Wrong Train, Right Time (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
wrongtrainrighttime) wrote2017-01-25 09:21 pm
wrongtrainrighttime) wrote2017-01-25 09:21 pm
Harbinger of the Storm (Obsidian and Blood #2) by Aliette de Bodard
de Bodard, Aliette. Harbinger of the Storm (Obsidian and Blood #2). Self-published, 2015. eBook. Finished 1/8/2017.
Servant of the Underworld
After Servant of the Underworld ended with such high stakes, I was really curious going into the second book about how those stakes would go up. After all, the first book ended with the apocalyptic end of the Fifth World so the Sixth World could rise. Hard to see where to go next from there. In my view, Harbinger of the Storm does a pretty good job of raising the stakes. Now it's not just the Fifth World, but also the anger of his society's patron god that Acatl has to contend with! It's heady stuff.
As with the first book, I'm really interested in how Aliette de Bodard evokes that noir atmosphere while working in a very un-noir setting. There’s the character tropes: secrets everywhere, nobody is innocent, nobody is what they seem, unsavory allies. But there's also a shift in setting, locating almost everything in the royal palace instead of throughout the city. That, plus the constant focus of all the characters on wards -- creating them, maintaining them, the danger of their destruction -- creates this very claustrophobic atmosphere. Confinement is all they have to keep themselves safe and even that isn't enough; what was supposed to be kept away finds them inside. The atmosphere of confinement is built so wonderfully that, even though the confinement is repeatedly shown to be incomplete and easily ruptured, the point when the narrative breaks out of the palace and the city and its wards still feels quite wrong and terribly dangerous. They aren’t supposed to be outside! It isn’t safe.
Another point about Acatl, our poor protagonist. I quite like how fallible he is, especially his constant lapses of memory. It can be frustrating to see in a mystery protagonist, and one could argue that, without easy external memory like a notebook or smartphone, Acatl's memory should sharpen to compensate, but I like it anyway. I feel like it would still be hard investigating a mystery with only his memory to aid him. It's an interesting little poke at mystery genre conventions.
All of the praise I had in my post on the first book carries over.
Servant of the Underworld
After Servant of the Underworld ended with such high stakes, I was really curious going into the second book about how those stakes would go up. After all, the first book ended with the apocalyptic end of the Fifth World so the Sixth World could rise. Hard to see where to go next from there. In my view, Harbinger of the Storm does a pretty good job of raising the stakes. Now it's not just the Fifth World, but also the anger of his society's patron god that Acatl has to contend with! It's heady stuff.
As with the first book, I'm really interested in how Aliette de Bodard evokes that noir atmosphere while working in a very un-noir setting. There’s the character tropes: secrets everywhere, nobody is innocent, nobody is what they seem, unsavory allies. But there's also a shift in setting, locating almost everything in the royal palace instead of throughout the city. That, plus the constant focus of all the characters on wards -- creating them, maintaining them, the danger of their destruction -- creates this very claustrophobic atmosphere. Confinement is all they have to keep themselves safe and even that isn't enough; what was supposed to be kept away finds them inside. The atmosphere of confinement is built so wonderfully that, even though the confinement is repeatedly shown to be incomplete and easily ruptured, the point when the narrative breaks out of the palace and the city and its wards still feels quite wrong and terribly dangerous. They aren’t supposed to be outside! It isn’t safe.
Another point about Acatl, our poor protagonist. I quite like how fallible he is, especially his constant lapses of memory. It can be frustrating to see in a mystery protagonist, and one could argue that, without easy external memory like a notebook or smartphone, Acatl's memory should sharpen to compensate, but I like it anyway. I feel like it would still be hard investigating a mystery with only his memory to aid him. It's an interesting little poke at mystery genre conventions.
All of the praise I had in my post on the first book carries over.