Review: Dragonflight, by Anne McCaffrey

Review: Dragonflight, by Anne McCaffrey

by Rich Horton

Our book club discussed Anne McCaffrey's Dragonflight this week, which prompted a long overdue reread on my part. I had first read it way back in my Golden Age, or technically shortly later -- when I was 14 or so instead Peter Graham's 12. I believe I read the 1968 Hugo winner "Weyr Search" first, in Isaac Asimov's second Hugo Winners anthology, or perhaps in Nebula Award Stories Three, and I read the sequel, "Dragonrider", in Nebula Award Stories Four. I am honestly not sure at this remove that I read Dragonflight back then -- it comprises "Weyr Search", "Dragonrider", and an additional novella length story that fits in between "Weyr Seach" and "Dragonrider". (This story seems to have originally been called "Crack Dust, Black Dust" but was never published separately.) Back then I think I may have assumed that there was no new material in Dragonflight. I did go on to read the first sequel, Dragonquest (1971), but never continued to any further Pern stories. By the time The White Dragon came out in 1978 I was in college, and I suspect I simply didn't have the time to read it. (I do remember that it was one of the earlier SF novels to get prominent front of store placement in the Waldenbooks where I still worked part time -- and indeed The White Dragon did become a New York Times bestseller.)

Anne McCaffrey (1926-2011) began publishing SF in 1953 with a story in Hugo Gernsback's odd late return to SF edition with Science Fiction Plus, but didn't sell any more stories until "The Lady in the Tower" (1959) and "The Ship Who Sang" (1961). She published a couple more "Ship" stories in 1966, but while those drew some attention it was "Weyr Search" that made her name. It appeared in Analog for October of 1967, and "Dragonrider" quickly followed, a two part serial, in December 1967 and January 1968. The novel Dragonflight came out in 1968. "Weyr Search" won the Hugo for Best Novella (in a tie with Philip Jose Farmer's "Riders of the Purple Wage"*) and "Dragonrider" won the Nebula for Best Novella. McCaffrey was the first woman to win a Hugo for fiction, and was tied with Kate Wilhelm as the first woman to win a Nebula, as Wilhelm's "The Planners" won for Best Short Story the same year that "Dragonrider" won. Dragonflight was McCaffrey's first novel, and two more novels followed in 1969 (The Ship Who Sang (fixed up from the stories) and Decision at Doona) so her career was well established, and she proceeded to publish dozens more novels in a variety of series -- not just Pern, but the Ship seres, Doona, Crystal Singer, and more. Much of her later work was in collaboration with various writers, including her son Todd. She was named an SFWA Grand Master in 2005.

I have to admit that in later years one reason I never returned to Pern was an impression I had that it had become, essentially, pure traditional fantasy; and also that much of it was YA. The latter is somewhat ture, but not entirely, but I am told (by other book club members) that the main sequence of Pern novels is quite definitely science fiction, and does some interesting things with technological developments, and also with SFnal rationales for the abilities of the dragons. Pern has often been cited as an SF/Fantasy edge case, perhaps unfairly -- largely because for many people dragons = fantasy. The Pern books can also be called a sort of Romantasy precursor -- especially to books like those in Rebecca Yarros' Empyrean series, which feature dragons and dragonriders. That said, while there is definitely romance in the Pern books I've read, it is less prominent than in Romantasy (as far as I can tell) and there is certainly less explicit sex.

As for Dragonflight -- as noted, I had read it decades ago, but I really recalled fairly little. For this reading I read both the two original novellas in their magazine publication and the book version. I will say that the differences between the books and the novellas are quite minor (except for the added section in the novel.) There are a few changes at the sentence level, either thanks to the book editor, or to McCaffrey doing revisions. It did seem to me that even by the magazine version of "Dragonrider" her prose was improving -- she was still a fairly new writer, even in her early 40s, so it's not surprising that she was getting better. 

