Moonshine

As was not unexpected, I completely ran out of time to post -- or even to read -- during the rest of my time at Stanford, but I had a long flight home, and flight time means reading time.  And once again, there's WiFi on the plane...

I was given an advance reading copy of Alaya Johnson's Moonshine (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin 2010; editor: Karyn Marcus) by an industry friend, though I dithered around long enough before reading it that the book has now come out for real.  I've read quite a bit of vampire fiction (though I can't keep up with the sheer quantity coming out nowadays), and Moonshine is not a bad addition to the genre, though it's not as overwhelmingly original as I'd hoped and has occasional jarring lapses in period atmosphere.  I've avoided plot spoilers below.

Zephyr Hollis, daughter of a Montana vampire-hunter and a former hunter herself, is now a starving "charity do-gooder" who teaches night classes in literacy for immigrants and works for vampire suffrage and other progressive causes in an alternate 1920s New York City inhabited by both humans and a range of supernatural beings.  The story opens strongly with her rescue of a dead boy who is soon to rise again as a vampire.  One of her students, the mysterious (not to mention darkly handsome and clearly supernatural) Amir, helps her with the newly risen boy and then draws her into a conspiracy to destroy a downtown mob boss.

That boss, Rinaldo, controls the vicious Turn Boys gang, the probable culprits in the boy's death and undeath.  Zephyr soon finds herself juggling her charitable work with her infiltration of the Turn Boys in the role of tutor to gang leader Nicholas, some steamy moments with Amir, and the first steps towards a singing career.  Also involved are her roommate Aileen, a silent-movie-style "vamp" (but not a vampire), and a high-society investigative reporter named Lily who is looking for a big scoop in between tony parties.  The pun of the book's title gets its nod in the plot with the bootleg vampire blood-liquor "Faust," despite the point being made that the book starts during the new moon, when the vampires are more dangerous and literal moonshine in smaller supply.  Further complications ensue when Zephyr's family turns up in New York City with her former vampire-hunting associate Troy and a commission to destroy the Turn Boys.

The central mysteries of Rinaldo's identity and that of the rescued boy, now an amnesiac child vampire, are good enough to hold the attention, though I twigged to the latter's identity and a large chunk of the solution well before Zephyr did. Rinaldo's reveal was more of a surprise.

The twenties atmosphere is also, for the most part, well-done, though occasionally sloppy in the details: it's not clear that Johnson knows that a camisole was underwear in this era, and people would not have called something a "partner dance" instead of the actual name of the dance (waltz, foxtrot, one-step, etc.)  Shallow research, there; she got as far as the Charleston and then stopped.  (Yes, it's unfair of me to nitpick dance research.  But it's my blog and I can obsess about dance if i want to.)  Some of her very modern language tics also made me wince; I'm fairly sure people in the 1920s did not refer to themselves as certifiable or use the term "face-plant."   You can get away with many things in an alternate timeline, but jarring 21st century slang is not on that list.

I also choked slightly on a reference to vampires in the movies.  That would make Zephyr pretty cosmopolitan for a girl from Montana in our timeline; the only vampire film before 1930 was the German Nosferatu (1922), most copies of which were destroyed after a Stoker family lawsuit.  The Lugosi Dracula was made in 1931.  But in an alternate reality in which vampires are real, it makes sense that there would be more movie treatments of the topic.  I can't help suspecting that this is more my retcon than authorial logic, however.

I also suspect Ms. Johnson's age is showing a bit in this book: I felt the Buffy and, especially, the Laurell Hamilton influences were very obvious.  Though Moonshine is not a pure paranormal romance, there's enough romance in it to loosen the mystery focus.  I sort of wish she'd skipped that element altogether; it's not necessary to the plot and something of a distraction.  And I'm getting deeply, deeply tired of paranormal worlds that mix multiple types of supernatural being from the get-go.  Vampires, skinwalkers (shapechangers), and...djinn?  At least that's an original starting combination.  But it doesn't quite hang together. 

