Nic

Leigh Bardugo is so good at historical, I hope she writes more! She is starting to write the same sort of characters though, often her side characters are much more interesting. This is the case for The Familiar - there's so many historical references, interesting views on history and characters that I wish we could have explored a lot more than the romance.

Not a lot I can say without spoiling everything.

I was delighted by the mystery though troubled by the darkness of the world and some of the terrible characters. I'm still so excited by the way Turton can surprise me.

His plotting is so so good and his prose is improving with each book he writes, can't wait to see what's next.

I liked the characters, but the way the world worked was a bit arbitrary at times, making the plot much less engaging.

As someone not from NY, Jemisin did a great job of showing what the city is like and portraying authentic experiences - She said she did a ton of research in the acknowledgements and I totally believe it.

This gave me a similar feeling to The Seven Deaths - a crunchy, complex mystery where you're wondering 'what is going on?' as often as 'whodunnit'

There were some fun ideas and interesting questions to ponder, I loved the point of view and there were some greatly intense as well as some nice and sweet moments.

It didn't quite measure up to Seven Deaths for me, just because of the loss of tension and questions for the middle chunk, and perhaps the characters being much more simplistic. Maybe not simple, but a lot more of an open book - most of the characters didn't felt like a mystery to me.

I loved it, I'm keen to read all of Turton's books!