The Shuddering City
Jun. 12th, 2024 03:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearGreat to see new fiction from Sharon Shinn - and a standalone to boot!
It takes a while to get going and feels subtler in some ways than her recent fantasy series.
I liked a lot of the characters, though it took me longer to get invested in Madeleine than the others.
There are several romance subplots, some of which rang truer than others, but I was on board with all of them by the end.
And plot's quite intriguing, with good worldbuilding up to a point. I like the discussion of mythology versus science - though, if the supposed gods are actually aliens giving humanity technology, the secret behind how the mechanism is maintained makes very little sense.
I enjoyed the book overall - but there's quite a lot of repeated exposition. When the big reveal is made, it has impact the first time around, but then it's explained multiple times to different characters in a way that's completely unnecessary. And this happens with several other discoveries along the way. Which starts to get tedious very quickly.
But the ultimate climax is exciting the well written, so I was happy with where it all ended up eventually.
A good read - though not one of her best, I don't think.
It takes a while to get going and feels subtler in some ways than her recent fantasy series.
I liked a lot of the characters, though it took me longer to get invested in Madeleine than the others.
There are several romance subplots, some of which rang truer than others, but I was on board with all of them by the end.
And plot's quite intriguing, with good worldbuilding up to a point. I like the discussion of mythology versus science - though, if the supposed gods are actually aliens giving humanity technology, the secret behind how the mechanism is maintained makes very little sense.
I enjoyed the book overall - but there's quite a lot of repeated exposition. When the big reveal is made, it has impact the first time around, but then it's explained multiple times to different characters in a way that's completely unnecessary. And this happens with several other discoveries along the way. Which starts to get tedious very quickly.
But the ultimate climax is exciting the well written, so I was happy with where it all ended up eventually.
A good read - though not one of her best, I don't think.
