Excellent fantasy from an author new to me. He posits just one magical premise and extrapolates the rest of the book from there. Since I'm usually a science fiction reader, it worked out for me that I was able to justify this one premise as pseudo-scientific. (I think it's bad form to reference other authors in a review, but in this case I'll make an exception and tell you that the premise is similar to the one in Ted Chiang's "Seventy-Two Letters".) The book also overcomes the challenge of keeping that premise fresh and exciting as the story advances. So many times you'll see a single premise laid out and then a conventional story follows that would not be sci-fi at all if the author hadn't said "this is in space". I require new wonders to be introduced into the story from time to time, and Bennett does an excellent job there.

The one flaw for me was the opening scene. I got to 8% before I decided the book was worth reading. I think it was Gene Wolfe (I know; I'm doing it again) who said that an author's second chapter should usually be their first, and this one is no exception. I blame the editor rather than the author.

Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Sometimes I come across a piece of fiction that tickles every single one of my funnybones. As in thoroughly delighting me. Charming me. Making me fall in love.

This is one of those.

I mean, don't get me wrong, I've LOVED Bennett's City of Stairs books and gushed on and on about those, but this one is a near picture-perfect mix of extremely detailed rules-based magic based on Scriving, or rune-like ancient language, to *persuade* reality to behave differently.

Basically, it's a hacking manual for reality. Nothing could be better designed to make me go squee.

Then give me a near-non-stop heist novel with a great thief, an AI-like skeleton key, a thief-catcher full of wonderful mysteries, himself, and a dirty town called Foundryside with corrupt Houses of writers, an old war of deadly physics-based-reality-hacking destruction ramping up into a new episode, and wonderful reveal after reveal after reveal for a meaty and delicious plot, and we've got ourselves an honest-to-Hierophant winner.

Truly. I never once got bored. Never once wanted to put the novel down. I was engaged from the first word to the very last and never wanted it to end.

This was a great story on its own, but the end really makes it shine. I could read this as a series FOREVER. And EVER. :) :) In fact, knowing Bennett's power of storytelling, I am pretty certain this is going to be one of my top-favorites for fantasy. Period.

Let me back up a little. Think of Sanderson's Mistborn for its magic system. Think about the best fantasy heist novels that jump from extremely deep worldbuilding and atmosphere and character-building into an ensemble cast that must band together against an utterly unstoppable foe behind impenetrable walls. Now get REALLY clever with the magic system. And go NUTS with history, implications, magic items that are more than what they seem, and a dark past that is waking up to take over the world.

Sound good?

Me ---> SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Nuff said. :)

Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett- A new series for this accomplished author of the Divine Cities Trilogy. In a world where magic symbols alter reality to suit the ruling class, a thief unknowingly dares to steal the most powerful relic that can be the key to undoing civilization. Sancia has lived by her wits and cunning almost as long as she can remember, but will have to dig deep down in her soul and find out things abut herself that bring fear and dread. Gregor comes from a long line of aristocrats, but desires only for truth and justice to be served in his fractured city. They and other renegades set out on a mission to do nothing else but change the reality of their world.
Like the Divine Cities the characters are drawn carefully and given life through their words and actions. Bennett keeps things moving right along and there are some intriguing surprises along the way. Alas no Sigrid.

Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett

Pros: unique magic system, intricate world-building, fascinating characters, interesting plot

Cons:

Three years ago Sancia Grado was a slave. Now she’s a skilled thief, hired to pull off a very difficult job. The payout means she can finally get a physiquere to fix the scar on her head and remove the metal plate beneath it that was scrived to allow her to hear the thoughts of every object she touches. But the item she steals is connected to the Occidentals, also known as hierophants, those who became like gods, able to use scrivings to change reality itself. Suddenly the plate in her head’s the least of her worries.

This book was amazing. I’ve only mentioned Sancia’s plot thread, though there are several others that intersect with hers once the book gets going. She’s a thoroughly engaging protagonist, and while her scrived state makes her fairly powerful in some respects, that’s balanced by the pain speaking with objects causes her.

I absolutely loved Clef. He’s such a fun character, coming out with all the sarcastic, swearing, responses people would love to use but don’t because they want to be polite. The book does have quite a lot of swearing, which I sometimes found jarring and other times thought fit the situation nicely.

