dichroic | a rash of second rate

I’ve been having a bad run of books lately – ones whose main effect is to remind me of something else I like better.

Patricia Wentworth’s Grey Mask: A Miss Silver mystery
An elderly, knitting female sleuth, a bit reminiscient of the Miss Marple and Miss Seeton mystery series, but not as likeable as the latter, let alone the former.

Gitty Daneshvari’s The School of Fear
Not bad, I guess – but it reminded me a lot of Trenton Lee Stewart’s Mysterious Benedict Society books, which are better. One interesting thing: Daneshvari herself is half Iranian and half-American, yet she’s got a pretty homogeneous cast of characters (three American, one English, all fairly privileged, all with parents married to each other). Stewart, who is white and male, has a much more varied cast of characters.

Carl Ashmore and Henryk Szor’s The Time Hunters
This one annoyed me by calling itself “the natural successor to Harry Potter” – not only in the Amazon listing but even in its Kindle title – seriously: it shows up as “The Time Hunters: (“the natural success to…etc”). This makes me think that a) it is self-published and b) the author isn’t aware of the gazillion other children’s fantasy books coming out now. It’s not even in the same subgenre; a brother and sister meet an old family friend and learn more about the heritage they’re born too, with a large side order of goofy charm. As such, it’s got more in common with the Kane Chronicles, the Children of the Lamp, the Sherlock Files, or the Fablehaven books, but not as good as the latter three and far behind the excellent Kane Chronicles. (A good editor, more internal consistency, and enough research to get things right would have helped a lot.)

Bah. I think I’m going to go reread The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate. That one reminds me of Flavia di Luce and a hundred other bright girl heroines … but in a good way.

Mirrored from Dichroic Reflections.