TITLE: In the Watchful City
AUTHOR: S. Qiouyi Lu
192 pages, Tor.Com, ISBN 9781250792983 (paperback, also available in audio and e-book)
DESCRIPTION: (from Goodreads): The city of Ora is watching. Anima is an extrasensory human tasked with surveilling and protecting Ora’s citizens via a complex living network called the Gleaming. Although ær world is restricted to what æ can see and experience through the Gleaming, Anima takes pride and comfort in keeping Ora safe from harm. When a mysterious outsider enters the city carrying a cabinet of curiosities from around with the world with a story attached to each item, Anima’s world expands beyond the borders of Ora to places―and possibilities―æ never before imagined to exist. But such knowledge leaves Anima with a question that throws into doubt ær entire purpose: What good is a city if it can’t protect its people?
MY RATING: 4 out of 5 stars
MY THOUGHTS: Stories have the power to change lives. Cliché, but very true … if the reader’s/listener’s mind is open to new ideas and to changing. Anima, the main character of In the Watchful City, starts out resistant to change and accepting of the party line. In fact, the first scene of the book shows us Anima using ær ability to inhabit and control animals in an attempt to capture someone trying to escape the city of Ora. It’s a tense, action-packed, vertiginous scene that sets Anima’s character up clearly, letting the reader see where æ is mentally and emotionally through the physical action. Why the runner is running is a mystery to Anima and to the reader until the very last moments of the scene, in which Anima must confront ær prejudices about citizens of Ora and citizens of neighboring Skyland.
Anima’s life is thrown into disarray with the arrival in Ora of Vessel, the mysterious outsider with stories to share. Those stories come at a price – Anima will have to give something of ærself in return – but as with the best storyteller/listener exchanges, Anima gets to decide what that something is and when it will be given. Anima even gets to decide which stories æ wants to hear of the plethora Vessel seems to have available. Each story has an incremental effect on how Anima views Ora, its history, and its rules, as well as what Anima wants ær life to be like going forward.
The sharing of stories affects Vessel as well, who has ser own history and challenges revealed through the visits with Anima. Where Anima is resistant to change, Vessel is actively looking to change ser circumstances and future. The stories affect the taller as much as the listener.
(A note here about pronouns: yes, both Anima and Vessel are non-binary humans who use different sets of pronouns. Some of the characters in the stories Vessel shares are non-binary, some are cisgender, some are transgender. In addition to a full spectrum of gender identities, the characters in the stories express a wide range of sexual identities as well.)
In the Watchful City is a wonderful hybrid of “stories within the story” and “mosaic novel” modes of writing. The stories Vessel shares are not directly connected to Anima or Vessel’s individual lives (although they clearly have an affect on the future course of those lives), but they are connected to each other (in sometimes obvious and sometimes subtle ways), building for the reader a sense of the shared history of Ora and the Skylands. Each of the stories also stands perfectly well on their own, without the connective tissue of the main action of the novel. Any one of them could appear in a magazine or an anthology and be a fantastic read. It takes, I think, a certain mastery of the form to make that work as effectively as it does here.
I should mention some content warnings: there is on-the-page suicide of a character, and several instances of physical or emotional abuse including the tradition of foot-binding. Foot-binding is just one of many aspects of Asian history, and in particular Chinese and Taiwanese history, that the book builds off to create the world in which it takes place.
In the Watchful City is a book whose core questions of identity and expectations, complacency and change, linger with the reader long after the final page. I cannot wait to see where S. Qiouyi Lu takes us next.
I received an electronic Advance Reading Copy from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. The book released last month.