FIQS, Fluctuating IQ Syndrome, is a devastating condition. There is no cure, but with early detection, it can be managed.
You might have FIQS if you:
- Are a fictional character.
- Are a woman.* 97.3% of FIQS sufferers are female.
- Are a first-person narrator. 66.7% of those with FIQS tell their stories in the first person.
Behaviors associated with the syndrome:
- For no good reason, you with-hold information from the person you are designated to protect, or whose trust you are trying to win.
- You destroy or hide crucial evidence and this delays the solution of the crime or mystery; it puts you under suspicion, or at risk.
- You are suspicious of the handsome man who wants to help you, but blindly trusting, with no basis, of almost everyone else.
- You are highly educated, but use your education to make small talk over burgers after an action sequence, and not when it’s useful.
- You race into ambushes based on the flimsiest of phone calls, texts or tweets, even though you know your enemy is trying to lure you out—often out of the one place that is a foolproof refuge from your enemy.
- You often have questions, good ones, but you never ask them.
- You ignore your instincts.
Paige Winterbourne, of Dime Store Magic, one of Kelley Armstrong’s Women of the Otherworld series, has a severe, chronic case of FIQS. Paige is a witch and the leader of the North American Coven (not that this means anything of importance in the book that I can tell). She is also intellectually inconsistent. She seems bright. She has a degree in Computer Sciences from Harvard. She is also trusting to the point of gullibility, even after she knows that Leah, the half-demon who killed her mother, is coming after Paige’s ward Savannah, and gunning for Paige.
Savannah, like Paige, is an orphan, daughter of a powerful non-coven witch who hung out with the corporate bad-guys called sorcerers, and did dark magic. Leah works for the sorcerer who might be Savannah’s father.
There is plenty of action, most of it generated by Paige’s bad choices. Savannah, 13, also makes bad choices, hurling magical spells with abandon, unconcerned about consequences. Paige makes no effort to educate or control her, mewling once when Savannah watches a John-Edwards-like medium on TV that the woman is a fake. She never holds Savannah accountable. It’s so bad that I am forced to agree with the killer half-demon—Paige is not a suitable guardian for Savannah.
Having been fooled once by Leah and her sorcerous partner, Paige immediately falls for two more traps. Then she lets herself be brow-beaten by the Coven. She wises up for a bit, but in the last third of the book, she checks her smarts at the door again. When two witches who work for the sorcerer take Savannah and Paige out for a “special spell—it’s a surprise,” Paige blithely goes along, oblivious to the obvious.
It doesn’t help that the world Armstrong has created here doesn’t exactly work. There is a lot of talk about historic enmity between sorcerers and witches. Once we get beyond that (the sorcerers, safely ensconced in the power structure, sold the witches out to the Inquisition) things fray and fall apart. Witches bear only daughters; sorcerers sire only sons. Plainly there would be no union from the mating of a witch and a sorcerer—or a set of fraternal twins; not a daughter—and yet, here’s Savannah. Or maybe that old story isn’t true. There’s also some puzzle about how the magic works. There is witch-magic and sorcerer-magic. Corporate-evil sorcerer magic is stronger, we are told, but there is no reason why. The American Coven has a set of grimoires, but it turns out some are missing; spells the witches would have to master to move up and become more powerful. None of this makes sense. There is no inherent reason witches would be weaker except that they are wimps. There is no reason the sorcerers would employ only one witch per “cabal” (sorcerer’s group), but they do. Except, as you noticed from earlier, for that one time when the villain in Dime-Store Magic hires two witches, because, y’know, he can.
There are no coherent rules to the magic. Armstrong makes things up on the fly as she needs them. The fearful, backstabbing, social-climbing witches and the corporatist, sexist sorcerers feel like tropes from a much older book, one from the 1980s, not 2004. It might have helped if I had read some of the earlier books, but I doubt it.
To avoid exposure to FIQS, practice safe reading habits. Seek out books where the plot seems to grow organically from the actions of the characters and characters must bring all their best skills to solve problems; where the beliefs and values of the characters are challenged; where intelligence is valued. And most of all read; read for the cure.
*Testosterone-Induced Termporary Stupidity (TITS) affects male characters. It is a similar disorder with a different root cause.