The worldbuilding was intricate and detailed, with several layers to it. The main setting is the city with it’s four campos and the commons, but other locations are mentioned. History comes mostly in the form of mythology - which different sources report in different ways.

The magic is unique and hard to describe in few words. It’s remarkably… logical, though it takes some time to wrap your brain around what the people are doing.

The plot is interesting, with several threads wrapping around each other. There is some downtime to get to know the characters and let them figure out their next moves, but the majority of the book is one daring break in or escape after another.

As I said, it’s an excellent book. If you’re looking for a unique fantasy novel, I highly recommend this.

Sancia Grado did what she does best--she stole something for a mystery client. Problem is, she didn't expect the object she stole to have an opinion about it.

Sancia has a strange power--she can hear the magic-engraved items in everyday use all around her. She knows what they do just by touching and listening to them. When she's paid to retrieve a simple looking artifact--it brings down more trouble than she'd ever imagined, and it's far more complicated than she'd ever have guessed. Now she needs to learn a lot more about herself and what she can do.

Bennett has created a rich new world and a beginning to an epic new series. The characters are well rounded, and the story interesting enough to keep you reading until the last page.

Robert Jackson Bennett is one of the few authors I watch out for. Recently, I finished his early award-winning book (Philip K. Dick, Edgar, Anthony), The Company Man, so I was very excited at the opportunity to read an advanced reader copy of Foundryside, his latest work.

Bennett has a habit of starting out a book slow, letting the reader get a feel for the world and the characters before heading into action. He’s gotten better at that through his career; Foundryside springs into action on the first pages during an elaborate heist. Skilled independent thief Sancia is in the midst of stealing an object in a safe, although she accidentally burns down half the waterfront in the process. Unfortunately this attracts the attention of Gregor Donaldo, head of security at the waterfront and noble heir, as her actions have jeopardized his long-term plans for a neutral police force in a decidedly partisan city.

For me, this had a decidedly new adult feel, a bit younger than I enjoy. I think I appreciated the more seasoned characters in his Divine Cities series and in some of his other works. He also seems to be experimenting a bit with world-building in this one, and I felt his magic system was far too detailed with too much information-dumping (Brandon Sanderson owes readers an apology). Thankfully, I had the experience of knowing Bennett and his interesting stories to keep me pushing through. I persevered and around page 99, found that the story was finally gripping me.

The plot is essentially a series of heists and cops-and-robbers that takes place in a city controlled by merchant houses who have a complete disregard for the underclass. It’s not an unusual setting, and I appreciate Bennett’s attempt to create a more ‘realistic’ vision of the proto-Renaissance setting so many fantasy authors love to play in. However, beyond the Commons area as a dirty cesspool where bodies were literally left to rot on the streets, and the gated merchant communities as pristine, light-infused compounds, I didn’t get much of a sense of how the two pieces fit together.

The magic system is complex, using a system of ‘scriving’ on objects to ‘tell’ them what their purpose is and how to interact with the world. Bennett spends far too much time describing this, although to give him credit, he at least tries to do this in conversation with Sancia and later with scriving experts explaining what they do. But to me, there was a lot of unnecessary information-dumping, kind of like explaining the molecular process behind tasting and nerve-signal processing when, really, I just want a piece of chocolate.

All that said, this just didn’t resonate with me like his other books. The City of Stairs, and it’s follow-up, City of Blades, were easily among the best books I’ve read in years. I loved the Southwest atmosphere and the magical-realism of American Elsewhere, and The Company Man had me paying attention to it’s intriguing mystery despite some heavy-handed moralizing. This seemed a bit rushed, a strange combination of over-worked (the explanobabble for scriving) and under-developed (the efforts to integrate economics, politics, war) compared to Bennett’s usual sophisticated and emotionally complex stories. It’s not that I wouldn’t recommend it as much as it wasn’t as awesome as I know he’s capable of (do I sound like a teacher or what?). It felt a little like The Lies of Locke Lamora, and a little bit like Mistborn, so if those appealed to you, I’d recommend it.



