Mechanique by Genevieve Valentine

I received a copy of this book courtesy of the publisher from NetGalley.

This book first caught my eye a few months ago when I saw it at my local bookstore. I was immediately intrigued but the price stick said €17.50, though, and I usually refuse to go over the €13 mark. So when this book cropped up on NetGalley, I immediately grabbed a copy, eagerly anticipating the adventures that it would take me on!

Information:

Title: Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti

Author: Genevieve Valentine

Publisher: Prime Books

Target Audience: Adult?

Genre: Steampunk

Length: 284 pages

Story: Come inside and take a seat; the show is about to begin... 

Outside any city still standing, the Mechanical Circus Tresaulti sets up its tents. Crowds pack the benches to gawk at the brass-and-copper troupe and their impossible feats: Ayar the Strong Man, the acrobatic Grimaldi Brothers, fearless Elena and her aerialists who perform on living trapezes. War is everywhere, but while the Circus is performing, the world is magic.

That magic is no accident: Boss builds her circus from the bones out, molding a mechanical company that will survive the unforgiving landscape.

But even a careful ringmaster can make mistakes.

Two of Tresaulti's performers are entangled in a secret standoff that threatens to tear the circus apart just as the war lands on their doorstep. Now the Circus must fight a war on two fronts: one from the outside, and a more dangerous one from within.

Thoughts and impressions: I feel that it is very important to point out that this novel is a true work of art. Of course, as with all works of art there will be those who are fascinated by it and others who are dissatisfied with what they find before them. As for me, I’m caught up somewhere in the middle.

I could appreciate the novel for the craftsmanship that went into it but at the same time the very original construction didn’t really appeal to me. The narrative jumps around both in point of view and chronologically. I assume that these jumps are marked by chapter breaks in the physical copy of the book but in my PDF-to-mobi copy only a handful of these breaks were marked. Sometimes a paragraph would start in the third person, present tense and suddenly switch to first person, past tense and be following a different plot point. This got to be very confusing at times; I’d be lying if I didn’t say that it affected my enjoyment of the story.

The opening scene is about “you” visiting the circus and admiring the marvels that are to be found there. It was so uncannily similar to the opening of The Night Circus that I wasn’t sure what to make of it at first. It turns out that both books are copyrighted to 2011 – in fact, Mechanique was published some 6 months before The Night Circus – so it’s just two different authors who came up with very similar ideas (albeit following completely different plot veins) at around the same time.

It took me a while to really get used to the narrator jumps. Sometimes it would be in the second person, sometimes third person omniscient and others in the first person. It took me a fair while to get used to the flow of this. It didn’t help that the plot took a long time in getting anywhere at all: it wasn’t until the 10-15% mark that the threads of a plot started to weave together beyond the confusion of seemingly random, unconnected scenes that had come before then, and it wasn’t until the 50% mark that the plot itself took precedence over anecdotes from various characters’ pasts.

That was what I didn’t really like about the book – how things seemed to yo-yo a lot between relevant scenes and what were really just scenes to flesh out the history behind the story. When things focused on the plot, though, I found it to be 100% original and absorbing. I loved the steampunk idea it all of a woman somehow endowed with the ability to sustain a person’s life indefinitely through metal contraptions. I liked the idea of a travelling circus moving through the wasteland of a country brought to its knees by constant wars, unable to pull itself back together. This was a fascinating setting, especially as we have no real idea of when it could possibly be as the chronology even within the story is very vague, or even where, though I pictured it being in North America.

I didn’t really buy the hatred behind Stenos and Bird, which was the main motivation for tension within the circus itself. I enjoyed the descriptions of their encounters but to me it always seemed that they were balanced very precariously on that fine line between love and hate, especially Stenos. They were certainly obsessed with each other either way.

They and Boss made a good foundation to build the circus up from but, with the exception of Elena, none of the other characters were quite as dazzling. Still, it presents a very interesting position to pick things up from in the second book.

All in all, I can appreciate that this author is a master weaver of the craft who has great vision but this particular structure didn’t work very well for me personally, which detracted from my enjoyment of the book.

