A review by justiceofkalr
Heart of Veridon by Tim Akers

3.0

Waffled back and forth between two and three stars for this one. I felt like I should have liked this book a lot more than I did. It's got an interesting set-up and the world is something that would typically interest me. It's got several intriguing races living in a city powered by magical clockwork. It almost seems a bit reminiscent of China Mieville's Bas-Lag, which is one of my favorite worlds. Still I mostly felt bored reading this book. It jumps right into the action and there's nearly non-stop action and development after that. Which I think ended up being my biggest problem. I didn't have time to care. I gather that the author has other Veridon short fiction, which might have helped to have read it first because then maybe I would have felt a bit more interested and involved in the world. As it is, I really disliked the main character and nearly every other character in the book, which I'm assuming I wasn't supposed to. The main character manages to be bitterly suspicious and stupidly naive at once, and his only retort seems to be 'fuck you'. The only characters I felt some amount of connection with were the angels, who were basically the bad guys. I spent the whole book after the reveal about who they are waiting for them to bring down some bloody vengeance on the entire crappy city.