I really hesitated in ordering this book. This was partly because it's a debut novel, and I wasn't sure I had the patience for one of those right now; but it was mostly because I'm getting a little burned out on the noir style, and I didn't know if I could give another noir-influenced SF/F novel a fair shot as a result.
The first half of the book went better than I expected. It was a very typical noir set-up, full of disconnected people carving out an existence on the fringes of society through the judicious application of violence and a relaxed (but not nonexistent) moral code. The hero, of course, gets drawn back into the world he gave up by a beautiful damsel in distress, and in trying to save her is forced to reexamine his life -- past and future. The nice thing about this familiar set-up was that despite some first-novel clunkiness in the exposition, the story was paced quite well; I would probably even describe it with all the appropriate t-words: taut, and tense, and thrilling.
It bogged down a little, for me, in the latter stages of the middle when it turned into a superhumans-with-powers novel, full of rhetoric about choosing sides in the coming war, a war in which mere humans are likely to be nothing more than pawns and casualties. I have liked noir in the past and am simply tired of its tropes at the moment; I've never liked the tropes of the superpower stories, so this turn of events made me wrinkle my nose a bit.
But the climax redeemed all, made me happy I requested the novel and happy to start pushing it on my friends. Because rather than playing the noir tropes straight, Jama-Everett neatly subverts them, proving the tag line of the jacket description accurate rather than a bunch of hot air. Ultimately, this is indeed a novel about hope and commitment, one about building communities rather than tearing them down. I suppose I should have suspected this from the beginning; Taggert is a healer, after all, not just a killer, and for the chance to read about that sort of hero (particularly a male one!) I'd put up with a great deal more than just some tropes I dislike.
The first half of the book went better than I expected. It was a very typical noir set-up, full of disconnected people carving out an existence on the fringes of society through the judicious application of violence and a relaxed (but not nonexistent) moral code. The hero, of course, gets drawn back into the world he gave up by a beautiful damsel in distress, and in trying to save her is forced to reexamine his life -- past and future. The nice thing about this familiar set-up was that despite some first-novel clunkiness in the exposition, the story was paced quite well; I would probably even describe it with all the appropriate t-words: taut, and tense, and thrilling.
It bogged down a little, for me, in the latter stages of the middle when it turned into a superhumans-with-powers novel, full of rhetoric about choosing sides in the coming war, a war in which mere humans are likely to be nothing more than pawns and casualties. I have liked noir in the past and am simply tired of its tropes at the moment; I've never liked the tropes of the superpower stories, so this turn of events made me wrinkle my nose a bit.
But the climax redeemed all, made me happy I requested the novel and happy to start pushing it on my friends. Because rather than playing the noir tropes straight, Jama-Everett neatly subverts them, proving the tag line of the jacket description accurate rather than a bunch of hot air. Ultimately, this is indeed a novel about hope and commitment, one about building communities rather than tearing them down. I suppose I should have suspected this from the beginning; Taggert is a healer, after all, not just a killer, and for the chance to read about that sort of hero (particularly a male one!) I'd put up with a great deal more than just some tropes I dislike.
