Short Reviews for October 2025
Between Two Thorns, Tinker, Bankrupting the Enemy, Smoke 'Em If You Got 'Em
Between Two Thorns, by Emma Newman (384 pp; 2013)
Who should read this? People who're willing to put up with much for beautiful worldbuilding pictures.
I liked the feeling of this novel's worldbuilding, and its premise, but it's developed in such an uninteresting direction that, by the end of the book, I didn't enjoy it.
We have a magically hidden community of "Fay-Touched", serving the powerful and wild Fay, with a quasi-Regency social structure among themselves. Our main protagonist is trying to escape to the mundane world and modernity, while her family tries to pull her back with an arranged marriage... and this gets entwined in a conspiracy being unmasked by an "Arbiter" (our second protagonist) who's commissioned to enforce the law even against the Fay.
Unfortunately, the plot itself is mediocre; the events that actually happen (rather than are threatened) rarely hold my interest. Worse, the worldbuilding seems to fall apart when I stare at it - why or how the Fay-Touched live like this isn't adequately explained. And worse still, their Regency-style social structure is merely held up more as a target for opprobrium rather than an opportunity for interesting development! I did finish the novel (and like our protagonist, I found things more interested when she had a secret project for the Arbiters), but I'm not interested in continuing to the rest of the series.
Tinker, by Wen Spencer (448 pp; 2004)
Who should read this? People who like engineer-as-hero stories and romances.
Once again, this was an intriguing premise that went in a way I didn't care for.
I really liked how this fantasy starts in what could be called the middle of the story, after the city of Pittsburgh has already been sent to the otherworld of Elfhome for all but one day a month, and with our protagonist Tinker already having come to people's attention for her ancestry and her talent with designing worldgates. It's a scenario that could be handled very interestingly, with mysterious adversaries and suspicion on all sides...
... But Spencer's writing doesn't live up to this. Tinker's romance with a mysterious elf (written in a way I didn't like) takes over the plot too much, her decisionmaking isn't written in a way interesting or sympathetic to me even though her challenges could be very interesting, and Spencer's hybrid of magic and science feels like it makes magic too reductionist for my taste. It feels like a Golden Age science-fiction Engineer Hero dropped in a fantasy setting - which is a story the Golden Age itself liked to tell (witness Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions which I loved, or Heinlein's Glory Road which I didn't), but here, Spencer emphasizes the personal and political drama in ways that don't feel like the Golden Age.
Worse, in the end, I found myself not really caring about the characters outside sort of Tinker herself, or what this author would have happen next.
Someone else should copy this premise and do it in a more fun way.
Bankrupting the Enemy: The U.S. Financial Siege of Japan Before Pearl Harbor, by Edward S. Miller (368 pp; 2007)
Who should read this? People who want to dig into the details of World War II, or people interested in economic history.
This's the account of the embargos and financial freeze America put on Japan before World War II, which drove them to war. Or, more specifically, it drove them to extend their war with China to also fight America and Britain - contrary to the ideas of Roosevelt's bureaucrats and officials who'd conceived the embargos and freeze. One major theme I picked up here was how amateur the bureaucrats were, flying by the seat of their pants without caring to research what impact they'd actually have on the Japanese economy beyond a few stockpiles, or speculate how they'd respond, or even having a cohesive multi-month plan rather than throwing one idea after another.
As it turned out, Japan was able to evade the embargos for a while... but the financial freeze cut them off from international trade. But what no one guessed until it happened was that they'd respond with war. This reminds me of US policy in Vietnam, where we also couldn't fathom the enemy's supposedly-irrational reactions.
The picture of the prewar economy, divided into multiple currency blocks with trade barriers between them was another gem of this book. As one block after another dropped out of the world economy due to war, I could imagine graphically how the war affected all the world.
Smoke 'Em If You Got 'Em: The Rise and Fall of the Army Cigarette Ration, by Joel R. Bius (320 pp; 2018)
Who should read this? People interested in the social history of the US Army.
Bius writes on tobacco and cigarettes and the US Army, starting with a detailed look at the World Wars and then jumping forward to the move to end smoking in the Army - first to stop including cigarettes with each meal ration, and then to end it more broadly. The first section, about the World Wars, was by far the most fascinating to me. The start of the second section, talking about how the Army's social structure changed when conscription ended, was also interesting; but the later bureaucratic and political machinations around the anti-smoking campaign felt much more bland.
It's a tiny piece of history, inside a side-story to the larger stories of history. But, Bius makes his topic interesting (up until the last bit). Bius readily ties smoking in to broader points about morale and expectations of soldiers' comfort in general during the mass mobilization of the World Wars. And in this day and age, when smoking is ostracized and the US Army dramatically changed, all of this is easily-forgotten pieces of history which tug on many other points.
I have to say that Glory Road strikes me as fantasy written by a man who doesn't get fantasy.