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An orcamancer - a woman riding an orca, with a polar bear by her side - comes to a post-apocalyptic floating city!
How could that premise possibly go wrong?
Yet again, not enough of the actual premise. For about the first half to two-thirds of the book, the characters hear about the orcamancer, talk about the orcamancer, search for the orcamancer, and catch brief glimpses of the orcamancer, but it's all second-hand. (I kept wondering how the hell an extremely conspicuous woman accompanied by an ORCA AND A POLAR BEAR were managing to hide out for so long, when the entire city seems to be looking for them.) This can sometimes work to create a mystique about the thing we keep hearing about but don't actually see - it's a key technique in horror - but here it just frustrated me because the orcamancer was by far the most interesting thing in the book, and the orcamancer was not actually there. It's like the author spent his awesome allotment on the word "orcamancer," and then didn't have enough for the actual orcamancer.
The city itself, to be fair, is pretty cool. It's very vividly described and feels real on its own terms, with noodle shops and martial arts and social workers. My big problem was that there are five POV characters and I didn't really care about any of them. If I was to describe them to you they'd sound good, but they didn't come to life for me. There's an AIDS-allegory disease that similarly didn't work for me.
Ambitious but not my cup of noodles.
How could that premise possibly go wrong?
Yet again, not enough of the actual premise. For about the first half to two-thirds of the book, the characters hear about the orcamancer, talk about the orcamancer, search for the orcamancer, and catch brief glimpses of the orcamancer, but it's all second-hand. (I kept wondering how the hell an extremely conspicuous woman accompanied by an ORCA AND A POLAR BEAR were managing to hide out for so long, when the entire city seems to be looking for them.) This can sometimes work to create a mystique about the thing we keep hearing about but don't actually see - it's a key technique in horror - but here it just frustrated me because the orcamancer was by far the most interesting thing in the book, and the orcamancer was not actually there. It's like the author spent his awesome allotment on the word "orcamancer," and then didn't have enough for the actual orcamancer.
The city itself, to be fair, is pretty cool. It's very vividly described and feels real on its own terms, with noodle shops and martial arts and social workers. My big problem was that there are five POV characters and I didn't really care about any of them. If I was to describe them to you they'd sound good, but they didn't come to life for me. There's an AIDS-allegory disease that similarly didn't work for me.
Ambitious but not my cup of noodles.
