book-review | Eric Taveren

My MFA thesis starts up this fall and I’ve decided to write a fantasy mystery (Mystasy?), because those are two genres I don’t see paired up too often. And whereas I’ve had the idea for this book/series for quite a while, I haven’t had the time to devote to it. Once I made my decision, it begged the question, what is a fantasy mystery?

As luck would have it, I was walking out of my local library and a cover on the staff recommendation shelf jumped out at me. The gold on navy with green accents pulled my eye and I found myself hushing my kid so I could read the back. I needed to know what a fantasy mystery was. The back read “A Holmes and Watson-style detective duo take the stage in this fantasy with a mystery twist, from the Edgar-winning, multiple Hugo-nominated Robert Jackson Bennett.”

I was ready to ask the question “where have you been all my life?” to both the book and the staff recommender (thanks Mao), simply from holding it in my hand. I’d instantaneously set The Tainted Cup on a pedestal without even realizing it. And it didn’t disappoint.

The story starts with our main protagonist, Din, as he investigates his first murder. He’s partnered with brilliant eccentric recluse Ana, who never steps foot on the crime scene (or out of her house for that matter). This grisly and disturbing murder is only the beginning, because as with any mystery (and transformer), there’s more than meets the eye.

I never want to give away spoilers, so here’s my brief rundown of what I liked and why you should read it:

The magic system is neat. Botanical and just vague enough to be mysterious in its own right.
Din’s flaws make his resourcefulness impressive. Plus he’s not too shabby with a sword. 🙂
Ana’s logic is never Deus Ex Machina. There’s never any logical leaps stemming from withheld information. Everything is presented, ready for you to figure it out.
Also: kaiju. Because why not.

Obviously there’s more going for it than what’s listed, but no sense giving anything away. Oh, and did I mention it’s the first in a series? The Tainted Cup just came out this year, so we’ll have some waiting to do (2025 according to google), but with the character, world, and story setup that happens in these pages, we’ll before too long be able to return to this world and continue sleuthing with Din and Ana.

One surprising aspect for me was the amount of violence in the book. And by that, I mean there was much less than I expected. Most fantasy has crazy action scenes with swords and magic and mythical beasts. Mysteries often have chases and, of course, murders. You’d think that crossing the two genres would ratchet that up a bit. Not really. And that’s not a bad thing. It wasn’t even until after I’d finished that I’d had this realization. Personal preference: I’d have loved some more fights. But it worked just fine without them.

I very much appreciated how the information was doled out to the reader. Sometimes we got the info and made the connection along with the characters. Sometimes the detail was mentioned chapters earlier and only became relevant at a later time and it was on us to remember it. And other times we were given hints at known information that wasn’t pertinent in the moment, but became a promise of a meaningful reveal later.

But how, as a writer, do you determine what information to give and when? That’s a good question, and one that applies to more than just mysteries. You might have guessed it, our craft subject of the day is:

Information Rationing.

Let’s start with characters who have information. When it comes to non-perspective characters, information rationing isn’t too difficult. People lie. Or they’re ignorant. Or they tell half-truths, intentional or not. You can pick any number of reasons why a non-perspective character will omit information, assuming it works with the story and their character of course. Bilbo doesn’t tell Frodo the details of his ring. The Dursleys tell Harry his parents died in a car crash. The International Fleet doesn’t tell Ender those aren’t just games. They’ve got reasons, and those reasons make sense for the characters and the plot.

Perspective characters are trickier. When Katniss has that flashback about Peeta giving her bread, we learn something about the both of them that impacts the story later on. That memory is triggered and she conveys that information to us. But what if we she withheld that memory? The characters’ connection later on wouldn’t make as much sense.

Even more to the point, take when Penelope is truly shocked about something Lady Whistledown said. It doesn’t make any sense. She is Lady Whistledown. The character’s knowledge of her secret role is hidden, even in her POV. Unless there’s a Fight Club situation going on, she would reasonably have thought once or twice about the fact that she is the one writing gossip.

