City of Stairs, Robert Jackson Bennett

I’m sorry it took me so long to get round to City of Stairs, because it turns out that the buzz on Twitter and the recommendations from other bloggers were absolutely right. It’s maintaining a high rating on Goodreads (4.20, with 8,000 ish reviews, at the time of writing), and for good reason. It’s really awesome. Now, if I’m honest, it did take some time to settle down, and to figure out who was going to be the protagonist. There’s a lot to learn about the world: the dos and don’ts, the past, the present, who and what we’re rooting for… Some details only become apparent as the book goes through its twists and turns. Some obvious things are avoided: loyalties can be mixed, long-held understandings overturned.

It’s a mystery/spy novel set in a fantasy world, essentially, and it does a great job of both. I’ve seen reviews which complain that mysteries in a fantastical setting don’t work, because mysteries rely upon rules, and fantasy inherently breaks rules. To me, that seems to rely overly much on the Golden Age idea that a mystery story is a game, which the reader must be able to solve — like Knox’s Ten Commandments, of which the second is: “All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.”

But even some Golden Age crime fiction satisfyingly flouted those laws — Agatha Christie bent the rules significantly with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, for example — and there’s no reason we have to stick to it. Fantasy often lets us see familiar things anew: I don’t see why not mystery, espionage, politics, bureaucracy… all of which play a part in City of Stairs. And if the commentary on empire still stings and conjures up spectres and parallels, as it seems to, well, it should.

Which is not saying very much about the book. Once I was into it, it was a page turner: I wanted to know, needed to know. Once the focus became clear, so did the characters: Shara, Sigrud, Mulaghesh… with their flaws, their pasts, their hopes for the future. Shara, particularly, with her knowledge of the past, with her interest in it, paired with a duty to suppress any recognition of it. Granted, at times her knowledge is very encyclopaedically convenient, but I do suspect that if she were a male character, people wouldn’t be complaining of that. She doesn’t always make the right decisions: she just makes some pretty good ones, based on her experience and knowledge.

Imagine a story about a surgeon. A good surgeon: one of the best. High in his profession. He completes a surgery without a mistake, even though something unexpected crops up, because he has the skill and experience. Or a librarian, with experience of his work, immediately nodding and turning to lay his hand on the right book when the plot requires. Is he a “Gary Stu”? An impossibility? Nope, we just believe that his background supports his actions in the story. We would probably call him “confident” and “capable”. I wonder how we’d react to a female surgeon… except I don’t really need to: we have the equivalent in Shara. She’s confident and capable, but people read it as arrogance, as being spoilt and having everything handed to her due to favouritism. (There’s a moment in the book that hangs a lampshade on that, really.)

The story tells you she’s good, and then she shows us it, and… people don’t want to believe it because she’s a woman? Ugh.

I love the background to the world, too: the history, the rules of the way the gods work and the intertwined nature of their relationship with their adherents. I’m excited to read City of Blades, though I don’t know anything yet about where it’s set, or even what the blurb says. I’m happy just to plunge straight into it on the strength of City of Stairs.

Rating: 5/5

The Frog Princess, E.D. Baker

The Frog Princess is one of my sister’s favourite comfort-reads, so it was the first thing she thought to recommend when I had a reading challenge prompt to read something recommended by a family member. It takes a generic medieval-ish setting (castles, royalty, witches), and the usual Frog Prince story, and gives it a little twist to complicate it. If you’ve seen Disney’s The Princess and the Frog, you know the basic twist — apparently, the film was somewhat based on this book, though my sister disagrees about the whole idea. (Setting is different, characters different, etc, etc.)

It’s fun enough, though because it’s aimed at — well, I’m not good at judging: middle grade, perhaps? Whatever that means in British terms… — anyway, say middle grade, it’s pretty slight. It has a fairly clever and strong-minded heroine, who is not the perfect sort of princess — a princess who laughs in entirely the wrong way, and is clumsy about everything she does. That’s an okay role model for kids, even if the whole story basically rushes her towards adulthood and romance, whether she likes it or not.

The main male character is mostly insufferable. Randomly demanding kisses, acting as entitled as they come, boastful… The romance itself, though it has some cute moments, fails to enchant me.

In terms of other characters, there’s some interesting and funny stuff going on in the background, like the character of the snake and the bat. All in all, cute enough, though it’s not something I’ll come back to the way my sister does — wrong point in my life entirely for it to become charmingly nostalgic.

Rating: 3/5

This Savage Song, Victoria Schwab

Received to review via Edelweiss

I’ve been quite interested in this one ever since I saw Victoria Schwab talking about it on Twitter. I didn’t even have to know much about it: I was sold from the quotation that apparently sparked (though I haven’t, in fact, read Vicious yet, which was the source).

“Plenty of humans were monstrous, and plenty of monsters knew how to play at being human.”

That’s really the core of this book: monstrous humans and human monsters, and the interplay between them, and sometimes how difficult it can be to recognise. It took me a while to get into the world and really understand what was going on — for the first 10% I was a little confused — but I think the worldbuilding works well. All the questions I had initially were answered as I read on; you just have to do a little work as a reader, which is something I actually enjoy, so was very much fine with me.

I really like the concepts underlying this: the way Corsai, Malchai and Sunai are created, their attributes, the way the city is split into two halves. There was a lot of background stuff that I think can be developed a lot more, and I’m excited to read it in future books. There’s a lot of depth to the monsters as-is, too: their limitations, the differences between them, the way they interact. The bonds between the three Sunai are quite different, despite the claims of Leo that they’re monsters, just monsters, just implements of judgement.

The description “Romeo and Juliet + Sin City” was a misleading one, to my mind. There’s little, if any, romance, which is what people automatically think of when they think about Romeo and Juliet. I expected something more like a retelling, which this isn’t so much; it just shares themes — connection between two opposing sides, the splitting of the city, the expectations of family.

Overall, I found this fascinating — and I actually liked it more than A Darker Shade of Magic, which I enjoyed and which I know many people thought couldn’t get much better!

Rating: 4/5

Impulse, Dave Bara

I picked up Impulse because I have a weakness for space opera — probably because I was raised on a steady diet of Star Trek and Star Wars, Blake’s 7 and Babylon 5. Impulse is fun enough, with chases and traitors and first contact with (sort of) aliens, and dealing with romance on board ship, and conflicts between differing kinds of orders.

It’s fun, but kind of bland; others have done it better, and there wasn’t much contact with aliens. Both romances were straight out of Kirk’s playbook, really, and the main character is a mixture of mature and immature; inexperienced and cocksure; getting rank through privilege but also coincidentally being good enough for it, somehow… His fuck-ups don’t have major consequences for him (only for other people), and generally life goes along pretty easily for him — other people get hurt and die, but he makes it through and will be fine.

I found the ending extremely annoying — the nominal goal of the book isn’t reached, and it’s just… very unsatisfying. There’s more in the background that interested me that wasn’t brought out.

Still, fun enough to occupy a train journey. Not sure if I’ll read the rest of the series, though I think the second book is now out.

Rating: 2/5