Combined book review | August 2017

August has flown by and that means it’s time to show you the books I read. I only read two books. However if I add up the amount of pages that I read between those two books, it is close to 1200 pages. So even though the amount of titles I read is not too impressive, it is still pretty close to what I usually read. I just felt like investing some time in reading something more hefty with it being summer break and all that. Here’s the two books I read last month.

Jay Kristoff – Nevernight
Steven Price – By Gaslight

Jay Kristoff – Nevernight

Mia has yearned for revenge ever since she saw her dad hanged for treason as a little girl. After ending up on the streets of Godsgrave in a world where the Sun never sets, she is taken in by an ex-member of the Red Church: a school for assassins. He trains her and we follow her journey as she tries to find the lair of the Red Church, trains harder than she has ever done before and learns what happens if you put your faith in the wrong sort of people.

This book was a slow burn but a good one. The first 100 pages or so were slow to get through as the worldbuilding is mostly done through footnotes that detail gods, history and politics of fictional Godsgrave. Through flashbacks we learn who Mia is, where she comes from and why she wants to become an assassin of the Red Church. This is an action packed YA fantasy novel that for once was not filled to the brim with angsty romance or feigning over boys. Yes, this is a good one, but one that needs commitment.

Steven Price – By Gaslight

It is 1885, after chasing a woman down the streets of London, American private detective William Pinkterton, son to Allen Pinkerton founder of the Pinkerton Agency, is informed she is dead. In London to investigate a curious case of a man his dad never managed to catch, Pinkterton becomes obsessed with his search. Helped by a reluctant Scotland Yard, he meets the mysterious Adam Foole, who knew the victim years before. To solve the murder and the mystery man, Pinkerton has to go into the underbelly of Victorian London.

When I bought this, I thought it would be a past-paced, action-packed detective story. Boy was I wrong. I still enjoyed this terribly, but it is a very different book than what it appears to be. This is more a faux historical detective novel that takes liberty in its storytelling of taking wide arcs through time and space to contribute to the story. The two main characters, Pinkerton and Foole, have their backstories told elaborately and vigorously, going back to their boyhood, through the American Civil War and their adult careers. A slow, but very satisfying read that isn’t as much of a whodunnit as you might deduce from the blurb on the back, but much more of a character study of two men who think they are opposites while they actually have much more in common than they think they do.

What have you read in August?