An effective way around this is for the character to be cognizant of the fact that they have information, and then move on. Everyone has secrets, but let’s say we’re in your head, and your secret comes up. You’re not going to not think about it. That’s silly. And unrealistic. And it loses the reader’s trust.

In The Tainted Cup, there’s a situation just like that. Din (and this isn’t really a spoiler since he thinks about it right away in chapter one) has somewhat regular thoughts about not wanting Ana to find out what he did, or what his limitations are. We eventually learn the truth, and all his actions make perfect sense because of it. But we don’t feel cheated as the reader, because Din was honest with us about what he knew, and we knew why he wasn’t going into specifics.

And beyond character information, there’s story information. One way story information is distributed is via the plot. For the longest time, those two terms were synonymous in my head. The way I like to think about it now is the story is what happens. The plot is the order in which we see it happen. In Edward P. Jones’ The Known World, we see the story of this fictional county through the lives of its many inhabitants. The stories are given to us in bits and pieces, from character to character and back again. If all those characters’ stories were told chronologically, one at a time, we’d still get the whole story, but we’d lose so much context and interconnection as we experienced each one. The rationing of information, the order in which the story is told, is was makes that story great. One of the many reasons, actually.

And of course we have to talk about mysteries. Finding clues, finding information, is what those books are all about. There are probably a ton of different ways to go about it, but I like to look at a mystery’s disbursement of information like a family tree. A likely incestuous family tree, but you get the idea. At the bottom is, for the sake of the analogy, you, the inciting incident, the moment that kicks the story off. From there we branch up to the parents, the clues we find. Some people only have one parent, some have two or four or even more. And those parents don’t exist in a vacuum. They have parents and cousins and aunts and uncles and secret lovers and all that.

But how do you know just how many parents your story needs? How many different people is your grandpa going to make kids with? For that, I start at the other end of the family tree. Your great great great great grandparent, for example. The bad guy. I need to figure out what they did, who they did it with, and why they did it. Each of those is one of their kids. Each of those kids will have their own motivations and actions and relationships, making kids of their own. Sometimes those kids will meet, sometimes they’ll get a little incestuous. But before long there’ll be this massive family tree of plot, all leading to the bad guy. You just need to find one of the bottom descendants and start your story there.

As with any incestuous relationship, the goal of the participants is to keep it hidden. Your protagonist needs to figure out which cousins did which cousins, and why. Surely it wasn’t just because of a pair of big brown eyes. Right? Right? Treat each step of the family tree as a new secret. Some won’t be hidden, they’ll just need to be traced. “Ohhhh, that’s who my great-grandma was.” Others will definitely be hidden and will take a bit more work. “Aunt Peggy did what?!” But once all the tree has been revealed, each clue, each relationship, will make sense and support the structure of the entire tree.

Wow. I had not planned on that analogy, especially not as much lover from the same mother. But I think it works. And you know what else works? The Tainted Cup. Without further ado, here’s how The Tainted Cup fares with The Author’s Arsenal.

For excellent character creation and portrayal, I award The Seal. Ana definitely is set up to be a big player in future books, but Din especially shines. For phenomenal world-building, I award The Scroll. The ecology of the world alone is astounding, but add in the politics and history and classism… very nice. And for brilliant storytelling, I award The Quill Pen. In order for a mystery to work, the storytelling has to be on point. And it very much is.

If you you’re a fan of either fantasy or mystery, and especially if you’re both, I highly recommend picking up The Tainted Cup. I don’t think I’ve read anything quite like it, and I’m certainly glad I did.

As always, feel free to let me know if there’s a book you want reviewed.

I read a lot of books. A lot. Most of the time as I’m reading, I’m simply enjoying the words in front of me. Sometimes I’m slogging through them. Infrequently I’m blown away by what’s in my hands. When I read Olivie Blake’s The Atlas Six last year, I was blown away. Yes, as you’d expect, the writing was good. But what thoroughly engaged me was the breadth of knowledge across fields of study and the application and integration of that knowledge in the story.

