Another excellent offering from Asher – he so rarely disappoints me!
This is a rather darker book than Asher’s norm and, whilst he always tends to write ambiguous heroes, in this book they are more than normally on the dark side of things. This should probably not be surprising considering this is his first book published after the tragic loss of his wife. But ambiguous or not the characters are all well drawn despite the rather surreal directions some of them take.
As always Asher constructs a beautifully twisted plot with various threads gradually weaving together into a satisfying whole. The enigmatic Penny Royal is brilliantly conceived, its sense of justice both apposite and horrifying and its development throughout the book both subtle and profound. Asher likes to give his Drones and AIs a certain acerbic sense of humour but Penny Royal is very different; if Penny Royal does have a sense of humour then it is a very dark one but I felt its character is possibly a little too tragic and surreal for the idea of humour to really apply and this was handled surprisingly sensitively by Asher resulting in a character who should have been horrific and repulsive but instead turns out to be unexpectedly sympathetic.
This next paragraph is a possible SPOILER.
My only complaint was that one of the main POV characters, who initially feels like the leading character (and quite possibly will be the only one other than Penny Royal to continue into the next volume), actually turns out to have had very little real purpose in the plot. At the final denouement I was expecting him to have some big significance but in the event his role was really little more than acting as bait for another character. Which, frankly, left me feeling rather let down and made the ending weaker than I had expected.
Despite that I still consider it an excellent book but not quite a 5 star one.
This is a rather darker book than Asher’s norm and, whilst he always tends to write ambiguous heroes, in this book they are more than normally on the dark side of things. This should probably not be surprising considering this is his first book published after the tragic loss of his wife. But ambiguous or not the characters are all well drawn despite the rather surreal directions some of them take.
As always Asher constructs a beautifully twisted plot with various threads gradually weaving together into a satisfying whole. The enigmatic Penny Royal is brilliantly conceived, its sense of justice both apposite and horrifying and its development throughout the book both subtle and profound. Asher likes to give his Drones and AIs a certain acerbic sense of humour but Penny Royal is very different; if Penny Royal does have a sense of humour then it is a very dark one but I felt its character is possibly a little too tragic and surreal for the idea of humour to really apply and this was handled surprisingly sensitively by Asher resulting in a character who should have been horrific and repulsive but instead turns out to be unexpectedly sympathetic.
This next paragraph is a possible SPOILER.
My only complaint was that one of the main POV characters, who initially feels like the leading character (and quite possibly will be the only one other than Penny Royal to continue into the next volume), actually turns out to have had very little real purpose in the plot. At the final denouement I was expecting him to have some big significance but in the event his role was really little more than acting as bait for another character. Which, frankly, left me feeling rather let down and made the ending weaker than I had expected.
Despite that I still consider it an excellent book but not quite a 5 star one.
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