Moon Over Soho by Ben Aaronovitch

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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