Book Reviews - March 2024 - Jasper Fforde, Sarah Painter, Seanan McGuire

Jasper Fforde

Red Side Story

Anyone who has read my book reviews before will know that I am a HUGE Jasper Fforde fan. I adore his quirky novels, finding them funny, highly entertaining, stimulating, clever and unpredictable.

My favourite Fforde novel is Shades Of Grey [not to be confused with that awful book, Fifty Shades of Grey]. He wrote this years ago and it ended on something of a cliffhanger. Since then he has promised a prequel, which never arrived, but finally he has released a sequel, which gives readers some sort of closure.

Personally, I absolutely loved this book. I have no idea what other fans think because I left the rather poe-faced Facebook Fforde fan-group I belonged to for a while, due to getting sick of the unthinking knee-jerk reactions of many people on it to any sort of perceived criticism of Fforde. The Pratchett groups are similar. There is too little genuine enjoyable open discussion of the novels, just uncritical adoration, which isn't my thing. 

Anyway, I felt this novel recaptured the distinctive style of the original book. It wasn't quite so surprising and unpredictable as Book One, as we had already been introduced to many of the weirdnesses of a land ruled by a hierarchy based on characters' perceptions of colour. Nevertheless, there were enough new ideas and interesting twists and turns to keep me reading. The characters were as deliciously absurd, and the plot as ridiculous, as ever. We weren't given a complete explanation for everything [I doubt Fforde has one], but we were told enough to get a happy-ish ending and a sense of jeopardy. I enjoyed every minute and look forward to reading it again.

****** Highly Recommended 

Sarah Painter

This is the second novel in Painter's Unholy Island series, which is itself a spin-off from her excellent Crow Family saga. 

I read the first in the series last year and enjoyed it, against expectations. I think Painter writes very well and I enjoyed all the Crow family books, though [like so many such series] they were starting to become a little repetitive, but I wondered whether a spin-off would work. Maybe the idea had run its course.  However, I discovered that moving the action far away from London, to a lonely island a few miles further north than Lindisfarne, was a surprisingly good move.

With an ensemble cast - though the story tends to centre on Esme the island's ward-witch - Painter skillfully moves around the isolated world she has invented, creating compelling stories. The characters are interesting and complex, the magic mysterious but nevertheless firmly entrenched in the modern world despite the island's distance from the nearest centre of civilisation, and the plots are engaging. 

These books aren't high literature, but if you enjoy contemporary fantasy, you'll probably like them. They have a similar vibe to Ben Aaronovitch's Peter Grant series, with moments of high drama and creepiness but never straying too far into horror.

***** Recommended 

 Seanan McGuire

Over the past few years, I've read a number of novels by award-winning and critically-acclaimed US author, Seanan McGuire, and I've generally been impressed by them.  She writes fantasy books aimed at a predominantly YA audience, but they are definitely worth reading by older readers. If you like imaginative fantasy positioned in a contemporary setting and which definitely isn't 'sword and sorcery' stuff, she might be the writer for you.

The Wayward Children Series

These were the first of her novels that I read, and they are my favourites. There are nine, I believe, in the series so far. They utilise McGuire's propensity for creating peculiar and wildly imaginative worlds. They are loosely focused on a school for children who have been pulled into - and then rejected by - different alternative worlds. Some are worlds that are nonsensical, others logical. Some are terrifying like the gothic 'moors', which are a sort of Hammer Horror movie come to life. The novels, which tend to be short, tell the interweaving tales of different children's adventures and experiences in these various worlds, and describe their longing to return. 

The thing I found so impressive about them is the vividness of McGuire's imagination and writing style. These novels were unlike anything else I'd read. Like all fantasy works, they draw on earlier fantasy tropes. but they contain sparks of brilliance that are dazzling. 

McGuire uses her fantasy framework to explore issues that real-life children often have to deal with, such as mental health, body-image, peer-pressure and the search for identity, and she generally does this well, revealing a great sensitivity for young people, and impressive psychological insight. I do, however, think that the later episodes in this series become increasingly preachy.  

