A review by cody_crumley
Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett

adventurous funny mysterious medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

“Every innovation—technological, sociological, or otherwise—begins as a crusade, organizes itself into a practical business, and then, over time, degrades into common exploitation. This is simply the life cycle of how human ingenuity manifests in the material world.”

This is one of those books that I keep seeing pop up on BookTok as a new mixture of ideas in a fantasy-style setting, with interesting characters. I feel like those type of recommendations are kinda hit and miss, I am glad to report that least for me, this was a hit. 

Foundryside has the beginning of a good action movie, it starts you off in the middle of a heist, with the main POV being Sancia, a former slave who now takes random “jobs” to survive on the streets. It does a good job of getting the reader engaged while also introducing us to the world. 

The setting is a city called Tevanne, which are controlled by old Merchant Houses that have a deep seated distrust and animosity towards each other but keep together so that power stays between them. Class structure is one of the major themes and it continues to be throughout the book, even within the higher Merchant houses. 

What really drew me in and kept me going though this book is the magic system. One of the most unique and interesting systems I have read or seen in a while. It is called Scriving, which is this worlds version of “magical coding” which are controlled by the Merchant Houses. What you learn later is with that there is “magical hacking” where the person doing the hacking communicates with the object, that talks back like a command terminal and “tricks” it out of their main command. How Robert Jackson Bennett shows this is by the character and the object having a conversation back and forth. This uniqueness really helps when the plot becomes kinda straight forward.

Which would be my only real complaint about this, I think the book could have been streamlined a little more, it does meander in the middle which causes a lull in what is happening, which could have been used to fully explain more about the different houses or things within the city. Hopefully this is only a book 1 issue and it gets resolved in the rest of the trilogy, but that is my only small complaint.

Definitely gonna check the rest of the finished trilogy out and can’t wait to see where the rest of the story goes!