3.97 AVERAGE


!!!!
adventurous challenging dark mysterious reflective sad tense slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven: A mix
Strong character development: No
Loveable characters: No
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes
adventurous dark mysterious medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: A mix
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated
adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious sad tense medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: A mix
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes
adventurous dark mysterious tense medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Plot
Strong character development: No
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: No
Flaws of characters a main focus: No

Fun, self-aware, very pulpy steampunk noir fantasy. Knocking it down for the way
the way a core female protagonist is abandoned in the narrative and steps close to girlfriend in the fridge territory; and a sudden consideration of rape and sexual violence at the end that feels incredibly half baked.

Expand filter menu Content Warnings
challenging tense slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Plot
Strong character development: Complicated
Loveable characters: No
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Beautiful writing, but I’m just not a person for long sprawling descriptions of a city. Really made this drag on despite really cool world building.
adventurous dark mysterious medium-paced
adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: A mix
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Complicated
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Perdido Street Station was highly recommended as a work of weird fiction similar in tone to the awesomely captivating audio drama Archive 81. Safe to say it's absolutely earned that. 

Fantastical and weird and horrific and exhilarating, and totally immersive. By the books midpoint I felt intimately familiar with the setting of New Crobuzon city, and none of it was delivered in stale, pointlessly expositional description. Plot and character are woven tightly and perfectly, each pov character felt concrete and real in their motivations, relation, and actions. Derkhan, a lesbian human who writes for an underground revolutionary unionist gazette and is also handy with guns, and Lin, a khepri who broke away from her mother's cult in order to live freely as an artist, are two favourites. 

The world is super rich and imaginative, with humanoid races like the amphibious Vodyanoi who use their control of water to mount a huge dock workers union strike, the bird Garuda who live in the harsh desert in highly communal bands that value autonomy and choice and cohesion above all else, or the insectoid Khepri who are highly sexually dimorphic, who mainly live in highly religious ghettos, and who can create sculptural artworks with a paste they secrete from their head glands. Punishment factories turn prisoners into Remade, a grotesque process sculpting their flesh into new utilitarian or buyer specified forms. The lore and cultures and creatures never feel tacked on or cheap. Even the monstrous and otherworldly entities are multidimensional. The government tries to ask favours of an ambassador from hell, there's the Weaver, a giant spider entity that loves poetry and can weave between worlds,  and then the slake moths themselves who terrorize the city, feeding on pure sentience. 

Expand filter menu Content Warnings

This was an enjoyable book to read. I loved how the world that this story has set in, almost had too much science. There were so many different disciplines of "magic" that were studied like a science, and I loved that. I also found it interesting how they had computers like we do, but there was so many other things which were much more useful or interesting or better studied, that it kind of fell to the wayside. It really got me thinking about how different our world could be, depending on which disciplines exploded with interest. Why computers, why not, I don't know, psychology or something? Whatever. I really didn't like how they tried to half kill Lin at the end, that felt a little contrived, like they were just trying to get a YIKES out of the reader. In my head, she eventually recovers, because you can't destroy raw consciousness or something. The twist with Yagharek was alright, and definitely shifted an entire books worth of relatability in an instance. I enjoyed reading this book, but the ending had me frustrated. Good book though.

I have a tough time reviewing this book. On the one hand, it's full of creative and interesting ideas that do a good job of sucking you in to a world that is very clearly not our own. Where many books take a few good ideas and base a world around them, Mieville throws new ideas at you on every page. On the other hand, however, the story itself suffers as a result of this. When I was continually getting distracted by new shiny objects, it was difficult to focus on the storyline, which seemed at times to be only a way to show off the next idea.