Style: Different in a good way. It felt like a very original style. It worked fairly well for me but I suspect that it won't appeal to some readers.

Final verdict: Had the story concentrated more on the main plot rather than laying so many different building blocks in place, I think I would have preferred it. As it was, I loved the vision behind the story but was less entranced by the execution. 3 stars

Extra notes: Not sure whether there was any bad language present. Sex is but behind closed doors. I have seen this book shelved in the YA section but I’m not sure I’d really consider it aimed at the YA market.

Beauty in the Beast by Christine Danse

I received this book courtesy of the publishers from NetGalley.

Considering my obsession with Beauty and the Beast, the title of this novella was always going to call to me until I gave in and read it. It didn’t take very much for me to give in to the urge to read it (read: it didn’t take anything at all). After I spent Valentine’s Day with something bordering on a horror story, I really fancied a bit of light romance next. And what better than Beauty and the Beast?

Infortmation:

Title: Beauty in the Beast

Author: Christine Danse

Publisher: Carina Press

Target Audience: Adult

Pages: ebook – approx. 29k words

PoV: 1^st person

Tense: Past tense

Story: Journeying by steam-powered sled to London's Frost Fair to perform, Tara and three friends are trapped in a blizzard in the woods. A gruff, handsome stranger offers them shelter-and wants one thing in return. Stories. 

The travellers are glad to oblige. Their host, Rolph, is especially captivated by Tara's story of an orphaned girl raised by the Fae in the world of the spirits. Equally intrigued by Rolph, and aware of an electric pull between them, Tara encourages him to share a story of his own. When Rolph weaves a tale of a man who is doomed by his own folly to turn into a wolf at the full moon, Tara suspects there is more than a grain of truth in his words. 

When the veil between the mortal and spiritual worlds is parted, and danger threatens, will Tara make the ultimate sacrifice to save Rolph?

(from Goodreads)

Thoughts and impressions: For a short story, Beauty in the Beast dabbles in a bit of everything! It’s historical, it’s romance, it’s paranormal, it’s steampunk. I really liked the opening where a company of four storytellers are battling their way through a snowstorm. The descriptions are poignant, all the more so because of the recent freezing weather and snow falls that we’ve had here. I could feel the cold seeping into my bones as much as it was into the characters’ bones!

There are essentially two halves to the story: in the first, the troop arrive at the cabin, beg for shelter and then take turns to each tell a story. The stories they tell are short but fun. I especially liked the story of the old man who replaced all his servants with automatons only to discover to his horror that these machines are far from the perfect servants that he had envisioned. A good moral for us all to keep in mind in this day and age!

The second half focuses on building the actual story between this particular Beauty (Tara) and the Beast (Rolph). There’s evident mutual attraction between the two of them but Rolph seems unwilling to act upon it for mysterious reasons. Tara, of course, won’t back down that easily. She knows what she wants and she’s willing to push to get it. There are some very sweet scenes when both of them are still finding their footing around the other as well as one particularly intense scene that I was rather hoping would lead to something more! It didn’t, but in this case I found that I wasn’t too disappointed because events didn’t give me time to be disappointed.

I’m a bit torn about the ending. On the one hand, I would have liked to have seen more – to get to know the characters and maybe get a glimpse into what was to come: would Tara leave the group or Rolph join in? How would they deal with Rolph’s particular “problem”? On the other hand, I recognise that it was probably the best place for the author to leave off as another ending point probably wouldn’t have been as powerful.

As for the paranormal side of things, well, the author asks the reader to take a lot on faith. She doesn’t really spend time worrying about how these things work or why they’re there. They just do and are. This worked for me but I’d understand if it didn’t work for everyone.

For a short story, the characters are very well developed, the story really caught my interest and I found it was all over far too soon. The mark of a good book is when you reach the end and wish there were still more pages to turn. I had that here.

Style: The story is set in Britain but written in American English. Usually I can ignore this fairly easily unless the author uses words that are not part of our British vocabulary. This story has a few offenders (the biggest being ‘stoop’ – the only reason I know this word is because it’s from a Dutch word) but this is a personal pet peeve. Everything flows well and I found it easy to immerse myself in the story.

