And Put Away Childish Things

Thank you to Netgalley and Solaris for an early access copy

And Put Away Childish Things disappointed me a little bit if I'm being honest. The concept is a brilliant one, as I've grown a tiny bit jaded on Narnia over the years, so seeing a darker twist on it was a really enticing concept. And I think that this book would have absolutely nailed that concept, had it been a full fledged novel rather than a novella.

I'm generally a sucker for a novella, so initially I was actually glad to see that this title wouldn't be a monstrous addition to an already overwhelming tbr, but now I wish that it was that monstrous addition. Because what is here, is really good, despite being riddled with pacing issues, it just failed to click with me, or explore any of it's themes and messages deeply enough for me to feel really satisfied with them.

This review is going to be quite negative, despite the 3 star rating, so I do want to preface this by saying that my issues aren't a fault of the book for the most part, they're a fault of my personal reading tastes, and I do think that there's an audience out there for what this book has on offer, it's just not me.

Something that I really did like about the book is how it blended Portal Fantasy with Science Fiction, which (in my admittedly limited) experience with Portal Fantasy hasn't really been done before. Tchacovsky attempts to pin scientific principles to the functionality of the portal world, and does it really well in my opinion.

Reading the book was a perfectly enjoyable experience, that I was engaged with the entire time, but I ran into more issues with it the deeper I got, though none so major that I felt the desire to put the book down, and found myself reasonably content with the time I spent reading it.

The book tries to deal with a bit too much with the page count it has in my opinion. It tries to deal with listlessness, not living up to the expectations you'd set for yourself, what it means to be alive, utilitarianism etc. and this just leads to the book feeling both bloated and rushed.

The main character is likely a primary cause of this, being a passenger to the story at almost every turn, never really taking a proactive, bar making a single phone call at the mid-point of the story. His voice was at times extremely grating as well, dripping in cynicism up until a sudden turn of heart that doesn't really feel earned.
The side characters however, were delivered upon quite well. Well, two of them were. Seitchman and Timon.

Seitchman is a PI who tracks Harry down for a cult who worship the stories his grandmother wrote about a mythical land, and Timon is a faun from that land, who's fallen victim to the decay of the land. Both characters are really good, and I think the book would have benefitted from being multi-pov between Harry and Seitchman, so that we could have had an actually proactive PoV.

I thought the antagonist was really weak, as they weren't set up the best, and then when introduced, they were very moustache twirly. Tchaicovsky has done this a few times, notably in Dogs of War, but I felt like that book in particular had more to say with it's themes and messages than this one ended up having, so having a less interesting antagonist wasn't particularly an issue there. Another factor that makes this worse is that this antagonist is very interesting conceptually, but doesn't get the screentime necessary to become a truly interesting character. Again, I feel like this would have been allayed by the book being longer, as maybe we would have seen the full breadth of this character.

The world of Underhill is really interesting, presented as a Narnia-esque land in the final stages of entropy, dying out because of some mysterious reason. I would have liked to spend more time in it, but half the book is dedicated to Lockdown era London, which leads to the feeling that this was inspired, in part, by the feeling of losing months at a time to Covid due to the disruption that it caused, which is shown by the strange loss of time experienced when people travel between our world and Underhill.

I really liked the spin that Tchaicovsky on the “always winter” angle, with the snow not actually being snow, instead being some kind of strange fungus that's coating the land as a result of the decay that it's undergoing.

The prose is fine, it's nothing particularly to write home about, however, I could be getting swayed by the fact that my ARC had quite a few grammar issues in it, and the typesetting wasn't fantastic. So, I won't comment too much on the prose for that reason.

Another issue that I had was the pacing, which was a little bit too breakneck for my taste. The pacing it had would have worked better for a different book in my opinion, because again, it just tries to tackle a bit too much for it's own good, so you'll be introduced to something, and ferried along before you really get to experience it properly, which was a massive shame, as there were questions and concepts raised that I would have loved to see fully explored. From my experience with Dogs of War, this seems to be the style of pacing that Tchaicovsky likes to employ, however, it just didn't really click with me all that well.

The last thing I want to touch on, while admittedly not that important, is the cover. I don't like it. I think it's really boring and generic, which is a damn shame because I feel like you could have done quite a few extravagant and eye catching things with the story, such as an art piece showing off the decaying Underhill, but instead we're left with a rather boring cover that screams “bad Narnia rip off” The colour scheme looks very nice however, so I feel like the book will, at the very least, look nice on the shelf if you get it physically.

In short, the book failed to deliver on the promises it makes in the depth that I would have liked, and has a really annoying and passive protagonist, however if you don't need deep exploration of themes, and enjoy Portal Fantasy, and the theoretical science behind it, I would recommend this book. For me it sits solidly at a 3/5, because despite my misgivings, it was still a fairly enjoyable read