SFF

The City in Glass

by Nghi Vo
Tor.com. Oct. 2024. 224p. ISBN 9781250348272. $24.99. FANTASY
COPY ISBN
Vitrine is a demon—immortal, powerful, capricious, and malicious. She’s also protective and possessive, and Azril is her city, a place she has nurtured and protected. It’s a city she has loved and watched grow from a tiny collection of huts to a free and beautiful place so mighty that the angels come to destroy it, which should have been the end. Instead, it’s a beginning, as Vitrine treads a hard road through the stages of grief, the beginning of her tempestuous relationship with one cursed and broken angel, and the start of a new city, rising on the ashes of the old, which they build together—one brick, one refugee, one monument at a time.
VERDICT Vo’s (The Brides of High Hill) latest takes the lyrical, mystical, otherworldly, and frequently contentious relationship between the demon and the angel and creates the kind of push-pull duality of This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, then adds a splash of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s Good Omens to tell a romantic story about two beings on opposite sides of an eternal conflict who find common ground but never peace.
Reviewed by Marlene Harris , Aug 01, 2024
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