TITLE: The City in Glass
AUTHOR: Nghi Vo
215 pages, TorDotCom, ISBN 9781250348272 (hardcover; also e-book and audio)
MY RATING: 5 stars out of 5
Nghi Vo has quickly become one of those handful of authors whose work I will buy without even reading a synopsis about the plot and whose new books I will usually read as soon as I purchase (See also: Seanan McGuire, ‘Nathan Burgoine, Silvia Moreno-Garcia), even if I’m a bit slow when it comes to posting the reviews.
The City in Glass, Vo’s latest novel, is a stunning portrait of responding to grief, recovering from trauma, and finding common ground. The demon Vitrine has been the largely unseen patron of the city of Azril for hundreds of years. Very few of the citizenry know her as more than a legend, and the few that do know she’s real tread a careful path with her. She has loved the city since she first arrived from another continent and has guided it to its current glory. And then a group of angels arrive, declare the city sinful, and destroy it. The angels begin to depart to their higher realm once their “work” is done, but Vitrine manages to curse one of them who then must be left behind. This all happens in the first chapter of the book and is the impetus for the rest of the action, so I’m not really spoiling anything. This first chapter is a master class in how to set a reader up, going from joyful immersion in a new setting to the complete destruction of that setting in a few short pages. Again, since I hadn’t read the front cover flap synopsis, I had no idea what was coming, and I was as devastated as Vitrine.
Vitrine, being immortal, does not have to move on from the ruins of her beloved city to find life and sustenance elsewhere. And so she begins the slow process of watching the land heal and foster new life – and thus, eventually after hundreds of years, a new settlement for her to watch over. We watch Vitrine move through various stages of grief for the loss of not just so many loved ones (both human and animal) but for the mementos and landmarks of the city’s long history. (I cannot help, in retrospect, compare Vitrine’s reactions to what I’ve watched friends in North Carolina go through thanks to last fall’s hurricane, or what I imagine the people of Los Angeles will be going through as they strive to move on from the current fires of winter 2025.) Vitrine cycles through sadness, anger, depression, and excitement for what develops – but Vo makes it clear that these emotions are not compartmentalized or managed on a straight timeline. They overlap, they recur. Setbacks for the city inspire setbacks in Vitrine’s mental and emotional state.
And the presence of the angel she cursed, the being she holds partly responsible (not fully, because the blame lies with the angel’s cohort as well, but they are beyond Vitrine’s reach), does not help her recovery and in fact hinders it for quite some time. Thanks to her curse, the angel is tied to the land that once held Azril and thus is tied to Vitrine. He also goes through a cycle of defiance (that he did anything wrong), regret (at what’s he’s done), and hope (that he can be part of healing the damage to Vitrine’s heart). It is never easy to heal from trauma when the cause of your trauma is still present and a part of your life, and Vo explores that emotional territory beautifully and without attempting to provide any kind of easy “one size fits all” answer to how to navigate the situation.
I also loved the time-lapse “development of a civilization from small settlement to world power” aspect of the book. Vo takes the new city through the stages of agriculture-based to commerce-based and gives it threats domestic, foreign, human, and natural (including a plague). This could have been a much longer, much more detailed novel about the city’s history alone, but viewing the highlights (and low points) of that history through the eyes of an immortal felt more appropriate. This story really is Vitrine’s, and so much can change in the relative blink of an immortal’s eyes.
I cannot recommend The City in Glass highly enough, especially to readers who enjoy deep character studies accompanied by intriguing worldbuilding.
I received an electronic advance reading copy of this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review. The City in Glass was published in October 2024, so this review is a bit late.