Wednesday, October 13, 2021

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: City of Shattered Light by Claire Winn

 



Full Disclosure:  This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on October 19, 2021 in exchange for a potential review.  I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.


City of Shattered Light is a YA scifi novel from debut author Claire Winn, and it's clearly the first in a series (whether that be a duology, trilogy, or something else, I don't know).  The story features a pair of point of view characters from divergent backgrounds - tech empire heiress (and hacker/tech expert) Asa and gunslinging smuggler Riven - and smashes them together in a story dealing with families (both blood and found families), AIs, aliens, crime lords, and questions about dreams and trust.  

It's also a story with a bunch of tropes that result in plot turns and twists often being a bit predictable, which does prevent this from really being a big winner....but still, the writing never drags, the characters are solid and enjoyable, and I never really wanted to put it down.  So yeah, this is a solid debut, even if it never quite hits that next level to make it an outstanding one.  

----------------------------------------------------Plot Summary-------------------------------------------------------
17 year old Asa Almeida is publicly the heiress to her father's rich tech empire....but her father barely lets her in to the company secrets about its technology projects, and fails to ever give her respect....and she has it better than her older sister Kaya, whose mind is key to their new "Winterdark Project".  But when Kaya asks Asa for help getting away from their father, she balks....only for her father to upload Kaya's mind to an experimental alien brain as part of a process of getting rid of Kaya for good.  Desperate to make up for her cowardice, Asa flees with her sister's digitized mind...only to wind up in the crosshairs of a deadly bounty hunter on the outlaw planet of Requiem.  

Riven Hawthorne, gunslinging smuggler on the streets of Requiem, cares only about two things - 1. making a name for herself and her crew, so that she's remembered after she's gone and 2. protecting Ty, the brother of the man she loved.  But when a mission goes bad thanks to the interference with a notorious bounty hunter, she and her team find themselves hunted by a matriarch of Requiem's underground, and their only shot of surviving is to get money fast...like by robbing that same bounty hunter.  But what Riven doesn't count on is the bounty being not some criminal....but Asa.  

For Asa, Riven's interference might just allow her the chance to survive and escape with her sister to safety...except Riven has a grudge against her father and the project Asa clearly didn't know enough about, meaning Asa doesn't dare divulge her true identity.  And then there's the nasty computer virus, which acts almost like an artificial intelligence, that is causing disruptions throughout Requiem, and seems to be hunting after her....and the remains of Kaya that she carries.  For Asa and Riven to survive, they'll need to find a way to work together, despite their secrets, or else they might not last long enough to get off the planet...
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
City of Shattered Light is told in a pretty classic YA manner - featuring two point of view characters from contrasting worlds from whose perspective the story alternates between (although the book doesn't alternate every chapter).  Unsurprisingly also, the two heroines wind up being attracted to each other - although both are bisexual and Asa features another love interest as well (and the story surprisingly doesn't turn into either a love triangle or polyamory, since Asa doesn't really have time to contrast the two possibilities - as the two characters get to know each other more and more...and as secrets are revealed.  The general setting of the world is pretty standard honestly - you have a rich overclass living on their own part of this galaxy, with the lower class and often criminal planet of Requiem ruled by a criminal Duchess thanks to some collaborating Feds (think Nar Shaddaa from old Star Wars canon).  

But Winn makes this work thanks to her two characters being very well done - plus one really well done secondary character.  Riven is a really fun gunslinger - utterly reckless and desperate to both protect Ty and make a name for herself before she dies from the disease she suffers from, she's foul mouthed and willing to do almost anything to get what she wants...which makes her unpredictable and fun to follow and root for.  And her caring for her team as a found family is very well done.  Asa is similarly well done for the most part (one exception below), as the privileged girl in the underworld for the first time who has to use her skills to help the team, and finds herself getting more and more brave by necessity even as she is so scared.  She's quick thinking with her mechanical and programming skills, and she learns to be a bit ruthless on her own....but only when necessary as opposed to Riven's willingness to do so as a first resort.  And secondary character Ty, as the boy who doesn't want to kill anyone (and so he goes for chokeholds) who wants to save Riven and finds himself smitten with Asa is a really strong secondary character.  

And these characters, plus two other members of the team and Riven's pet AI, form a nice group as the plot never basically lets up from action sequence to action sequence, with small bits of rest in between as the party finds themselves caught between various factions throughout.  It makes the plot have a really nice pace that makes it easy to go through quite quickly, and the action sequences and other parts of the plot (such as the romantic attraction) work generally pretty well.  

That said, there are a few hangups.  Again some of the plot twists are incredibly predictable, which will make you groan when they turn out exactly as you'd have thought pages and pages beforehand.  The drama milked from Asa hiding her identity from Riven is a bit cliche, although how Riven winds up repaying that "betrayal" did surprise.  More annoyingly, the plot relies upon Asa being a skilled mechanic and tech person who somehow apparently never used that skill to look into her dad's affairs before the book's plot, despite her prior frustration with being locked out of them, which leads to her having a level of ignorance about it all that is just kind of unbelievable given how smart she is throughout this novel.  It's a bit baffling really.  

Overall though, this is a solid novel, and it ends on a not too surprising but still interesting cliffhanger - with a satisfying ending before that point to boot.  I might come back for the sequel.  

Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)