Book review - "The City and The City" (China Mieville)

[cybermule]

First and foremost, this is a detective story. and my opinion is that even the best of detective stories are still just detective stories with an essentially rather thin plot. But then it's the setting that makes this uite cool IMO. I'm not going to spoilerify it, but the city in which the story is set is split. I found this played very cleverly into my own prejudices and preconceptions of what was actually going on (it's revealed slowly) and was written pretty well. It's enjoyable and absorbing, but sometimes I thought that it tried hard too hard to not be a particular genre by swerving between stylistic features of several genres. I hope that makes sense as I'm a bit sleepy. In short, it's a good read, and some aspects will stick.

Comments

[zleetle.livejournal.com]

agreed. I did not like the end, however - there were many cooler places to take the concept then where it went, imo. And Mieville is such a lush writer when he wants to be, I felt like he was trying to hard to be "hard boiled detective" in his style. It worked for the book, I just think I like his fantasy better.