Many, many thanks to Kathleen Quinlan at Crown Archetype & Three Rivers Press, Crown Publishing and NetGalley for the advanced reader copy.

"Reality doesn't matter. If you can change something's mind enough, it'll believe whatever reality you choose."

I was thoroughly captivated at this fantasy world of mechanized magic and rival merchant houses striving to create new spells (scrivings) to maintain the status quo. Sancia Grado is a thief with unique abilities who inadvertently steals a valuable item of immense power, and finds herself a target of an unknown adversary. She forms unlikely alliances to combat forces that threaten to alter reality as they know it.

There were plenty of plot twists that kept my attention, and a balance between the action and the necessary exposition, without giving too much away. Even though the story is set in a fantasy world (a variant on the Steampunk model), there were parallels (commentary?) on real world issues such as slavery, capitalism and gender equality. The characters were well rounded, real people with their strengths and flaws with their own agendas and desires.

I look forward to reading more about this series (which I feel should be adapted into a feature film sometime in the future).

If the Divine Cities series by author Robert Jackson Bennett was something you enjoyed get a copy of Foundryside as soon as you possibly can. The author seemed to take what made that series so fascinating and apply it to a new world while writing characters that are so much more interesting and relatable. There is still a touch of a world that has it's own life, performs it's own actions, with objects we normally see as inanimate being something more. You will feel for Sancia, respect Gregor, enjoy Orso, be interested in Ofelia and so many more small characters will make you wonder. Clef is great. This book is one you will have trouble putting down as it simply flows from one interesting and captivating chapter and situation to the next.

I received this book from the publisher via NetGalley.

I was just about two chapters into this book when I thought, "Hmm, this is going to be one of my favorite books for the year, isn't it?" <i>Foundryside</i> fully lived up to the promise of its early pages. This is a darn good book, and one I have already added to my awards nomination list for next year.

The world-building stands out foremost. There are a lot of political machinations going on between different city founders, but the magic was what gripped me right away. Sancia is a young thief with unusual magical skills; she can meddle with objects and make them do things. But this skill isn't natural--she's essentially a hacked human being, raised in slavery then subject to a cruel experiment to attempt to "scrive" human beings, i.e. grant them magical abilities like the sort once used by god-like entities called hierophants. Sancia takes on a difficult job to steal a box from a safe, and that safe holds a talking key that just might be connected to the hierophants of old. (Clef, the talking key, is one of the stand-outs of the book and a major reason to continue reading this series.) Of course, a lot of really nasty people want that key, deaths ensue, and Sancia creates a band of reluctant, quirky allies to try to survive. The action is near-constant but this is no fluff action book--there is genuine heart and soul here, and these are characters I want to stick with for the long haul.

Robert Jackson Bennett hit the trifecta as far as I was concerned with his DIVINE CITIES trilogy. I placed each book pretty much immediately on my respective best-of-the-year lists as I finished them, and then once the trilogy was completed put the whole thing on my best-of-the-decade list. So it would be more than a little unfair to expect his newest, Foundryside, to match that experience. But like a younger sibling following a genius older sister/brother, Foundryside finds its own kind of greatness, a no-less pleasing but more “moderate” greatness if you’ll allow the seeming paradox. Even I’d say a stealthy greatness, the kind that sneaks up on you while you thought you were just reading something really good until it whacks you upside the head and you realize no, it’s better than that.

Foundryside is set in the city-state of Tevanne, controlled by four merchant houses (“campos”) whose business is “scriving”—a form of magic that involves “instructions written upon mindless objects that convinced them to disobey reality in select ways.” This magic system has greatly enriched the four houses thanks to their tight control of it (anyone not part of the campos lives in the Commons, relegated to a subsistence-level existence of poverty and lawlessness), but it has its limitations, mostly because it’s the dregs of the much more magically advanced and ancient Occidental Empire (long fallen) whose wielders (hierophonts) were near-gods. The campos, powerful as they are in Tevanne and in the wider world thanks to their monopoly on magic, are like children in comparison, children trying to learn a foreign language via old left-over picture books with some pages missing.

The characters include:
• Sancia Grado (our main character): a young thief with a traumatic past who gets in over her head on a job, thus setting in motion the plot. Her goal is survival.

