Broken Homes by Ben Aaronovitch

[laleia]

I so should be studying for the bar exam but of course I was reading romance novels & fantasy novels.

And I should be stressed out about how little I know about New York's civil procedure rules but instead I am filled out outrage and horror and shock (and, of course, whatever the noun form of "impressed" is) at the end of Broken Homes.

I gasped. Out loud. I clapped my hand to my mouth. I hadn't even realized that was an actual thing people did outside of movies and books and then I did it because I was SO caught off-guard. I gasped and then I thought about it and slowly things made sense (I swear, when they were talking about the woman's face, I even thought, hm, sounds like he might be doing something Lesley might be interested in). I swear I don't think I've been taken this unawares by a plot twist since Brandon Sanderson's Warbreaker.

And I have to wait AGES for the next book. I think it might not come out in the US until January!!! How am I to wait that long?

I'm actually very pleased with this series as a whole. I will admit I found the first book a bit boring and very difficult to get into. I think it was partly because the magic system wasn't as fleshed out as I like and mostly because the book was very London. There's a lot of jargon, which I assume is partly police jargon, mostly Britishisms, and because I didn't have as much a frame of reference (two trips to London and a handful of BBC tv shows are not as helpful as I would have thought) for almost anything Peter was talking about, so wading through it and getting used to it was a bit of a struggle at first. Plus I usually prefer high fantasy to urban fantasy my taste in urban fantasy runs towards the YA kind.

I checked out the second book from the library, though, because I wanted something to read, and it was better, and the third book was even better. It's almost like when I start reading a fantasy or science fiction novel in a different universe - I have to get used to it enough that reading doesn't seem as much work. The magic system also got more and more fleshed out as Peter learned more, which I appreciated, and of course the Faceless Man made the plot more interesting. I think the more characters learning magic gave it more of a magic school aspect, which is one fantasy trope I particularly enjoy.

But now I have finished the fourth book and I'll have to wait and I am very upset about Lesley but not in a way that I didn't like the twist? I really appreciated how completely the book took me off-guard and I knew there would be some sort of cliffhanger at the end and even so I didn't expect this. (I thought Nightingale would die or disappear, for some reason.)

When I get the next book, I may do a more coherent writeup of my opinions about the series, but for now, I should study.

(I'll be honest, what I'm actually going to do is check out philomytha's fic, because the reason I picked up the first book in the first place was that I noticed she'd started writing fic in a new fandom and I wanted to read her fic ... but I should study.)

Comments

[philomytha.livejournal.com]

I know the next book is supposed to be out in the UK in September, but I'm not sure if that's worldwide or not.

And yeah, the twist at the end took me totally by surprise too, to the extent that I didn't fully realise what I'd read until a page or so later. It's all set up very delicately - the 'call your boss' moment with Varvara looks different in hindsight, and Lesley's dissatisfaction with the way the magic police deal with stuff.

Also, ha, I started reading these books so that I could understand a Yuletide fic I was Britpicking a few years ago - in fact, a lot of the stuff I've picked up over the years is so that I could follow along with various fics and fan chatter :-).