mayfly93 's review for:

The House of Shattered Wings by Aliette de Bodard

5.0

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An urban fantasy made memorable by a rich reimagining of a historical setting: an alternate 20th-century Paris ruled over by noble houses of fallen angels. Not your conventional genre fare, with a focus primarily on postcard-style examination of its world and the people, human or otherwise, who live in it. A little organ-harvesting might put off the squeamish among us, but if that's the sort of thing you enjoy, you've come to the right place. The opening of the narrative takes its time establishing our various protagonists and their places within their fallen House, languidly building up a certain creeping dread that'll be quite familiar to fans of horror and weird fiction. By the end of the book, however, you're likely to be flipping pages as you come to the end of an unfolding mystery narrative that mixes the mythological with the modern. Might not be everyone's cup of tea, but this was exactly what I was looking for (to an almost eerie precision) when I stumbled across this book.