Final verdict: A short but sweet retelling of my favourite fairy tale. I really liked Tara and Rolph – I just wish I’d been able to spend more time with them! 4 stars

Extra notes: No bad language. No sex.

Heart's Blood by Gail Dayton

This is a book that I read for the first time about a year ago. Coming back to it now made me realise that my memory is a funny thing. I can easily remember book titles and author names but character names just don’t stick around. Then again, I suppose that is to be expected with so many different characters going through my head.

With Heart’s Blood, I read this book, the second in a series, without having read the first book first. I can’t remember whether or not I was aware of this when I started reading but I have no doubt that it will have impacted my understanding of the story. When I finally decided to get around to reading New Blood, I soon found myself tempted to go and find my copy of Heart’s Blood and reread that one too. After a brief inner struggle (desire to reread vs. desire to read new material), temptation came out tops and I went rummaging in the attic. I had vague memories left of the events of the book, but I was still looking forward to rediscovering it.

Presentation: Mass market paperback. There are 418 pages broken down into 29 chapters. They type is medium-sized but well-spaced.

Story: Someone is killing people with magical intent. Everybody is already up in arms about the return of sorcery – of blood magic – and Grey Cataret, magister of the Conjurers’ guild, has got himself in a bit of a mess.

Pearl Parkin has been living in London’s slums, disguised as a boy, for some time now. Thanks to her magic, she’s managed to keep herself out of trouble but one night she spots Grey stumbling through the streets. Intrigued, she follows him, keeping him safe when he finally stops his advancement.

When he is arrested the next morning on suspicion of murder, she seizes her chance and blackmails him into accepting her as his apprentice in a society that is still prejudiced against female magic workers. Reluctantly, he accepts but it soon becomes obvious that her sorcerous talents are to be of use in his murder investigation, even if her presence complicates his life.

Thoughts and impressions: In the first book, Amanusa’s talents are explored but the other three schools of magic go ignored. In this second book, sorcery is re-examined from a different stand point (Amanusa had Jax - and through Jax, Yvaine – whereas Pearl has to learn from books and her own intuition) but conjury is also explored. The inner workings of this school of magic were very interesting and I liked the ghosts’ personalities – especially Davy, it’s a shame that the various ghosts weren’t expanded on more.

The dead zones have piqued my interest. Essentially they are areas where there’s no magic left and as such living things (both animals and plants) cannot survive there… but weird little machines constructed of all manner of metal items scuttle about the zones. The concept of them, and the origin of the machines, is not really expanded on much in this book, which is a shame as I’d have liked to have learnt more about them. They came in second to the story about someone abusing magic. This is fair enough, but it would have been nice to have had at least some new information about them offered up.

Grey didn’t really come across as the same character as he’s portrayed in the first book. I mentioned in my review of that one that he didn’t sit right with me; this could be because I’d already been inside his head by that point. There are mentions of him having wanted Amanusa but I never got that impression from the interactions in New Blood. But it was also a bit weird when he first realised that Pearl was a female. Despite the fact that she was coated in a couple of years’ worth of East End grime (later it is mentioned that it took multiple baths to get all of this off her skin), he refers to her as a ‘tasty morsel’. I feel it would have been better to wait with that thought until he’d seen her all cleaned up.

I was right when I figured I’d missed things. This time around, more aware of what sorcery magic entails, I was able to pick up on things that would not have stood out to me before. This is interesting as it shows little clues that I would have missed out on, but then I can’t be sure that I would have spotted them all had I not already been aware of just who the culprit turns out to be.

There is an awful lot of inner monologue in this book. Both characters spend a lot of their time questioning themselves and their motives. This goes perhaps beyond what I’m comfortable with and into the realm of me starting to get bored with them.

Added bonus: There’s one character called Fahquaar… all I could think of was the tiny king in Shrek! (even though she’s a female character.)

Style: The author has a tendency to stop her chapters in the middle of a scene. Sometimes this is the middle of a conversation and the first chapter just stops and the next chapter picks up with the next reply. These aren’t cliffhangers, they’re just stops.

Final verdict: Though still good, I felt that with careful editing it could have been better. 4 stars.

