SciFi/Fantasy Novella Review: A Long Day in Lychford by Paul Cornell

A Long Day in Lychford by Paul Cornell

A Long Day in Lychford is the third novella in Paul Cornell's Witches of Lychford series.  I've enjoyed this novella series quite a bit, and really enjoyed the second novella quite a good bit.  For those new to the series, it features a trio of women -  an elderly witch, her apprentice skeptic, and a young woman newly hired as the town's vicar - facing off against magical beings from other worlds trying to invade a quaint english town (Lychford, of course).  The novellas aren't particularly long, but the first two managed to end in satisfying self-contained ways.  By contrast, this third novella differs from its predecessors in a few ways, including the fact that is seemingly not self-contained and has a clear cliffhanger and unresolved plot arcs, making it my least favorite of the trio in my opinion.

Note: As usual with this series, I've been listening to this in audiobook format.  For some strange reason, each novella in this series has had a different narrator, but the first two narrators were at least somewhat close in the voices they used for each of the three main characters.  Not so this novella, which for some reason gives Lizzie a voice that sounded to me like an elderly woman, making it hard to tell her and Judith (the actual elderly woman) apart, and sounded nothing like Lizzie in either of the earlier two novellas.  It's very disorienting.  

Quick Plot Summary:  After Brexit, Autumn has been feeling especially uncomfortable of late - as the only Black person in Lychford, the racial comments she's always endured suddenly seem worse, and taking them in stride just seems harder these days.  But after a fight with Judith over Brexit, and an angry night at the pub she barely remembers, she wakes up to find Judith's police officer son Sean at her door with reports of missing persons.  And it soon becomes clear that in her drunker stupor, Autumn may have done something incredibly stupid....and magically dangerous.  To fix it and to save the missing persons, it will take Autumn, Judith, and Lizzie all of their magical abilities and wits, or else they may find themselves trapped with the people Autumn accidentally got lost in the first place!

Thoughts:  The first two Lychford novellas could've taken place in basically any modern year in a small town in England, without really public real world events referenced at any point.  Not so with this novella, which references Brexit from its start, which threw me a little bit for a loop.  Not that Brexit remains a plot point after the first act, mind you, and after the setup is done in that first act, the story continues in typical Lychford fashion.  And it's executed fairly well, with Cornell finding some interesting ways for our heroines to get out of their predicament...and twists how those methods work in ways I didn't expect.

Still, this novella is the first in the series not to be completely stand-alone, with the beginning and ending both including plot elements that are not resolved, with one of those elements resulting in a clear cliffhanger.  The result is that the ending isn't particularly satisfying since again these novellas are so short: if these are not going to be book length, introducing plot elements only to leave them hanging just feels annoying.  So yeah, as a result I think this is easily my least favorite of the Lychford novellas, even if it's still solid.  I'll still be on board for novella 4 when it comes out in November, though hopefully it'll have a better audiobook reader (a listing I find online suggests that the reader from novella 2 may be coming back, but I don't trust that listing).