Paperback, 608 pages
English language
Published Feb. 2, 2020 by Orbit.
Four years ago, two girls went looking for monsters on Bodmin Moor. Only one came back.
Lee thought she'd lost Mal, but now her friend has miraculously returned. But what happened that day on the moors? And where has she been all this time? The answers will open the door to a world beyond anything either of them might have imagined.
Normally I am a big fan of Adrian Tchaikovsky, but this novel proved to be surprisingly hard going.
There are a lot of interesting ideas in here, and the ending works really well. But it did take long time to get there.
It's one of those Adrian Tchaikovsky novels that has alternatively-evolved sapient animals in it, but it also has an unexpected amount of queer characters. Tchaikovsky tends to be good at the former, and this book is not an exception; he also handles the latter well enough, though if you are not okay with bigotry exhibited by some of the more contemptible characters being part of the plot, you may want to skip this one.
The novel starts out kind of slow and takes a while to ramp up while you want to scream at the characters to figure it out already. In the middle, it may seem to be a bit predictable, although it does take some interesting twists in the last third, which subverts that impression a bit.
Overall, a fun parallel universe story, if you're into that sort of thing, even if not an exceptional one.
Wide-spanning and imaginative. If you're feeling sceptic in the beginning, give it until at least the second set of characters are introduced proper—I feel that's when the book was coming into its stride.
Consistently entertaining and engaging, I never felt like I was slogging through a chapter to reach the end. At times, a bit too many pop-cultural references, but within acceptable bounds given the YA bent of the novel.
I'd say this is recommended if you're a fan of other Tchaikovsky novels :)