There are two primary viewpoint characters in the novel. Lessa is a scullery maid at Ruatha Hold, but secretly she is the only survivor of the ruling family of the Hold, the rest of whom had been massacred by Lord Fax a decade earlier. Lessa, just now reaching adulthood, is plotting to have Fax killed so she can reclaim her hold. Meanwhile F'Lar, a bronze dragonrider from the only remaining Weyr, Benden, is Searching for a new Weyrwoman -- a woman with the telepathic ability to bond with a Queen dragon; as the old Queen is about to die, and her bonded Weyrwoman is incompetent. F'Lar's Search has not been promising, but at last he comes to Ruatha, despite being told that there is no one left of "royal" blood. Well, you can see where that's going, and indeed, F'Lar does manage to recognize in Lessa the abilities he needs, while she is able to manipulate F'Lar to confront Lord Fax ... Along with this, we learn that the Holds and some of the dragonriders do not believe that the "threads" which the dragons and their riders burn away are a threat any more.

The subsequent story concerns Lessa's first couple of years at Benden Weyr, learning the historic lore of the dragonriders, and her and F'lar's ascension to leadership, even as the two of them still don't get along well. Then it is time for the threads -- and we see the desperate attempt of the limited number of remaining dragons and riders to fend them off. F'Lar and Lessa -- particularly Lessa -- come up with a rather clever method of fighting the threads despite their depleted numbers. I'll leave that secret to the readers to discover. 

There is the skeleton of a really interesting novel here, but I don't think McCaffrey pulled it off. The prose is erratic -- as I said, it improves, but McCaffrey really wasn't a good writer at this time. The central romantic relationship just doesn't come off -- there is no chemistry between the leads, and it all seems forced (literally so, at times.) Some of the conflicts are too easily resolved, some don't convince, and the pacing is off (to some extent because of the structure compelled by the novel being written in three parts.) I do think a complete rewrite, keeping the same basic story but fixing the issues I mention, could be pretty effective. And I believe the later novels in the long series got better.

I know these are books many people love -- and Dragonflight was a book I quite liked when I was much younger. But I think this is a book that hasn't held up -- even if later books work much better. 

*("Weyr Search" tieing for the Hugo prevented Harlan Ellison from a clean sweep of the short fiction Hugos that year -- "Riders of the Purple Wage" was from his anthology Dangerous Visions, as was the novelette winner (Fritz Leiber's "Gonna Roll the Bones"), while Ellison himself kept two other Dangerous Visions stories from winning -- his "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" beat out Larry Niven's "The Jigsaw Man" and Samuel R. Delany's "Aye, and Gomorrah".)

Review: Major Arcana, by John Pistelli

 Review: Major Arcana, by John Pistelli

I have been busy the last couple days and will be for the next couple so I haven't finished my next planned review (Dragonflight, by Anne McCaffrey), so I figured I'd post a link to my review at my Substack of John Pistelli's Major Arcana.

Review: The Brothers Lionheart, by Astrid Lindgren

Review: The Brothers Lionheart, by Astrid Lindgren

by Rich Horton

The Swedish writer Astrid Lindgren (1907-2002) is by far best known for Pippi Longstocking (1945) and its sequels. I encountered these at about the age of 10, but didn't continue to any other books by Lindgren, though she was very prolific. The novel at hand, The Brothers Lionheart, was first published in 1973 in Sweden, and in 1975 in English (translation by Joan Tate) -- so it's not surprising that I never knew of it as I would have been 15 or 16 when I could have possibly seen a copy -- and by then I was not reading much YA fiction. The first I heard of this book, actually, was just the other day when Farah Mendlesohn happened to mention it on Facebook. She praised it wholeheartedly, and many others echoed that praise. I figured I ought to give it a try.

The story is told by Karl Lion, a frail boy, about ten years old. He is unable to do much of anything due to his health, and he idolized his older brother, 13 year old Jonathan, who is very popular, beloved by his teachers and by the other children, and who is also very devoted to Karl, whom he calls Rusky. He tells Rusky stories, for example stories of Nangiyala, where the sagas come from and where you go when you die. And then a tragic event happens -- there is a fire, and the building where Karl, his mother, and Jonathan live burns down. Jonathan rushes back into the building to save his brother -- and jumps out of a second floor window at the last minute. Karl is saved, but Jonathan dies of his injuries, reminding Karl at the end that he'll be OK -- he'll be in Nangiyala. Soon after, Karl dies as well.

