The 2024 Mega Review

[mtvessel]

My usual round-up of some of the lighter books from last year.

Feb 2024
The Last Argument of Kings - Joe Abercrombie – Gollancz, 2009
* *
I'm so over grimdark. The previous book in this series showed promise in giving some agency and character development to its protagonists, but that is all squandered in this one, which consists of one-half gruesomely depicted battle-scenes and one-half magical god games. Glotka, Jezal and Logen are reduced back to helpless observers, whose character development, as such, consists of shrugging and going with the flow. There are a couple of amusing plot twists and the occasional good one-liner, but otherwise very little to recommend it.

May 2024
The House in the Cerulean Sea - T.J. Kline – Tor, 2020
* * *
This one hasn't been marketed as a YA novel but probably should be. An education inspector is sent to a distant island where there is a school for unusual children, and becomes caught up in tensions with local people who see them as monsters. While I would never say no to the found family story that this becomes, it all felt a little by the numbers - there was no real grit or complexity in the characterisation, with the children too obviously the victims of trauma to be unlikeable and the romance lacking any real friction. It doesn't help that the worldbuilding was minimal and very lightly sketched, making it all feel insubstantial.

July 2024
The Witness for the Dead - Katherine Addison – Tom Doherty Associates, 2021
* * *
A year after reading it, I barely recall this follow-up to The Goblin Emperor which is perhaps not a great recommendation, but I do think it is a better book. It is an example of what I like to call everyday fantasy, in which a disgraced former prelate, Thara Celehar, goes about his duties in the city of Amalo. As his skill is in communicating with the spirits of the recently deceased, it's not surprising that a murder mystery, of an unlikeable opera singer, is one of his cases, but he also gets involved in a disputed will and a missing person investigation while trying to deal with the feelings of recrimination and guilt resulting from the events that led to his downfall.

It's all very gentle and there is a lack of dramatic action and vivid secondary characters, which is why it hasn't lingered in my memory. The pacing is also odd, with Thara's main cases being sidelined for several hundred pages as other things crop up in which the reader is much less invested. But Thara's compassion for people both alive and dead is compelling and the worldbuilding is less clunky than in The Goblin Emperor (though a glossary for the invented terms would have been helpful). Gentle, redemptive fantasy is thin on the ground at present so I will probably give the sequels a try.

Aug 2024
The Mercies - Kiran Millwood Hargraves – Picador, 2021
* * *
This chilly novel, based on real events, is a feminist take on witch trials in seventeenth-century Norway. It is beautifully written and is worth reading for its evocation of life in a cold, isolated fishing village in an unusual part of the world, but its theme of the use of patriarchal religion to suppress women's freedoms and actions is hardly original. If you have read or seen The Crucible, you kind of know what's going to happen.

Sep 2024
Rosewater - Tade Thompson – Orbit, 2017
* * *
This novel is another one that hasn't lasted in my memory, but it probably should have (it was a holiday read). It is an alien conspiracy thriller largely set in 2050s Nigeria, where a giant alien visitor known as Wormwood has created an impenetrable dome that is rumoured to emit healing rays, resulting in a shanty city called Rosewater growing up around it. But Wormwood has been around for many years (it landed in London in 2012 and disappeared into the earth's crust) and its presence has given a few people access to a sort of psychic internet called the xenosphere, allowing them to read minds. One of these sensitives is our protagonist, an ex-thief turned government agent called Kaaro. After being called upon to mind-read a captured terrorist, Kaaro becomes caught up in a conspiracy that leads back to the mysterious dome and some terrifying revelations.

Kaaro is an interesting character and I very much enjoyed the Afro-centric worldbuilding (the UK and USA are no longer world powers, with the former having been decimated by Wormwood's arrival and the latter having isolated itself and "gone dark" in an effort to defend itself against sensitives). The story is gritty and violent, with a generally cynical view of humanity and little redeeming humour, but it is well told, using cross-cutting timelines to good effect. The ending sets up an interesting situation for the following sequels, and while the dark tone has not made me eager to return to the world, I am a little curious to know how it resolves.

Jun / Sep 2024
The Man Who Died Twice / The Bullet that Missed - Richard Osman – Penguin, 2022 / 2023
* * * / * * *
These sequels to The Thursday Murder Club are still fun but show a law of diminishing returns. They both centre on events from Elizabeth's past - in the first, her ex-husband, whom she thought was dead, turns up on her doorstep asking for protection, and in the second a blackmailer threatens her friends unless she offs an ex-KGB agent - which somewhat diminishes the agency of Joyce, Ron and Ibrahim, not to mention the secondary characters of Donna, Chris and Bogdan. Both also make use of criminal gangs, like the more recent Flavia Albia novels, which is a pity because organised crime is the least exciting reason to have a dead body showing up. Family secrets, a la Agatha Christie, is a far more fertile source of interesting motivations and could have been done by introducing more side characters from Coopers Chase. Fortunately the chapters told from Joyce's viewpoint are still laugh-out-loud funny and the trope of thugs being outwitted by wily old people never gets old.

Comments

[ingaborg]

THank you! I suspect I enjoyed your review more than I would enjoy any of the books!