RogerBW's Blog

2014 Ruritanian fantasy. Barbara is the elderly Baron's bodyguard-duellist, and after his death is passed on with most of his property to his distant niece Margerit—who mostly wants to study miracles at the university…

This is that rare thing, a fantasy that downplays the magic. Yes, it's not exactly the real world—Alpennia has been squeezed in between France, Germany and Switzerland perhaps somewhere around Basel—but it's closely correlated; and this works because while there are miracles, they're tied up with Christian worship, so even speculation about how it all works risks charges of unorthodoxy. And since very few people can even perceive the effects of the things (insofar as it influences the real world it might make a snowstorm more severe, rather than letting people throw fireballs) there's just a lot of other more rewarding stuff to do.

We're some time in the 19th century; the "French wars" are in living memory, technology is all quite vague and this certainly doesn't approach steampunk. Indeed, much of it is a comedy of manners, as Margerit deals with her sudden elevation to the status of an heiress (though everyone knows where she came from), while Barbara tries to keep her not only alive but intact of reputation.

I particularly liked the way that Margerit and Barbara, given the same information, interpret it differently: for example, Margerit, invited to join a student society working on understanding more about miracles, sees this as an unalloyed good, while Barbara immediately suspects a trap and starts checking everyone's backgrounds. Margerit remembers the old Baron as her charming and amusing uncle whom she very occasionally visited, but Barbara, who had to live with him, can't help but remember him as the self-satisfied plotter he was for the rest of the time. (And not all his plots have unwound after his death…)

But I think what really made me feel positive about the book was the ways in which the miracles were worked; I was reminded of Katherine Kurtz' early Deryni books, except that nobody here is a master magician with all the answers, and they aren't even all perceiving the same things. So if an updated ritual for seeking the saint's blessing on the land is raising power but then letting it drain away, maybe nobody even notices for a while; and that may not particularly matter…

"Heather Rose Jones is a manufacturing discrepancy investigator for a major San Francisco Bay Area pharmaceutical company and has a PhD from U.C. Berkeley in Linguistics, specializing in the semantics of Medieval Welsh prepositions," so she has some crunch to her rather than just a liking for fluffy historical fantasy, and it very much shows. I'll be continuing with this series.