Juno Dawson’s “Her Majesty’s Royal Coven” ended on a shocking cliffhanger (which I will spoil at the end of this paragraph), and THE SHADOW CABINET (Penguin Books, 508 pp., paperback, $17) picks up where it left off. The first book introduced Niamh, Helena, Leonie and Elle, modern-day witches with a friendship modeled on the Spice Girls. Largely absent was Ciara, Niamh’s twin sister, who was in a nine-year coma after picking the wrong side of a war. At the end of the book, Ciara wakes, magically swaps bodies with Niamh and kills her.
“The Shadow Cabinet” explores the consequences. Ciara must reckon with all that’s changed since her coma and recover her fragmented memories, while fooling her formerly closest friends into thinking that she’s actually her sister — who was on the cusp of being crowned high priestess of the national coven when she died.
It’s almost a cliché to find the middle book of a trilogy disappointing. It needs to do so much: recap the plot for new readers, set up the finale and offer an affecting whole in its own right, all while living up to its predecessor. Unfortunately, “The Shadow Cabinet” suffers by comparison. Whereas “Her Majesty’s Royal Coven” balances four points of view in a story that is more than the sum of its parts, its sequel is mostly consumed by Ciara’s. Whereas the first book sets up conventions and rules for magic, the second breaks them, but haphazardly, messily, in the service of chaotic plot engineering. It also flounders in taking the action international. The Britishness of “Her Majesty’s Royal Coven” was rooted in West Yorkshire and was part of the novel’s confident charm; “The Shadow Cabinet” has the more imperial cast of shallow tourism.
While the balance on the whole is off, Ciara’s shattered perspective is genuinely moving, and the decision to swap main characters so violently is admirably bold. I’m still champing at the bit for the series conclusion.
Emma Mieko Candon’s THE ARCHIVE UNDYING (Tordotcom, 482 pp., $28.99) teems with ideas and energy. The world used to be made up of city-states infused with godlike A.I.s that were served by priestlike archivists — but one by one the A.I.s succumbed to a mysterious corruption, dooming millions as they variously imploded or self-cannibalized, littering their former lands with fragments of themselves. Humans with some trace of connection to their fallen A.I.s are called relics and are hunted by the Harbor, a dominant faction that uses them to pilot huge war machines cobbled together from A.I. remains.
Sunai is a relic and former archivist who keeps a low profile and is strangely unable to die. On the run from his past and haunted by a letter he refuses to read, Sunai leads a life of melancholy debauchery — which lands him on the crew of a salvage mission he can’t remember joining. In his company is an attractive and troubled doctor named Veyadi Lut, a man in pursuit of secrets Sunai has been desperate to escape.
“The Archive Undying” is a frustrating read. While a voice of undeniably avid and assured intelligence animates the story, the execution is mushy and oblique. Reading this was akin to watching a film with bad sound mixing: the action onscreen crystalline and sweeping, but the plot and stakes incomprehensible without subtitles. There’s a cast of characters in the front matter, but I found myself desperate for a map and a glossary of terms to help orient myself in the constantly shifting web of those characters’ elided or obscured motivations. Giant robot fights are indisputably cool, but it’s hard to be invested in them when you don’t know why they’re fighting or what will happen if they win or lose.
Alexander Darwin’s THE COMBAT CODES (Orbit, 456 pp., paperback, $18.99) shows a world organized around principles of hand-to-hand combat. In the distant past, martial monks called Grievar Knights offered their services to war-ravaged nations, replacing whole armies with single champions. The result was a worldwide armistice and the creation of the Knights’ Combat Codes, a set of instructions for living, fighting and dying well. Their core motto: “We fight so the rest shall not have to.”
But moneyed interests have sullied the Codes, and created a society where the Grievar generate both mass entertainment and an escalating arms race, with nations struggling to produce the fastest and strongest fighters by any means necessary. Murray Pearson is a formerly famous Knight turned scout, who is bitter and resigned to the corruption of the Codes — until he finds Cego, a boy enslaved by an underground fighting ring. Cego’s abilities and compassion give Murray hope for the future.
Initially self-published in 2015 but expanded in this edition, “The Combat Codes” is in several ways a stock book of types: a grizzled veteran takes a gifted orphan to a prestigious boarding school to receive a dangerous education in secret arts. Scenes and characters, especially early on, arrive on the page as if ordered from a network TV warehouse.
But as soon as someone throws a punch, the book shines. Darwin writes violence with the rhythm and surprise of a well-executed sonnet, wedding the smooth grace of choreography with the unflinching brutality of fists breaking bone. The fights are mesmerizing, layered like fascia, twitching and flexing and propelling the story toward a conclusion that both satisfies and opens the door to the next volume.
Amal El-Mohtar is a Hugo Award-winning writer and co-author, with Max Gladstone, of “This Is How You Lose the Time War.”