• Gregor Dandolo: only son of the one of the more powerful Houses. Thanks to his own past trauma, Gregor has turned his back on his position in society in a tilt-at-the-windmills attempt to reform it

• Ofelia Dandolo: Gregor’s mother, the fiercely formidable woman who runs the Dandolo Campo and plans on making sure it stays on or near the top

• Orso and Berenice: the master scriver of Gregor’s House and his “Fab” (think the “builder” to his “architect”), both driven by intellectual curiosity and a desire to further their craft

• Claudia and Giovanni: scrivers who failed out of the campo system and now do scriving work in the black market

• Estelle and Tomas Candiano: Orso’s former love and her husband, head of the Candiano Campo, now fallen on hard times and seeking a comeback

• Clef: The less said about him here the better, though I think it’s OK to note he shares the traumatic past trait with both Sancia and Gregor.

All the characters are richly drawn, with their own wholly personal and utterly believable motivation as well as a sense of a life lived in their own individual fashion outside this particular span of time that is the novel’s plot. This holds true whether or not they get a lot of page time or a little, if they be protagonist or antagonist (or sometimes both), or even if they seem at first blush to be a common trope character (just wait a bit and the layers will start accreting). Thanks to the combination of her character, her voice, and her situation, Sancia is easy to fall for, and one does so pretty immediately. Clef has a similarly winning voice, though a unique one. Orso and Berenice, meanwhile, pull you in via different methods, particularly their intelligence and enthusiasm for knowledge, while Gregor is more darkly compelling.

As for plot, at its simplest level, Foundryside is a heist novel (it’d be more accurate to say a heists novel), with the basic conflict between the antagonists seeking to find and wield an uber-powerful ancient artifact and the protagonists trying desperately to stop them. And the novel absolutely succeeds at that most basic reading level: a fun story full of tension, adventure, great set action scenes, feats of derring do, wonderfully timed revelations, all driven at a rollicking pace balanced by just the right amount of quieter moments. The characters’ pasts, along with the workings of the magical system and the history of this setting are all wonderfully doled out in a masterfully orchestrated use of flashbacks, dialogue, and internal monologue. If you want a great fantasy adventure/action novel, Foundryside has you covered. But there’s oh so much more going on here.

As with the DIVINE CITIES trilogy, Bennett works in a serious helping of social criticism that adds several layers of depth that serve to both move and intellectual stimulate the reader. That whole merchant house system, for instance, has created a sharp inequality amongst the people of Tevanne:

If you didn’t work for a house . . . if you were poor, lame, uneducated, or just the wrong sort of person — then you lived in the remaining 20 percent of Tevanne . . . There were a lot of differences between the Commons and the campos. The campos, for instance, had waste systems, fresh water, well-maintained roads, and their buildings tended to stay standing . . . . The campos also had a plethora of scrived devices to make their lives easier . . . Another thing that the campos had that the Commons did not were laws.

This gross inequality is made plain throughout the novel, perhaps nowhere so poignantly as when Sancia gets her first look inside a campo and sees: “Water. Fountains with just water in the, real clear, running water . . . They use water — clean water — as decoration?” Such a concept was, as she thinks to herself, utterly “incomprehensible.”

That same sense of surrealism rears its head later in the novel as she once again enters a campo: “It was unreal. To imagine that people lived in muddy alleys mere miles from here . . . shared the same rain clouds as this place.” While Tevanne’s economy isn’t strictly capitalistic, the obvious parallels to our own world are painfully bright.

Such parallels rise again when we learn that this is a system based on slavery in outer plantations, which is where we also learn human experimentation (attempts to scrive people rather than objects) has also been occurring. The practices are illegal in Tevanne itself, but as Orso notes, “provided we get our sugar, coffee, and whatever else on time, we couldn’t care less about what goes on out there” (before one thinks too smugly that sure, this is a historical parallel, but we don’t have slavery anymore, try replacing sugar and coffee with smartphones and cheap clothing).

