★★★★☆ Thaniel and Mori and Mori's secret wife in Japan

The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

Natasha Pulley

I complained in my review of Natasha Pulley's The Watchmaker of Filigree Street that "The ending of the book left me confused. I wasn't sure what had just happened, and there were loose ends that were not tied up, or perhaps merely seemed so in my confusion." I hoped that this sequel would clear up my confusion, and it did that. And it also tells a big story of Keita Mori.

Who is this "Pepperharrow" named in the title? It turns out that all this time Mori has had a secret wife, Takiko Pepperharrow, living on his estate back in Japan. Takiko's father was English -- thus the non-Japanese name Pepperharrow. Takiko is the main point-of-view character of this novel. She's an impressive woman, a theater owner who acquired her theater and her position by threatening the former owner. Mori had a use for her, so he abetted her schemes. They married and she went to live on his Yokohama estate Yoruji.

We start the book with Thaniel back in London and Mori in Russia. All Hell is about to break loose in Japan because new Prime Minister Kiyotaki Kuroda is playing naval power games. Thaniel, as the best Japanese speaker in the foreign office, is sent to Japan to help out. Mori accompanies him there. Thaniel's estranged wife Grace Carrow (now Dr Grace Matsumoto) is there teaching physics.

These are the pieces in the game Mori plays. As in The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, we are never inside Mori's head -- he is not a point-of-view character. We see his machinations from the outside only.

This one feels more serious than The Watchmaker of Filigree Street. The stakes this time are geopolitical disaster. Indeed, it becomes clear that even back in The Watchmaker of Filigree Street Mori was playing the opening moves of the game whose final half is here recounted. Without getting specific, I will say that there is tragedy as well as joy and farce.

It's a good one. If you liked The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, you certainly want to read The Lost Future of Pepperharrow.

The Lost Future of Pepperharrow on Amazon

Goodreads review

Comments

★★★★☆ Where Peter Pan and Tiger Lilly come from

Tigerlilja Erin Michelle Sky, Steven Brown In J.M. Barrie 's Peter Pan Peter's great ally is Tiger Lily, who is introduced thus ...Tiger Lily, proudly erect, a princess in her own right. She is the most beautiful of dusky Dianas and the belle of the Piccaninnies, coquettish, cold and amorous by turns; there is not a brave who would not have the wayward thing to wife, but she staves off the altar with a hatchet. There's obviously a lot there that's problematic in the 21st century. So she gets a rewrite in this Erin Michelle Sky and Steven Brown prequel to Tales of the Wendy . In addition, we get an origin story for Peter, something that to my knowledge Barrie never supplied. In fact, we start with Peter. Peter, it transpires, is descended from gods. Sky and Brown freely mix Norse and Greek gods here. In seeking to protect him from ancestral enemy Buri, Peter's mother accidentally curses him. You will forg...

★★★☆☆ Vanja comes to terms with her history

Holy Terrors Margaret Owen Vanja Ros has a long history of disappointing people. She was the thirteenth child of Marthe Ros, and therefore, Marthe believed, ill-fated. She asked Death and Fortune to take her daughter. Death promised her, "Only one of you will go home." Death and Fortune gave their God Daughter Vanja a home. Vanja's mother never returned home from the forest. Marthe, now a ghost, is still furious about this. And so it went. Vanja went into service in a noble house and there she disappointed. Eventually she ended up as a thief. And then things got serious. A brilliant young prefect (police detective) came after her. She fell in love with him, and he with her, but she left him. She found her family and deceived them. She even became a goddess and failed at that. Now, to be clear, none of that is fair. It is, however, far too accurate a picture of how Vanja sees herself. When Holy Terrors begins, Vanja is estranged from Emeric, the prefect she loves, and sh...

★★★★☆ Embrace the confusion!

Witch King Martha Wells In 1995 I saw the Film Ghost in the Shell . It was a formative experience for me. The film was incredibly confusing -- cyborgs and thermoptic camouflage and international plots and sentient net intelligences and wheels within plots within wheels within plots. When it was over I had only the vaguest idea what had happened. But I was mortally certain of one thing: I LOVED it! What I didn't know at the time was that This Was How It Was Going To Be From Now On. Since then all major science fiction and most fantasy novels have been like that. I expect when I read a new one not to know what's going on. (Consider recent reads Children of Memory , Myriad , or grand-prize winner, the entirety of Tamsyn Muir 's Locked Tomb Series .) In fact, it is now at the point where, if I understand a new F&SF novel on the first read, I feel cheated. Martha Wells 's Witch King does not disappoint in this regard. Hierarchs and Expositors and...

★★★★★ King of the Cats, Alice and Thomas, Fairies, bogeymen, and assorted entertainments

Patreon Year 5 Seanan McGuire I will begin by clarifying what I am reviewing here. Seanan McGuire has a Patreon Creator page. Patreon is a website where artists can share their work with subscribers. Subscribers pay a certain amount (usually monthly, but that varies from artist to artist), and in return get access to things ("rewards" in Patreon-speak) that the artist posts on Patreon. "Things" can mean images, videos, or (most relevantly in this case) eBooks. Typically there are multiple reward tiers -- the more you pay, the more you get. McGuire set up her Patreon page in June 2016 and has posted a story every month since then, which makes 64 now (September 30, 2021, when I am writing this), plus a few one-time extras. These "stories" can be pretty substantial literary works. For instance, the reward for July 2021 was an 80,000-word novel. The way Patreon works, if you subscribe to a tier, you typically get access to everything that was posted for th...

