hybrid havocI #AmReading Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett.
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In a city that runs on industrialized magic, a secret war will be fought to overwrite reality itself
I'm about 45% done with Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett. Hoping that the second half starts turning things up.
The biggest hurdles I've had so far kind of go hand in hand: way too much exposition, and not enough showing instead of telling. Even going so far as to pause in the middle of a fight scene to explain why the specific interplay of magic and physics is resulting in this particular outcome - completely unnecessary to explain in that moment, or maybe at all, and drags the action.
That sort of focus on weird details is pretty consistent, and appears very early when our protagonist doesn't just shoo off a rat, or just kill a rat, but punches the rat with their left hand, crushing the rat's skull. This detail is completely unimportant, and it's delivered in the middle of a tense stealth sequence.
69% done with Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett. There seem to be a lot of shortcuts taken just to help push along the plot.
Characters seem incredibly inconsistent. A character's entire personality will sometimes shift to meet the needs of the moment. Sometimes characters inextricably do things exactly counter to what is expected of them - my own expectations as a reader and the expectations of the other characters, and sometimes even what we know to have actually happened..
Another shortcut: dialogue has this weird way of sometimes being far too on-point. Like, a character will ask another character a question but it will be an incredibly leading question, driving them directly to the point that needs to be discussed. This same thing could have happened without the lead-in - none of the characters seem particularly stupid after all, so it's not like they would otherwise just ramble. But there are a lot of leading questions.
And the final shortcut I'm noticing a lot of: often times the story will just fade to black or skip ahead whenever a difficult discussion needs to happen. Now I'm not entirely against this in principal - I certainly don't need to hear every single discussion the characters have. But there's one discussion in particular where it really stood out, where character A needs to convince character B to side with character A, and all we get is "[character A] told [character B] what they needed to hear."
82% update.
Tomas (sp?) may be the most bland, flat antagonist I've ever experienced in a story. At least he's gone now.
The differences between my experience of #Foundryside so far and the glowing praise that I see for this book elsewhere... I don't know if my tastes are just shifting away from #fantasy or what. It's certainly not the only example of this in recent years. The work of Wil Wight is another good example.
I have 1 hour and 10 minutes left in the audiobook for #Foundryside. About to go for my daily walk, might go ahead and finish it. I'm at a point in the book now where all of the things I've expected to happen since very early on in the book are happening. Does that mean it's predictable, or that it's good at foreshadowing?
Let's see how the book ends.
I have finished reading #Foundryside. It did indeed end more or less the way that I expected. What I will say is that the book isn't necessarily predictable in the sense that it is just following expected tropes and such. It is foreshadowing things, but I feel like it has a very heavy hand in it, such that I wouldn't call it foreshadowing so much as telegraphing.
I'm not sure that I will continue with this series. I have yet to speak with anybody about the book that has similar issues with it, so I haven't been able to determine whether those issues persist into the other entries in the series.
Summarized my thoughts on #Foundryside in my review on #StoryGraph
https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/2ad36f20-3ab4-4c3f-bf19-fd3f0744fe17