But to say Bennett is criticizing capitalism is I think perhaps too much a narrowing of what Foundryside does. Much as with the DIVINE CITIES, he’s examining structures and systems and power in general, how it works, how its corrupted, how it corrupts, what it does to its wielders and those whom it exploits (often children, here and in the prior trilogy), this last in particular via several searing conversations and interior monologues that I don’t want to spoil here but that hit like a punch in the gut. We see it in the economic system as noted above so that “even in the greatest city on earth children go hungry, every day,” we see it in the plantation slavery, the human experimentation, in sexual slavery, in the way women “are rarely admitted to scriving academies.” It’s built into the magic system, since what is magic but power made direct and immediate, and it is explored as well via one of my favorite aspects of fantasy, one of its most powerful attributes—the ability to make the metaphoric literal.

I could spend much more time discussing the multiple themes and topics Bennett investigates, such as PTSD and the long-term effects of trauma, or the way marginalizing whole groups of people is not just immoral but also a colossal waste of human talent. I could go on at length about how Bennett never fails to offer up complexities and shadings and nuances in terms of behavior and motivation and actions and consequences, such as the way a particular act of do-gooding doesn’t end up anywhere near as expected. And I haven’t even touched upon the world-building, which is vivid and immersive, or the way I absolutely loved the blurring/melding of science and magic and technology in this book, including the incorporation of computer coding and AI and information science and even perhaps something akin to quantum entanglement. Or how the gravitas of the book is more than balanced by a fine sense of humor that runs throughout its entire span. Suffice to say my only complaint about Foundryside is the wait until the next one (while not quite as stand-alone as the DIVINE CITY books, this one does resolve the main plot line while leaving us hanging for book two). And yes, I’ve already cleared a place on my Best Books of 2018 list.

Hooray!

This almost felt like a buddy comedy, which I fully support in fantasy, a genre with an irritating tendency to take itself way too seriously. This reminded me a lot of The Lies of Locke Lamora, which is high praise in my book.

Excellent world building and magical system, fantastic characters, and I felt it hit the right (if sometimes difficult to read) note on slavery. Sancia’s PTSD was well rendered, and something that should come up more often in fantasy (given the plot points the genre often employs).

I had zero gripes with this book-fun, inventive, and incredibly compelling. My only concern going forward is the trajectory of the bigger picture plot. I do hope we’re not headed for a humans vs. gods showdown here. I absolutely hate this trope in fantasy, and it really soured the Divine Cities series for me.

Sancia is a specially skilled thief who accepted a job that can pay beyond her wildest dreams. The target is a simple box in a safe at the Tevanne docks. When curiosity gets the best of Sancia she learns she's stolen a device that could forever change the magic like scriving that has built Tevanne. She decides to flee rather than hand it over. Before she even has a chance to do so her contact is murdered and she escapes a trap that would undoubtedly lead to her demise. Sancia has to keep running, but she unfortunately doesn't have the resources to get far. She's forced to make previously unthinkable allies and to take risks that could lead to the destruction of Tevanne itself.

Foundryside is an intriguing book jam packed with world building. It's clear the author intends for Foundryside to be the first in a series as it establishes the history of the world along with the detailed day to day science of the world's unique attribute, scriving.

I've read and watched many stories that go into detail about scientific details of a world, but I don't know that I've ever seen one explained as thoroughly as scriving. Scriving at it's core is the process of making an item believe something different about itself through a complicated process filled with sigils and fueled by lexicons. For example weapons in the world similar to crossbow bolts believe when fired by the bow that they haven't been fired by the bow, but instead have been falling for hundreds or thousands of feet. This increases the attack velocity and power of the bolts which in turn makes a useful weapon into something inhumanly devastating.

The most interesting part of the story was Sancia herself. Sancia is a scrived human. Scrived humans shouldn't exist, but Sancia does. Her powers are a gift for stealing and fleeing, but a nightmare for everyday life. Sancia learns about anything she touches. If she touches a table for example she learns it's physical attributes such as where it's weakest or if any grooves have been carved into it. This is extremely helpful for her when she's on a job as such an ability is very useful on a wall or tunnel. The problem with her ability is she can't turn it off. Sancia keeps her skin covered most of the time and has to avoid human contact so she isn't overloaded by her ability. Sancia as a person is simply a survivor who is doing her best in a hard world.

Foundryside is largely a mystery to unravel and it is filled with stunning surprises.

