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Sep. 21st, 2014 05:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsI'm really glad I read Kate Milford's The Broken Lands before leaving New York and (specifically) Brooklyn -- it's such a New York book! And a proper one (unlike the last New York fantasy I read, sorry Joe Golem and the Drowning City.)
The Broken Lands is a YA novel set mostly in Brooklyn and occasionally in Manhattan towards the end of the nineteenth century, during (plot-relevantly) the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, and starring:
- Plucky Orphan A, Sam, a Coney Island card-sharp with a MASSIVE starry-eyed crush on
- Plucky Orphan B, Jin, a Chinese fireworks-maker in a traveling show, who doesn't have all that much time to sort out how she feels about this weird card-sharp and his starry-eyed crush because she's too busy dealing with the ritually murdered dead body over which she has just stumbled
The cast is rounded out by a number of other plucky orphans, a number of Union Army vets with varying degrees of PTSD and supernatural experience, and some folktale-based villains.
Most of the actual plot centers around the search for people who hold the magical heart of the city, because the villains want to take it over and the good guys obviously would like to stop that from happening, which means you get all kinds of stuff about, like, history and memory and folklore and responsibility, and assumptions made about things and people that hold a city together and the kinds of things and people that actually hold a city together, which OBVIOUSLY I LOVE, NEW YORK FEELINGS UP THE WAZOO. It took a while for the story to grab me at the beginning, but by the end I was all in.
Also the characters are charming, and (unsurprisingly but pleasingly nonetheless) the climax has a couple of really nice set pieces involving inordinately complex card games with the devil, inordinately complex magical fireworks, and the inordinately complex real-life construction of the Brooklyn Bridge. Again: NEW YORK FEELINGS TO THE MAX.
One thing I do want to warn for, though: Jin's tragic backstory -- not spelled out in graphic detail, but referenced pretty clearly nonetheless -- is pretty child-abuse heavy and involves both footbinding and the San Francisco Chinese brothels. It didn't feel exploitative to me, and it's not really the focus of Jin's story, but other people's perceptions may vary!
The Broken Lands is a YA novel set mostly in Brooklyn and occasionally in Manhattan towards the end of the nineteenth century, during (plot-relevantly) the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, and starring:
- Plucky Orphan A, Sam, a Coney Island card-sharp with a MASSIVE starry-eyed crush on
- Plucky Orphan B, Jin, a Chinese fireworks-maker in a traveling show, who doesn't have all that much time to sort out how she feels about this weird card-sharp and his starry-eyed crush because she's too busy dealing with the ritually murdered dead body over which she has just stumbled
The cast is rounded out by a number of other plucky orphans, a number of Union Army vets with varying degrees of PTSD and supernatural experience, and some folktale-based villains.
Most of the actual plot centers around the search for people who hold the magical heart of the city, because the villains want to take it over and the good guys obviously would like to stop that from happening, which means you get all kinds of stuff about, like, history and memory and folklore and responsibility, and assumptions made about things and people that hold a city together and the kinds of things and people that actually hold a city together, which OBVIOUSLY I LOVE, NEW YORK FEELINGS UP THE WAZOO. It took a while for the story to grab me at the beginning, but by the end I was all in.
Also the characters are charming, and (unsurprisingly but pleasingly nonetheless) the climax has a couple of really nice set pieces involving inordinately complex card games with the devil, inordinately complex magical fireworks, and the inordinately complex real-life construction of the Brooklyn Bridge. Again: NEW YORK FEELINGS TO THE MAX.
One thing I do want to warn for, though: Jin's tragic backstory -- not spelled out in graphic detail, but referenced pretty clearly nonetheless -- is pretty child-abuse heavy and involves both footbinding and the San Francisco Chinese brothels. It didn't feel exploitative to me, and it's not really the focus of Jin's story, but other people's perceptions may vary!
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Date: 2014-09-22 05:35 am (UTC)Yeah, I'm not sure if others might find Jin's backstory problematic. It didn't so much to me, because her backstory wasn't allowed to define her? Her past is important but it doesn't define her, and Jin is always the active player in her own narrative.
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Date: 2014-09-22 05:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-09-22 11:28 pm (UTC)Yeah, I felt pretty much the same way about Jin's backstory -- I actually really liked how it was handled, how her backstory certainly shaped her and was not erasable, but definitely didn't make her a tragic broken person. Even though in general I wish writers would stop jumping straight to ZOMG SAN FRANCISCO BROTHELS when writing 19th-century Chinese-American characters, this is definitely one of the better handlings of it I've seen!
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Date: 2014-09-22 11:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-09-23 06:06 am (UTC)(Though I wouldn't complain about getting more of Jin's story too. I would totally read the further adventures of Travelling Fireworks Prodigy and her starstruck card-sharp boyfriend!)
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Date: 2014-09-23 09:51 pm (UTC)(AS WOULD I. I want them together either to fight crime or commit crime! Either would do, I'm not picky.)