Note: I believe that this series was meant to be a trilogy. Tor currently owns the rights to the third book, Heart’s Magic, but has decided against publishing it. Gail Dayton is currently trying to get the rights back so that she can make the third book, Harry and Elinor’s story, available as an ebook for those who want to read it.

Extra notes: Both sex and swearing present.

New Blood by Gail Dayton

A little over a year ago, I purchased this book, spur of the moment, by an author that I’d never heard of before. That author was Gail Dayton and the book was called Heart’s Blood. At the time of the purchase, I didn’t realise that Heart’s Blood was actually the second book in a steampunk / paranormal romance series. I managed to muddle my way through the book without becoming too confused but I did soon realise that I seemed to be missing information. Anyway, I enjoyed the book and found that I wanted to read Amanusa’s story, even though she didn’t figure all that much in the second book. So I ordered New Blood then did my typical thing of putting it on a shelf and forgetting about it. Until now.

I actually read this book a month ago and it was my fifth and final read in the favourites challenge for autumn 2011.

Presentation: Mass market paperback. There are 500 pages and 30 chapters (I think. I gave the book to a friend to read so I can’t check.) New chapters do not start on a new page. The type is medium-sized and spaced.

Story: There are four schools of magic: alchemy, which works with natural elements; conjury, which works by contacting the dead; wizardy, which also works with natural elements but in a slightly different way; and sorcery, which works by taking blood. Blood sorcery is feared and only available to female practitioners of magic. Women having been pushed out of the ranks of magicians, sorcery has been lost.

Yvaine, the last blood sorceress, was burnt at the stake over 200 years ago but before she died, she set her servant, Jax, the task of finding her successor. It has taken him a long time, but he has finally found Amanusa, the next blood sorceress, in the wilds of Transylvania. Amanusa has a painful past, though, and when she unleashes her magic on those who hurt her, she and Jax must run for Western Europe.

Meanwhile, in Paris, the Magicians’ Conclave has scheduled a crisis meeting to try to find a way of dealing with dead zones – areas of land where no magic exists anymore and where no living beings can survive – that are cropping up all over the world. They must try to find a way of preventing these areas from expanding.

Thoughts and impressions: At first it was a little weird coming into this first book with prior knowledge of the world building. This soon passed, however, and I found myself fully immersed in the story. The setting, the wilds of the Transylvanian mountains (or the Carpathians to call them by their real name), is one that I am particularly fond of (just personal taste) and the author did the remote mountain area justice in her narration. I got a sense of remoteness from the story.

I also liked how she made the Hungarian Inquisition (a society that hunts down illegal practitioners of magic – especially women) so set in their ways that they are willing to chase this female magician – a sorceress no less! – across the whole of Europe. The presentation made it feel authentic, something that is always important to me. This contrasted with Western Europe where the reader sees that women - in particular Elinor, an aspiring wizard – are starting to demand their rightful place in the magicians’ ranks. Of course, there are two camps of men: the ‘traditionalists’ (who want to keep the practise of magic a male-only domain) and the ‘progressives’ (who are the ones who actually want to go back to traditional traditions from some 200 years ago before the witch hunts killed off all female practitioners, and to readmit women among their ranks.) Some of the characters went too far for me, Nigel Cranshaw in particular (I remember not liking him in the second book either), though I suspect that he’s probably more of an archetype, representative of a mainstream opinion, rather than a character in his own rights.

Sorcery and the machinations behind blood magic were interesting. In fact, the whole magic system was very well thought out: it’s one of my favourites from the paranormal genre and it seems to me that a lot of time and effort must have gone into setting up the system and all its various rules. This is expended on more in the second book, if I remember correctly, but it’s a good introduction. There were some things that Amanusa seemed to just know instinctively about the intricacies of her magic; I’m not entirely sure how I feel about this, especially when she often has to have the basics explained to her. Despite this, I still liked the rides that these vents took me on as a reader.

