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A review by truestorydesu
City of Broken Magic by Mirah Bolender
4.0
You can read the whole nonsensical review on my ridiculous blog here. It has gifs!
So the city of Amicae is built with a Minas Tirith-like tier system and exists in a world that seems an awful lot like Studio Ghibli’s Howl’s Moving Castle, complete with blob-slime-monsters called “infestations” that happen if you don’t keep your amulet plugged in or…something. I’m not 100% certain how the whole magic-infestation-system works here, but, to be fair, neither do any of the characters, so there’s that.
Anyway, it’s hard to pinpoint the time period Amicae is supposed to be reminiscent of - the city has trolleys, phones, radios, but is also very down with enforcing traditional gender roles for men and women. Also, there’s the foxtrot, a dance that came about in the 1910s, so…anyway I just started imagining Amicae as being if Studio Ghibli made Howl’s Moving Castle but with Minas Tirith.
Anyway. So, our heroine, Laura Kramer, is a “sweeper” in Amicae: a person who deals with infestations of these magical blob Studio Ghibli monsters. Laura is one of only two sweepers in the whole of Amicae - it’s just her, and her prickliest of the prickly pears, Clae Sinclair. Clae (pronounced Cly, and not Clay like I assumed for the first 20 or so pages) was once part of a whole family of sweepers - only, being a sweeper is a dangerous job, most of Clae’s apprentices have been killed on the job, and the higher-ups of Amicae are so desperate to avoid acknowledging the magic-blob-monster infestations that they’ve provided the sweeper department with almost no support. As a result, the sweepers have dwindled to literally just Clae and Laura. While dealing with a magical infestation at the mansion of a rich douchebag, Clae liberates one of the household servants, Okane, who, as it turns out, is a magi - no, he didn’t sell his watch to get a comb for his wife and his wife didn’t sell her hair to get him a watch chain, coordinate your Christmas gift-giving, people - a magi is someone who has more magic to them than normal people. Magi have, of course, been treated like shit throughout history, so most of them hide who they are, and sometimes rich douchebags will keep them in their houses as slaves, because they’re rich douchebags.
Anyway, Okane has the ability to sense infestations, but so far as sweeper training goes, he’s really, really bad at it.
So while Amicae is hell-bent on avoiding the infestation problem, Clae has been fighting to get more recognition for his department, Laura is stuck between societal expectations from her as a woman vs what Clae says is a natural talent for sweeping, and Okane is slowly but surely overcoming a lifetime of enslavement and abuse to become a somewhat adequate sweeper.
But while all this is going down, there’s a massive infestation taking root in Amicae. Like, supermassive. Like, No-Face from Spirited Away after he ate all that food levels of massive. So massive that it could destroy the whole city and kill everyone in it.
And the only people left to deal with it are Clae, Laura and Okane.
I struggled with City of Broken Magic - I really liked the characters, especially prickly-pear Clae, but the worldbuilding seemed a bit shaky - as City is first in an intended series, we may have more to learn about the world around it, but much of this first book felt like the world was being built as the story was written. I could get over that, though, because I wanted to know more about Laura, Okane and Clae. To add more to the Ghibli-esque feel of the story, there are a lot of Japanese-inspired terms for the monsters. Okane’s name is mentioned, in-story, to mean “money” - which is does in Japanese (お金 , it’s considered the more polite form for “money” - for someone who spent four years learning Japanese, I’ve retained…uh…practically none of it).
So, to make a long story short: I really liked the characters. I want to know what happens to them. I can ignore some of the glitches in worldbuilding because I actually do want to know what will happen next to the Amicae Sweepers.
So the city of Amicae is built with a Minas Tirith-like tier system and exists in a world that seems an awful lot like Studio Ghibli’s Howl’s Moving Castle, complete with blob-slime-monsters called “infestations” that happen if you don’t keep your amulet plugged in or…something. I’m not 100% certain how the whole magic-infestation-system works here, but, to be fair, neither do any of the characters, so there’s that.
Anyway, it’s hard to pinpoint the time period Amicae is supposed to be reminiscent of - the city has trolleys, phones, radios, but is also very down with enforcing traditional gender roles for men and women. Also, there’s the foxtrot, a dance that came about in the 1910s, so…anyway I just started imagining Amicae as being if Studio Ghibli made Howl’s Moving Castle but with Minas Tirith.
Anyway. So, our heroine, Laura Kramer, is a “sweeper” in Amicae: a person who deals with infestations of these magical blob Studio Ghibli monsters. Laura is one of only two sweepers in the whole of Amicae - it’s just her, and her prickliest of the prickly pears, Clae Sinclair. Clae (pronounced Cly, and not Clay like I assumed for the first 20 or so pages) was once part of a whole family of sweepers - only, being a sweeper is a dangerous job, most of Clae’s apprentices have been killed on the job, and the higher-ups of Amicae are so desperate to avoid acknowledging the magic-blob-monster infestations that they’ve provided the sweeper department with almost no support. As a result, the sweepers have dwindled to literally just Clae and Laura. While dealing with a magical infestation at the mansion of a rich douchebag, Clae liberates one of the household servants, Okane, who, as it turns out, is a magi - no, he didn’t sell his watch to get a comb for his wife and his wife didn’t sell her hair to get him a watch chain, coordinate your Christmas gift-giving, people - a magi is someone who has more magic to them than normal people. Magi have, of course, been treated like shit throughout history, so most of them hide who they are, and sometimes rich douchebags will keep them in their houses as slaves, because they’re rich douchebags.
Anyway, Okane has the ability to sense infestations, but so far as sweeper training goes, he’s really, really bad at it.
So while Amicae is hell-bent on avoiding the infestation problem, Clae has been fighting to get more recognition for his department, Laura is stuck between societal expectations from her as a woman vs what Clae says is a natural talent for sweeping, and Okane is slowly but surely overcoming a lifetime of enslavement and abuse to become a somewhat adequate sweeper.
But while all this is going down, there’s a massive infestation taking root in Amicae. Like, supermassive. Like, No-Face from Spirited Away after he ate all that food levels of massive. So massive that it could destroy the whole city and kill everyone in it.
And the only people left to deal with it are Clae, Laura and Okane.
I struggled with City of Broken Magic - I really liked the characters, especially prickly-pear Clae, but the worldbuilding seemed a bit shaky - as City is first in an intended series, we may have more to learn about the world around it, but much of this first book felt like the world was being built as the story was written. I could get over that, though, because I wanted to know more about Laura, Okane and Clae. To add more to the Ghibli-esque feel of the story, there are a lot of Japanese-inspired terms for the monsters. Okane’s name is mentioned, in-story, to mean “money” - which is does in Japanese (お金 , it’s considered the more polite form for “money” - for someone who spent four years learning Japanese, I’ve retained…uh…practically none of it).
So, to make a long story short: I really liked the characters. I want to know what happens to them. I can ignore some of the glitches in worldbuilding because I actually do want to know what will happen next to the Amicae Sweepers.