The House of Shattered Wings

A frustrating read. A decent idea, but, to begin with at least, not that well executed. I found a sense of place lacking. The post war ruins of Paris didn't light up in my head like I'd hoped they might, and the HOuse itself was a missed opportunity - the frequent references to its enormous size set it up as a kind of Gormenghast, a location that could be a character itself, but this never panned out, and we only got a series of corridors and rooms, with no spatial relationship in the text. The actual characters aren't defined enough, and I had to keep flicking back to remind myself who the two characters in a conversation, and their relationship to each other, actually were.
Fairly damning criticisms so far, and yet, and yet....There's something about the book that kept me reading. The climax is genuinely exciting, and what had been a slog for the first few hundred pages turned into a sprint. I'll stick around for the next one.