Strong world-building, a few surprises, an original main character but delivered at a pace that dragged.

There's a lot to like in this book. It creates a credible empire, with a rich history and a believable social structure. It makes clever use of pre-industrial military technology and military tactics.

It has a main character who is neither hero nor villain, just an engineer unable to resist trying to find a solution to defending a walled city under siege - even though it's under siege by people he has more in common with than the people he's defending.

The plot sets up a series of credible military and political problems and solves them in innovative but plausible ways. It also uses the backstory of the main character, who has gone from slave to Colonel of the Engineers, (which is impressive given that his skin is the wrong colour), to show what the empire is and to consider the choices those not born to rule it have to make.

So I should be saying "READ THIS", but I'm not. I'm sure that there are many people who will enjoy it. I enjoyed bits of it. Unfortunately, the pace was so poorly judged that I spend much of the novel feeling unengaged. I felt as if I were watching a dramatised documentary where the focus was split between Engineering and sociology rather than storytelling.

It didn't help that I listened to the audiobook, where the narrator, Ray Sawyer, got the tone and the accent right but was so slow that I played most of the book at 1.25% of normal speed with almost no distortion.

Click on the SoundCloud link below to hear a sample.

This has strong world-building, an ingenious plot and an original main character BUT I'm struggling a little with the narration.

The narrator has the tone and the accent right but he's moving slowly through the text, even when sharing basic information. The story is slow-moving anyway - which is ok - but adding a 15%-slower-than-my ears-are-used-to narrator makes things drag a little.

Not enough for me to send the audiobook back and buy the Kindle version but enough to take the shine off.

Book: Read a book involving a war, battle, or where characters are active military or veterans

I've never read this author before but the premise intrigued me: an engineer with no military background being put in the position of having to defend a walled city using nothing much other than his wits.

So far it's slow-moving but original. Here's an example of the kind of joke our hero makes to himself

"As a wise man once asked: 'What's the difference between luck and a wheelbarrow?' - luck doesn't work if you push it."

I'm currently reading The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern.

It is a buddy read I am doing with a friend I met through Booktube. We now chat over at Goodreads and do buddy reads often.

Our last buddy read was The Walled City by Ryan Graudin. We mutually decided to DNF that book, because we were both not liking it for various reason!

So... She LOVES The Night Circus. She's read it like 2 times already. I know we all have different tastes and opinions and that is completely fine. I just feel bad DNFing a buddy read, especially when it is a book my buddy loves.

I feel all alone in a sea of people who are gushing about this book. I'm 150 pages into it and not enjoying myself. I love the setting and the first couple chapters were really interesting. The first bad experience I got which put a bad taste in my mouth is how Celia is treated by her father.

Also, I guess... I'm bored.

Do you buddy read? Do you DNF? Will you DNF a buddy read?

Maybe I should set the book aside and try it another day or maybe this one is truly not for me.

When I first chose this book from NetGalley, I was expecting a dystopian thriller. Instead, it has the feel of a thriller, but takes place in some vague contemporary time, and is based on an actual walled city in Kowloon, Hong Kong. Honestly, I wish I had googled that before I read the book, but it is a credit to the author that the images she evoked were at least as good as what I saw later online. I say this because the actual city is stunning – not in beauty, but in the sheer number of buildings stacked up against each other and cobbled together in what is called the densest place on earth. Take a minute now and google it yourself and then come back.

Can you believe it? It’s crazy! I stayed in a walled city in Tuscany, so that’s really what I thought of as I read this book, but it was nothing like the menacing, crime-filled streets of Hak Nam Walled City. The oddest thing is that the city beyond, where life seemed to go on as usual, was, in contrast, boring and ordinary; the walled city was a lord of the flies ghetto. The one disconnect for me was the fact that it wasn’t all criminals there – it was also filled with the unfortunate poor, and there were pleasant-seeming images of people eating in restaurants that just seemed out of place with these destitute, desperate characters. It took me a while to adjust to the fact that there was a hierarchy even here, and that the characters described as vagrants were the lowest of the very low who populated the walled city.

The story is told from three points of view, and, for the most part, I thought each character was well developed and compelling. I did think they possessed some generic traits, and there was a little rehashing of some old familiar plots, but the story was told well, and I thought it moved very quickly. There were a few scenes that slowed the action, but not enough to be a distraction.

I am not sure of the appropriate age recommendation on this. It is listed as YA, but there are a lot of topics that might be a little too edgy for the youngest teens, i.e. one of the three main characters lives and works in a brothel run by a drug lord. But the story is so much more than this, I would hate for that to be a deterrent. It is really just a classic tale of greed, hurt, sacrifice, and hope; and of course, in the end, redemption.