It’s time to review the third of our four semi-finalists! Following on from our review of Meg Cowley’s Flight of Sorcery and Shadow and Travis M. Riddle’s On Lavender Tides, we’re going to review Mysterious Ways by Abbie Evans.
To yet again reiterate some of our boilerplate text… we have posted these semi finalist reviews in no particular order, and each of them feature multiple (sometimes opposing) opinions from our judges. Rather than requiring a mandatory review from each judge, however, our readers had the option to opt-out of providing any text if they felt like all of their opinions had been touched on. We figure that this saves you from reading the same stuff a whole bunch of times! Please keep in mind that the nature of the competition means that there will be a fair bit of critique present in these reviews — we have discussed the merits of each book a lot at this stage — but we hope that we have kept this fair and balanced, and it of course only reflects our own opinions.
With all of that out of the way… on to the reviews! And, uh. Be prepared for this one. Between us, there’s about 4500 words in here. Look, we had a lot of thoughts. You might want to put the kettle on.
The Blurb
The Goddess works in mysterious ways, and Isabella Varselak intends to find out exactly what those ways are.
As the commander of the 7th Unit of the Solistopian City Watch, Isabella Varselak has dealt with many a mystery. Murderers, burglars, con artists, and troublesome demons have given her a multitude of crimes to solve over the years.
But injustice in the way the world works is all around her. Innocent people suffer, guilty people triumph. When this is questioned, the only answer she receives is that the Goddess works in mysterious ways.
Determined to get to the bottom of what these ways are and solve the ultimate mystery, she sets off on a journey to find answers — but she’ll have to go through hell to get them.
Mysterious Ways is a fantasy novel set in a matriarchal world. Women are in power, they worship a Goddess, and same sex relationships are common and socially acceptable.
Hiu’s Thoughts:
Alright, I’m about to throw a LOT of words at you, so I hope you’re prepared.
Straight out of the gate, let me say that Mysterious Ways is perhaps the most fun I’ve had reading any SPFBO book as a judge to date. It’s not my highest scoring (that honour still belongs to Patrick Samphire’s amazing Shadow of a Dead God), but honestly, most of my criticisms are more nitpicks than anything else. So. Let’s dive into it, shall we?
Mysterious Ways is a queer-normative, comedy-forward, alternate-world urban fantasy. In many ways, it feels like a giant “fuck you” to the chastity and reservedness often preached by organised religion. Our main characters are Isabella (a stoic city watch commander) and Cerys (a very-much-not-stoic conwoman), whose paths become intertwined by a murder mystery that causes the former to question whether the current justice system is actually, y’know… Just. (It isn’t.) Together, the pair quite literally go to hell and back. One trying to ensure that their pre-democratic society is as fair as it possibly can be, and the other… well, trying to avoid execution for a murder she may or may not have committed. In the process, the pair get to know each other. Quite well. Very well. Intimately well.
The romance is quite sweet, is what I’m getting at. With loads of disaster-couple complications thrown in for good measure. Complications such as “did you murder that woman?”.
The way in which the story is crafted is admittedly a little rough. At times, certain decisions (both character and authorial) don’t seem to hold up to much scrutiny, and some of the worldbuilding paint feels like it would peel away if scratched by a nail. (The fact that the world is so close to ours but so clearly NOT ours is both a blessing and a curse in this regard.) The prose, too, is unpolished at times. It feels a little too formal and adverb-y in a lot of places and comes with the occasional error or missing word. But it’s a mark of how fun this book was that for the most part I just… didn’t really care?
I mentioned that “fuck you” to the drabness of (some) organised religion earlier, and I want to touch on that a little bit more since it was an aspect that I really enjoyed. Whereas some major organised religions in our world frown upon open sexuality, intoxication, and a lot of other stuff that you could probably describe as “fun”, Mysterious Ways turns that on its head. In this world, things like sex and companionable drinking are encouraged, and are seen as “from the goddess”, whereas Satan is a much more miserable and chaste sod. There are pleasure houses manned by literal angels, and sexy things such as casual sex, group sex, or sex work are actually seen as quite mundane. Why should sex have to be such a taboo topic, anyway?
