Reviews with content warning for Drug use - The City Beautiful

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The City Beautiful by Aden Polydoros

3 reviews

emily_mh's review

dark emotional mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.75

This was such a great read! The MC Alter was so dynamic, because as well as having to deal with possession and finding a serial killer, he has a rich inner world as the narrator. He’s trying to earn the money to bring his family over to the US from Romania, he is haunted by internalised homophobia and he is living in poverty in an antisemitic world and responding to that situation in his own way. His perspective really exposed the facade of the American Dream.

Alter’s romance with Frankie was great. I love when an author writes an romance where the MC is oblivious to how much the LI is into them but the reader can clearly see it, and the romantic subplot here is exactly that. Because Alter and Frankie had already been through so much together before the events of this book, their connection was believable and their chemistry was good. I like how balanced their relationship was, with Frankie helping Alter with his mission, and Alter helping Frankie through his grief and trauma.

It’s hard to comment on the predictability of the mystery as I am older than the target audience, but I found it to be engaging. I also don’t believe that the point of the mystery here was to be elusive and hard to solve, but to compound the social themes Polydoros was exploring. And boy did he EXPLORE. The narrative looks at the intersection of classism and antisemitism in the experiences of Alter, showing how doubly vulnerable it makes poor Jewish people to exploitation and violence. It displays the dissonance between having a grand international exhibition while people are living in poverty; the ludicrousness of the existence of the mega-wealthy when there are those with nothing. What is truly sickening is that these same issues and oppressions characterise today’s society too, like Polydoros was holding up a mirror to the present. I appreciated him foregrounding these issues for that reason, and also because it gives a more realistic depiction of Chicago and the US in general in 1893.

Another fantastic element in this book was the atmosphere the author created. He conveyed the darkness and grit of Victorian Chicago effortlessly: the senseless violence and exploitation and the constant presence of danger. It was completely immersive and, like the mystery, engaging, so that even in slower-paced moments the book didn’t feel like it dragged at all, despite its 450+ pages.

Rep: gay Jewish MC, gay Jewish LI, Jewish SCs

Content Warnings

thecriticalreader's review

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dark sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.75

I bought The City Beautiful by Aden Polydoros because I am obsessed with everything related to the 1893 Columbian Exposition, which happens to be surprisingly underrepresented in historical fiction. Thus, I was intrigued by this book because of its historical setting.

Blurb:

Alter Rosen is a seventeen-year-old Jewish immigrant who turned his back on a life of crime and wants nothing more than to keep his head down and work to buy his family’s passage from Romania to the United States. When his friend Yakov dies in a mysterious “accident,” Alter recognizes an ominous pattern of Jewish boys who go missing. Alter is spurred to avenge Yakov’s killer after he is possessed by Yakov’s dybbuk, or spirit, and he unwillingly ends up working with an old friend from his criminal days, Frankie. Alter struggles between his forbidden desire for Frankie, his need to avenge Yakov, and his resolution to be a law-abiding member of his religious and civic community as he finds himself confronting the wealthy and powerful who control Chicago.

Helpful Note:
If you are anything like me and do not recognize the many Yiddish words and phrases used in this book, the glossary is at the back of the book!

Review:

The strongest parts of The City Beautiful rest heavily on Polydoros’s strong character work, especially with the protagonist, Alter. Alter, despite being a little pathetic, is a believable and likable character and his voice shines through on every page. His motivations and development are easy to track as the plot escalates. Side characters such as Raizel and Frankie, although significantly less developed than Alter, are similarly likable and fun to read about.

The prose in the book is adequate most of the time, although Polydoros has an annoying habit of repeating certain phrases too often. Some of these phrases stuck out to me as particularly amateurish or fan-fictiony, such as “purred” or “my knees weakened.” The most annoying offense is that he describes one character’s eyes as being “sepia-colored” at least four times. Whenever he used these words or phrases, I was pulled out of the story.

The biggest flaw of this book is that Polydoros tries to do too much all at once, resulting in a story that feels claustrophobic and underdeveloped. Each individual element captured my interest—the backstories of the characters, the Jewish mythology, the dybbuk possession, the Chicagoan history, the queer love story, the mystery of the missing boys—but none was addressed with enough detail or complexity to sustain my attention. The book felt especially bogged down by the complicated plot in the last quarter, and I had to push myself to keep reading at times. The villains, in contrast with the main characters, came across as flat and one-dimensional. The City Beautiful could be significantly improved if the author either cut certain elements to focus on others or if he had expanded the book to address everything adequately.

As a history major who specializes in this time period, my expectations for historical accuracy are far more stringent than the average reader’s. I am pleased to say that the author gets the big details right. There were no glaring errors or inaccuracies that I picked up on, although I am not well-versed in Jewish immigration history. He captured the most important trends of the time and place, especially when it came to America’s class divide and industrialization.

***The rest of this review lies more in the realm of personal taste rather than objective criticism***

Modern historical fiction authors inevitably bring their biases and agendas into their stories, which can create tension when they want to create stories that are set in the past, yet at the same time champion certain contemporary ideas about identity and class. They especially face this tension when writing about queer relationships, because although queer people (at least how we think of them today) certainly existed in the past, people in the nineteenth century navigated gender in ways that can substantially deviate from the twenty-first-century paradigm. Authors can either research nineteenth-century gender and sexuality and attempt to create queer characters who accurately reflect how someone in that time period would think about gender and sexuality—even if that means writing about things that make modern readers uncomfortable or confused—or they can mold their characters in a way that appeals to current gender ideology. Either choice is completely valid, although I personally find the latter more interesting, and I find it difficult to suspend my disbelief when certain historical characters act anachronistically. Polydoros attempts to keep the historical situation in mind when he writes the queer relationship within The City Beautiful, yet for the most part, it feels quite modern.

I cannot speak to the historical portrayal of Jewishness, but my guess would be that it shares similarities in historical accuracy to the portrayals of queerness. At times, the author inserts what are clearly modern academic arguments about race, religion, and gender into the text, hitting the reader over the head with his viewpoint. To be clear, I do not mind historical fiction stories that have an agenda or something to say that pertains to modern society. However, I appreciate it when the issues are tackled with subtlety and sensitivity for the historical time period.

The Run-Down:

You will probably like The City Beautiful if you love the idea of a queer Jewish historical fiction fantasy/mystery, enjoy books in the Young Adult category of literature, and want to learn more about Chicago and Jewish culture/immigration in the 1890s.

You might not like The City Beautiful if you are uncomfortable with any of the content warnings (this book can be quite graphic and dark), if you dislike tropes commonly found within Young Adult literature, if you dislike historical fantasy, or if you are looking for a complex, nuanced dive into historical issues of race, religion, and queerness.

A Similar Book:

The Witch Haven by Sasha Peyton Smith. Similarities between these two books include:

· A Progressive-Era American setting

· Fantasy elements

· A protagonist who tries to solve the mysterious murder of someone close to them and uncovers the dark side of society’s ruling class in the process

· Romance

· Social justice themes

Content Warnings

ashleycmms's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional informative lighthearted sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

Content Warnings

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