A rose by any other name

Week 49: Between Two Thorns – Emma Newman
Recommended by: Jan Crosser

And for this week's edition, I bring you something a bit different, at least to me. It's something a sub-genre mash-up that's perhaps best described as urban fantasy meets historical fantasy (or maybe that should be period fantasy?) Either way, it's got faeries, sorcerers, talking gargoyles, detective work and more debutantes than you can shake a Jane Austen-sized stick at. The superlative Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is probably the best point of reference I can think of and there are enough interesting ingredients here and they mostly work to form a satisfactory whole.

In the split worlds, you have the real world, the realms of magic and faerie, and the Nether in between the two. This is the world of the fae-touched, living out the politics and relationships of Georgian and Victorian costume drama in the mirror cities of Aquae Sulis (Bath) and Londinium (London). Cathy, the heroine, is from this world but certainly not of it – a feminist rebel, the last thing she wants is an arranged marriage in a world she does not belong in and so she's hiding out in the real world.

Naturally events conspire against her and she, along with Sam, a Joe Ordinary from the real world, and Max, an Arbiter (essentially a magical law enforcer), are dragged into a plot that threatens all of them in different ways. I haven't tested the boundaries of the world too far to see how much the whole makes sense, but I liked that it didn't just information dump at the beginning, I had to piece together how the characters and worlds interacted, what the relative roles and statuses were, and I liked that each world had very different perceptions of the other – two sides to every story indeed. The Nether also felt well-crafted, a place of constant revels and duels, where family comes first and is either a beautiful dream or horrendous nightmare depending on your perspective.

The characterisation of Cathy was pretty good and there were windows into Sam's life as well, though his accent did very strange things in veering from full-on Cockney geezer towards Queen's English via a dash of West Country burr. By contrast, Max is more defined by his job and I'd like to see him developed beyond this. Plenty of time was given over to building up the worlds and characters, which is a good thing in general but I did have a big issue with the pacing. The whole thing felt slow and while there is a reveal at the end, the reader knows most of what has happened and who was behind it so it's more just the consequences and the fallout that you're waiting to see. There was no great suspense, though there doesn't need to be, but overall the book felt merely like the opening salvo of a trilogy.

Admittedly it is the opening chapter of a trilogy, but judged as a book in it's own right, I felt it needed a bit more to stand on its own feet. The epilogue-like final chapter gave new information beyond the rest of the story so as to set things up nicely with a cliffhanger, merely adding to the episodic feel. I liked it well enough to continue with the series and see how things play out but the plotting and pacing here were a bit uneven. Next time maybe a little less dancing around and a bit more rapier thrust.