Jonathan

One star for each Body

Terry is generally pretty good at coming up with fantasy names but..... Eton Shart? Really, did no one in writing or editing say that one out loud?

Sometimes, an author says "okay everyone, here is a regular fantasy world. You’ve seen it before but I changed a couple small things. Anyway, here is a 14 book series set in this world." Sometimes, an author (Hiron Ennes) says "okay everyone, here is one of the weirdest, most unique worlds you’ve ever read. You get 400 pages." Cruel. This book is special. It is so unique. Where to begin. The world, the atmosphere, the feeling of this book is just so strange and wonderful and horrible and unique. An ancient city carved into a giant tree stump. The grimy undercity is made up of the literal roots of the stump. There are vermin infesting the place. Vermin that can emit toxins to bend light, or make people behave a certain way, or to be blind to anything other than beauty. The city is obsessed with theater, opera, and drama. These dramas are written and play out on stage while simultaneously being the real time politics of the place and people. Even at the end of the book I am unsure how this works. The roots are named in a very whimsical fashion after the names of these plays and operas. There are even different schools of art styles as they apply to these stage plays. There is SO MUCH rich stuff here, yet so much stuff left intentionally vague or up to the imagination. I have so many questions. I want more books in this world. It is just so lush and strange and wonderful. And the prose is just wonderful and beautiful.

There were some aspects of this that reminded me in a weird way of *Repo! The Genetic Opera* while also being totally different. The vibes. The people in lifelong debt to the upper crust of eccentric, theatrical bastards as the opera plays out below them, and to them.

Now, the story. In the past, when I read books that confused the hell out of me, I would get so confused that I lost interest (see Gideon & Nona the Ninth, and Witch King). I am so happy to report that this book confused the hell out of me, but it only pulled me in deeper. I was confused but so enthralled. This book did for me what Gideon does for a lot of people, I think. I was confused, trying to figure it out. Seeing a tangle of strings, trying to figure out what goes where. It isn’t until a certain point in the book that the ends of the strings get pulled and you see the elaborate knot they’ve created. You see it is all the same string. Wonderful. Joyous. This is a book where you have to trust the process and wait for it to all come together, because it does so wonderfully. But while you wait for this, you can just spend time in one of the most unique places I’ve read in a while.

This book was just fun.
It felt extremely binge-able and I just flew through it.
I was a little confused at times about how the systems/worldbuilding work exactly, but I'm sure that will all make more sense as I progress through the series and get more familiar with it.
I would like for it to have a little bit more focus on building the characters, but again, this first book is so short and there are 12 books so I'm sure that will come in time. This is an entirely new genre for me and I would say it isn't my normal cup of tea, but I'm interested in seeing how the series moves forward.

4.5
I didn't love the train aspects necessarily, and some parts were confusing, but this one delivered on and improved on a few different aspects, mainly having real emotional weight to characters and actions.