(The Skyscraper Throne, #1)
Release Date: September 8, 2012
Publisher: Flux; 480 pages
Running from her traitorous best friend and her estranged father, graffiti artist Beth Bradley is looking for sanctuary. What she finds is Urchin, the ragged and cocky crown prince of London’s mystical underworld. Urchin opens Beth’s eyes to the city she’s never truly seen-where vast spiders crawl telephone wires seeking voices to steal, railwraiths escape their tethers, and statues conceal an ancient priesthood robed in bronze.
But it all teeters on the brink of destruction. Amid rumors that Urchin’s goddess mother will soon return from her 15-year exile, Reach, a malign god of urban decay, wants the young prince dead. Helping Urchin raise an alleyway army to reclaim his skyscraper throne, Beth soon forgets her old life. But when her best friend is captured, Beth must choose between this wondrous existence and the life she left behind
Thank you to netgalley & Flux for allowing me the opportunity to review this novel in exchange for an honest review.
I will say I am surprised by how much I enjoyed this. I will tell you why. For about the first quarter of the book, I had no idea what Fil was. That bothered me just because I like to have a sense of what I'm dealing with, if you will. It made me nervous, thinking it was going to be like this for the entire book, which, in a way, it was. However, it started getting to the point where it didn't really matter much what he was; what mattered was what he could do and how he was going to get it done.
The imagination of the author is just unbelievable. To create this entire world, enemies the way they are, allies the way they are. I mean, there are light people! Light people...as in light bulbs. It's ridiculously awesome!
Beth is pretty screwed up. She lost her mother suddenly, it messed with her father pretty bad. He hardly does anything but sit there reading her favorite book. It's kind of heartbreaking, actually. She gets in trouble at school, gets suspended and has no idea what to do especially since her father hardly even cares. Her best friend, Pen, is the one who turned her in but she's got a horrible secret she's keeping that is just gut wrenching.
She meets Fil when he saves her life during a fight between two trains (yes, trains) then she, in return, saves his life immediately afterward. He's different. He's got a grey-ish tint to his skin and walks around with a spear. Not exactly something you see every day in London. He ends up telling her where she can find him and the next day, she goes looking. It's the beginning of her new life.
Beth is incredibly stubborn yet insanely brave. Even if my life were pretty rotten, I don't think I'd have the courage she had to do the things she did, especially change the way she was, physically.
The writing was just amazing, the story was intense and it was overall a fantastic read. I recommend this to anyone looking for something really creative and pretty far out there. You need patience to read this book, I think. Like I said, the first quarter or so of the book was slightly chaotic for the reader but if you can hold out after that, you're in for a treat!
No comments:
Post a Comment