Foundryside

This book has its flaws (and they're glaringly obvious too) but damn if the world and the magic system doesn't pull you in. In most other books displaying the storytelling problems that this one does, I'd probably have rated this much lower, if not completely DNFed long ago. Foundryside had the huge, huge advantage that it has such a compelling and fascinating world, lore, and magic system that it managed to get away with its problems and still shine.

With a tragic past behind her, Sancia Grado makes her way being a sneak thief in the seedy underbelly of Tevanne. What enables her to have survived so long and be so good at what she does are certain talents that she possesses. When she touches an object, she feels everything they do, so touching a building allows her to instantly know how many guards are positioned within it and where, and where the weaknesses in its defences are. Things go wrong in Sancia's latest job, however, where she had been instructed to steal a precious cargo from a safe. Out of curiosity, Sancia opens the parcel that she has just stolen and her life is never the same again.

Probably one of the main attractions of this book to me is the world and the magic system. Tevanne, and indeed the world that Sancia lives in, is fascinated by scriving, a process in which objects can be “re-written” to believe in a different reality from its own. Wheels can be scrived to believe they are rolling down a hill even while they are on flat ground, essentially propelling it forwards. People have also found ways to control such scrivings, thus being able to maneuver the wheels in certain directions given by a lever - essentially inventing driving by magic instead of by fuel and engine. That's really just the start of it. We learn more about this vast and complex magic system along the way, and it only gets crazier and crazier. Most stories rely on plot alone to provide a hook for readers to keep on reading until the end (and there's nothing wrong with that), but in this one I felt that, while the plot had some hook to it, the revelations of how the magic system worked also kept me going. I wanted to know more and find out more.

It's odd that in a book where there are a number of main characters running around doing things, I found myself more endeared to the number of semi-sentient inordinate objects like Clef and the Mountain in particular, but sometimes also all the random scrived objects that they talk to and befuddle. Because Tevanne is basically a shit hole of a city, it makes complete sense that all the people in it are either really jaded or really corrupted, or both. However, it doesn't make for very endearing characters that I can get attached to. The death(s) of any of the main characters may not have made me blink an eye.

A major problem of the book that was immediately obvious from the beginning chapters was Bennett's storytelling style. Instead of the classic “showing, not telling” approach, Bennett constantly adds info-dump after info-dump into his narrative. The first few chapters were a fairly obvious set-up for him to explain this world and magic system to us - it felt almost like a tutorial sequence in a video game. There were actual paragraphs where Bennett just ruminates about how Sancia's talents worked, exactly what she can sense and what she can't, and it's all done in an expository way instead of us seeing it play out in the plot or in a relevant scene. It felt a little unpolished and jarring, but Bennett had the advantage of having also built a really compelling world to distract me from those flaws.

A lot of things also happened illogically or way too conveniently. One point I noted was how Sancia, a hardened and jaded street urchin who has survived a lot of violence and treachery, also seems to scream at every thing that shocks her, even during an adrenaline-charged situation where people are firing bolts at her. That's not really how I'd expect someone whose entire means of survival is steathily infiltrating into places and stealing things to behave. I particularly had issues with the bit in Ch 26 when Sancia gets her body taken over by Clef, and he starts having a very interesting discussion with Orso about the nature of scriving, and Sancia just randomly starts fading in and out of consciousness even though there is no good reason for her to do so, and she only catches very convenient snatches of the conversation between Clef and Orso as this happens. I was so mad at this part!! Especially when she finally regains consciousness permanently just at the bit where she miraculously figured out and had to make a dramatic announcement to the party that Clef must've been a person before this. And then she never faints again even though they have a somewhat lengthy discussion about Clef's previous identity after that.

The book has a lot of flaws, and a lot of them are glaringly obvious. I wouldn't fault someone who chose to DNF because of them, especially if the world and magic system doesn't compel them. Personally though, I thoroughly enjoyed the setting so much that I was able to just glaze over the flaws (which would otherwise have driven me close to DNFing too). I'd continue the series just because I really want to know more about the lore of this world.