The City in Glass by Nghi Vo Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy
Pages: 216
Published by Tordotcom on October 1, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
In this new standalone, Hugo Award-winning author Nghi Vo introduces a beguiling fantasy city in the tradition of Calvino, Mieville, and Le Guin.
A demon. An angel. A city that burns at the heart of the world.
The demon Vitrine—immortal, powerful, and capricious—loves the dazzling city of Azril. She has mothered, married, and maddened the city and its people for generations, and built it into a place of joy and desire, revelry and riot.
And then the angels come, and the city falls.
Vitrine is left with nothing but memories and a book containing the names of those she has lost—and an angel, now bound by her mad, grief-stricken curse to haunt the city he burned.
She mourns her dead and rages against the angel she longs to destroy. Made to be each other’s devastation, angel and demon are destined for eternal battle. Instead, they find themselves locked in a devouring fascination that will change them both forever.
Together, they unearth the past of the lost city and begin to shape its future. But when war threatens Azril and everything they have built, Vitrine and her angel must decide whether they will let the city fall again.
The City in Glass is both a brilliantly constructed history and an epic love story, of death and resurrection, memory and transformation, redemption and desire strong enough to burn a world to ashes and build it anew.
My Review:
Azril isn’t on any map. It never was – and not just because of what happened to it. But before we get to that, we have to begin at the beginning, because Vitrine happened to it first.
Vitrine was a demon. And in some ways she’s very demonic indeed. She’s immortal and powerful. She’s mischievous and capricious. She’s possessive and she’s protective. And in that combination of forces and attributes she’s not anything like the demons of popular mythology.
Because the way that Vitrine occupies herself down the centuries and the millenia isn’t chaotic and isn’t destructive – at least not in the fire and brimstone sense of destruction and not that those things don’t happen anyway.
The city of Azril is the thing of which Vitrine is the most possessive and protective. The city is HERS. She planted its seeds, she nurtured it, she’s watched it grow. She takes care of it and the people in it. Not by keeping them like children, but rather by allowing them to grow. Which means that people are born and they die, some of them leave and some of them return, some live good lives and others don’t. She lets them be what they are and helps the city as a whole to flourish.
Until the angels came, self-righteous, obedient and above all, destructive. The freedom she gave her people, freedom of both thought and action, may have been too much for Heaven to allow.
The angels leave Azril a smoking wreck, a tomb for all she held dear and all the people she loved. In her grief she cursed one of them. The proudest, the haughtiest, the one who expected her to beg even as he admitted that no pleading of hers would ever matter.
So she cursed him. And just as she was damned – so was he.
Escape Rating B: I picked this book up because I love the author’s Singing Hills Cycle and was hoping for something like that even though I knew this wasn’t part of that.
What I actually got was something completely unexpected – in a way I’m still not sure how I feel about it.
At the beginning, the immovable, implacable, rigidly self-righteous angels seemed straight out of Simon R. Green’s Nightside or some world adjacent to it. They’re like some of the avatars of justice in Max Gladstone’s Craft Sequence. They’re entirely too much like the angels in Diablo 3 – which was a weird thing to think of. These are all varieties of angels where the stick up their collective asses has taken root and shoved out their brains.
But as the story progresses, the angel is forced to bend. He’s been exiled from heaven because he’s now flawed. He has a tiny bit of demon-stuff in him. But Vitrine isn’t a demon the way that we tend to think of demons, so what that demon stuff does is make him think and feel – and initially he’s pretty bad at both.
While Vitrine goes through all the stages of grief and he tries to ‘help’. And fails. Badly, frequently and often.
But Vitrine grieves and rebuilds. He hangs around and tries to help because he’s got nothing else to do. And they circle each other and drive each other mad and feel things they can’t articulate until I decided that this book is what you get when you combine This is How You Lose the Time War with Good Omens. Which shouldn’t even be possible and wouldn’t work at all if Vitrine was anything like what we think of when we hear ‘demon’.
The ending, in its own way, is just as equivocal as This is How You Lose the Time War – although it’s also entirely different. Whether it’s done out of love or hate is something that the reader is left to decide for themselves. I loved the form it took, and I certainly enjoyed the way they rebuilt the city, but this was as much metaphor as it was story and I’m still mulling it over.