It’s a simple reversal, but it’s a thought experiment that I found quite enjoyable when reading. How different would the relationships so many people have with their religion be if all of that guilt was taken away? I also enjoyed that this change didn’t suddenly mean that the religion shown in the book was perfect. Here, the religion is intrinsically tied to the flawed justice system, and I appreciated that the characters were still trapped in that unconsciously loyal mindset when trying to problem solve, and so still had a lot of questioning to do.
That aforementioned simplicity is also present in the matriarchal society of the book, which is likewise just a reversal of historical gender roles and expectations. There is still sexism present, with men trying to break through the gender-imposed glass ceiling, and honestly this is where it kind of breaks down for me. I’ve seen this particular reversal before in a bunch of other books, and I’m never sure that it truly works beyond the surface level. Thankfully, this subplot is only present in a few scenes concerning one of Isabella’s underlings.
As with any book that is heavy on comedy, I can imagine that your mileage here will vary massively. The comedy is ever so slightly “British” feeling, but I don’t think that Abbie Evans is actually from our behated hell isle. It’s hard to describe the sense of humour on show here, but I’d say that it’s… a sort of unabashedly immature absurdism. A woman will be given the magical equivalent of a mobile phone (a wonder of communication that could solve/prevent countless varieties of potential problems!) and the first thing she’ll do is arrange a fling with a fond ex. A queen will be too hangry to make any rational decisions, but the reason for that anger will be that her food taster has died. A baker will be woken up in the middle of the night for a dire emergency, and that emergency will be the need for a dozen eclairs. You see what I mean. Some will find this kind of thing juvenile. Others (me) will find it absurd and funny enough to skip lunch to sneak in another chapter.
My biggest criticism, however, is that at times Mysterious Ways feels like it doesn’t know what kind of book it wants to be. On one hand it wants to be a crazy, queer, high-on-hijinks comedic rollercoaster ride. On the other hand, it tries to be more philosophical. It gets really quite preachy in places (though sometimes it’s hard to tell what it’s trying to preach), and it labours the point a bit too hard and for too long in certain scenes. There are times where I think it nails the balance, and has the feeling of a great romcom fantasy with a righteous anger behind it. At others… it kind of falls apart. On occasion, it did also feel like some of the philosophical elements of the story would trip over each other in the delivery.
But with all that said… if it were solely up to me, Mysterious Ways would be my finalist. It’s a flawed, messy, gem of a book, but I loved it like I’ve loved very few SPFBO books in the past. I would rather put forward an unpolished book that I believe to be outstanding in one or two aspects than a book which is just “solid” in all aspects.
At the time of my writing this, our finalist choice still hasn’t been settled, so I genuinely don’t know if Mysterious Ways will make the next round or not. Regardless, I’d encourage anyone interested in this review to pick the book up, read it, review it, shout about it… all of that fun stuff. In my opinion, Abbie Evans has nailed a lot of the hard parts of being a great writer. This book has such an infectious personality to it, and most of my complaints could very well have been rendered null and void by a stricter editor and some more fine-tuning. Whatever they write next, I want to read it. And with so many books and so many authors out there, that’s not a thought I’m often left with.
Calvin’s Thoughts:
You weren’t lying when you said a lot of words, were you Hiu? What’s interesting about this one is that I basically agree with everything Hiu just said. But for me, the novel as a whole doesn’t hang together nearly so well as it does for him. It’s fun in places, but for me the overwhelming feeling was of a book that didn’t quite know what it wanted to be. Is it a comedic fantasy rom-com? A murder mystery? An epic quest fantasy? It’s all of those things, and while that’s OK, I didn’t feel like it blended those different elements into a cohesive whole.
Having said that, I feel like I need to be clear that I didn’t dislike the novel. It just didn’t particularly hit for me.
