this better starts getting better... cause i wanna like it!

What books are you looking forward to reading in February?

Somehow I managed to have a stack of ARCs to read for February. (Surprise Surprise! I know!) - so at the moment I will be reading ARCS, except for the Book of the Week.

 

This weekend we will be reading Two Lies and a Spy. There are discussions about next weekends book- so if you got any ideas and wanna join in- let me know!

The Waking Engine - David Edison This debut novel shows Edison’s promise as an author. It’s an ambitious tale, displaying depth of imagination and an unbridled love of words.
Comparisons? I’d definitely recommend this for fans of Catherynne Valente’s ‘Palimpsest.’ At times, it also reminded me of Richard Kadrey’s ‘Butcher Bird.’ The language felt very similar to the latter books of Cecilia Dart Thornton’s Bitterbynde Trilogy – and unfortunately, mileage may vary, but to me, that’s not really a good thing. There are some lovely turns of phrase here – but in many places, the language becomes so flowery and overloaded that it serves to obscure rather than illuminate the events being described. I felt there was room for more restraint in the style – to let the language serve the story, rather than vice versa.

The premise: A young New Yorker, Cooper, awakens in The City Unspoken, ‘where the dead come to die.’ You see, the world we know, Earth, is highly unusual, in that everyone here is born. Most places, it’s taken for granted that we have a near-endless succession of lives. The True Death is hard to find, and the City is full of the suicidal, seeking release.
The descriptions of The City are rich and wonderful; making it come alive as the truest character in the books.
Unfortunately, we never get to know Cooper. He seems like a stand-in for the author. We know he’s chubby, gay, wears a Danzig t-shirt, and had a loving family. That’s about it. The reader never really ‘feels’ him as a personality, and although many characters seem to think that he is the center of the strange events occurring in the City, I found myself wondering if he was even necessary to the story at all. As the book moves along, the focus shifts from Cooper, introducing other characters altogether, and their part in the drama seems far more compelling:

Suddenly, the reader finds oneself in the midst of a drama involving a power struggle involving some rarefied, imprisoned aristocrats, and some steampunk/programmer faeries, who are involved in some truly nasty and evil stuff. The fate of the whole City may be at stake… The young aristocrat Purity Kloo emerges as the one-to-watch here…

However, the way things progress, I thought the plot could also have used some tightening up and increased clarity: more flow, less, “Wait, what just happened to who, where?”

The story does a good job of mixing high drama and absurd, low comedy. I even enjoyed the appearance of various historical characters (something I often dislike), including Cleopatra, Nixon, and Walt Whitman (obviously a favorite of the author.) The atmosphere and grotesquerie were right up my alley.

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I received a copy of this book through NetGalley. Thanks to Netgalley and to Tor Books!

This could have been something so unique and special but what it turned out to be was utter chaos. I actually breathed a sigh of relief when I finished it. At times it almost felt like a chore reading this.

 

In the beginning of the book I felt like I had either jumped in the middle of a story of that I was supposed to come into reading this book already having knowledge about certain things. It starts off with the main character (or at least I guess he was the main character, but more about that later) Cooper waking up confused and lost in a place known as the City Unspoken. Quite like Cooper I spent most of this book confused and lost. It seemed like terms and places in the book would be thrown at readers and then an explanation of it would follow a ways afterwards. I would have liked more backstory about the City Unspoken and certain characters to have been in the beginning.

 

Another problem that I had with this book was the constant point-of-view changes between a ton of different characters. In fact I found some of the characters that at times controlled the point-of-view to be unnecessary to the plot. I would have liked the author to have picked two or three characters to switch between points-of-view instead of a whole bunch. I at first also had a hard time finding a likeable character in the book but once I read more about some characters I felt myself sympathizing and liking them (particularly Sesstri).

 

To me this book needs a lot of work still and at times tended to be extremely odd. I couldn't really connect with the characters, and it was hard to follow the plot making me have to go back and keep re-reading passages. As you can see from my review, I would not recommend this book to others.

 

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the galley copy of the book.