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emtees's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.0
Dark Cities Underground combines a couple of concepts that I find interesting, so I was predisposed to enjoy it. It starts with the idea of urban landscapes, and especially subway systems, having a magic of their own, a modern equivalent to the ancient sources of mysticism and power. (The magic system has a notable overlap with Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, which came out in the same period, though they obviously aren’t the only two books to touch on this concept.) It adds inspiration from the real world history of adults writing fantasy stories inspired by the children in their lives (Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan) and then raises the question of what would happen if those children really had crossed into other realms and then returned, forced to take up life in the mundane world after being touched by magic. The result is a fascinating modern fairytale that shines in the depiction of magic and struggles a bit with the real-world aspects.
Jeremy Jones - Jerry, as he prefers to be called, in the vain hope that he won’t be recognized - inspired his mother’s phenomenally popular Neverwas books, a series of children’s stories about a boy who travels through a door in a tree into a world of pirates, dragons and epic battles. Supposedly, Jerry told his mother these stories, though he has no memory of doing so. Now a middle-aged man, divorced, estranged from his mother, and living a quiet life of retreat, Jerry has no desire to revisit Neverwas, and he’s used to pushing away the fans who show up with questions. But two manage to make it through his walls: Ruth Berry, a self-confident journalist working on a biography of Jerry and his mother, and Mr. Sattermole, an eerie man obsessed with Jerry’s childhood home, the place where, in the books, he found the tree that took him to Neverwas. As Jerry reluctantly revisits the scenes of his childhood, he begins to question whether his mother’s claim that he is the origin of the Neverwas stories might be true after all, if he might really have stepped into another world. When Mr. Sattermole mysteriously disappears, Jerry and Ruth go searching and find that magic exists in the strangest of places: the subway systems that run beneath most major cities, leading to a world of shadowy motives and figures out of myth.
The fantasy elements of this story are really incredible. Goldstein takes the familiar idea of portal worlds from children’s stories and reimagines them as reflections of a much more adult underworld, inspired by Egyptian mythology, dramatically revamped by the Industrial Revolution, and populated by gods and madmen. The history she develops for her Nefer Lands, the connection between the English discovery of Egyptology and the building of the first subways, works very well. The scenes sent in the Nefer Lands have a fairy-tale sense to them, where nothing is quite logical but it all hangs together, and the bits where characters step from one world to the other are appropriately disorienting. Every element of this part of the story worked very well for me: the creepy villains, the complicated plot that unfurls slowly through the story, the way disparate tales all prove to have common threads. I really liked the way she made this story feel plausible by tying it to real world events and people.
The slightly weaker parts of the story were the real world characters. There were four protagonists: Jerry, Ruth, Sarah, a widow lured into this world by the possibility of seeing her husband returned to her, and Gilly, Ruth’s young daughter, who as a child has the ability to travel between worlds. Compared to the characters in the Nefer Lands, none of them were very interesting. Jerry was the only one I had a real sense of as a character and he was both sympathetic and irritating: a man damaged by how much of his life was given up to his mother’s stories, as though by putting his life to paper she robbed him of his ability to really live it. Ruth and Sarah were more vague for me; we kept being told things like that Ruth was unusually bold and self-assured, or that Sarah was shaped by a traumatic childhood, but little of that was reflected in their own actions. And Gilly was supposed to be four years old, but once she stepped between worlds she was written as more capable than I’d expect from a child that young. All of the characters made decisions that were illogical or unexplained, and while later in the book the story justifies some of that in a really neat wayby explaining that they are being slowly turned into archetypes by their time in the Nefer Lands the problem was that I never had a clear sense of who they were before those changes started. But this wasn’t a barrier to enjoying the story; ultimately the characters just felt like a way into this fascinating world.
Jeremy Jones - Jerry, as he prefers to be called, in the vain hope that he won’t be recognized - inspired his mother’s phenomenally popular Neverwas books, a series of children’s stories about a boy who travels through a door in a tree into a world of pirates, dragons and epic battles. Supposedly, Jerry told his mother these stories, though he has no memory of doing so. Now a middle-aged man, divorced, estranged from his mother, and living a quiet life of retreat, Jerry has no desire to revisit Neverwas, and he’s used to pushing away the fans who show up with questions. But two manage to make it through his walls: Ruth Berry, a self-confident journalist working on a biography of Jerry and his mother, and Mr. Sattermole, an eerie man obsessed with Jerry’s childhood home, the place where, in the books, he found the tree that took him to Neverwas. As Jerry reluctantly revisits the scenes of his childhood, he begins to question whether his mother’s claim that he is the origin of the Neverwas stories might be true after all, if he might really have stepped into another world. When Mr. Sattermole mysteriously disappears, Jerry and Ruth go searching and find that magic exists in the strangest of places: the subway systems that run beneath most major cities, leading to a world of shadowy motives and figures out of myth.
The fantasy elements of this story are really incredible. Goldstein takes the familiar idea of portal worlds from children’s stories and reimagines them as reflections of a much more adult underworld, inspired by Egyptian mythology, dramatically revamped by the Industrial Revolution, and populated by gods and madmen. The history she develops for her Nefer Lands, the connection between the English discovery of Egyptology and the building of the first subways, works very well. The scenes sent in the Nefer Lands have a fairy-tale sense to them, where nothing is quite logical but it all hangs together, and the bits where characters step from one world to the other are appropriately disorienting. Every element of this part of the story worked very well for me: the creepy villains, the complicated plot that unfurls slowly through the story, the way disparate tales all prove to have common threads. I really liked the way she made this story feel plausible by tying it to real world events and people.
The slightly weaker parts of the story were the real world characters. There were four protagonists: Jerry, Ruth, Sarah, a widow lured into this world by the possibility of seeing her husband returned to her, and Gilly, Ruth’s young daughter, who as a child has the ability to travel between worlds. Compared to the characters in the Nefer Lands, none of them were very interesting. Jerry was the only one I had a real sense of as a character and he was both sympathetic and irritating: a man damaged by how much of his life was given up to his mother’s stories, as though by putting his life to paper she robbed him of his ability to really live it. Ruth and Sarah were more vague for me; we kept being told things like that Ruth was unusually bold and self-assured, or that Sarah was shaped by a traumatic childhood, but little of that was reflected in their own actions. And Gilly was supposed to be four years old, but once she stepped between worlds she was written as more capable than I’d expect from a child that young. All of the characters made decisions that were illogical or unexplained, and while later in the book the story justifies some of that in a really neat way
sandeestarlite's review against another edition
4.0
A fun fantasy read about the underworld of subway systems. Nice tie in with Egyptian mythology. I realized on about chapter 2 that I had read this one before. Probably when it first came out. Still as good as the first time around.
crowyhead's review against another edition
3.0
When Jerry was a child, his mother wrote a bestselling series of books based on stories he told her. Now, as an adult, he is estranged from her, feeling she stole his childhood. Yet when strange people start popping up in his life, he begins to realize that the stories he told his mother may have been true...
This is an appealing, entertaining novel that, like Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, makes use of the London Underground as a setting. Goldstein does some really unique things with folklore and mythology, and the result by and large is quite good. Still, there was something about it that seemed "off" to me, as though parts of the plot were rushed or not fully explained.
This is an appealing, entertaining novel that, like Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, makes use of the London Underground as a setting. Goldstein does some really unique things with folklore and mythology, and the result by and large is quite good. Still, there was something about it that seemed "off" to me, as though parts of the plot were rushed or not fully explained.
rjl20's review against another edition
mysterious
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.0
Feels oddly dated. I might be spoiled by Tim Powers, though.
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