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Book notes - Ledge by Stacey McEwan
I liked reading the recent selection of reviews by @Apocryphal so much I thought I'd do similar for books passed on to me for comment by Will, our local bookseller. The notes are not so much reviews as comments that might help him in the bookshop, so a little bit different in focus than something I might write to put on Goodreads (if I ever had the time 
). They're also more chatty than a "proper review" 'cos they're extracted from emails I sent to Will - recycling at work...
All of the books he passes on to me are recent hardback productions (occasionally ones coming out in a couple of months) and although they're all loosely SFF / speculative (by Will's reckoning) many of them are not nearly so much SFF as I would normally choose. You'll see what I mean.
First up is Ledge by Stacey McEwan...
I had kind of mixed feelings throughout which weren't resolved by the ending. I like books to have a clear ending for themselves even if they are part of a series, but Ledge finished on a kind of end-of-episode cliffhanger with "don't miss next week's exciting episode" written all over it (actually it's September 2023's episode but the same applies ).
Stacey's writing is basically competent and there were no proofreading issues that I spotted, so the book has been well put together. However, I confess not to really liking her writing style - it's full of short sentences.
Like this. I thought I'd explain.
Except they're separate paragraphs.
You get the drift, I'm sure. She writes in the present tense which works well for the story, and there's a decent amount of description of the geography of the world. Strictly speaking it's not a world, but rather a fairly small island which can be crossed on foot in only a few days, which has this impossibly high mountain at the southern end on which the ledge of the title is located.
But the rest of her world-building left me a bit cold. There are two quite different races, along with numerous political sub-factions of these. There doesn't seem to be any historical or biological link between the two, but somehow they can intermarry and have children. One race is human, the other is a kind of flying humanoid thing rather larger than the average person: these are imposing but, apparently, physically quite weak. Then there's bits of magic which are kind of glued into the plot without any real coherence as to what it can and cannot do, and who can or cannot exercise it. I don't think the magic added anything important to the world, but it was crucial to the plot in the sense of healing the protagonist at one point, and helping her get through some locked doors at another. It was altogether less impressive and less well thought through than one would hope.
However, I don't think that world-building was what Stacey was interested in - she basically wanted to write a sexy romance in a vaguely mysterious world where the two lovers begin completely alienated from each other but are forced together by circumstance. The sex (by the time they get around to it, about 2/3 of the way through) is surprisingly explicit, and focuses on the mechanics and sensations of their coupling rather than going more sensitively into the how and why of inter-species sex. This kind of felt like an enormous elephant in the room! Stacey talked about feelings, but they are kind of binary black-and-white feelings rather than nuanced ones, and I wasn't convinced from the writing that the couple in question actually felt anything serious for each other, other than being able to scratch an itch.
Personally I wouldn't rush to read anything else Stacey has written (I think from the blurb that this is in fact her first novel so there isn't anything else out there to try). It's interesting (to me, at least) that she or her publisher has decided that it is the first book of a trilogy, so one assumes that Stacey has books 2 and 3 mapped out to a greater or lesser degree. I guess if she's promising book 2 this September, then that one at least must be essentially finished.
So - I think the book would appeal to people who like sexy romances along the lines of vampire / werewolf / shapeshifter protagonists. It's not a book for people who want a richly imagined and coherent alternative world. Indeed, it's kind of questionable (in a strict nerdy sense) whether it should be classed with fantasy at all, as that kind of sends the wrong message as to what the book actually is about. Within those constraints, and provided you don't stop to ask yourself awkward questions of the book, it works, and carries along at a decent pace. I was never at any serious risk of giving up on it. If I was rating it on Goodreads or whatever it would be a 3* book for me.
Comments
Did you mention that this series of Book Notes deals only with local authors Lake District authors?
EDIT: Oh, never mind - I see they're not.
No, there's no local connection for most of them (and I'd mention if there was)