The Sorceress and the Postgraduate, by Clive Heritage-Tilley. Matador, 2018

In 2017, a postgrad student at Oxford steals (“borrows”) an exhibit titled “Witch in a bottle” and opens the bottle. To his amazement, a full sized young woman appears. She speaks perfectly good modern English, and says she is a sorceress, bottled up in prison by her sister witches so that she might escape execution in 1497 Nuremberg. The mistress of Albrecht Durer, she was supposed to be released soon after the bottle was smuggled out of the prison. Things didn’t work out right, though, and she spent 600 years in suspended animation in the bottle.

As Constance- the sorceress- learns more about current times, they go in search of other magical items, which leads to another “borrowing”, that of the Alfred Jewel. From there we have Alice-in-Wonderland shrinking, magical fish, giant talking birds, and giant spiders. It’s a wild ride.

While the Witch in the bottle and the Alfred Jewel are both very real, the story is really only on the marginal edges of “historical fiction”. It’s fantasy, pure and simple. While it was a rather amusing read – and a very fast one- it’s not the best I’ve ever read. Constance adapts to the 21^st century way to fast to be believable (she also gets over her 15^th century lover promptly). She, and the other historical characters, all speak modern English. The story doesn’t really have a plot; it’s more of a series of adventures that aren’t really guided by anything but their curiosity – which is a splendid reason to do things in real life but it doesn’t make for a good story. And I really disliked the main male character. It reads like a first novel (and may very well be); the author has some good ideas so I hope he gets better. Three stars. 

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No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters, by Ursula K. LeGuin. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017

This is a collection of short essays that LeGuin originally put up on her blog. Basically they are short form essays, and the book is divided roughly into subjects that include aging, sexism, politics, morals, nature, religion, swearing, writing, and, in between, are the Annals of Pard. Pard being the author’s latest cat, who is still a youngster- a year old when procured. But these are not your ordinary old woman with a cat entries; she examines the moral issues of cats catching mice.

LeGuin is in her eighties now, and has seen a lot of changes in the world. Always the feminist and anti-authoritarian, she has said a lot about those subjects in her novels and continues to have lots to say about them. Her essays are written in simple but elegant prose and are a delight to read. Five stars. 

The above is a an affiliate link. If you click through and buy something- anything- from Amazon, they will give me a few cents.

I received this book free from Net Galley in return for an honest review. 

Neither of these things influenced my review. 

The Interior, by Lisa See. Harpertorch, 1999

 Liu Hulan is an investigator with China’s version of the FBI. Considered a “Red Princess”, she has more money and privilege beyond that of most Chinese citizens, but even so, she’s taking risks by having a white American for a lover and getting pregnant without a permit. Her lover, David Stark, is an American attorney who jumps at the chance to go into private practice when a firm offers him a posting in China and he can live with Hulan. This is following an attempt on his life and the shocking death of his friend in Los Angeles.

When an old friend contacts Hulan about the death of her adult daughter, they don’t expect it to turn into a major investigation. The death is ruled a suicide, but the mother doesn’t buy that, and clues Hulan sees tell her it was a murder. When Hulan looks into it, it leads her right to the girl’s employer- a company that is being purchased by the very firm that David is representing. More and more irregularities appear, and David feels he has to step in.

There are many, many plot strands in this story, sometimes more than I could keep track of, along with lots and lots of characters. The ‘interior’ the title refers to is the interior of China, an area almost all rural (at the time; the book is set in 1997) and extremely poor. This makes the American owned factories that have started appearing very appealing to young Chinese, especially women, who have almost no other chances for advancement. The novel exposes some of the problems that happened during that time, when there were almost no rules for foreign investors.

Legal thrillers are not normally something I read. I picked this up because I love Lisa See’s writing, both fiction and non-fiction. I enjoyed it, but didn’t feel that the characters were nearly as developed as in her historical fiction, and that she had too many different elements in the story. The detail on life in China was amazing, though, and featured an aspect of China I had read little of. Four stars. 

The above is an affiliate link. If you click through and buy something- anything- from Amazon, they will give me a few cents. 

This did not influence my review.