Jared’s Thoughts:
Hiu wasn’t kidding about words. And there I was feeling guilty for my essay at the start of On Lavender Tides! Happily for everyone, I agree with most of these words. There are quite a few things that bugged me about Mysterious Ways (I thought the humour was a little forced, I rolled my eyes at twists like “now we’ve invented undercover policing!”, and the book spent a lot of time at the start finding its… well… “way”).
All that said, Calvin’s — very justified — criticism that the book is a bit all over the shop is one of the things I liked most. Mysterious Ways went lots of directions I wasn’t expecting — tonally, philosophically, plot-ly, whatever. I really like that (as Hiu pointed out) it quietly explores super-progressive themes, but then noisily blundered around between plot points and sub-genres. There were bits that made me laugh, bits that made me misty-eyed, lots of action, a fair amount of introspection, and unexpected mixes of all of the above. This is a very, very weird book.
I moan a lot about self-publishing as a commercial alternative that doesn’t always produce creative alternatives. Mysterious Ways is not doing what many other books have done in the self- or traditional publishing space. It is fun and new and bonkers. It is also inconsistent and imperfect, but the genuine surprise it brings more than offsets that for me.
Devin’s Thoughts:
With the great plan to split our reading more evenly having totally failed and given us a lot of tough decisions to make for our eventual finalist, I came to Mysterious Ways with the unenviable task of giving a final opinion. Not a great position to be in, but it did mean I went into this book expecting it to be really good and I didn’t get anything quite that simple. Strap in, because if you thought Hiu had a lot of words to say about this book, you haven’t seen my review yet. Warning, there’s likely to be spoilers here, I’ll try to flag the major ones, but just generally proceed with caution.
So. Ahem. Mysterious Ways. As I said I went into this book expecting to enjoy it, especially since my taste has generally run somewhere between Hiu’s and Jared’s and they both enjoyed it, so it was quite surprising that I was soon ranting into our discord chat about everything from disliking the city name, Solistopia, to grinding my teeth over our MC’s detailed plans to invent detective work in a way that was tedious to anyone who has seen even a single police procedural. There is a reason for this, of course, because this society has zero percent of a functional justice system, merely the trappings of one linked to an “infallible” religious structure of real angels, demons and goddesses who simply cannot be wrong. So, in short, up until about the one third mark of this book, I was quite sure I disliked it immensely and would, in any other situation, have DNFed it after the pointless magical phone charm chapter. Now, before we get into why I’m glad I didn’t, I do want to detail what made the first third of this book frustrating for me.
The First Third
(Editor’s Note: Yes, Devin’s review needs subheadings. We did warn you.)
Like Hiu said earlier, this book doesn’t seem to know what sort of book it wants to be and nowhere is that more true than the first third. It is on occasion comedic to the point of eye-rolling farce (I mean, we’re introduced to our MC at the moment she gets caught in an invisible mousetrap while her guards are dolting about being doltish), while at others it is trying to be very serious and make points about organised religion and sexuality. The split between seeming to want to be taken seriously and then taking the piss out of the thing it wants to be taken seriously about (see comments about garments without pockets and the horrified question of ‘but what would he do if he had to do multiple things at once?’ re: men not able to be in charge of things because multitasking) gave the first part of this book the feeling of a smug teenager who thinks they are both very funny and very clever. This doesn’t continue all the way through, but was really off-putting in the beginning before it found its stride. Many of the world-building choices seem, beneath the jokes, to be mostly-serious critiques of our social structures, but flipped from ours to make a point. But I’ll return to my (lengthy) thoughts about underlying philosophies in a bit.