I immediately burned through the second book, The Atlas Paradox. It built on much of what had been established in the first book, upped the stakes, contextualized and humanized some characters, and was a worthy successor to the first one. Then I was sad because I had to wait until the third one was published.

And so here we are now, The Atlas Complex is out, and I have thoughts. As always, I strive for spoiler free reviews, but I do want to note that the only way to talk about this book is to spoil parts of the first two. If you’ve read them, then you can proceed safely. If you haven’t, and the blending of the psychology and morality and philosophy of magic sounds interesting, then go get a copy of The Atlas Six. Right now. Like, stop reading, and do it.

The Atlas Complex follows our favorite sextet (and their add-ons) as they try to make sense of their new (sort of) freedom. Libby is back from the past and a newly minted mass murderer, Parisa is shacking up with Dalton and scared of her own mortality, Reina and Callum are off playing God and trying to fix the world (good luck with that), Tristan’s trying to figure out where the hell Atlas went and how he’s supposed to handle the Archives, and Nico just wants everyone to be friends.

As with the first two books, the entire narrative focuses on the characters and their journeys. The plot is their relationships with each other. The story is their relationships with each other. The trouble is their relationships with each other. You get the idea.

Some of our questions from the prior books get answered. Libby and Nico: Will they or won’t they? Callum: Does he care about anything? All of them minus Libby: Who hates themselves the most?

One of the more interesting aspects of the third installment is how much more screen time side characters get. We get inside Dalton’s head (in a non-literal sense this time). We get to see how Gideon’s handling everything with his mom and Nico and Libby and a few other issues rearing their ugly heads. And, we get brief snippets from members of The Forum.

What does this mean? The driving force of the trilogy is the character work Blake presents us with. In the afterward of this book, she talks about how her goal was to write a story where the characters and their relationships became the plot and story. That strategy was what made the first book so novel (at least to me), and the second and third followed suit. The problem is that when something novel is done repeatedly, it starts to lose that novelty.

Ultimately, while the characters were still engaging and interesting, their stories alone weren’t enough to conclude a trilogy. Blake easily compels us to invest in her characters, but we end up lacking reason to invest in a greater conflict.

What is the greater conflict, you ask? That’s a very good question. I wondered that too as I read this. And that brings us to today’s topic: stakes.

Why does Frodo need to destroy the One Ring? To prevent Sauron from ruling Middle Earth. Why does Elizabeth need to get married? So the Bennett family won’t go bankrupt. Why does the Cat in the Hat need to clean up his mess? Because mother will be very angry when she gets home if it’s dirty.

Regardless of the perceived severity, stakes drive narratives and characters, and are the reason characters do what they do. There are several levels of stakes that can be at play: public, personal, and philosophical. If we look at the Elizabeth example, the public stake is her family’s wealth. Pretty straight forward. The personal stake is her own pride. She believes Mr. Darcy looks down on her family for being lower rank and accepting his proposal will wound her pride. The philosophical stake is losing her belief that society shouldn’t care so much about wealth and rank.

It’s not enough to have a world-ending catastrophe to avert. It’s also not enough to overcome personal demons. A good narrative will have multiple levels of stakes, often connected or reliant on each other. Elizabeth isn’t the only person with stakes in Pride and Prejudice. Each character needs something, some motivation and something that motivates them.

An easy way to to establish stakes, at least early on as you’re figuring out your story, is to take your character, figure out what makes them great or wonderful or happy, and then decide how to destroy those things. Doing bad things to protagonists inherently creates stakes. You can tweak them or think of new ones throughout the process, but attacking their comfort zones is a great place to start.

Based on what I’ve mentioned with The Atlas Complex, it shouldn’t be a surprise that it’s lacking in the stakes department, but how did it fare otherwise with the Author’s Arsenal?

For exceptional character development, The Atlas Complex is awarded The Seal. Character is what drives this whole series, and The Atlas Complex in particular relies on character to engage the reader and advance the story.

That about wraps this up. Happy reading, have a great weekend, and stay tuned for more. And as always, if you have a book you’d like reviewed, add a comment and I’ll try and fit it in.