Other problems: The big climactic battle is poorly written.  Zephyr's special immunity to vampires is not well-explained and seems an arbitrary plot device.  Her parents are not convincingly drawn.  And the djinn just don't fit into the milieu very well.  Everything is dark and noirish and creepy, and then suddenly we're taking a side-trip into...the Arabian Nights?  It's not out of period, exactly.  It just doesn't fit well with the vampires.

Zephyr is also all too reminiscent of the vampire Genevieve, another "do-gooder" who did social work in late nineteenth century London in Kim Newman's truly magnificent Anno Dracula (which every vampire fan should read) and ended up foiling a vampire conspiracy.  I was also vaguely reminded of Madeline Robins' excellent Point of Honour, which featured sleuth Sarah Tolerance in early 19th-century England but (as far as I recall) no supernatural elements.

I'm nit-picking quite a bit, but I had a fun enough time reading Moonshine.  And it's possible that some of the quibbles I mention were solved between the ARC and the final edition.  Regardless, Moonshine is much better than most of the junk vampire fiction floating around (not to mention most of the crappy paranormal romances), so I'll recommend it in a mild sort of way, especially to people whose interests fall somewhere in the intersection of vampire fiction, paranormal romance, and historical mysteries. 

There's a clear setup at the end for a sequel or even a series.

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Comments

[Serge]

The twenties atmosphere is also, for the most part, well-done

My wife wrote a couple of outright paranormal vampire romances set in that era. She thought that, with the 1920s now being nearly a century in the Past, romance readers would finally consider them as historicals just like they do with anything ste in the 19th century. She was wrong. For them it's not historical if mechanized transportation is available.

[Susan de Guardiola]

The heroine in this one primarily got around by bicycle and, err, teleportation. There were also hansom cabs (horse-drawn) and motor cars sharing the streets, though she doesn't dwell much on either.

And I wouldn't characterize this as a romance novel; I actually thought the romance elements were something of a hindrance to the storytelling. And the whole "supernatural and ludicrously good-looking" guy thing is starting to bore me intensely. (I read a lot more of this genre than is apparent on Rixo because I review for PW.)

[Serge]

I remember being 5-year-old and staying on my grandparents's farm while my mom was in the hospital to give birth to my sister, and my granddad had no tractor and went around in a buggy. But very seldom do stories and/or movies remind us that, by 1895, combustion engines were already around. It's like they think that taking forever to get anywhere makes things more romantic.

[Susan de Guardiola]

Serge,
The irony being that in many historical novels (not just romances) and fantasy novels as well, travel time is unrealistically short given the capacity of an actual horse.

My experiences with air travel delays and sitting in traffic have not convinced me that slow travel is at all romantic.

[Serge]

Susan... And how often have movies shown the hero's horse galloping at full speed for what seems like 10 miles?

[Susan de Guardiola]

Dunno -- I see so few movies, and more of them are genre SF and thus short on horses!

[Marilee J. Layman]

I'm reading a book that's in a different universe and maybe that's why when the army marches six days, the people they find there look different and have different accents. No, really, they just have big changes much too close.

[Serge]

I still think that one of the main attractions of steampunk is that it reminds us that our supposedly unromantic Modern Age is filled with wonders.

[Neil W]

...when the army marches six days, the people they find there look different and have different accents.

If you pushed it, a medieval army could make it from London to the Welsh border in 6 days, and the Welsh spoke a different language and, perhaps, looked different to the English. Whether the differences in appearance were more cultural than inherent I leave to others.

Most examples of different peoples living closely together tend to involve, mountain ranges, bodies of water, climactic boundaries or unstable situations. Or in other words, I'd like an explanation of such proximity, but will suspend my disbelief for a mountain range, large enough river or "In the past generation the [whoever] people had come over the mountains and settled in the lush hill valleys."