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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 9520221" data-attributes="member: 8461">I just finished reading Erynn Q's 2020 urban fantasy novel <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Welcome-Other-London-1-Erynn/dp/192801139X" target="_blank">Welcome to the Other London</a>, and it...wasn't great.EDIT: My copy of this book has the author listed as being "Erynn Q." I have no idea why they're listed as "Lumen Quill" on the Amazon page.I picked this up a few Gen Cons ago, from one of the booths in the "authors alley" (e.g. the edge of the artist's section in the dealer hall), and in hindsight the person I bought this from might have been the author. I suppose I should have gotten an autograph.That said, this book didn't grab me much at all. Set in London, Ontario, it tells the story of a high school freshman named Ella Masterson who goes to work for the local outlet of Fixers Bureau, who're the troubleshooters called in to deal with magical problems. Of course, she's hired because the person who runs the place notices something special about her, with the story gradually moving toward revealing what that is.In other words, this is fairly typical stuff for this genre, and the entire story came across as something of a YA novel (even though, as far as I know, it isn't marketed as one). Pop culture references abound, mostly to anime and Nintendo games. Moreover, while the plot wasn't quite as predictable as I expected, that was mostly because the book wasn't as forthcoming with details as it should have been. Leaving aside the formulaic tropes, it can be hard to figure out what's going to happen if you're not sure what's going on in the first place.And really, that's my big problem with this book: it avoids exposition like the plague, and that's not a good thing.I've heard a lot of people talk about this like it's something utterly unnuanced and absolutely axiomatic. Exposition is bad; show, don't tell; keep the action going, etc. It's amateurish advice, as evidenced by the fact that a lot of classic works of fiction utilize the very things those heuristics say to avoid, and still became classics anyway (nor do I believe that they did so in spite of the expository sections of their writing). Yes, too much exposition is bad, but that doesn't warrant going to the opposite extreme!In this book, for instance, we get references to the "hole in the sky" that opened up fifty years ago and brought Earth into "the Grand Narrative" with other worlds, giving Earth magic and an influx of magical beings...and this description is already more overt than anything the book says. Quite frankly, if it wasn't for the summary on the back cover (or the glossary found at the end) then it would have been hard for me to have figured even that much out.Quite frankly, these kinds of how's and why's deserve expository treatment, and I find their absence a lot more off-putting than the author seems to think their presence would have been. Even if the author didn't want a long section of narration, they could have framed that as a conversation, because while it's vogue to roll your eyes at two characters discussing things that are considered common knowledge to everyone in the setting, there are ways to get it done believably. Heck, the main character is a high school student; couldn't the author have given her a boring old history teacher who grilled the students on stuff like this? That would have been perfect for introducing readers to this setting's idiosyncrasies!Of course, even if we'd gotten the exposition, I'm not sure if that would have been enough. The characters are presented as being mysterious and reticent, but they come across as flat and uncompelling, their motivations paper-thin at best. The plot meanders between predictable and nonsensical. The nicest thing I can say is that it was short.I didn't mean to be so down on the book when I started writing this, but my overall takeaway is that there's simply nothing of substance here. I don't dislike mindless brain-candy, but it has to at least be entertaining, and this wasn't. I can safely say that I won't be reading the next book in the series.</blockquote>

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