American Craftsmen by Tom Doyle

This is an interesting concept, and the execution is, well, it's not great. It's not execrable, either. It's the kind of book that you don't mind reading, but really wish that it was about 30% better, and then it could get an enthusiastic recommendation as a good pulp read. I like good pulpy fun, but those books really have to embrace that aspect of themselves. This comes so close to being rollicking, but not quite, and at times, it tries a little too hard to be serious, and it's not that either.

So this book is about a world where the CIA has a magical branch of operatives. All well and good, right? I even like that a good part of the book is about a hangover of Puritan magical attitudes, as two of the major families originate in that time period. That would be fine, except that then it seems that ALL the magic users employed by the CIA and indeed, that exist in the continental U.S., come from Puritan families. Except for the first family the main character meets who aren't Puritan are immigrants from Iran. In this family, the young woman has magical powers unlike anything seen before, and of course she and the main character fall head over heels.

So, wait a second. In all this time, all hundreds of years of U.S. history, magic users who came from immigrant groups never materialized? Not at all? Not even from white immigrants of British Isles ancestry who DIDN'T come over with the Puritans? Not one? Except the first woman he meets outside that group is one? That's the kind of logical leap that beggars the imagination. Particularly when the story seems to state that the CIA was formed in part to control magic users who weren't their Puritan lackeys, which seems a) super racist and b) unlikely, given that the CIA was created in the 1940s, and that leaves a whole century and half at least where non-Puritan magic users could be running around, and they suddenly and definitively managed to take control in such a way it's not even remarked upon? It's either rare, or it's not, and trying to say it's all Puritan except for this plot-convenient Iranian beauty for the main character to fall in love with is...not really the greatest way to handle this.

I mean, I am all for books about an occult secret service. I'm even okay if it's a little more rah-rah than, say Charles Stross' Laundry books, although I will always love sardonic skepticism of intelligence services more than All-American Puritan boy toys.

So, how is the prose and how are the characters? Well, the prose is unobjectionable - it's not great, and weirdly, it is mostly written fairly colloquially, with very occasional erudite words thrown in, and it almost always struck me as odd. I like vocabulary, but it didn't seem to match the rest of the book. As for the characters, well....  They're...fine? Pretty one-dimensional? They all fight ancestral battles over two centuries old like it happened to them? There doesn't seem to be much room for variations of human experience, or even one person thinking "hey, that doesn't make much sense, does it?"

They are pretty much what you would expect to find if you really thought that personality traits were handed down through families, and that family history would always be as vivid to later generations as it was to those who experienced it. It's not that people can't get obsessed over the past, and I supposed having ghosts around might not help the issue, but there's been remarkably little drift over the centuries. And Scherie, sure, she's powerful, but she's mostly there to be gorgeous, the object of the main character's affections, and to be a weapon at the end. Even her stated goals of going back to Iran to fight against oppression there fall by the wayside once she falls in love.  (There are a number of secondary female characters, and they're no better or worse than the male ones.)

I'm struggling with the part where this was just okay. It was okay! But it's not a lot more and that's too bad, because it could have been 30% more fun and I would have been telling lots of people to read it.