Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City

K. J. Parker's Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City is a low-fantasy swirl of sardonic, unreliable narration. It is told in the style of direct address, with the narrator in full acknowledgement of his readership audience and historical context; it tells the story of how a lowly ethnic-minority army engineer lied, cheated, manipulated the bureaucracy, and used commonsense engineering-brain to protect the capital city from complete obliteration.

The narrative style was clever and comforting, but after about three chapters which end with a twist or cliffhanger, I came to expect it. This undermined my enjoyment of the unreliable narration, since it was easy to make the assumption "some stuff is lies and the rest is obscured to make a dramatic reveal later" in every chapter and always, always be correct. In the end it answered lots of questions and didn't leave me with much to mull over.

The very clever and self-contradicting narrator, in a style of direct address, the preface and addendum notes that directly disavow the historicity of the contents of the narration (it's a low-fantasy medieval walled city of no particular resemblance to anything), all the snide to-camera comments making fun of personalities around him... all these are elements which I enjoy, but overall the book didn't capture me and I found myself thinking wistfully of how excellent A Deadly Education was. This book doesn't seem like it will stick with me, but it was fun.

We've been ingenious, resourceful and inventive, and we haven't let ourselves be hindered by outmoded or irrelevant ways of thinking. It's a shame, really, because nobody will ever know how clever we were. (p 113)

This post's theme word is propugnaculum (n), "a fortress; defense; protection". The trained defense soldiers and maintenance workers are a vital part of your walled city's propugnaculum; in this case, the public gardeners! 

P.S. Every time I catch the title of this book out of the corner of my eye, it triggers my subconscious and "Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover" starts playing in my head. I had been idly humming it to myself for days before realizing that this book was the cause.

A Deadly Education

Naomi Novik's A Deadly Education is the reasonable, correct, logical sort of magical boarding school novel, which has considered the implications of magic, and childhood development, and boarding schools, and societal systems, and wants to lure you in to considering these things, too.

The overall premise is this: magic is real, and only some people can use it. (Standard so far.) The use of magic, and even merely the access to magic, draws magical predators, who are varied and horrifying and want to consume magicians --- but of course, adult wizards are in control of their magic and strong and so their creamy, gooey center is well-guarded and hard to predate. Adolescent wizards, though, are just growing in to their magical powers, and so are relatively easier to devour, plus they are not as good at hiding themselves or defending themselves.

Given these stakes, surviving to adulthood is unlikely. So the magical community built a giant fortress-cum-boarding school (located in the UK of course) which is hard (but not impossible) to attack. Unlike the Harry Potter-verse where students are whisked into a world of whimsy when they turn 11, kids in this world are unwillingly teleported at age 11 to inside the school if they are lucky enough to receive a seat. (The unlucky try to survive pubescence outside the school and generally... don't.) The school contains no adults and runs on eldritch machinery, slightly broken and haphazard since it has been impossible to service. Upon graduation, the class of 18-year-olds (who lived through years of attrition-by-monster inside the school) are forced to fight their way out through all the too-big-to-sneak-inside monsters, who have been waiting outside all year to eat them.

Unsurprisingly, a lot of them also don't survive.

But overall, the odds of surviving to adulthood are better (but still horrible) if you attend the school than if you don't.

This was a really great read (I consumed it in one day!), and the slow reveal, through the narrator's sarcasm, of the delicate details of the world was fascinating and terrible. Our narrator is a 17-yo social outcast, trying to keep her head down to avoid the ire of the popular kids but still have enough loose social connections that no one feeds her to a monster in her sleep. This is a boarding school where the usual social pressures and uncomfortable alliances of puberty are writ large: whether you have a buddy to watch your back as you brush your teeth is the difference between life and death. Every day. Every student is stressed and tired (not to mention vitamin-D-deficient and undernourished), and on top of that they are all, continuously, furiously studying magic to try to level up in time to survive. There are the usual dramas (good vs evil magic, disastrous teen flirtation, who sits at which lunch table, rooms and staircases moving around unpredictably) and some completely delightful unexpected ones (the school automagically sets your lessons, so if you get uppity it gives you harder assignments; "no one wants to be in honors classes... the school puts you in them against your will" p. 96)

The writing was great, the characters had depth and were interesting, I was not sure what would happen next, and the twists and turns of the plot felt legitimate and also incredibly catchy. I am still thinking about the choices that were made, and the ones that still remain in the future. As soon as I put the book down --- that last sentence! aaaiiiieee! --- I looked up the release date of the next book. I now impatiently await.

Highly recommended.

This post's theme word is urticaceous (adj), "relating to a nettle; stinging." Immediate identification and distinguishing between lethal and merely dangerous urticaceous growths from the dormitory ceiling is a mandatory survival skill.