And, indeed, Karl finds himself in Nangiyala, in a house with his brother, in a place called Cherry Valley. They are very happy there -- it is an idyllic place, where no one goes wanting, and there is cooperation and community. Both brothers, of course, are fully cured of illness and injury. Karl gets to do the things he has always wanted -- to camp, and fish, and ride horses. But there is a shadown -- Cherry Valley is happy, but a neighboring place, Wild Rose Valley, has been conquered by Tengil, the evil leader of a harsh nearby country, Karmanyaka. Tengil fiercely oppresses the people in Wild Rose Valley, using the mysterious threat of Katla -- the nature of which we don't know until near the end of the book -- to keep them in line. 

There is a resistance movement, and there is a desire in Cherry Valley to come to the aid of their neighboring valley. And Jonathan -- now called Lionheart -- is a leader, along with an older woman named Sofia. Another rebel leader, Ortvar, is imprisoned by Tengil, and Jonathan realizes he must find a way into Wild Rose Valley, and help the people there rise up against Tengil. So he leaves -- and soon after, Karl has a dream which convinces him that he must come to his brother's aid. And despite what he considers his lack of courage, he finds a way to Wild Rose Valley, fortuitously encountering some of Tengil's men on the way -- along with a traitor from Cherry Valley. Karl convinces the guards that he is from Wild Rose Valley, living with his grandfather -- and when they ask him where his house is, he luckily sees a likely old man living alone and claims him as his grandfather -- and wouldn't you know it, this is the same man who is helping Jonathan hide from Tengil!

Things continue as we might expect -- Jonathan has dug a tunnel out of Wild Rose Valley, and he and Karl use to escape and head for Karmanyaka, and for the cave of Katla, where Ortvar must be imprisoned. The two boys bravely make there way to the cave, rescue Ortvar, face down the terrifying Katla, and return to Cherry Valley, to rally the people for the final battle against Tengil.

In many ways this is a pretty typical children's portal fantasy. The broad outline of the plot resembles many other examples -- from minor works such as X. J. Kennedy's The Owlstone Crown to major works like C. S. Lewis's Narnia series. And, indeed, encountering this book as an adult I found some aspects disappointing -- the way things work out is in many ways too easy, too convenient. While there is definitely stress and tragedy in the battle to overcome Tengil, it still feels -- implausible, I guess. But on thinking it through, the strength of the novel lies elsewhere. It is an afterlife fantasy, through and through, and there's a reading available where it is all in Karl's mind, or perhaps a subcreation of both Karl and his Jonathan. And there are no compromises -- death is death, there is no return. Jonathan is a pacifist -- and this has consequences. And Nangilaya is not the only place in the afterlife -- there is also Nangilima ... The best scenes of this novel are truly moving. And the depictions of courage, of the moral response to villainy, of brotherly love -- these strike home. I have to say I think I'd have loved it uncritically had I found it when I was 10 or 12 (which of course I could not have.) Coming to it now -- it didn't strike me as strongly, but I'm still glad to have read it. 

Review: A Ladder of Swords, by Gilbert Parker

Review: A Ladder of Swords, by Gilbert Parker

by Rich Horton

I haven't read as many "Old Bestsellers" (the original focus of this blog) in recent times as I used to. (For my purpose, "Old Bestseller" primarily refers to popular fiction of the first half of the 20th Century.) But one writer I knew I'd get around to trying at some time was Gilbert Parker. And when I did my recent Victorian Fiction quiz, I realized that I really didn't have any Canadian writers featured -- and that that was primarily because I have read very little Victorian-era fiction by Canadians, and those I have read, such as Ralph Connor, are really too obscure for a general interest quiz. But Gilbert Parker? Well, he still might be rather obscure, but I knew of him as a very popular Canadian writer of mostly historical fiction, who was active around the turn of the 20th Century. So when I happened across a book by him at an estate sale the other day, I snapped it up.

Gilbert Parker was born in Camden East, a village in Southeastern Ontario, more or less the length of Lake Ontario away from Toronto, in 1862. He became a teacher, including for a time a teacher of the deaf, and then a lecturer at Trinity College in Toronto, before moving to Australia in 1885 to work as an editor for the Sydney Morning Herald. While in Australia he wrote a few short stories about Canada, but when he moved to London (England, not Ontario!) in 1889 and tried to publish a collection, it was politely rejected and Parker burned the stories -- saying later that he was certain the publisher who had rejected them was right. Soon after he began writing again, and another set of stories set in Canada appeared in 1892, Pierre and His People -- stories set in "the Far North" about fur trappers and the like. He continued to write stories in that mode, but soon turned to novels, most notably The Seats of the Mighty (1896), concerning the British conquest of Quebec in the middle of the 18th Century. Later novels tended to be set elsewhere than Canada -- including England, the Channel Islands, and even Egypt. His novels The Battle of the Strong (1898), The Right of Way (1901), and The Weavers (1907) were listed as among the top ten bestselling novels of their years in the United States. (One of his latest novels is The Power and the Glory (1925), which somehow is not remembered as well as a certain other novel of that title.) He married a wealthy American woman, Amy VanTine, in 1895. He was a Member of Parliament from 1900 to 1918, and was Knighted in 1902 and made a Baronet in 1915. He is considered instrumental in convincing the US to join on the British side in World War I. He died in 1932.