The main threat in this novel is the fact that women have been excluded from the magical community for so long that some men are willing to go to any lengths necessary to prevent a woman from practising any of the magical fields. On top of this, there are hundreds of years’ worth of bad rumours about just how sorcery works – the most popular of these being that the blood used to channel the spells is stolen from innocent victims – making this lost form of magic the most feared. This presents Amanusa with many hurdles to overcome - with both supporters who want to welcome the return of sorcery and others who would rather see her killed, so reviled is her school of magic. The reader knows that all blood used to channel magic must be given freely and that it is only with this, blood of the innocents that has been shed by another, or with her own blood (this one’s a secret, though, so shush!) that a sorceress can work. But prejudices prevail and it was amusing to read about Amanusa’s frustrations with these people.

The relationship was of my favourite kinds: one allowed to evolve slowly from resigned acceptance, to like, to trust, to love. Jax, despite his sordid past, made for the type of hero a girl will root for and both of the characters had to face their own demons and overcome their fears before anything could come of it all.

As for the secondary characters, Elinor’s dogged determinations and Harry’s desire to set the world back to rights both appealed to me. Grey I wasn’t so sure about as the character presented here contradicted with the hero that I remember from Heart’s Blood. Crow made for a good non-human character, though I wish his role had been explained and that he’d been used more.

I now find myself wanted to dig through my boxes of read books to unearth Heart’s Blood. I’m sure that I missed things the first time around and that would lend the story another dimension now that I’ve read New Blood. In fact, I think I’ll do just that and make Heart’s Blood a December read!

Style: A few weird little mistakes that didn’t get spotted in the editing process made for some confusing moments. Obviously no one bothered to check the French. Some of the most basic mistakes:

Conseil française: conseil is a masculine noun ; française is an adjective marked by the female morpheme ‘-e’ at the end.

Sorcire – not sure where this one comes from unless the ‘è’ after the ‘i’ got deleted for some reason. The French for witch is sorcière.

L’environs – le / la / l’ = determiners for singular nouns; les = determiner for plural nouns. L’environ → les environs.

There were other problems,  like ‘l’endroit de la mort’, which sounds wrong to me. It’s ‘lieu du crime’ so lieu would sound more natural to me in this sort of structure.  Even so, it still sounds odd as a translation for dead zone.

All the English was engaging. I really like the description of… I think it was dawn… when they were in the rebels’ camp in Romania.

Final verdict: I’ve been feeling torn between 4 and 5 stars but have decided to be nice and go up. 5 stars.

Extra notes: Mild language. One sex scene that extends over a couple of chapters.

Nell Gwynne's Scarlet Spy by Kage Baker

This book was first released as a collector’s edition entitled The Women of Nell Gwynne’s. Considering that it garnered a lot of attention and the author sadly passed away shortly after, the publishers decided to republish it along with an accompanying short story. This was good news for me as it meant that I could get the book that had piqued my interest for less than the $100 asking price for the limited edition. Unfortunately, for a long time the only edition that came up on my book provider’s site was the German one, and my German is far too rusty to attempt to read a book in the language! So I found myself waiting until the English language edition became available. Having forgotten about the book for some time, I recently went back to check on the status only to discover that it was now available for ordering. I, of course, immediately put the order through, excited for what awaited me even though I knew absolutely nothing about the story. Yes, sometimes I get fixated on things that I know nothing about!

Presentation: A large, good quality paperback. The type is small but spaced. The original novella is 122 pages broken down into 18 chapters. There then follows a short story The Bohemian Astrobleme that is approx. 40 pages long and includes breaks in the text but no chapters.

Story: I’m only going to address the story of the original novella here. In The Women of Nell Gwynne’s, Lady Beatrice, daughter of a high-ranking member of the English army, finds herself fallen from grace and unacceptable in polite society after the death of her father. Instead, she turns to prostitution and is soon approached by the madam of a very exclusive brothel that deals only in secrets. When one of their agents goes missing on a mission, the Gentlemen’s Speculative Society (which works hand in hand with Nell Gwynne’s) sends the ladies to an ancient English manor hoping not only to find their agent but also to uncover just what the Lord has been doing with vast sums of money.

