Jessica
This is very hard to get into. For the first third or so of the book, I found it mind-bogglingly boring – so boring that trying to read it on the train, I would periodically decide that my own thoughts were more attention-grabbing and my eyes would glaze over and I'd stop reading. If you're not very patient, the book starts out as a hard slog.
But I persevered, partly because the last China Miéville I'd read was brilliant and partly because I feel like a failure if I can't finish a novel. Eventually, I got sucked in.
The thing that sucked me in was the impressive world-building, of course. Miéville has constructed an intricately detailed city, New Crobuzon, partly based on industrial revolution-era Europe but with a lot of fantastical twists. This is a city where humans are not the only sentient species, and the specific part of the book that really set me to begrudgingly liking it was where Lin ponders the history of her own migrant community, the khepri, which we would consider a hybrid of beetles and humans, probably. New Crobuzon has dozens of neighbourhoods whose histories and characters get fleetingly described in the novel – too many to actually remember, which is frustrating, especially when the description goes on too long and you're impatient to get back to some action, but fascinating nonetheless.
I will say that some of the other description, not devoted to telling the history or social situation of the city, got really boring. Actual events in the plot seemed to take forever to unfold, which sapped the narrative of a lot of the urgency I think it was supposed to have. Some of the plot didn't sit well with me, either; in particular, I was really disappointed with how Miéville dealt with Lin (seeming to kill her off to fuel the male protagonist's growth, then suddenly reintroduce her at the end of the story – only to immediately have her brain half sucked out by those slake-moths leaving her permanently retarded!). Considering how male-dominated the narrative was otherwise (there were only two women!), it was a pretty poor way to treat her.
So... as you can see, I've given this three stars. The world-building is fantastic, but the description is excessive and I disliked elements of the plot. It's interesting to note that out of everyone who's rated this book in Goodreads, only half have gone on to rate the sequel...
This is very hard to get into. For the first third or so of the book, I found it mind-bogglingly boring – so boring that trying to read it on the train, I would periodically decide that my own thoughts were more attention-grabbing and my eyes would glaze over and I'd stop reading. If you're not very patient, the book starts out as a hard slog.
But I persevered, partly because the last China Miéville I'd read was brilliant and partly because I feel like a failure if I can't finish a novel. Eventually, I got sucked in.
The thing that sucked me in was the impressive world-building, of course. Miéville has constructed an intricately detailed city, New Crobuzon, partly based on industrial revolution-era Europe but with a lot of fantastical twists. This is a city where humans are not the only sentient species, and the specific part of the book that really set me to begrudgingly liking it was where Lin ponders the history of her own migrant community, the khepri, which we would consider a hybrid of beetles and humans, probably. New Crobuzon has dozens of neighbourhoods whose histories and characters get fleetingly described in the novel – too many to actually remember, which is frustrating, especially when the description goes on too long and you're impatient to get back to some action, but fascinating nonetheless.
I will say that some of the other description, not devoted to telling the history or social situation of the city, got really boring. Actual events in the plot seemed to take forever to unfold, which sapped the narrative of a lot of the urgency I think it was supposed to have. Some of the plot didn't sit well with me, either; in particular, I was really disappointed with how Miéville dealt with Lin (seeming to kill her off to fuel the male protagonist's growth, then suddenly reintroduce her at the end of the story – only to immediately have her brain half sucked out by those slake-moths leaving her permanently retarded!). Considering how male-dominated the narrative was otherwise (there were only two women!), it was a pretty poor way to treat her.
So... as you can see, I've given this three stars. The world-building is fantastic, but the description is excessive and I disliked elements of the plot. It's interesting to note that out of everyone who's rated this book in Goodreads, only half have gone on to rate the sequel...