A Ladder of Swords was published in 1904. My copy is a 1914 reprint from A. L. Burt, then the most prominent publisher of inexpensive reprint editions. (This was, of course, long before the time of paperbacks.) The A. L. Burt edition reproduces the illustrations from the original, by the husband and wife team Troy Sylvanus Kinney and Margaret West Kinney, who signed their work "The Kinneys", and also reproduces the rather attractive cover shown above, with the gold leaf (or imitation gold leaf?) panel. I've also included a photo of the title page (with the credit to "Sir Gilbert Parker") and the frontispiece illustration of Queen Elizabeth with Angèle Aubert.

The novel is ostensibly set sometime in the 1570s, though a note at the beginning warns "there will be found a few anachnronisms in this tale, but none so important as to give a wrong impression of the events of Queen Elizabeth's reign." At the open Angèle Aubert and her father, a Councillor of the Parliament of Rouen, are living in exile on Jersey, one of the Channel Islands. Angèle is a Huguenot (a French Reformed (i.e. Calvinist) Protestant) and so her family has been persecuted, as this is the time of the French Religious Wars. (At a guess, this is shortly after the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, in 1572 when a Catholic mob, probably incited by Catherine de Medici, the former Queen and mother of the then King, Charles IX, killed a group of Huguenots in Paris.) Angèle has just sent a letter to her betrothed, Michel de la Forêt, who is in hiding in France, as Catherine wishes to kill any remaining influential Huguenots. Michel then tries to reach Jersey, a dangerous trip which he takes in the company of a notorious pirate, Buonespoir, who is under sentence of death in both France and England. Their boat founders, but they are rescued by a nobleman on Jersey, Raoul Lemprière of Rozel. (Raoul had previously asked Angèle to marry him, but his honesty is proven by rescuing his rival.)

It quickly becomes clear that Michel's position is still precarious, as Catherine de Medici wishes Queen Elizabeth to arrest him and send him back to France, in exchange for some political support. Lemprière manages to facilitate the escape of Michel and Buonespoir from immediate arrest, but they must go to Elizabeth's court to negotiate his freedom. Angèle and her father travel to court as well, along with Lemprière and Rozel. There follows a few months of intrigue, also involving Elizabeth's favorite Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, as well as a friendly lady of the court called only the Duke's Daughter. We see a duel, a joust, Queen Elizabeth playing the virginal, and a number of scenes showing Angèle impressing the Queen with her virtue and loyalty. The general shape of the outcome is obvious from the start (though there is a rather depressing final episode, probably about 20 years later, but surely before the Edict of Nantes, in which the Huguenots were finally given freedom of religion* by Henry IV (who was also raised Protestant but had converted to Catholicism in order to keep the throne -- as he reputedly said: "The Crown is worth a Mass."**)) 

The novel is somewhat episodic in structure, and the main characters are a bit too much the paragons to hold the interest. Parker is arguably more interested in the relationship between Elizabeth and Dudley -- the book is very much anti-Leicester, and even implies that he is disgraced by the end of it, and more or less banished by Elizabeth. (In reality, he remained one of her favorites until he died in 1588, though of course his influence, as with everyone at court, had up and down periods.) The two more comic characters -- Lemprière and Buonespoir -- are enjoyable in their scenes. The historical aspects are somewhat reasonably portrayed, with some timeline issues -- with Leicester's career, as I noted, plus there is a mention of the future James I's birth, which actually happened in 1567, at least five years prior to the action of this book. And it's a bit tricky to place Catherine de Medici's involvement in things like her demand to Elizabeth to arrest Michel relative to real history. But that's all quibble.