Thoughts and impressions: As of the very first lines, this book strikes you. It is probably largely due to the fact that the style is so very formal but at the same time… I can only think to call it in-your-face and cheeky. The main character is always referred to as Lady Beatrice because that is the name that she took for her prostitute persona. The reader never knows what her name was before this, though they do (briefly) follow her through the early years of her life and the events that led up to her decision to sell her body to earn her way.

The author introduces the reader to a steampunk early Victorian society where the underground Gentlemen’s Speculative Society has invented any number of interesting and quirky devices, such as mechanical lenses that allow the blind to see, but do not share their inventions with society at large. At least, not for now. But they do use these inventions to influence society with the help of the secrets that the women of Nell Gwynne’s extract from their high-ranking clientele. Some of the devices are great fun!

But the characters themselves are even more fun. There’s just something about writing about whores that allows the author to present the tight-laced society that they live in and characters that completely contradict everything about that society. Books about whores also always seem to have an undercurrent of dry, sarcastic humour and Nell Gwynne’s is no exception! I’m a big fan of dry humour when it is handled correctly, as it is here. Lady Beatrice always goes with whatever the flow but tries to subtly influence it to meet her means, sometimes with funny or unexpected consequences.

I believe that it was the author's original intention to continue this series of novellas but that life unfortunately did not allow for such. This is a great shame as it could have heralded the start of an excellent series about Lady Beatrice's adventures.

A quick note on The Bohemian Astrobleme: this short story delves more into the Gentlemen’s Speculative Society and the work that they do. It’s about a specific type of meteorite only found in Bohemia that gives a powerful electric shock to anyone who touches it after it comes in contact with a specific type of acid. It is soon ascertained that this red glass would make excellent battery fuel cells. Ludbridge, whom we met in The Women on Nell Gwynne’s is sent to Bohemia with two companions to track the origin of the glass. Lady Beatrice soon joins him and again the reader is treated to a delightful romp through this society with characters who are quiet and others who are too cocky for their own good.

Style: The greatness of this style stems from the juxtaposition of a very formal style and extremely informal situations. There’s just something about describing an orgy and then mentioning that the host had agreed to allow himself to be “fellatiated”!

Final verdict: Great fun. Short but it worked really well. I really enjoyed it, it was a quick read and I’ll likely go back and reread it at some point soon in case I missed anything. 5 stars.

Extra notes: Occasional mild language. The story is about whores so obviously there’s a certain amount of sex involved.

Heartless by Gail Carriger

One almost sunny evening on June 30th 2011, I found myself in Amsterdam with some time to kill before going to listen to Stephen Fry talk about his new autobiography, The Fry Chronicles. The boyfriend decided that he wanted to purchase a copy of this book prior to the talk, so we headed off to The American Book Center. There, not only did we find Fry’s autobiography, but I also found Heartless staring at me from the shelves. Now, I will admit that I find this cover awfully ugly, but my desire to know what would happen to Lord and Lady Maccon, the infant inconvenience, Akeldama, Biffy, Lyall, Ivy, and so on pushed me to purchase the book against my reservations.

As with most books that I purchase, it ended up sitting quietly on my shelves for a time while I made my way through other books. Last week I decided that it was high time I took on this fourth Alexia Tarabotti book so that I could stow away books 2 and 4 with books 1 and 3 and then conveniently forget all about her until the fifth and (supposedly) final book is released in early 2012. As a bit of a side track, I opened up Heartless and discovered the cover art for Timeless. If I thought Heartless was bad, Timeless really takes the cake! I don’t think that I have ever seen a fantasy cover that I consider that ugly. Each cover seems to have got progressively worse (excepting Blameless. I rather like the cover art on that one.)

I went into Heartless after not having really appreciated Changeless and expected much the same case with this book. With a heavy heart, I plunged in…

Presentation: Mass market paperback. There are 374 pages broken down into a prologue and 17 chapters. Unlike in previous books, Heartless only really follows Alexia’s PoV, though a ghost does get a few paragraphs at the end of some chapters.

*Please note that this is the fourth book in a series and as such lack of knowledge of events in previous books may make this a little hard to follow.*

Story: Alexia, now 8 months pregnant, finds herself agreeing to Lord Akeldama adopting her as-yet unborn child in an attempt to stem the flow of vampire attacks on her person.  However, she also decides that she will be joining the child and taking up residence in the vampire’s humble abode. Her husband, realising she intends to only spend two days a week with him in the pack’s castle outside London, purchases the townhouse next door to Akeldama’s residence to be the pack’s residence in the city.

