ladyofastolat | Small Change series

Oops. I've got very behind with my write-up of the books of 2016. I finished Farthing, the first book in the Small Change trilogy by Jo Walton, exactly 4 weeks ago, while waiting for Pellinor to pick me up from the ferry terminal in Southampton before heading off to Cornwall. I read the next two during the first half of our roleplaying week. Since so long has gone by, I don't feel like writing a proper review, but I want to at least record the fact that I read them, for future reference.

Farthing is a country house murder mystery set in 1949. At a gathering of the elite "Farthing set," a guest - a prominent politician - is found dead, and suspicion falls upon the "unsuitable" husband of the daughter of the house. The daughter tells her story in the first person, her chapters alternating with the third person viewpoint of Carmichael, the Scotland Yard inspector investigating the case. The twist is that this is an AU version of 1949. In 1941, the UK made peace with Hitler, and by 1949 is generally congratulating itself on avoiding the devastating war that is still raging between Germany and the USSR. On the surface, little has changed, but there are subtle and growing differences - disturbing differences.

Each book in the trilogy has a different female first person narrator, but in each book those chapters alternate with Carmichael's third person story. The second is set not that long after the first, with the third happening around a decade later. I can't say much about these because of spoilers, except to say that the world gets progressively darker as the AU plays out.

I found the first book rather slow to get in to, but got more interested as the book progressed. I found the slow and steady progression towards awfulness to be horribly plausible. For most people, normal life continues. If you see horrible things happening on the news... Well, if you're innocent, you've nothing to worry about, right? And at least we're not getting bombed in our beds like in that horrid war that we wisely extricated ourselves from.

The ending of the trilogy, though, I did not find plausible.

Throughout it all, I was unreasonably bothered by the repeated references to the farthing coing depicting a robin. I was assuming that the AU diverged in 1941, and before then, everything happened as it happened for real. There are no other noticeable differences. (Well, there is a reference to James I having his head cut off, but it's along the lines of "who was that king who had his head cut off? James I?" so I read it as indicating the character's ignorance of history, rather than being a truth.) But the real farthing had a wren on it. Is this a mistake on the author's part? The interet reveals that quite a lot of people who were alive when farthings were in circulation still swear blind that it had a robin on. Or is it a different sort of AU? Was it AU even before 1941, with the farthing being the clue? It really shouldn't matter, but it bothers me exceedingly. I like to know the rules behind an AU, and with this one, I'm all thrown into doubt.

Oh well. I appear to have written something resembling a proper review, after all

I won't be writing individual book reviews for a while, though. I'm reading all the Peter Wimsey books - I read one some years ago, but only one, and I can't remember it - and don't want to write up each one separately.

Small Change series

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