In the end, this is a pretty minor novel, and probably not the best choice to have read among Parker's ouevre. Perhaps some day I'll get to The Weavers or The Seats of the Mighty, which seem to have better reputations.

(*Alas, the Edict of Nantes was revoked by the Edict of Fontainebleau in 1685, and eventually nearly all the Huguenots were driven out of France.)

(**I have read an historical novel about Henry IV's conversion to Catholicism in 1893, which essentially put a cap on the French Religious Wars -- this is Bertha Runkle's 1901 bestseller The Helmet of Navarre, which I review here.)

Review: The Sleep of Reason, by Michael Swanwick

Review: The Sleep of Reason, by Michael Swanwick

by Rich Horton

Around the turn of the millennium, Michael Swanwick wrote a sequence of short-shorts based on Goya's satrical etchings Los Caprichos. He had done short-short sequences before, most notably Puck Aleshire's Abecedary, in The New York Review of Science Fiction in the late '90s, and The Periodic Table of the Elements, a story for each then-known element, that appeared in Ellen Datlow's seminal online 'zine Sci Fiction beginning around 2001. Those two series became chapbooks in 2000 and 2005 respectively. The stories based on Los Caprichos, collectively called The Sleep of Reason, appeared in Eileen Gunn's excellent online magazine Infinite Matrix in 2002-2003, but did not get book publication until PS Publishing produced this volume in 2024. I got my copy at World Fantasy in Niagara Falls last year, and Michael was kind enough to sign it.

(He has done numerous other pieces of flash fiction, I should note, many making up smaller sequences, often published as beautiful tiny books from his wife Marianne Porter's Dragonstairs Press. I've been fortunate enought to obtain a couple of these, but the print runs are very small. Michael's bibliographer will have an Herculean task assembling all the information on those books!)

The title of this collection comes from the 43rd etching in Los Caprichos, "El sueño de la razón produce monstruos" (normally translated "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters" though Swanwick replaces "monsters" with "nighmares").) These etchings were made in 1797-1798, and published in 1799. This volume reproduces each of the 80 prints on one page, with Swanwick's accompanying story on the opposite page. (The original edition of Los Caprichos included some prose commentary, probably by Goya, but Swanwick states in the last entry in this book that he found the commentary unsatisfactory, even complacent, in contrast to the implications of the prints themselves. (It seems that Goya included these comments partly to help explain his intent, but also to avoid reprisal from the objects of the satire by (unconvincingly, it seems) disguising the true targets, which presumably would have included the Inquisition. In the end the first edition was mostly withdrawn by the publisher, and Goya ended up selling the unsold copies and the original plates to the King. Several further editions have been produced from those plates, most recently in 1970.)

Each individual story is a sardonic narrative based on a particular etching. The stories are not presented in the numerical order Goya gave in his edition. The prints depict some recurring characters, named by Swanwick Prick the Donkey, Elena, and Grace; as well as recurring themes: nightmares, witches, monsters human and otherwise. Swanwick's reordering allows him to develop some thematic threads, as well as a continuing narrative for each of Prick, Elena, and Grace. The pieces about Prick develop his career, involving corruption in business, war, and politics, including time spent as the US President. Elena is a clever woman who delights in using her sexual wiles (and her job as a whore) to make fools of men, while Grace is an innocent beauty who is forced by circumtances into prostitution, and is treated dreadfully throughout. The witches and nightmares and the various other monstorosities pretty sharply illustrate the dark side of humanity (and society.)

The result is bracing -- a very funny book in a very uneasy way; a fierce satire on the depredations of the powerful; a despairing look at the the way men treat women; a condemnation of politicians, the church, the rich, and people in general. All of this was present in Goya's original, aimed then primarily at Spain. It is present in Swanwick's 2002 text -- aimed both at people throughout time, and the specifics of our world, especially our country, at that time. And the message resonates as much or more today, even if the specific details were originally aimed at others.

It's a dark book, for sure, and sardonic. At times the tone is cynical, at times almost imploring, at times just angry. It's not necessarily a book to read in one go -- perhaps pacing it like the original pacing of the stories' publications would makes sense. I read it in tranches of 5 or 10 stories at a time over a few weeks. Recommended.