Newly moved into the new residence, Alexia receives a ghostly warning that the Queen is in danger. Despite her current very pregnant state, Alexia launches into an investigation of just what could be threatening the queen: an investigation that takes her down memory lane and uncovers a few pack secrets that might have been better left undisturbed.

Thoughts and impressions: The plot in this one was a sight better than that of Changeless and Blameless. Unfortunately it still wasn’t that great and some of the more defining moments were based on Alexia uncharacteristically overlooking important things, which was somewhat of a disappointment. I enjoyed her pregnancy and some of the humorous situations that came from it. The best part of the story may have been when Alexia initiated Ivy Tunstell into the Parasol Protectorate. On the down side, she then sent Ivy off to Scotland and she didn’t make another appearance in the book; a shame as Ivy is a fun character. In fact, a lot of the previously important characters took a bit of a backseat for this book: Madame Lefoux only had a limited role as well as Ivy and Felicity was kind of there but ignored most of the time.

The humour remains the same in each book and it is becoming tired rather than really remaining amusing. With this book I noticed that it is often very dependent on similes and usually the images conjured up are more cringe-worthy than actually being funny. The book did, however, contain what is possibly the best quote of the last three books: “By the end, Rafe wore the long-suffering look of an eagle being ordered about by a flock of excited pigeons.” The only laugh out loud moments were towards the start of the book and there were only two or three of them.

I would have liked to have seen an actual resolution to Felicity’s subplot, but, as always, she is just cast to one side and conveniently forgotten about.

Book five is currently planned as being the final book in the series. It’s got to the point where it needs to wrap up so this is probably for the best.

Style: Ok, diving into the humour debate here. This is not British humour. It irks me to see it classed as British humour. I am British, I think I know what my humour is like. I am a firm believer that, though it is possible to come to appreciate another culture’s humour, it is not possible to adopt that humour as your own. Your humour will inevitably be that of the culture that you were brought up in. This is dry American wit. That I didn’t find this particularly funny coupled with the fact that a lot of the reviews I scanned where people claim to have giggled their way through the book came from American reviewers and not British ones, seems to back up my point. I actually found the dark humour in Darkly Dreaming Dexter to be far funnier than the dry wit presented in The Parasol Protectorate.

It has come to my attention that the language in the book is strictly American English because the publishers require it to be so. Why?! Would the poor American audience really be that stumped if they come across “travelled” instead of “traveled”? Because obviously it cannot possibly mean the same thing if the word has an extra ‘l’ in it! What about “the top step” instead of “stoop”? Stoop is actually a word that a lot of British people do not know because it comes from the Dutch word ‘stoep’ (meaning pavement or sidewalk depending on which side of the pond you come from) and entered American English from the Dutch settlers there. Dutch hasn’t had much of an influence on British English so this word is not part of our general vocabulary.  Frankly, it is annoying to be faced with British aristocracy who speak a mix of present day American and period English. It should be one or the other, not a mix of both.

As mentioned, the humour is getting old and isn’t particularly funny anymore. A lot of what is meant to be humorous really just leaves me wondering how on earth anyone could actually find that funny.

Final verdict: Mediocre. Better than books 2 and 3, probably about on par with book 1. I cannot say I really enjoyed it but I didn’t feel like it was a mental slog to get through it either. 3 stars.

Extra notes: Occasional minor language; no sex (due to Alexia being so far along in her pregnancy one would assume). Suitable for older teens and up.

Changeless by Gail Carriger

I’ve had this book sitting on my shelves for almost a year now. I came across Soulless, the first book in The Parasol Protectorate series quite by accident last September. I read and enjoyed the book and immediately ordered in the other two currently available books. Unfortunately, Blameless, the third book in the series, was delivered first and Changeless was to be delayed by up to a week. I wanted another fix and I couldn’t be bothered to wait a week, so I decided I would read books 2 and 3 in the wrong order. Even more unfortunately, I did not like Blameless at all. This put me off the mere idea of reading Changeless and consequently it has been shunned, ignored on my shelves. Until now.