4 out of 5 stars

I received this ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

Fresh off his brilliant Divine Cities trilogy, author Robert Jackson Bennett is back with Foundryside, the first book in The Founders trilogy. If this first installment is any indication, readers are in for another great fantasy series.

Set between the massive walls of four merchant house cities, Foundryside follows Sancia Grado, a street urchin whose unique relationship with scriving, the magic that fuels Tevanne’s industry, causes all sorts of issues…but also opportunities.

This book has pieces of everything I want in a fantasy novel — an intriguing magic system, rich worldbuilding, interesting characters, humor, and heart. Those pieces coalesce into something really interesting and make for an enjoyable reading experience. Bennett has done an impressive job building the framework of this world, from the physical structure of Tevanne, to the types of characters that inhabit it, as well as the magic system that makes unexpected things possible.

That said, the explanations and complexities of the magic system were sometimes confusing to me and took time away from developing the cast of characters that will need to be further fleshed before I’m fully committed to their plights.

Luckily, Foundryside is swiftly paced, has great action, and features loads of sharp, snappy dialogue. It’s a fun ride that I won’t be getting off any time soon. I’m very much looking forward to the next book, even though the wait will be longer than usual since this book doesn’t technically come out for another 112 days!

The description of this novel did not capture me, but a sample chapter was provided by the author and publisher. The writing was exciting and I felt as if I needed to know Sancia's story. Where many stories about thieves can drag while the heist is planned out, Bennett begins his story with the heist and manages to continue to weave an engaging and very unique story about a thief, a guard, and a magical object. 

Bennett's characters are perfectly written. He produces flawed, realistic, and sympathetic characters that don't have to fall in love just because they are working together. I adore the clarity with which Bennett writes his characters, regardless of gender. I would put Sancia on my list of favourite thieves, in a place right next to Locke Lamora.

The world-building in Foundryside is brilliant. The world has a rich history that resembles the ancient world's relationship with European cities while managing to be intriguing and new to the reader. 

The mingling of magic and technology made my engineer self very happy with my fantasy-loving self. Bennett introduces a unique and well-developed system of magic that is interesting to learn about and actually believable.

Bennett gave the reader so much with this novel and let much more unanswered. I await the upcoming books in this series anxiously. Luckily, Bennett has other books out that I have not yet read to help pass the time.

Thank you to Crown Publishing, NetGalley, and Robert Jackson Bennett for an eARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I loved Robert Jackson Bennett Divine City series so when given the opportunity to read this advanced copy of Foundryside from the publisher, I accepted it without any hesitation. After reading it I’m sure when edited and published in August Foundryside will get the attention it deserves.

Like Divine City this is a new world of magic, something remaining from a long lost magic era. The other similarity is the female protagonist which this time is a thief. This time the main city is called Tevanne and it has two side, Commons and Merchant houses. Merchant houses are wealthy and corrupt and commons are poor and have a slave like life.
All main characters in the book are very likable and very well developed. If I want to say who my favorite was, it’s probably Clef the key, but still I enjoyed every character in its own role, even Orso.
The world Bennett has created is kind of mixing science and magic. Today’s human have access to part of a magic language of now a dead civilization and can utilize objects and change reality by scriving symbols of that language into objects. There are many lost symbols and critical missed parts that prevent them to fully use this magic science, until a small box with a Key in it is stolen.
This is a story of action, of mystery, of fighting for power and craving justice and highly recommended for fantasy lovers.

Excellent fantasy, as I am coming to expect from Robert Jackson Bennett. I really enjoyed how the beginning of this book played with a few bog standard tropes -- the girl thief, the divided city, magical technology -- before archly revealing new details and differences that made it all rise above. The worldbuilding is fantastic, as are the characters and plot. And the humor! For all its darkness, and there is hella darkness, this is is also a very funny book.

Sancia, the girl thief, is the cog around which nearly everything else turns. There is a meta aspect to this, as she is also the figure around which most of the book's heist action depends. The cast of characters soon grows into an ensemble, and while others do a lot of the planning, and the "magic" stuff -- this book's magic system is based on a system of sigil writing, or "scriving" -- it still falls to poor Sancia to do most of the hands on, dangerous execution. Sancia is not the only POV character, however, and each POV has its own distinct voice. It is often through others -- for example Gregor, ambivalent member of a ruling family and officer of what little law exists in the central city of Tevanne -- that we get a fuller picture of what's going on behind the curtain, the forces under which Sancia and others labor.