Why I’m glad I kept reading
Once the world has been established and our main character has been metaphorically pushed out the door by Gandalf, Mysterious Ways gets itself something of a destination the characters are working toward and a plan to get there and things actually start to happen. Some of what happens is utterly wild and unexpected, some is tangential to the point of mild annoyance, and some seems to exist merely to keep making social critiques in which our MC, Isabella, has ‘how things really are’ explained to her by her con-woman love interest. The pacing certainly isn’t steady or fluid, but I read from about 45% to 100% in one sitting quite easily as there was always enough keeping me turning the pages. And there is a sense of dramatic escalation that builds toward the end. It’s the first in a series by the look of the title page, yet Mysterious Ways works fairly well as a stand-alone story in that there is character growth and change and enough of a satisfying conclusion. The real highlight of this book for me was the relationship between Isabella and Cerys, the con-woman. It’s always exciting to watch two characters who don’t trust each other, and who keep plotting against one another in various ways, fall in love or at least grow to care for one another with a side of getting frisky. There were a few moments I was worried character change would happen too fast and it would collapse in a gooey heap, but the balance between softening toward one another and maintaining their very different core selves is well-handled.
Isabella’s relationship with her offsider, Theo, is also nice and I’m glad he’s in the story even if his motivations make even less sense than everyone else’s (more on motivations in a bit). Theo and Cerys together are the wake-up call Isabella needs to stop looking at everything through her entitled lens, and while that’s something I like a lot, it is heavy handed in places and occasionally turns Theo into something of a character development device rather than a person with their own journey. Minor nitpicks, but I think it’s worth saying because in the parts of the book where Theo is allowed to be his own person, he does far more interesting things and brings more to the narrative.
Once the book got past the first third, the humour became far better balanced and integrated (“fucking havoc demons!”) and made this book a lot of fun as its plot careened about revelling in its own sense of adventure. Mysterious Ways is a book that feels like it can, and does, do whatever the hell it likes regardless of convention, which depending on what sort of reader you are, or even what mood you’re in when you pick it up, may or may not work for you. Especially since it does whatever the hell it likes, regardless of internal world logic and the motivations of the characters it’s playing with. Which I guess brings us to…
Plot/motivations
As Hiu mentioned at the beginning, there are some issues in how the plot and motivations are presented that left me shouting BUT WHY? THAT MAKES NO SENSE! at my e-reader.
“Why go to the effort of dressing up like Satan if demons can’t tell humans apart?”
“Because if we’re going to do this con we’re going to do it PROPERLY DAMN IT!”
…is probably the best, low-spoiler example of this in the book. Extra effort for… no reason beyond ‘cos we want to, ok?’ In fact, the whole plot hinges on Isabella’s decision to (MAJOR SPOILER HERE) travel to the underworld to trick Satan so she can use her portal to the overworld (essentially heaven) so she can ask the infallible Goddess to like… fix justice??? is… uh, let’s say a bit batshit with so small a degree of likelihood and so high a degree of risk that it’s ridiculous to the point of foolhardy, and no amount of Isabella’s stubborn insistence on justice needing to be done can overcome that with any degree of believability (SPOILER OVER).
So in short, Mysterious Ways is very much a book in which you have to take to heart the central maxim of the Goddess’s religion (‘the Goddess works in mysterious ways’) in order to roll with the plot — Mysterious Ways works in Mysterious Ways and is more enjoyable when not examined too closely or questioned overmuch. In most cases it’s fine in the moment because the characters keep sweeping you along to the next moment of batshittery, but its fridge logic all the way down. This was also true of some of the philosophical explorations and underpinnings/social critiques present throughout the book, about which I have some… very complicated thoughts.
