The Missing of Clairdelune, by Christelle Dabos

Book Two of The Mirror Visitor series begins a little clunkily, with insufficient recap of the first book for a seamless transition. There are so many characters in such a complex storyline and it has been translated from French; no wonder it’s easy to get lost. As the story moves on it gathers pace and excitement. Dabos has developed the happy knack of ending a chapter on a cliffhanger, making it difficult to put the book down. With echoes of Arabian Nights Ophelia is appointed vice-storyteller by Farouk, the all-powerful ruler and ancestral spirit of the ark of Pole. She is at loggerheads with her fiancé, Thorn, but she may need him to survive her precarious position at the court. It is impossible not to cheer for dogged underdog Ophelia and it is really not necessary for he to sustain quite so much physical damage. Dabos is great at world-building and depicting characters; where the book falls down is in how they interact. The central romance is just not credible and Ophelia’s family relationships are treated superficially. The latter is perhaps understandable when the tale already runs to more than 500 pages. It ends on yet another cliffhanger as a teaser for the next book, if you have the stamina.

A Winter’s Promise, by Christelle Dabos

Following the Rupture the world has been reduced to around two-dozen scattered arks, connected only by airship travel. Each ark has an immortal founder and has developed according to the personality of this spirit and the genetic talents of its people. Ophelia lives on the peaceful and egalitarian ark of Anima, ruled by a Matriarchy of Doyennes. She runs a museum and her talents include reading the history of objects and the ability to travel via mirror. Quiet, scruffy and clumsy, Ophelia is an unlikely candidate for a diplomatic marriage with a man from the remote and icy ark of Pole. We never do discover why the alliance is so vital that she must be forced into it or why the Doyennes sabotage her chances of success by providing no information or support. It can be difficult to criticise novels in translation because you don’t know if any problems with the story are from the original writing or are a fault in translation. This tale has been a bestseller in France, which is no guarantee of quality, but may tend to point to issues with the translation. There is a problem with some of the tenses, which may be technically correct but don’t read well in English, with excessive use of passive voice. The book plunges straight in to the plot with minimal exposition, which demonstrates refreshing respect for the intelligence of the audience. The quiet and unobtrusive heroine flies under the radar most of the time but nevertheless flies. Lesser characters tend to caricature and the baffling behaviour of Ophelia’s fiancé Thorn is not satisfactorily resolved. This is possibly because the novel is the first of a planned quartet and we will discover if he is hero or villain in later books.