Review: The Early Worm, by Robert Benchley

Review: The Early Worm, by Robert Benchley

by Rich Horton

Robert Benchley (1889-1945) was one of the leading American humor writers of his time, as well as a theater critic and a fairly successful character actor. He worked for a variety of publications, most notably the New Yorker in its early years, but also Life, Vanity Fair, and numerous other places. He was one of the most prominent member of the "Algonquin Round Table", a group of wits who met regularly at the Algonquin hotel. (Other famous members included Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woolcott, and Harold Ross.)

I've known of his work and reputation for a long time, but hadn't really read him, so I figured I'd try when I found his 1927 collection The Early Worm at an estate sale. My edition seems to be a first, from Henry Holt, but it's in rather poor condition. It is illustrated by Gluyas Williams, with some additional engravings by John Held.

I have to say that my basic reaction to most of the book is "I guess you had to have been there". And by "there" I mean, mostly, in New York in the early 1920s. It's easy to see that what he writes is supposed to be funny, and probably was when it was first seen, but doesn't quite come off now. Some of this is simply that the references are very topical, and sometimes pretty geographically bound as well. Some of this is that times have changed -- one essay laments that surely New York will soon by treated as Sodom and Gomorrah were, due to the profusion of theatrical revues featuring scantily clad women. This may have hit home then, but falls flat now. (I should note that Benchley was not being at all serious in this case.)

At times he belabors a joke too long -- the worst example is a series of short pieces for Life which tell of the "Life Polar Expedition" -- in which a group of writers for the magazine decide to race the Byrd and Amundsen expeditions to the North Pole -- on bicycle. That's one joke -- and it's a joke that was made effectively enough in the first 1000 words or so. So why was it extended to six entries?

But there are some bits here that are still amusing. He did a series of essays on "Fascinating Crimes", which tell of elaborately silly fictional crimes, in a sort of shaggy dog fashion, and I thought those were pretty nice. And some of his complaints about society do hold up -- "What College Did to Me" is a fine satirical look at his college career, and with minor updating it still applies today. Two satirical looks at Christmas traditions, "A Good Old-Fashioned Christmas" and "The Rise and Fall of the Christmas Card", are pretty effective. There are several supposed "interviews" with prominent people of that era -- Mussolini, Vice President Dawes, the Countess Karolyi -- which are so absurd as to keep the interest. And a parodic suggestion as to how Theodore Dreiser should write his next novel seemed spot on!

I should say that throughout there are occasional jokes, and an off-handedly witty point of view, that tickled this reader. I do suspect that he was writing for a specific audience here, and for that reason dulled the edge of his wit -- I would bet he might have been better being more savage. Still -- I don't doubt that he deserved his reputation -- but I'm not sure he really repays reading now. 

Hugo Novel Ballot Review: A Sorceress Comes to Call, by T. Kingfisher

Hugo Novel Ballot Review: A Sorceress Comes to Call, by T. Kingfisher

by Rich Horton

I'll be working my way through the 2025 Hugo Ballot for Best Novel in the next couple of months. I have already read Kaliane Bradley's The Ministry of Time, which I highly recommend. I chose T. Kingfisher's novel next, in large part because I hadn't read any novels by her, nor by her alter ego Ursula Vernon, before; though I've read some short fiction which I enjoyed. 

Ursula Vernon is a very successful writer and illustrator -- of graphic novels and children's books. Most of her work for adults (not counting the graphic novels) is under the pseudonym T. Kingfisher. She has won a Best Novel Hugo for Nettle and Bone, a Best Graphic Novel for Digger (at the first Worldcon I ever attended, in Chicago in 2012), three short fiction Hugos, plus a Nebula and a Lodestar (for Best Young Adult Novel) and has received numerous other awards and nominations. Suffice it to say that she's been very successful -- and based on what I've read (mostly the award winning short fiction) she deserves her success.

A Sorceress Comes to Call is told through two viewpoint characters, and I listed to the audiobook, narrated very well by Eliza Foss and Jennifer Pickens. One of them tells the chapters from the point of view of Cordelia, a 14 year old girl; and the other the parts from the POV of Hester, a 50ish woman. 

