Read: The Rook, by Daniel O'Malley
This was a strange creature of a book. The problem, perhaps, is that it contains a dizzying array of excellent concepts and spends a little too much time focusing purely on exposition.
The book opens with a young woman waking up in a park in London, surrounded by corpses, all of them wearing latex gloves. From there, she learns that her name is Myfanwy Thomas; that she is a secret magical operative in a covert government organisation called the Chequy; that the organisation’s centuries-old enemies may be staging a comeback, and that someone from within the Chequy is trying to kill her.
She - a blank canvas at first - largely learns about all of this from a sequence of letters from her former self, and it’s these letters that suffer from a little too much exposition. Some get into her past exploits, and these are gripping, but just as many are devoted to explaining the backstories of every single character you encounter. It feels a little sometimes like reading case files, and while there’s obviously an argument that a book about someone with amnesia necessitates this level of prior explanation, that isn’t in itself an excuse.
All of that aside, though, this was wonderfully entertaining, especially so at its high points, where the characters were given the room to open up and breathe a little. There’s a captivating plot at work here that kept surprising me, and for something that definitely has genre trappings (to all intents and purposes, it’s a fantasy spy novel) it often finds a way to subvert expectations. The protagonist, while a bit saddled with quips, is a breeze to read, and by the end of this novel - the first in a series - you’re left hungry for more.