A review by flying_monkey
Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City by K.J. Parker

adventurous funny lighthearted fast-paced
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

This is a workmanlike humorous (if not necessarily actually funny) fantasy novel by humorous (if not necessarily actually funny) fantasy novelist, Tom Holt, writing under a pseudonym, the need for which I don't quite understand - but then I never found Holt actually funny so perhaps he wanted to attract a new audience. It's a first-person narrative of an ethnic outsider in a powerful empire, who has overcome prejudice and poverty to be the Colonel-in-Chief of the imperial engineers. By his own account he is a coward who gets by on his brains and, as they song goes, with a little help from his friends. Anyway, he ends up in the imperial capital as it comes under siege by powerful forces unknown to anyone, and has to resort to every physical and social engineering tactic, ruse and scheme to defend the city. The writing is breezy, the characterisation and worldbuilding perfunctory at best, and it slips down without touching the sides. It is, as a result, really annoying and throughout I was reminded very strongly of a much better humorous (but this time actually funny) unreliable narrator story and couldn't think what it was - and then about 2/3 of the way through I remembered - it was the Murderbot novellas by Martha Wells. Yes, this novel's narration is like a vastly inferior fantasy version of Wells. Anyway, people who like this kind of thing will like this novel, especially if you're into engineering or are someone whose idea of a good time is reading about historical siege technologies. It's not bad.
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