We begin with Cordelia at church, and something strange is going on -- she has no control of her body. We soon gather that her mother, a sorceress, makes her "obedient" from time to time -- takes over her body either as punishment, or to make sure Cordelia does just what she wants. It's quite clear that the mother, Evangeline, is a monster, and indeed she is one of the most unremittingly evil characters I've encountered in recent fiction. Before long Evangeline's latest "benefactor" has broken off with her, and she hatches a plan to move to a larger city and seduce a wealthy man, with the goal of marriage and thus a more long-term secure financial position. But Evangeline knows that her age likely means she won't be able to gain the attention of as wealthy a man as she hopes, so she also decides that Cordelia, once established as the stepdaughter of a socially acceptable man, must attract an even wealthier husband, hopefully one old enough to die and leave his fortune in Cordelia's hands -- which functionally would mean Evangeline's. Cordelia hates her mother and hates that plan, and attempts to run away -- only to learn that her beloved horse Falada has betrayed her -- he is not a real horse, but Evangeline's familiar, and anything Cordelia tries will come immediately to her mother's attention. 

Hester, meanwhile, is the sister of Samuel, a Squire. She is fairly comfortable living with her brother, whom she loves affectionately, though he is a shallow if likeable man. She has had a lover, Lord Richard Evermore, but she rejected his marriage proposal for a couple of reasons: insecurity (she and Richard were about 40 when he proposed and she worries that her looks will fade and he'll lose interest) and a desire for independence. But suddenly she has a premonition of "Doom". And before long "Doom" shows up, in the person -- as the reader will have guessed -- of Evangeline, who has already attracted the Squire's attention. Samuel has never shown much interest in the "Parson's Trap" as he calls it -- but Hester senses that Evangeline might be problem in that area, though she doesn't know why. She does know, quickly enough, that Evangeline is a terrible person.

Cordelia and her mother are soon long-term guests at the Squire's house. And, slowly, Cordelia and Hester form a relationship -- Hester is suspicious of Cordelia at first but soon understands that she has been at least mentally abused by her mother, and that she needs helps as much or more as the Squire needs to be saved from a disastrous marriage. We also learn -- indeed, Cordelia realizes for the first time -- that her mother is more than just a terrible mother -- she's a murderer, and she has "punished" her former benefactor in an utterly horrifying fashion.

Hester hatches a plan to interfere with Evangeline's schemes -- she'll invite some friends to a "house party" in the hopes that the Squire can be distracted from Evangeline. But Evangeline is a tricky character -- and a murderer, and things accelerate horribly. Cordelia finally tries to convince Hester of Evangeline's real nature, and eventually she and Hester and Lord Evermore and a couple more of Hester's friends are desperately trying to learn how to stop sorcery. The problem is -- nobody in this world believes that sorcerers are capable of anything beyond, basically, hedge magic. So there's a step to get people to believe in the danger Evangeline poses -- and a lot of work to track down a way to deal with her. The resolution is pretty well done, with some very dark scenes, and courage, and some pretty clever magical logic.

So -- it's a good book, and I quite enjoyed it. The abuse of Cordelia is horrifying and well-depicted. Hester is a really nicely done character, and her romance is nice to see resolved. There is a fine gaggle (word chosen advisedly -- read the book!) of smart and witty women side characters, and a good butler and a nice lady's maid. There is a fun ghost, and the villainess is appropriately vile, and her actions are truly scary. I was involved throughout, and I cared about the plight of the good guys.

So, it's too bad this is a Hugo review. But I need to ask -- is it a great book? A worthy Hugo winner? I have to say, I don't think so. Part of it is simply a sense that it's a bit slight. It's enjoyable but not entirely convincing to me. Some of this worldbuilding -- the setting is sort of faux-Victorian, or perhaps faux-Regency, in a polity that seems somewhat similar to England in that time frame, but with references to the "Old Country" that make one things of Colonial America -- and none of that holds up which is OK I suppose because it's a fantasy world of sorts. But -- I found myself not believing things. And even in that context, the magical part is, well, kind of routine, if handled nicely enough. The solution is, as I suggested, kind of neat in context -- but also on the convenient side. None of my issues are at all fatal, I hasten to add -- it's a good read that I'm happy to have encountered -- and I'll be reading more by T. Kingfisher. It's just -- not quite Hugo level in my mind. 

[A side note -- not a comment on quality at all -- the novel is advertised as being an adaptation of the Grimm fairy tale "The Goose Girl". And you can seem some parallels -- but they are pretty slim, really. Which is just fine! It's its own story -- doubtless suggested or inspired by "The Goose Girl", but not really a retelling.]