Underlying philosophies
Right, so super strap in here for the short version of my philosophical thoughts, which isn’t as short as most people would like it to be but unfortunately in my non-writing life I study sociology, gender and sexuality, and philosophy so the ideas being poked at in this book are extremely in my cranky-at-the-world wheelhouse. Ahem. Here we go…
First, while no book NEEDS to have any level of social critique, and social critique is really fucking hard to do well or ‘right’ for any given value of ‘right’, something I hugely appreciate about Mysterious Ways is what it aims at. Depending on what sort of reader you are, you’ll come across blatant (and sometimes overly belaboured) critiques and subtle ones the author may not even have consciously intended but are still present in the text. While, as you’ll see in the following paragraphs, I don’t always agree with the simplicity with which some of it is presented, it’s not lost on me that I’m only writing this section because Mysterious Ways stepped outside of the idea of our ‘normal’ and tried something new. We don’t talk about social/philosophical critiques in books that stick to hegemonic heterosexuality, or patriarchy, or that glorify war, police, or hereditary monarchy. These things are just normal either for us in our modern world or in fantasy more generally, but that doesn’t make them more ‘right’ than anything I feel Mysterious Ways might do ‘wrong’.
That being said, there were a few moments in this book where I hmmmmmed anxiously and had to stop reading to think through what it was trying (or accidentally managing) to say.
Whether it was a deliberately subversive choice or something the author just thought would be fun (I don’t like to presume I know someone else’s authorial intent), the decision to flip the puritan religious ideas about sex is an interesting one. I both agree and disagree with Hiu on this in that, yes, there is some value to the idea of making sex just another thing people do without any special importance in order to show that said puritan ideas about it are ridiculous, but making it as exciting as watching water boil also completely removes all the heat and desire and sensuality that makes sex worth having in the first place. The dry, dull descriptions of orgies and sexual pleasure had me skimming — not something I usually do reading sex scenes — and I ended up wondering if the author was attempting to make the point that sex is only exciting when it’s a religious taboo or whether an awful lot of nuance was being missed in making what, on a shallow level, appears to be a subversive choice but may also be just the flipping of a binary system as erroneous and incomplete upside down as it was the right way up.
The gender-flipped social hierarchy Hiu also mentioned is another example where I struggled to articulate the ways in which it both worked and didn’t work for me. As with the sex-as-mundane stuff above, the unsubtle switching of shitty entitled male bosses for shitty entitled female bosses works to highlight how ridiculous our social constructions of gender expectations are, but in doing so all nuance around power structures and how gender intersects with class and socioeconomic position and race etc are lost. The critique becomes its own caricature, especially with piss-taking/heavy-handed (depending on your view) comments about pockets in clothes and men lacking the ability to lead because what if they have to multitask. It also strikes me as a shallow or half-formed critique to make a point about the silliness of gender roles while at the same time maintaining a neatly demarcated gender binary. My poor little agender heart approves of deconstructing gender roles as nonsensical systems of social control, but I’m not sure that’s really possible without also deconstructing gender essentialism and binary thinking.
You could probably read whatever you wanted/didn’t want into those first two, but the philosophical concept that underpins this entire book is the idea of justice. Isabella’s whole motivation throughout the book is the sense that something is wrong and justice isn’t being done, that the city watch aren’t investigating properly, or at all, and that innocent people are being condemned for crimes they didn’t commit. This is because they use an infallible sister of the Goddess as their neutral judge, but perhaps she’s not so neutral as they thought. Oops, better fix that! I think the problem I had here isn’t that Mysterious Ways says anything particularly troubling about the idea of justice, merely that it’s such a HUGE and COMPLICATED topic that in making it a central theme the book now has a lot it needs to chew. As it is, the book is working from the idea that there is natural, inbuilt knowledge of good and bad, likely because it’s working from a religious system of justice, but it’s not something the text ever seeks to question. What IS justice and who is it for?