***** Recommended 

The October Daye Series

These books, set in San Francisco, imagine a world where our heroine, October Daye [Toby], is a half-fae detective, fitting in poorly both with humans and fairies. As the novels progress, her life improves and she gathers a scooby-gang of interesting and likeable cronies around her, though she faces increasingly challenging villains and situations.

As always, McGuire's world-building is highly effective. The fairy world exists side-by-side with the human world, mostly concealed from it,  but nevertheless interacting with it.  McGuire's version of 'fairyland' draws on such mythologies as the Tuatha De Danaan and other regional folklore from around the globe, and presents the magical culture as profoundly hierarchical, steeped in virtually unbreakable traditions and protocols. Toby, straddling the fae and human world, moves between the two, generally causing mayhem wherever she goes. 

Toby is a great character, though I grew tired of her frequent urge towards self-sacrifice - she is a hero, after all. She puts herself into life-threatening situations and experiences extreme physical injury repeatedly. I very much enjoyed the use of folkloric characters and I think McGuire explores different species with great imagination. Nevertheless, I was beginning to weary of the slightly repetitive stories - despite McGuire's exceptional imagination, it is simply impossible to sustain so many episodes of a story, even if your characters are near-enough immortal. The only writer I have read who can do this effectively is Jasper Fforde. In his Thursday Next series, he uses all sorts of technically brilliant devices to keep the reader gripped - writing the first person narrative from the viewpoint of alternative Thursdays, 'real' and fictional, and moving round in time, changing the past and the future as he sees fit - it is all breathtakingly creative and rather brave, and McGuire never reaches those heights. Nevertheless, these books are worth a read if you like detective-fantasy hybrids.

**** Recommended with reservations

The Incryptid Series

This series is more light-hearted than either the Toby Daye books or the Wayward Children books. It's central characters are young and beautiful people from a family of crypto-zoologists, people who both fight and look after cryptids (supernatural creatures). The protagonists are superheroes of a sort and the stories are twisty and lively, with dollops of humour and lots of enjoyable fantasy elements and action scenes. Again, I stopped reading because many of the books aren't available on Kindle.

*** Enjoyable 

The Alchemical Series

According to McGuire's comments in these books,, these novels are something she has wanted to write for years and has finally got round to. They are certainly imaginative, original and beautifully written on the whole. 

The first instalment concerns Roger and Dodger, twins created artificially by a dangerous alchemist who wants to rule the world. Roger embodies language, while Dodger embodies maths. Their alchemist creator wants them to embody The Doctrine, a mysterious force that will give them access to The Impossible City. Or something like that anyway. It's hard to follow, to be honest. Roger and Dodger are separated at birth but come together because they can't actually stay apart, and they eventually defeat their evil creator and his very scary minions.

Roger and Dodger have a cameo role in Book Two, but here the action moves to another couple, this time a young couple who are romantically-involved - he is a potential manifestation of Summer and she is a potential manifestation of Winter. Again, the complexity standing behind the plot is hard to grasp, though the story is basically a road-trip with frightening episodes along the way, and then a disappointingly dull denouement.

The ideas behind these stories [McGuire has recently published a third in the series] is quite interesting and original, but they suffer from far, far too much exposition, which just gets worse as the novels progress so that I found Book Two virtually unreadable in places, though I persevered. I became heartily sick of the long and frequent sections in which the characters had seemingly endless conversations about why they were doing the things they were doing. I mean, how many times does something have to be explained to a character before he takes it on board and accepts it?  Yes, in real-life, these fantastical events would be difficult to accept by any sane person, but this isn't real-life and people failing to believe things is simply not compelling for the reader. And also, once you've witnessed magical events, surely that would make you believe in the existence of magic?

There is a great deal of McGuire's writerly magic in these books but ultimately the boring expositional passages and the weak endings, particularly in Book Two, led to my deciding not to read on.

 

** Good ideas, good bits, but ultimately dull