The only reason I picked up this book now is because the fourth book in the series, Heartless, was recently released and for some reason I will not pretend to understand, I immediately snapped up a copy of the book. Before delving into Heartless I wanted to know the events of all the previous books so I chose to ignore my trepidation and give Changeless a whirl…

Presentation: Mass market paperback. There are 374 pages broken down into 14 chapters. The chapters tend to be touching on the long side at approx. 30 pages each.

Story: Lady Alexia Maccon, formerly Alexia Tarabotti, wakes up one evening to find a werewolf army regiment camped on her front lawn, a rude Gamma not aware of her status, and central London hit by some form of “humanisation” epidemic. The vampires and the werewolves are frantic, and Alexia, as Muhjah to the queen, has to get to the bottom of this riddle. When, the next day, she finds that her husband, the Alpha werewolf Conall Maccon, has left for Scotland and his previous, currently Alpha-less pack whom he deserted some twenty years previously, Alexia is notified that this humanisation epidemic is also heading north. Putting two and two together, she realises that whatever is causing the problem must be in the hands of the Kingair pack, the pack her husband is going to sort out.

Seeing no other option, Alexia immediately plans to fly to Scotland on the next dirigible out of London… unfortunately for her, she has quite the entourage foisted upon her before she can leave: Tunstell, her husband’s claviger (a werewolf’s ‘personal servant’) and actor; her insipid and shallow sister, Felicity; and her airhead of a best friend, Miss Ivy Hisselpenny . On top of this already impressive entourage, a new acquaintance, the daring Madame Lefoux, French inventor who dresses like a man, seems to be following them on their trip up north.

But Alexia has no time to worry about this. There is a mystery, and the soulless Alexia needs to get to the bottom of it!

Thoughts and impressions: I like the idea behind this series. Basically, Alexia is a preternatural (as opposed to a supernatural). She has no soul and her touch causes a supernatural to temporarily become human again (or in the case of a ghost, exorcises it). Only people with a natural overabundance of soul can become supernatural (werewolf, vampire or ghost). Due to her lack of soul, Alexia is very pragmatic and can only accept logical answers, being unable to take anything on faith.

The book is not meant to be taken seriously, and it is intended to be humour. I think it’s intended to be British humour, but it’s not. There are very few laugh out loud moments (I think I only laughed out loud once during the whole of Changeless) and the humour often feels forced. It’s good that it’s light, but sometimes it takes the lightness too far and in this case it meant that the story didn’t become interesting for a long time. It took me a whole week to read this book – six days to read the first 174 pages, an evening to finish off the last 200. Once it got to the point where it was interesting, the plot worked quite well, though the villain was obvious and the source of the humanisation problem evident to the reader a good while before Alexia figured it out.

There wasn’t enough Lord Akeldama in this book. He lightens things, plus, who can resist a who-knows-how-old vampire with openly ‘flowery gay’ mannerisms? Not I.

Warning: there’s a cliffhanger ending to this one so you’ll want Blameless at the ready to pick up as soon as you’re done with it.

Style: I hate all the Americanisms in the writing when there is an obvious effort to make the speech sound period British (though the author fails at this too from time to time and uses blatantly modern American language.)  As mentioned, the humour often feels forced and though I appreciate the lightness of the book I do not find it all that funny. I will expand on this point in the review of Heartless.

As a side note, I find it an insult to Jane Austen to compare this work with hers. This work is mediocre at best. Jane Austen’s is an excellent commentary on the society of her era.

Final verdict: The story took too long to get interesting; the lightness was sometimes too light, detracting from the plot; and it just didn’t appeal to me in the way the first book did. Admittedly, I may have gone into this book with some prejudices considering my dislike of Blameless (if I had to read about a British aristocrat talking about “ladybugs” one more time I was going to blow my top) but I still did not really like this one. 2 stars.

Extra notes: Occasional language, though it stays on the light side; several intimate scenes, though it fades out before sex takes place. I would recommend for older teens and up.