(Editor’s Note: Strap in…)
Justice isn’t a tangible commodity you can measure or mete out, rather it’s the social control by law that a given society has ‘agreed’ on in order to maintain the internal peace of said society. There isn’t universal law or universal justice, because the job of justice in the sense that the police (or the city watch in this case) use it is the maintaining of peace, ie. the maintaining of the status quo. To consider justice as something more akin to some form of fairness and equity, one has to use a broader lens because societies don’t exist in an individualist vacuum. No matter how deeply we are coming to believe the neoliberal fever dream of individual choice and individual responsibility, a real examination of justice would have to include things like… does everyone have fair and equal access to food, water, safe housing, healthcare, etc and, in a capitalist society, the work required to earn the money needed for basic survival that doesn’t at the same time destroy mental health. Choosing to stand up for each specific individual and ‘be more observant’ isn’t going to make anything more just, especially when Isabella, is… a police officer. No matter how progressive one is attempting to be, police officers are enforcers of status quo systems and writing a narrative in which grand social change is being attempted without examining the part the police/city watch play in maintaining existing power structures feels rather pointless. It reads rather ‘cops can be good if only we get rid of the bad apples’, which critiques individual choices rather than the structures that inform and constrain individual choices, and which will keep creating new bad apples for every one you manage to remove.
Now to be clear, this long and wordy think-piece of a critique could, and probably should, be levelled at a lot more books, especially ones that aren’t even trying to consider or reconsider an entrenched conception of justice. Not hitting every nuance and complication isn’t something I would dock Mysterious Ways points for either, but these are all thoughts that came to mind as I read in that very ‘oh how I wish this book could do everything I wanted it to do’ way in which we, as judges, often have to wrangle with what a book is versus what it potentially could be.
Lastly I think with much of the thoughtful stuff I’ve discussed here at painful length, it’s worth making a divide between what the BOOK is trying to do and how the WORLD in it is presented. While as Jared said in his review, Mysterious Ways is pulling on some progressive ideas, the world it presents us with is not actually progressive and I think that’s important. A good example of what I mean is that while the book is progressive in terms of sexuality and gender roles and is, ultimately (I hope), aiming for the gradual emergence of a truly queer-normative society, the world it presents isn’t actually queer-normative. Not only does it lack any spectrum in terms of gender representation, its also kind of… hegemonically homosexual. All the women are sexually engaged with other women and all the men with men, to the point that our MC is shocked when she discovers Theo has had sex with a woman. Aside from the question of… how this society reproduces itself… there is nothing queer about binary genders and seemingly narrow ideas of normative sexual partners. That isn’t to say the book isn’t ultimately queer-normative, rather that Mysterious Ways has, here as in all the other ways previously mentioned, presented us not with a progressive society, rather a twisted mirror that flips everything to show us how ridiculous and regressive our own social constructs are.
As you can tell, this book got me thinking. A lot! And now you’re all suffering for it. I’m finished being all philosophical now though, I promise. I mean… probably.
So wait… did you like it or not?
I’m working up to that part! Having started off extremely sure I disliked Mysterious Ways, bit by bit it got its claws into me. It made me laugh and think and become invested enough to care what happened and to happily suspend all disbelief to go along for the ride. And, in the end, it had me itching for the next book. Despite having apologised to Hiu early in the read for not liking his favourite semi-finalist, I find myself coming back, hat in hand, to agree with his pronouncement that this is the most fun I’ve had reading a SPFBO book, or any book really, for quite some time. I’m a nibbler, as a reader, I pick away slowly at books over weeks and can count on my fingers the number of books that have grabbed me so thoroughly I couldn’t do anything else until I’d finished them. Mysterious Ways has a place amongst that small number. It’s far from perfect and polished, but full of rough and ready, badass, gives-no-shit-what-you-think charm and I think the author, Abbie Evans, has a bright future ahead.
Conclusions
Oi! You! You skipped to this part didn’t you? Probably saw how many words there were and decided you couldn’t be arsed. The cheek of you. Well… fair enough, honestly. Can’t say I’ve never done the same.
Look, we had a lot of thoughts on this book, and we’ve discussed all four of our semi-finalists at length. Repeatedly. For days on end. It’s hard to fit all of those conflicting thoughts into one post! As reviewers, our job is to steer the right people to the right books. Hopefully amongst all of those words you’ll have figured out whether this (great! we think!) book is for you or not.
But I’m under no illusions. What you’ve skipped down here for is the score. So! Taking an average of all readers, Mysterious Ways finished with a final score of…
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