A review by leelah
Our Lady of the Ice by Cassandra Rose Clarke

3.0



Our Lady of the Ice takes a bit of [b:Under the Dome|6320534|Under the Dome|Stephen King|https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/books/1268982908s/6320534.jpg|6760952] and the bit of Fortitude, with a touch of Äkta människor thrown in. City under the dome in the middle of Antarctica, crime in such closed community and robots with artificial intelligence developed just enough to start questioning their role of servitude- when you look at parts of this novel, they all sound individually great, but somehow put together, story just isn't as interesting as I hoped it would be and not that memorable.
I'll start with good: Setting. Hope City is self-sustained city in Antarctica under the control of Argentinian government. How can a town set there be self sustained? Well, it started as an amusement park, but with establishing atomic power plants it became a considerable source of energy that's supplying not just Hope City but mainland as well. Maintenance of plants and other systems in HC is done by drones and robots, simple pieces of machinery purely developed to perform that duty. But in early time of Hope City there were more advanced machines like androids with intelligence and human appearance... and not all of them are destroyed. At the time our main character Eliana is hired by one of the most recognizable and important people, Marianella Luna, to retrieve papers that can destroy her, Hope City is facing frequent power outages which makes members of Independents, a political current advocating independence of Hope City from Argentina louder than ever. I liked that we are starting the story at the moment where this project of HC is starting to show its cracks. Everything is more suspenseful because whatever is happening with our characters, whatever they have to do in short timeframe, you can never look at it out of the bigger,dome picture. Lack of power leads to lack of heat which is a disaster there and you have no idea when it's going to happen or who's behind it.
But other side of the coin, characterization, didn't really work for me. Eliana, a PI who knows what her bf is doing and for whom, gets reckless af even after warnings, not to mention that the way she retrieved papers is more suited to hungry orphan walking past fruit stand in 18 century novel, than a licensed PI. And to be clear,
SpoilerI think it's very clumsy done because they can find her right away...only by checking licensed female PIs
, so I am baffled it didn't even cross her mind, and I expect that when you tell me your character has professional experience. And this trait in her character never changed throughout novel. Everything about Luna was predictable which made me exasperating because she was so hopeless and had tied hands all the time and I wanted to see her be more proactive (her butler is immensely more intriguing). Diego was...serviceable. He had his move to play in certain moment to further Eliana's arc and that's the extent of his character. Now, my favourite character was Sofia, android on a mission of her own- an android who gave me more personality than any other character in the book, including humans. She is vulnerable, she is strong, she is passionate and she makes things happen instead of just letting things happening to her. But even with her Cassandra Rose Clarke didn't risk and venture far from stereotypical plot points of rebelling machine.
There was such a strong potential here, a promising setting, but characters were lacking which ultimately didn't let me fully connect with story.