A review by riverwise
The House of Binding Thorns by Aliette de Bodard

3.0

I was not quite won over by the first book in this series. Sometimes, it was a struggle, but there was enough there to make me want to read the next volume. And here it is. Sadly, I have much the same reaction, and I could almost copy my previous review over. Once again, there are a lot of machinations and intrigues that our characters are only partly privy to, if that, meaning that the first half of the book ends up as a load of disconnected scenes where nothing much seems to happen. We spend a lot more time in the dragon kingdom under the Seine this time, which is a good thing, as it is evocatively described and a genuinely unsettling location, fishscales and all. This stands in contrast to the Paris of the books, which should be a real winner - one of the most beautiful cities in the world ruined by magical war, peopled by enigmatic Fallen angels? I'm in. But somehow, this just doesn't come across on the page. It should be the defining feature of the books, a landscape that becomes a character like Gormenghast, but it is annoyingly vague throughout. This and its predecessor are decent books, but they could have been great, and they fall short of that. A frustrating read, but not a futile one.