Scan barcode
A review by gossy
Midnight Riot by Ben Aaronovitch
2.0
I did enjoy the plot for this, and the world-building was fairly fun. I liked how there wasn’t a major emphasis on hiding magic despite it not being publicly known, how the protagonists just rolled with things.
The characters, however, never quite managed to truly interest me. The main character had some promising facets in theory—an interesting background and family, an inquisitive attitude that interacted with the plot in productive ways—that never actually congealed into a very compelling page presence for me. And the same was true for most of the side characters as well. There were a few sweet bonding moments, but never quite enough substance to them. And there are things I want to learn about these characters, but I didn’t learn them in this book and what I did see wasn’t in itself all that interesting.
So! Overall not bad, I did enjoy the read. In the surface flavor and narration style this reminded me a bit of a cross between the Discworld City Watch books and the Dresden Files. But it lacked something of the heart and soul of those other series, and I’m not sure I’ll be moving on to the next book; I wasn’t particularly compelled.
The characters, however, never quite managed to truly interest me. The main character had some promising facets in theory—an interesting background and family, an inquisitive attitude that interacted with the plot in productive ways—that never actually congealed into a very compelling page presence for me. And the same was true for most of the side characters as well. There were a few sweet bonding moments, but never quite enough substance to them. And there are things I want to learn about these characters, but I didn’t learn them in this book and what I did see wasn’t in itself all that interesting.
So! Overall not bad, I did enjoy the read. In the surface flavor and narration style this reminded me a bit of a cross between the Discworld City Watch books and the Dresden Files. But it lacked something of the heart and soul of those other series, and I’m not sure I’ll be moving on to the next book; I wasn’t particularly compelled.