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rushthatspeaksYesterday's review.
The second of the Twenty Palace books continues to follow Ray Lilly, an ex-con who now works for a society of extremely ruthless magicians who are trying to keep the world safe from Lovecraftian ex-dimensional predatory monstrosities. Ray is too low on the totem pole to be told anything about anything, which makes the worldbuilding a fun mental jigsaw.
I was not as pleased with this book as I was with the first, Child of Fire, because this was too much like the first: small town under siege because of the actions of the wealthy and ruthless, which becomes blockaded from the greater world, and in which Ray is the person who cares the most about mitigating the damage to civilians. And the predator was creepier in the first book.
Still, this is perfectly competent fantasy of a kind I would call 'urban' except that it's kind of semi-rural, with an enjoyable Twin Peaks vibe. I will definitely give the series a third book, to see whether any of the various pieces of the jigsaw start to fit together and whether the setting and plot are sufficiently different. At the moment, things could go either way.
The second of the Twenty Palace books continues to follow Ray Lilly, an ex-con who now works for a society of extremely ruthless magicians who are trying to keep the world safe from Lovecraftian ex-dimensional predatory monstrosities. Ray is too low on the totem pole to be told anything about anything, which makes the worldbuilding a fun mental jigsaw.
I was not as pleased with this book as I was with the first, Child of Fire, because this was too much like the first: small town under siege because of the actions of the wealthy and ruthless, which becomes blockaded from the greater world, and in which Ray is the person who cares the most about mitigating the damage to civilians. And the predator was creepier in the first book.
Still, this is perfectly competent fantasy of a kind I would call 'urban' except that it's kind of semi-rural, with an enjoyable Twin Peaks vibe. I will definitely give the series a third book, to see whether any of the various pieces of the jigsaw start to fit together and whether the setting and plot are sufficiently different. At the moment, things could go either way.
