Moon Over Soho by Ben Aaronovitch

[lightreads]

Moon Over Soho by Ben Aaronovitch

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Not as good as Rivers of London -- the plot is sloppy, he accidentally replaced the romance with a cliche, etc. – but I liked it anyway for reasons that had nothing to do with the London copper urban fantasy bits.



This book made so much sense to me. It’s all quiet and subliminal, the way it would be, but this first person narration is just so dead on for what it’s like to be the token minority. The unspoken sense that everyone else is always going to have an opinion bout you or a reaction to you, and that managing them is always going to be your problem and not the other guy’s. Dry, ironic acceptance of that. The immediate sense of . . . conspiracy when you meet someone else who is like you, the way you acknowledge each other in passing -- we are here on sufferance, what a fuckin’ world, right?



Totally different minority status – the narrator of this book is a person of color and I am not – but yeah. Rang some bells. Living in the interstices. Reminded me flickeringly of sitting in a crowded meeting with my disabled boss, the two of us having a coded conversation about how to survive a particularly insidious bit of workplace ablism, and all the nondisabled people in the room having no idea we were discussing anything important at all.



Pretty deft, interesting stuff for a silly bit of London detective urban fantasy.





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Comments

[lightreads]

"When two ethnic officers meet for the first time the first question you ask can be about anything but the second question you ask is always, 'Why did you join?'"




Ha. I set electronic bookmarks as I read. Sometimes a couple per book, but often just one, with the notion that this bit is what my review will be about, even if I don't know why yet. And for this book, I marked that passage right there.

What did you think of Leslie in this book?


I was pretty pleased. I mean, I wish she'd been around more, but that's because the A-plot was so woobly and she was being really quite interesting in the background. I was moved by their relationship -- skipping the guilt wangst, the way she knew not to watch him when he first saw her face because it would hurt too much. They felt very solid to me, much more sincerely friends than in the first book, and it was nice.

I'm not entirely sure about the curveball at the end. On the one hand, I'm delighted she's getting set up for an arc, but on the other hand I dug the dynamic they had going where Peter was kind of a dope with access to magic, and she was a really good cop with access to, um, common sense.

I suspect her arc will be about her basic question here: why can't magic undo what magic did? Peter's response -- you don't heal a burn with fire -- was both interesting and, I think, not the final word on the subject from these books. The whole thing could go off into an obsessive healing quest, but I'm hoping not.

Someone on Goodreads said the first book was the interesting show pilot, and this book is the weird transitional second episode, so that means now we get the really interesting stuff. I hope so.

[kate_nepveu]

I liked her agency and the callback to the first time Peter did the same thing. But obsessive healing quest would certainly be bad.

I'm a little dubious about the apparent to-be-continued plot element, but since I'm clearly not reading these for the plots, oh well.