I’ve been having a hard time reading fiction of late, largely because my daily schedule leaves me so drained by the time the kids are in bed that I just go directly to sleep myself. The current state of the world is also a factor– the daily news cycle is so stupid and depressing that, again, it just saps my will to read anything. I did, however, finish two interesting new books, one the conclusion of a series and the other the start of a new one, so to celebrate here are some brief review-type comments.
The The Divided Earth is the wrap-up volume of Faith Erin Hicks’ graphic novel series beginning with The Nameless City, the first two volumes of which we picked up for the kids last winter, because I remember reading them while on a cross-country ski weekend this past MLK Day weekend. The third volume came out in the last few weeks, and SteelyKid immediately pounced on it when she saw it in Barnes and Noble. Being graphic novels aimed at a young audience, this was a nice fast read.
The titular city was built by a now-vanished civilization who were powerful enough to cut a gigantic hole in a mountain to give it a path to the sea. It’s fought over by three empires, who take turns conquering it as their fortunes wax and wane, and is “nameless” because each conqueror tries to apply its own name every generation or so. The central characters are a young nobleman from the Dao, current masters of the city, and an orphan girl from the city, who meet and become friends at a pivotal moment in history.
As you would expect from a book targeted at younger readers, this is serious but not overly dark; there’s war and bloodshed in the plot, but the in-panel violence is minimal and not overly graphic. The characters and their cultures have a nice bit of depth to them, making the world an interesting place to visit. The political message of the story is not especially subtle, but not annoyingly preachy, and is generally positive and uplifting. The resolution might be a tiny bit too pat, especially where it comes to the chief antagonists, but again, that’s appropriate for the target audience.
On the other hand, Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett is very much an adult book, with quite a bit of sex and violence. Bennett’s Divine Cities trilogy was amazing, so I was eagerly awaiting this one.
Foundryside has a kind of Dickensian feel, set in the city of Tevanne where a system of industrial-scale magic has created a vast gulf between ordinary citizens and the ultra-wealthy merchant houses, whose founders and employees live in luxury in walled “campos” surrounded by incredibly squalid slums. The magic system is based on “scriving,” where writing the correct magical words on an object (or a metal plate bolted to said object) can convince it that the nature of reality is different. For example, many projectile weapons are scrived to “believe” that they’ve been falling from a great height for some time before they were released, and thus fly at their targets with terrifying velocity. The main character, Sancia, is a former slave turned thief, who has scriving-based abilities that make her exceptionally good at her job.
The magic system here is very much up my alley, and Bennett does a great job working out the details and implications of the system in ways that I found fascinating. He also doesn’t flinch away from the big moral questions raised by the society he’s created here, or the violence inherent in the system. There’s plenty of blood and death to go along with the squalor, and some impressive pyrotechnics around the conclusion.
This books was, unfortunately, not well served by the constraints mentioned in the first paragraph above. For long stretches of reading it, I was stuck doing at most a chapter a night, and the amount of exposition required regarding the magic system doesn’t fit well with such a disjointed reading schedule. And the heavy class politics of the world and plot occasionally felt a little too on-the-nose when paired with the grind of the modern news cycle.
That said, I did manage to get into more of a flow toward the very end, and I enjoyed the conclusion quite a bit. And I think that the way the plot opens up promises good things to come in the sequel, whenever that hits. I’ll do my best to carve out bigger blocks of time to read that, because I think this has a lot of promise.
And that’s what I’ve got by way of commentary on recent fiction reading. I definitely recommend both of these, though given the giant difference in tone, you probably want to consider your mood carefully when picking which to read.