House of Shattered Wings by Aliette de Bodard

[lightreads]

And thus begins a year of reading only women. Or, more accurately, not reading men.

The House of Shattered Wings

4/5. House politics and old curses in alt history post war Paris ruled largely by fallen angels.

This novel is basically manga. Just, you know, *gestures*, the esthetics of the thing. This book is all fallen-down churches, and underwater dragons in the Seine, and trees squeezing buildings to death, and fallen angels wearing wings made of metal and blades.

I would have said, if I'd known what I was getting into, that this isn't my sort of thing. But this worked for me anyway. These fallen angels don't remember why they fell, or much of what came before; they cannot expect miracles or answered prayers, and there is a hole in their lives where God no longer is. The whole book is, in the negative spaces, about that lack, without ever being particularly about religion, if you get me. It's a book about being betrayed, and falling from grace, and falling….and falling. The same story plays out a good half dozen times here, with the angels and their God, with the angels and their students, with a soldier and his emperor, and each person falls in their own way.

Lovely, with a flavor of decaying decadence about it. Not my thing, and yet somehow my thing.

Comments

[kate_nepveu]

Thanks, this is useful. I bought this on vague principle but haven't been in the right mood, and now I have a better sense of what that mood should be.