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I am so torn with this book! Even though I pretty much just skimmed the ending.
The positive - I'm such a sucker for unique fantasies that go beyond Tolkein shadows and Medieval politics, and this books was definitely unique. It takes place in a vertical city - that's right, vertical, a massive towering complex built in rows, with the upper-class toward the top and the slums at the very bottom. There are strange creatures, strange machines mimicking creatures, guards that can fly using magical capes and mysterious demons that live in the heights. Yet despite all the obvious fantasy elements there's also an almost a dickens-esque quality to it. Gangs of street-kids control the slums, and the main character is one of those street-kids - your typical orphan boy with a great destiny ahead of him.
The negative - but, for me, despite all the pure imagination at work, the story fell short. I wasn't too fond of the writing style, which felt almost amateurish to me. As I said elsewhere in a comment, it read like a young adult novel trying to be an adult novel. The author was rather fond of not only stating the obvious but repeating what had already been said (even if it was worded differently, it was still tiresome). He was one of those authors that for all his love of detail there was a lot he left out, which leads me to my biggest problem with the book - the main character.
His name is Tom, he's a member of a street gang, he has unique abilities... and that's all I know about him. I have no idea how old he is, what he looks like, where he came from before joining the gang. His friend and guide, Kat, however, we learn almost everything about from the moment Tom meets her. Kat is one of those secondary characters who, really, should have been the primary character. She's more interesting, she has more of a past, has more going on in her life. While Tom... well, Tom just seems to be there for the sake of having a main character. He is constantly barraging Kat about her life, while Kat never once asks anything about him except when it comes to his abilities. Tom's a street kid and for the first couple of pages it shows - he knows how to hide, how to survive, how to get around, how to fight. But the moment he meets Kat, he goes from competent survivor to naive child, helpless without Kat's expertise. And the only depth to him is that all he wants in life is to be an ignored street-nick.
This frustrated me to no end, and it made Tom not only flat but nearly invisible. In fact, had he not been the POV character, I would've kept forgetting he was there for most of the book. I wasn't hoping for a massive biography on the kid, but a a vague memory or two of his past - mother and father if he had one, how he came to be a part of his gang, etc - would have gone a long way. I mean, the kid is supposed to be important, the key to understanding the power of the city, in fact, but it's Kat who gets most of the spotlight with Tom only tagging along.
The book did manage to keep me interested enough in the characters and the situation to keep going for quite a while, but that interest waned to the point of giving the final chapters only a cursory look to find out what happened. I have no intentions of reading the second book.
The positive - I'm such a sucker for unique fantasies that go beyond Tolkein shadows and Medieval politics, and this books was definitely unique. It takes place in a vertical city - that's right, vertical, a massive towering complex built in rows, with the upper-class toward the top and the slums at the very bottom. There are strange creatures, strange machines mimicking creatures, guards that can fly using magical capes and mysterious demons that live in the heights. Yet despite all the obvious fantasy elements there's also an almost a dickens-esque quality to it. Gangs of street-kids control the slums, and the main character is one of those street-kids - your typical orphan boy with a great destiny ahead of him.
The negative - but, for me, despite all the pure imagination at work, the story fell short. I wasn't too fond of the writing style, which felt almost amateurish to me. As I said elsewhere in a comment, it read like a young adult novel trying to be an adult novel. The author was rather fond of not only stating the obvious but repeating what had already been said (even if it was worded differently, it was still tiresome). He was one of those authors that for all his love of detail there was a lot he left out, which leads me to my biggest problem with the book - the main character.
His name is Tom, he's a member of a street gang, he has unique abilities... and that's all I know about him. I have no idea how old he is, what he looks like, where he came from before joining the gang. His friend and guide, Kat, however, we learn almost everything about from the moment Tom meets her. Kat is one of those secondary characters who, really, should have been the primary character. She's more interesting, she has more of a past, has more going on in her life. While Tom... well, Tom just seems to be there for the sake of having a main character. He is constantly barraging Kat about her life, while Kat never once asks anything about him except when it comes to his abilities. Tom's a street kid and for the first couple of pages it shows - he knows how to hide, how to survive, how to get around, how to fight. But the moment he meets Kat, he goes from competent survivor to naive child, helpless without Kat's expertise. And the only depth to him is that all he wants in life is to be an ignored street-nick.
This frustrated me to no end, and it made Tom not only flat but nearly invisible. In fact, had he not been the POV character, I would've kept forgetting he was there for most of the book. I wasn't hoping for a massive biography on the kid, but a a vague memory or two of his past - mother and father if he had one, how he came to be a part of his gang, etc - would have gone a long way. I mean, the kid is supposed to be important, the key to understanding the power of the city, in fact, but it's Kat who gets most of the spotlight with Tom only tagging along.
The book did manage to keep me interested enough in the characters and the situation to keep going for quite a while, but that interest waned to the point of giving the final chapters only a cursory look to find out what happened. I have no intentions of reading the second book.
