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4.75
My interest in this book when I picked it up was about as weak as that back cover. I was curious about the shattered city and dead gods, but I fully expected this to be either a DNF or just okay.
And to start with, it was. The story starts by introducing two different caracters before we finally get our protagonist, a tiny, bookish covert agent who goes to a broken conquered city full of resentful conquered people to investigate a murder. The person murdered was a professor who was probably murdered for studying the history of the conquered people that they themselves aren’t allowed to know. It was, honestly, not that interesting, and I was fairly ambivalent about the characters. I really wasn’t emotionally invested at all.
What I stayed for was the setting. I love dead, dying, or surreally-altered architecture, which Bulikov has in spades. I was very intrigued by the group of people that conquered the world with their gods until a people they enslaved found a way to kill the gods and become the new rulers of the world. I was interested in the way the naming conventions seemed to draw parallels between the two clashing cultures of the book and real-world Russia and India even though everything else seemed entirely uncoupled from the real world. I was curious about the architecture and how it got so dang weird. But honestly, I was mostly intrigued by the dead gods and the people who still wanted to worship them.
And then little by little, there kept being more.
There is so much to this story. Characters that on the surface seemed like a mousy-looking but fairly competent bureaucrat, her gigantic bodyguard, a governor who’d been in the military so long she couldn’t let go of military habits, and a host of secondary and minor characters turned out to have fascinating backstories, remarkable depth, and a lot to love, care about, and root for. A plot that seemed to be a fairly straightforward murder mystery kept uncovering layers upon layers of secrets, divine magic, historical ties, and people who are not at all what they seem.
And the setting. I’m a sucker for cool gods, interesting mythologies, worlds where the gods did exist but now they’re dead, and messed-up cities. But this world is the kind of setting that people describe as “lush” and “richly imagined.” There is so much to it. History, mythology, government, myth, magic tied to divinity (both when the gods were around and after they were killed), racial and geographical and historical tensions, historical research … there is so much. Every detail of this world is rich and vibrant and alive and singing a siren song that makes me want to know everything about it.
I was more than halfway through before I started getting emotionally invested, but once this book got its hooks into me, it wasn’t going to let go. I loved Shara and her longing for home and her “I guess this is the nonsense I’m dealing with now” attitude when things kept going wrong. (She didn’t jump off the page as much as other characters but I liked her nonetheless.) I loved her secretary Sigrud and his story. I loved the weird magical rules based on divine beings and whether or not they’re dead. I loved the vivid, detailed history of this world. I loved how the world itself emphasizes the importance of history and if old gods can fit into a new world and if they even should. And I love how deeply, fascinatingly layered this story is. Shara pulls on one thread – who murdered this one guy? – and finds a massive tangled knot of history, secrets, and obscured reality. There is so much to learn and uncover almost to the last page.
I thought the back cover was weak because it focused on the city and the world instead of whatever is happening. But the focus on the city and the world and its history is the best part. I want to know everything about this world and its dead gods. I am absolutely reading the next book.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Colonisation, Death, Murder, Injury/Injury detail, Violence, and Racism
Moderate: Torture, Self harm, Homophobia, Blood, and Religious bigotry
Minor: Child death, Grief, Body horror, Slavery, and Sexual content
Ethnonationalism, unreality (minor)
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