Early Review – The City in Glass by Nghi Vo (3.5/5 stars)
Reading Level: Adult
Genre: Fantasy
Length: 224 pages
Publisher: Tordotcom
Release Date: October 1, 2024
ASIN: B0CWZ24KX1
Stand Alone or Series: Stand Alone
Source: eGalley from NetGalley for Review
Rating: 3.5/5 stars
“The demon Vitrine—immortal, powerful, and capricious—loves the dazzling city of Azril. She has mothered, married, and maddened the city and its people for generations, and built it into a place of joy and desire, revelry and riot.
And then the angels come, and the city falls.
Vitrine is left with nothing but memories and a book containing the names of those she has lost—and an angel, now bound by her mad, grief-stricken curse to haunt the city he burned.
She mourns her dead and rages against the angel she longs to destroy. Made to be each other’s devastation, angel and demon are destined for eternal battle. Instead, they find themselves locked in a devouring fascination that will change them both forever.
Together, they unearth the past of the lost city and begin to shape its future. But when war threatens Azril and everything they have built, Vitrine and her angel must decide whether they will let the city fall again.”
Series Info/Source: This is a stand alone book. I got a copy of this on ebook to review through NetGalley..
Thoughts: I was incredibly excited to read this but ended up being fairly disappointed. This tells the story of a demon, Vitrine, who has built up the city of Azril only to have it destroyed by a host of angels. When she infects one of the angels with part of herself he is not allowed to return home and is forced to stay by Vitrine’s side. We follow Vitrine and the angel through the ages as Vitrine struggles to build up a new Azril and protect it from threats.
This is written in a very flowery, somewhat hard to access style that I struggled to stay engaged with. The beginning of the book is especially slow paced; this is a bit better in the last quarter of the book. The book jumps between past and present, and sometimes it takes a bit to figure out if you are in the past or present when you start a new chapter.
As you get to the last third of the book, some intriguing characters are introduced. However, they are never around very long because this book is written on the scale of angels and demons, who measure time in decades and centuries.
I struggled to have any interest in Vitrine or the angel. Vitrine does not show growth or change throughout the book but remains selfish and unwilling to let go of the past. The angel changes more but is kept at a distance from the reader, and because of this, it feels very two dimensional.
The ending was just kind of odd and I wasn’t sure what to think about it.
My Summary (3.5/5): Overall this was beautifully written but strangely slow and hard to engage with. If you enjoy beautiful, lyrically written, slow paced, somewhat ambiguous stories about things on a godlike time scale you might enjoy this. It is intriguing idea but just wasn’t quite there on execution. It most definitely was not one of my favorite reads by Vo, but part of that could be the style of writing here. I just found the story and writing not to be very accessible.
