A review by ailsaod
City of Hope & Despair by Ian Whates

adventurous dark mysterious slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

 OK so after I reread book one specifically so I could read this book (and didn't enjoy it) I should have just been sensible and stopped there. But I didn't because I am a stubborn idiot that hauled this book to and from uni for years in the hopes I would have the time and energy to read it and I wasn't going to let my disappointment at the first book stop me!

For me Whates' books have the strange quality of being unenjoyable but also extremely readable and if you liked book one you'll find this book much of the same. The main difference is that a good deal of the story no longer takes place in Thaiburley and is focused on finding the source of the River Thaiss so there isn't such an urban feel. I will say that Whates doesn't appear to understand Geography particularly well when it comes to the formation of swamps but the worldbuilding was overall OK if a bit unsatisfying. It's hard to describe precisely why it is unsatisfying but my best attempt is that it feels as if you are wearing blinders that only let you see what is straight ahead - or that if you left the exact path the story takes there would be an empty void. There were a couple of instances where Whates came off a bit preachy - ironically about religion/the way it is practiced being stupid - and while I might agree with him on this topic I didn't like the way he wrote about it as it was kind of jarring and going after low-hanging fruit. When the temple at Pilgrimage end was described I very much wished to tell him to chill out - yes the consumerisation of Religion isn't great but there are far worse ways for people to make a living!

After the previous book I was not pleased to hear that Dewar was also going to feature here as he is a self-important nasty piece of work and I really didn't like him. One thing I think this book did very well is that Dewar is brought back from the brink of irredeemable awfulness and while he remains unsympathetic and nasty he is much more interesting. However his continued presence in the narrative is just to be the warrior character to fight off the threats the party faces but there were some issues regarding the outcomes of some fight scenes feeling rushed and anticlimactic.

Another aspect of the book is the arrival of the 'bone plague' in Thaiburley. This part is from the perspective of the Prime Master and has aged like milk because he is e x t r e m e l y irresponsible:
he catches the plague and then pretends nothing is wrong even though they have no idea how its spread and he could be infecting everyone!
. I think the Prime Master (which I always read as prime minister and get confused) is supposed to be this wise old man figure but he just makes me think of Palpatine when he's pretending to be nice.

All female characters continued to be written in a manner I found uncomfortable: every girl/woman is attractive and we must know this (if ALL of them are super pretty then doesn't that make the term irrelevant?), there is another (luckily only referenced) case of men lusting after a preteen and its framed in that annoying 'oh I am too weak to resist the charms of the seductive hot girl' way when she's literally just EXISTING. At least Jezmina in book 1 was actually setting out to seduce people! To many people this probably sounds like I'm just whining about minor details because I have deemed them 'problematic' and to an extent that is true (sir, I must ask you to look away from the preteen girls!) but really it just spoiled my enjoyment of the book and the story could have done without it fine. The Tom/Mildra romance was very meh and shows that Tom is basically that one guy you went to school with that would ask out a different one of your friends every week and each time pretend he was devoted to that one person all along. ALSO there is an almost sex scene in this book with the sex pollen trope thrown in to really make me want to yeet myself into the next dimension over (why? why would you do this?) and not only was the scene itself yucky but every time Tom interacts with Mildra after that all he can think about is her nipples. I liked Mildra and she was pretty cool in book one but I desperately didn't want to know a thing about anything under her clothes. There is also a case of attempted rape in this book which was fairly intense.

TL;DR: if you liked the first book then you'll like this one. There are some interesting ideas here but much of it has been done better elsewhere.
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