My thoughts on a couple of recent reads…

The Honours – Tim Clare

This has been a very difficult book for me to review. For starters, I loved the main character Delphine. She was extremely well-built, and her personality flowed out of the pages as if she was real. Some people have compared Delphine to His Dark Materials’ Lyra, and indeed, there is a very strong resemblance in their wilfulness, resourcefulness, and outright incredible imagination. She was a joy to read. Likewise, the writing of the book was captivating. Tim Clare wrote this novel beautifully, each passage wonderfully constructed, kept your attention and kept you coming back for more. On those merits, a fully get the praise given to The Honours. But here’s the thing… I finished the book, and I realised that actually I didn’t really gave a damn about the story. A setting so wonderfully constructed, for nothing. The book mainly spends its majority trying to keep us at our toes that a great mystery is afoot, and finally when it reaches its climax, it was m’eh. And that’s a crying shame, because it feels that all the effort creating a wonderful main character and a compelling setting went to waste. I give it 3.5 for effort, and it really was a great effort, but not that great of an execution.

The Just City – Jo Walton

I can see how this book won’t be for everyone. The premise consists of the goddess Athena deciding to build Plato’s Just City (from The Republic) as an experiment, with scholars being brought from across centuries to make it work. If you don’t care much for Greek mythology, or philosophy, chances are, you are not going to enjoy this. But as I do care, I found it fascinating, thought-provoking, powerful in so many ways. To me this has been a wonderful book, and as it ended in a cliff-hanger, can’t wait for the sequel. You don’t really need to have read Plato’s work to enjoy it (my knowledge of Plato mainly comes from having read “The World According to Sophie”, another wonderful book). I found The Just City an excellent read, and very happy to have come across it. 5 out of 5.