This book has a lot of characters, and I mean a lot. Each chapter is told from a different perspective and each citizen of Ilmar help to build upon a larger story which all cleverly comes together by the end. Whilst I absolutely loved the premise of this and the fact that Tchaikovsky uses a tapestry form of narrative, I unfortunately struggled with the characters. I found many of them unmemorable and the few which I did find fascinating didn’t appear often enough for me to really learn significantly more about them. I’m the kind of reader who generally does love a large cast of characters, but I need them to hold depth and have distinct enough voices for me to be able to recognise who they are. Ilmar is, as well as being a melting pot of different nationalities, as well as suffering under the yoke of occupation, a city that has recently undergone something of an industrial revolution. Some of the immigrants have brought with them the technology of... demons. How to raise them, bind them in contracts, and have them do large scale drudge work at a pace and capacity humans can't match. And so the demons power factories, and people who worked on farms a generation before now risk limbs in the demon-run mills instead. The analogy to the industrial revolution isn't subtle here, but it doesn't have to be - it's setting the scene for a city undergoing abrupt and dramatic change. But with demons. Because why not?

Tchaikovsky again shines with his suspenseful second Final Architecture space opera (after Shards of Earth). The Architects, moon-size alien entities who destroyed Earth 50 years prior, have Continue reading » Felt like a series of short stories with no real investment to any of the characters involved. Dissapointed. But never more so than now. The city chafes under the heavy hand of the Palleseen occupation, the choke-hold of its criminal underworld, the boot of its factory owners, the weight of its wretched poor and the burden of its ancient curse. The list of characters and factions is quite large and this makes eye-reading of this book much preferred to an audiobook. The descriptions are often quite dense and without infodumps, one have often to guess what is behind the introduced concepts, like, e.g. this piece from the early chapter (most places like Gownhall or people like Allorwen aren’t described in earlier paragraphs, a reader learns what is what on a fly):

Spark of the Rebellion: After Ivarn tries to return secretly to the Gownhall and has to be saved by Shantrov and other students from soldiers, the students fortify the Gownhall Square, the Siblingries strike and begin marching in support of them, and the Vultures use the chaos to loot and burn as much Palleseen property as they can find. Maģija un aizmirsti dievi te ir atliku likām, no viena piemirsta dieva var uzlādēt maģiskās baterijas pāris kārtībsargu maģiskajiem stekiem un Pal Impērija nekad nelaiž garām savu iespēju. Ilmar tauta saprot, ka vajag revolūciju, bet ar revolūcijām ir tā, ka nekad nesanāk laika un tās vienmēr var atlikt uz rītdienu. Šī grāmata parāda arī šīs rītdienas atnākšanu. Bittersweet Ending: By the end of the book, hundreds of people are dead, including several people the characters knew, Shantrov and Lemya are both changed forever by the Reproach, and the Palleseen are still in control of the city. On the other hand, the Gownhall is allowed to remain open because the Palleseen need its knowledge, the Reproach finally finds a measure of peace, the Donjon's records have been destroyed and its prisoners freed, and the many worship-deprived gods of Ilmar are being tended to by Yasnic, leading to a small-scale religious revival.

City of Last Chances really feels like a snapshot of a city. A guided glimpse at a world on the precipice of change, where the beauty of the story is in the slow and gentle unfolding of how the unrelated combine, rather than a race to the plot line.

A major reason for this has to be the worldbuilding that Tchaikovsky always excels at. The City of Ilmar, City of Last Chances, is a melting pot of cultures and unique settings — the Allorwen with their specialization in demonic contracts, the Divinati mages, the masked and mysterious Indwellers, and the various local factions of Ravens, Vultures, and Shrikes. The Anchorwood, a normal grove for most of the month, serves as a dangerous pathway to countless other worlds during the full moon, and the Reproach is a dilapidated neighbourhood under a curse of grotesque bliss and horrific memories. The scenes where certain characters attempt to traverse the Reproach are easily among my favourite parts of this book. Despite the city's refugees, wanderers, murderers, madmen, fanatics and thieves, the catalyst, as always, will be the Anchorwood - that dark grove of trees, that primeval remnant, that portal, when the moon is full, to strange and distant shores. There are two superbly unique regions of the city that really help emphasise the story’s themes of colonisation and cultural decay, that being the Anchorwood and the Reproach. The Empire: The Palleseen Sway is a vast colonial empire, stretching over at least four countries (the Pallesand Archipelago, Allorwen, Telmark, and Nihilostes' homeland), and is the method by which the Palleseen seek to perfect the world by extinguishing religion, magic, and the cultures and languages of conquered peoples. Thanks to NetGalley and Head of Zeus for providing me with a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.