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A review by billblume
Phoenix Rising by Pip Ballantine, Tee Morris
4.0
As an author who has written manuscripts for fantasy novels with a partner who is my wife, the idea of husband/wife writing teams fascinates me. I've often wondered how other writing spouses handle the division of duties and if their method resembles what my wife and I came up with. With that in mind, reading Phoenix Rising provided me with several moments of unintentional déjà vu.
The real question is did Pip Ballantine and Tee Morris pull off a successful novel?
In short: they nailed it.
The first novel in their "Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences" series provides a steampunk adventure that often reminded me of the 1960's "Avengers" TV show. The story starts with a bang. No, seriously. The title to chapter one even warns you that's what's going to happen. We're talking a massive explosion as the heroine of the novel Eliza Braun sends one of the bad guys' secret bases to kingdom come. She's all about the shoot first and ask questions later. Actually, it's more like shoot first, explode with dynamite and then ask questions later. Her task at the start of the novel is the rescue of her co-star, the ministry's archivist Wellington Books. On the surface, Welly is everything Eliza is not. She bends the rules into pretzels while he files and categorizes them into order of importance.
At this point, you might roll your eyes at how egregiously cliché this all sounds. Here's the good news: Pip and Tee make it all work. Very often, they find ways to surprise you with little twists in the story and characters to make things entertaining. More importantly, they've done a lot of work to give each of these characters the depth they need. As Eliza and Welly launch into their unauthorized investigation of some especially violent murders, a case which claimed the sanity of a fellow ministry agent (who is a former partner of Eliza's), they get in over their heads as they navigate their steampunk version of Victorian England and unearth a secret society with an agenda for global, racial and social dominance that would make Hitler proud.
I laughed, got giddy and even cringed at all the right times. Pip and Tee hit all the marks that great action adventure in a gritty fantasy world should deliver. With all the praise, you might wonder why I'm only giving it four stars. I'd say it's really more like four-and-a-half stars. Perhaps my only gripe would be within the interludes for this novel. The interludes focus mostly on another ministry agent named Bruce Campbell (a shameless and awesome nod to the actor best known for his roles as Sam Axe from "Burn Notice" and Ash from "Evil Dead"). The subplot is clearly setup for a storyline that will see more development in future novels. My complaint isn't so much about the unresolved storylines touched on here, but Bruce Campbell's character just didn't ring true to me for some reason, and that's a big issue since most of the interludes are told from his perspective. Of all the characters whose points-of-view are provided, Campbell doesn't hold up to the awesomeness of Eliza and Welly. What does impress me with the interludes is that Pip and Tee manage to leave me satisfied as a reader. Even with so much unresolved, they tie off enough threads in the plot to make this book work by itself, and that's not easy to do.
As for how this husband and wife write as a team, I look forward to learning more about this later this year. They'll be speaking at the James River Writers Conference in October, and speaking as someone who has written with a spouse, I will wager there are some great stories behind the story. I can't wait to hear them. As for how my wife and I approached the task of co-writing, I'll offer you a link to a blog entry I wrote many years ago to explain our process.
The real question is did Pip Ballantine and Tee Morris pull off a successful novel?
In short: they nailed it.
The first novel in their "Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences" series provides a steampunk adventure that often reminded me of the 1960's "Avengers" TV show. The story starts with a bang. No, seriously. The title to chapter one even warns you that's what's going to happen. We're talking a massive explosion as the heroine of the novel Eliza Braun sends one of the bad guys' secret bases to kingdom come. She's all about the shoot first and ask questions later. Actually, it's more like shoot first, explode with dynamite and then ask questions later. Her task at the start of the novel is the rescue of her co-star, the ministry's archivist Wellington Books. On the surface, Welly is everything Eliza is not. She bends the rules into pretzels while he files and categorizes them into order of importance.
At this point, you might roll your eyes at how egregiously cliché this all sounds. Here's the good news: Pip and Tee make it all work. Very often, they find ways to surprise you with little twists in the story and characters to make things entertaining. More importantly, they've done a lot of work to give each of these characters the depth they need. As Eliza and Welly launch into their unauthorized investigation of some especially violent murders, a case which claimed the sanity of a fellow ministry agent (who is a former partner of Eliza's), they get in over their heads as they navigate their steampunk version of Victorian England and unearth a secret society with an agenda for global, racial and social dominance that would make Hitler proud.
I laughed, got giddy and even cringed at all the right times. Pip and Tee hit all the marks that great action adventure in a gritty fantasy world should deliver. With all the praise, you might wonder why I'm only giving it four stars. I'd say it's really more like four-and-a-half stars. Perhaps my only gripe would be within the interludes for this novel. The interludes focus mostly on another ministry agent named Bruce Campbell (a shameless and awesome nod to the actor best known for his roles as Sam Axe from "Burn Notice" and Ash from "Evil Dead"). The subplot is clearly setup for a storyline that will see more development in future novels. My complaint isn't so much about the unresolved storylines touched on here, but Bruce Campbell's character just didn't ring true to me for some reason, and that's a big issue since most of the interludes are told from his perspective. Of all the characters whose points-of-view are provided, Campbell doesn't hold up to the awesomeness of Eliza and Welly. What does impress me with the interludes is that Pip and Tee manage to leave me satisfied as a reader. Even with so much unresolved, they tie off enough threads in the plot to make this book work by itself, and that's not easy to do.
As for how this husband and wife write as a team, I look forward to learning more about this later this year. They'll be speaking at the James River Writers Conference in October, and speaking as someone who has written with a spouse, I will wager there are some great stories behind the story. I can't wait to hear them. As for how my wife and I approached the task of co-writing, I'll offer you a link to a blog entry I wrote many years ago to explain our process.