Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett
Sancia Grado is a thief, and a damn good one. And her latest target, a heavily guarded warehouse on Tevanne’s docks, is nothing her unique abilities can’t handle.
But unbeknownst to her, Sancia’s been sent to steal an artifact of unimaginable power, an object that could revolutionize the magical technology known as scriving. The Merchant Houses who control this magic--the art of using coded commands to imbue everyday objects with sentience--have already used it to transform Tevanne into a vast, remorseless capitalist machine. But if they can unlock the artifact’s secrets, they will rewrite the world itself to suit their aims.
Now someone in those Houses wants Sancia dead, and the artifact for themselves. And in the city of Tevanne, there’s nobody with the power to stop them.
To have a chance at surviving—and at stopping the deadly transformation that’s underway—Sancia will have to marshal unlikely allies, learn to harness the artifact’s power for herself, and undergo her own transformation, one that will turn her into something she could never have imagined.
This book takes a while to catch on. The beginning third is full of complicated world building, and sets the scenes for the story to come. There is so much going on at the beginning of the book that it easily feels overwhelming.
However, the story really picks up as the book progresses, and it settles into a fun rhythm. The plot is relatively interesting, and it has a couple of plot twists thrown in that make it more fun.
The book attempts to make commentary on slavery and personal freedom, but it gets a little lost in all the other noise, and everything seems a little too chaotic for any unified message to come through.
The characters are all pretty one dimensional. The evil ones are evil. The suspicious ones do some bad stuff, and so on. The world building is interesting, and was something that I’d never seen, even though the process of scriving just seems so complicated, and I really zoned out every time they started talking about gods or mythology or history.
Nothing really stands out about the book, and it’s really neither good nor bad. However, I like the cover, so there’s that.
But unbeknownst to her, Sancia’s been sent to steal an artifact of unimaginable power, an object that could revolutionize the magical technology known as scriving. The Merchant Houses who control this magic--the art of using coded commands to imbue everyday objects with sentience--have already used it to transform Tevanne into a vast, remorseless capitalist machine. But if they can unlock the artifact’s secrets, they will rewrite the world itself to suit their aims.
Now someone in those Houses wants Sancia dead, and the artifact for themselves. And in the city of Tevanne, there’s nobody with the power to stop them.
To have a chance at surviving—and at stopping the deadly transformation that’s underway—Sancia will have to marshal unlikely allies, learn to harness the artifact’s power for herself, and undergo her own transformation, one that will turn her into something she could never have imagined.
This book takes a while to catch on. The beginning third is full of complicated world building, and sets the scenes for the story to come. There is so much going on at the beginning of the book that it easily feels overwhelming.
However, the story really picks up as the book progresses, and it settles into a fun rhythm. The plot is relatively interesting, and it has a couple of plot twists thrown in that make it more fun.
The book attempts to make commentary on slavery and personal freedom, but it gets a little lost in all the other noise, and everything seems a little too chaotic for any unified message to come through.
The characters are all pretty one dimensional. The evil ones are evil. The suspicious ones do some bad stuff, and so on. The world building is interesting, and was something that I’d never seen, even though the process of scriving just seems so complicated, and I really zoned out every time they started talking about gods or mythology or history.
Nothing really stands out about the book, and it’s really neither good nor bad. However, I like the cover, so there’s that.
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