★★★★☆ A good and intelligent goose girl

Thorn Intisar Khanani The Goose Girl (Die Gänsemagd in the Grimm brothers ' original German) is one of the more obscure Grimm's Fairy Tales, by which I mean that it has never, to my knowledge, been made into a Disney Feature Film. This obscurity, I suspect, is because it is a disturbingly modern story, in the sense of not having clear heroes and villains. (The Grimm brothers , however, perceived no such ambiguity. For them the princess is unequivocally good and the maid bad, in part because the princess has noble blood and the maid is common. Values have changed since those days.) The central story is that a princess takes off to marry the prince of a nearby kingdom, to whom she has long been engaged. She is accompanied by a maid. On the trip the maid forcibly swaps places with the princess and makes the princess, on pain of death, swear not to expose her. The princess takes this compelled oath much more seriously than any legal expert would advise. Arrived at the dest...

★★★★★ A scoundrel, a liar, a cheat, a thief, a coward—and, oh yes, a toady

Flashman: A novel George MacDonald Fraser No less an author than P.G. Wodehouse blurbed George MacDonald Fraser 's Flashman . This quote can be found on the cover of one edition, "If ever there was a time when I felt that watcher-of-the-skies-when-a-new-planet-stuff, it was when I read the first Flashman." While acknowledging Wodehouse 's sneaky hedging ("If ever"), we can also acknowledge that this is a strong endorsement. And it is deserved. Harry Flashman, the protagonist (I will not say "hero") of the Flashman Papers , is, to my experience, unique in all of fiction. He describes himself as "a scoundrel, a liar, a cheat, a thief, a coward—and, oh yes, a toady" -- and that description is accurate. He is an utterly despicable guy. Now, you're probably thinking, "This is not unusual -- I can think of dozens of literary antiheroes who match this description." And of course you're right. But what all these antiheroes...

★★★★★ Tactical Assault Clown

Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass—How I Went 77 Years Without Growing Up Dave Barry There is one living human who can write prose that makes me laugh so hard I can't breathe. That person is Tactical Assault Clown Dave Barry . Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass—How I Went 77 Years Without Growing Up had that effect on me at least twice -- an automatic five-star rating. ("Tactical Assault Clown" is right up there with "Combat Epistemologist" ( The Jennifer Morgue ) on my list of creative military specializations. And if you're one of those people who get their knickers all in a twist when someone uses parens inside of parens, you know what you can do about it.) (Yes, I know I'm not funny.) It's not all ROFL funny. In fact, he tells about his father's alcoholism ( that story has a happy ending ) and his mother's suicide ( that one obviously does not ). Later in the book he tries to convince us that his real li...

★★★☆☆ The Handmaid’s Tale meets MAS*H.

Manacled senlinyu Some candid reactions as I read: 22%: "Make it stop. Please." 54%: "Once more unto the breach! Took a short break to read Bookshops & Bonedust , which was released yesterday. To my surprise, I feel some eagerness to return to Manacled after the somewhat flaccid plot of B&B ." 67%: "To be fair, a lot is done right. The characters are well drawn and the plot, as far as I've gotten, is very good, intricate and well-thought-out". 100% (last night): Thank God that's over. So, mixed reactions. This one is unusual for me. Usually I read fiction for enjoyment. If a book has a lot of stuff I like in it, that's a good book and gets all the stars. This is unlike most Goodreads reviewers. Judging from the reviews I read, most GR reviewers read books looking for things they don't like, then make a list and if there are lots of things they don't like, then no stars. (Or maybe that's just the way they write reviews.) ...

★★★★☆ Sigrud suffers

City of Miracles Robert Jackson Bennett City of Miracles is the third book of Robert Jackson Bennett 's Divine Cities Trilogy . Book 1, City of Stairs , was mostly about Shara Komayd, book 2, City of Blades , about Turyin Mulaghesh. If you read those two books, you know that book three had to be about Sigrud Je Harkvaldsson. We first met Sigrud in City of Stairs as Shara's hulking Dreyling bodyguard. Sigrud is the world's best bodyguard -- adept with all weapons, capable of killing even a demigod monster. In City of Blades we met him again, and his daughter Signe. When Signe was killed Sigrud went berserk, killing multiple innocent Saypuri (Shara and Mulaghesh's nationality) soldiers with his bare hands. As a result he is in hiding when City of Miracles begins. City of Miracles doesn't begin with Sigrud, however. It begins with the assassination of Shara. Sigrud, as soon as he hears the news, is set on revenging her...

★★★★☆ An intelligent debut

The Last Bloodcarver Vanessa Le I bought this book because of the spectacular cover, . Judge this book by its cover! Of course you want to know what a Bloodcarver is. The best place to begin is Vanessa Le 's author biography Vanessa Le graduated from Brown University with a degree in Health and Human Biology and now resides in Portland, Oregon. Her writing is an expression of her love for medicine and her Vietnamese heritage. When not writing, she can be found studying medicine, spoiling her two Shiba Inus, or wishing she were writing. A heartsooth, we learn, is a healer who communicates and affects the body through touch. "Bloodcarver" is a sort of slur used for a heartsooth by those who don't understand. One suspects that Le herself aspires to be something like a heartsooth. Although Nhika grew up in Central Theumas and knows no other place, her mother and father escaped from the conquered and oppressed Island of Yarong, where all heartsooths came ...

Search This Blog