The seventh book (or, if you believe the publisher, sixth) in Lackey's
Elemental Masters series; for a change, it's not just more of the
same. Well, all right, there are similarities. The protagonist is
as always a young woman with magical powers having to defend herself
against powerful foes. The time is nebulously just before the Great
War, though on this occasion also during it. We start in Yorkshire;
our heroine is the utterly-neglected daughter of a man whose beloved
wife died giving birth to her, or rather neglected until he decided he
could bring said wife back with appropriate necromancy and a suitable
vessel.
Yes, it's Donkeyskin through the lens that Lackey brings to the
series. The complication in the inevitable romance is that our heroine
falls in love with the wrong chap, but that's a relatively minor part
of the plot.
In common with other books in this series, the villain suffers from
terminal stupidity. Most of the series' villains have been
megalomaniacs to some extent, and the heroines usually defeat them by
outthinking them, so it's not entirely unreasonable, but that does get
a bit samey. At least here we don't have the situation of The Gates
of Sleep, where nobody bothers to inform the heroine that the aunt
who's ripping her away from her beloved foster family is the villain
who cursed her and caused her to be sent away from her parents in the
first place!
The language is odd. I assume Lackey's trying to write in period
American for her primarily American audience, which is fair enough,
though words like "auto" and "shirtwaist" ring oddly on the lips of
English characters and throw me out of the narrative. (After some
research, I've discovered that at this particular time "shirtwaist"
in American meant a shirt for a lady, i.e. a blouse. Before these
books I'd only met the term from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.) In
this book, the odd language goes one step further into factual error:
a bully in the village pub spills our hero's pint, fair enough, but
it's explicitly described as a pint of lager.
Um, no.
But all right, it's not a plot-affecting error; this is no
Blackout/All Clear. Once the action shifts to the battlefields of
the Great War, things perk up a bit, and even a Zeppelin bombing raid
is woven into the plot in a fairly clean manner. The implication that
German necromancers are actively involved in their side's military
effort is an interesting one, and I look forward to more of this side
of things if the series runs to that; it's somehow rather more
convincing than the contention in Phoenix and Ashes that the Spanish
'Flu epidemic in the USA was the result of a casual invocation.
In sum, this series still feels reasonably fresh, and I shall read
more of it while not expecting Great Literature.
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