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A review by pilebythebed
City of Lies by Sam Hawke
4.0
Sam Hawke’s incredibly assured debut fantasy novel City of Lies starts intriguingly. Jovan, the narrator has been trained from a young age in the family trade of taster for the Chancellor. He has been exposed to multiple poisons by his uncle as part of his training and has learnt to identify them in foods. He has been trained in the place of his elder sister Kalina whose constitution was too weak to handle the poisoning. Both are close and are close to Tain, heir to the Chancellorship of Silasta. There world is thrown into stunning and sudden disarray when both the Chancellor and their Uncle Ethan are poison and the city is besieged.
While City of Lies can be read by anyone it definitely has a young adult bent. While not teenagers, the main characters are all young adults, thrust into an adult world, learning quickly how to navigate treacherous political waters while dealing with a series of escalating crises. This also allows them to question the way things have been done traditionally (particularly as this has partially led to current events) and find new ways forward.
The narrative of City of Lies swaps between Jovan and Kalina. It takes some time for their narrative voices to diverge so that it is sometimes difficult to remember which character is narrating at any particular time. But they do become distinct as the siege wears on and each has a very different role to play in events.
City of Lies is epic fantasy but its scope is restrained mainly to the capital city. There are clearly some machinations at play behind the events in this book but the shape of them is unclear. So that while City of Lies tells a contained narrative Hawke has left herself plenty of scope for exploring her world further and continuing this series.
While City of Lies can be read by anyone it definitely has a young adult bent. While not teenagers, the main characters are all young adults, thrust into an adult world, learning quickly how to navigate treacherous political waters while dealing with a series of escalating crises. This also allows them to question the way things have been done traditionally (particularly as this has partially led to current events) and find new ways forward.
The narrative of City of Lies swaps between Jovan and Kalina. It takes some time for their narrative voices to diverge so that it is sometimes difficult to remember which character is narrating at any particular time. But they do become distinct as the siege wears on and each has a very different role to play in events.
City of Lies is epic fantasy but its scope is restrained mainly to the capital city. There are clearly some machinations at play behind the events in this book but the shape of them is unclear. So that while City of Lies tells a contained narrative Hawke has left herself plenty of scope for exploring her world further and continuing this series.