, too, of unconvincing, invented minor expletives – horns and fangs, skies and seas – (despite usages of the f-word occurring elsewhere,) and expressions like “scrunched her nose,” plus a plethora of raised or rocketed up eyebrows, with MacLean’s treatment of sexual matters being coy to the point of sub-adolescence. (If this is supposed to be a YA book there is no hint of that in the accompanying blurbs.)

MacLean’s writing here is undemanding, doubtless targeted at her intended audience – who will most likely take to it. There is a place for simple entertainment after all. There is a story here but for me it is too overdosed with persiflage. Once MacLean has found the resolve to kill her darlings she may well come up with something a little more absorbing.

The following did not appear in the published review.

Pedant’s corner:- pegasi (this plural of ‘pegasus’ looks odd but then so does ‘pegasuses’,) “the perceptive mink” (minx?) “Teddy had an inch of height on her – unfair, both her tall parents passing on the lamest genetics” (has MacLean not heard of regression to the mean?) “an merlion” (a merlion – unless merlion is pronounced in a very unusual way,) “lights shined” (lights shone,) “from griffin show” (from the griffin show,) “a silver poof” (pouffe.) “Not teachers telling her” (this was in a list of sentences beginning with ‘No’. So. ‘No teachers telling her’,) “like a baton in a championship foot race” (like a baton in a relay race,) Movas’ (Movas’s,) “to get her feathers laying right” (lying right.) “She brought up her legs up” (only one ‘up’ necessary,) “the sweet of mango lingered on the air” (the sweet smell of mango,) “on rare occasion” (on rare occasions,) “laying low” (lying low.)

free hit counter script