The City in Glass

August 1, 2024

Vitrine is a demon--immortal, powerful, capricious, and malicious. She's also protective and possessive, and Azril is her city, a place she has nurtured and protected. It's a city she has loved and watched grow from a tiny collection of huts to a free and beautiful place so mighty that the angels come to destroy it, which should have been the end. Instead, it's a beginning, as Vitrine treads a hard road through the stages of grief, the beginning of her tempestuous relationship with one cursed and broken angel, and the start of a new city, rising on the ashes of the old, which they build together--one brick, one refugee, one monument at a time. VERDICT Vo's (The Brides of High Hill) latest takes the lyrical, mystical, otherworldly, and frequently contentious relationship between the demon and the angel and creates the kind of push-pull duality of This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, then adds a splash of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's Good Omens to tell a romantic story about two beings on opposite sides of an eternal conflict who find common ground but never peace.--Marlene Harris

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Starred review from August 19, 2024
Hugo Award winner Vo (Siren Queen) delivers an astonishing standalone novel of grief, retribution, and love that evokes the best of Italo Calvino and Ursula K. Le Guin. Vitrine, a capricious and powerful demon, has nurtured the city of Azril into a vibrant metropolis bursting with joy, chaos, and hedonism. Her world shatters when angels descend, reducing her beloved city to ruins. Grieving, Vitrine captures one of the angels responsible for the devastation and binds him to her with a curse. As Vitrine mourns and attempts to rebuild, her feelings toward the angel, who remains nameless and enigmatic despite now being her constant companion, evolve from vengeful hatred into something profound and complex. Their relationship, marked by both conflict and connection, unearths forgotten histories and ignites a transformative journey that reshapes them and their world. Vo’s nonlinear narrative anchors itself in the powerful emotions and memories that bind Vitrine to both her city and the angel. In poetic and evocative prose, Vo draws readers into the richly textured world of Azril while gracefully exploring themes of love, loss, and redemption. This beautifully crafted tale of resilience and transformation may be Vo’s best yet.

Starred review from September 1, 2024
The demon named Vitrine has a glass cabinet in her chest. In it, she keeps a book, where she writes the names, histories, and songs of her beloved city of Azril, which she has patronized and honed over the centuries. Yet the angels wipe it out in minutes, and she's powerless to stop the deaths of everyone in Azril. All she can do is curse the angel who most provokes her. All she can do is mourn--and slowly, with patience and pain, try to rebuild. Vo (best known for the Singing Hills Cycle) has done something truly wonderful here. In a way, very little happens in this novel, and yet centuries worth of growth, rebirth, and change occur under the consideration of Vitrine, all while her cursed angel flits in and out of her story, unable to go home. Their story is half the angel-demon balancing act of Good Omens, half the poetic, sensually visceral prose and enemies-to-lovers tale of This Is How You Lose the Time War, all powered by Vitrine's combined grief and stubborn hope for the future of Azril. Vo's newest is a beautiful, bloody-yet-cozy, intensely hopeful novel about the power to rebuild.

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