Silkpunk. Short. A land of elemental magic, twin children born to a cruel empress and given to a monastery, and an uprising in which the intertwining of magic and new technologies is becoming ever more destructive. Really like the world building, and the writing is effective, but the story felt like it wasn’t enough. On the one hand, the short and punchy approach to storytelling fit the writing as well as the feel that I think the author was trying to create, and I did enjoy it. But particularly later in the book, the pattern of having a few short chapters portraying important, intense events and then skipping ahead a few years got to be a bit unsatisfying. Not that it will stop me from checking out this author again, but it felt like the world and the premise could easily bear a longer and more complex story – What’s really going on with this uprising? What are the more subtle implications of this non-binary-at-birth and choose-a-gender-when-you’re-older gender system? – without turning it into the sort of interminable fantasy epic that I’d no longer be likely to pick up.
Originally posted by Scott on Goodreads.