The metaphysics of the "scriving" is fascinating and extremely well-thought-out. Within the circumscribed rules of the novel, RJB actually made this stuff seem scientifically possible! At every step of the plot, I loved reading the details of how the scrivers would make objects do whatever they needed them to do. Very cinematic too; one can easily picture these methods of allowing people to fly high over buildings, or of making buildings implode or change form.

In 2018 it should go without saying, but sadly cannot, that the female characters here are great. They are numerous, varied, complicated, and not all good. That is to say, they are people equivalent to men. The story world does include some instances of misogyny, but it seems to be limited to the feelings of certain secondary characters on an individual basis, as opposed to anything systemic in the culture of Tevanne. And any sexual violence encountered is equal opportunity.

Is this a perfect book? No. I could name a few quibbles I have with the lack of clarity on how the merchant houses of Tevanne make money outside of Tevanne (which is ostensibly how they accumulate and retain wealth and power). There is also the treatment of slavery, for example. It is an important theme throughout the book, and actual slavery is of course depicted as wrong, but I think this could have gone further, and also poses problems vis-a-vis racial representation (the characters are of varying skin colors with seemingly no correlation to economic or class status, and yet the main slave character apparently happens to be the one with the darkest skin). But it gets sooooo much right, and as with RJB's previous series of books, it is head and shoulders above a lot of the current high fantasy novels out there.

I will have to wait a while, but am already impatient for the next book.

I really enjoyed this. It had an original, interesting premise, great characterizations, and a completely fitting ending that left just enough left dangling to make you look forward to the next book.

Foundryside takes some of the more interesting elements from Lies of Locke Lamora, Name of the Wind, and Mistborn, combining these with RJB's beautiful and cinematic writing style. The result is an exciting story with familiar elements, a fresh story and compelling characters.

The tone and feel of the story was very Lies of Locke Lamora and like the Thief video games. The magic system relies on people (scrivers) that convince things to behave in new ways by scriving them with instructions. For example, making doors stronger by convincing them that they're made of iron. The logical extensions of this technology have been taken pretty far and it's neat to see how the entire society has come to depend on this magical technology.

The characters are excellent. They're fairly standard; a thief, a sentient macguffin, a law enforcement type, and a powerful scriver with his apprentice.

Sancia is a fairly traditional thief character with a dark history and a good heart. She has a particular set of skills which are poorly understood, at first. We learn more about her as the story unfolds. The evolution of her abilities and what she can do, is a very cool aspect to the story. Her personal evolution is a little less interesting, except for a brief blip where her selfish side surfaces.

The setting is wonderful. Clearly based on Renaissance-y Italian city-states with a colonial component. The magic system is pretty neat and it's very reminiscent of rune-crafting or sygaldry (NOTW) but crossed with coding. Using letters and lexicons to re-write reality is very meta and RJB makes it pretty exciting with the ways in which his characters use this magic.

The story starts off in the middle of a caper, the consequences of which more or less kick off the main plot line. It isn't until the last third or quarter that we find out that the main story intersected with a much grander story, which is clearly going to be the arc of this trilogy. The pacing is good, it starts off fast and slows down between periods of increasing action; culminating in a satisfyingly dramatic climax.

There are definitely some issues, the drama with Gregor for example was foreshadowed a little but I felt it was resolved a little too easily. There was a real opportunity there for a proper moral quandary. I suspect we'll see that explored in the rest of the trilogy, and I certainly hope so. RJB has done a great job of exploring the consequences of soldiering in past works and I'll be interested to see this theme develop in Gregor. Orso and Berenice also seemed pretty thinly drawn, which was necessary to allow us to explore Sancia's character and back story.

I'm looking forward to the rest of the trilogy (I think it's going to be a trilogy? I certainly hope there's more coming!). I highly recommend Foundryside.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC.

The industrial city of Tevanne is powered by magical technology developed by a long-lost culture, in which objects are given limited sentience and unusual abilities by "scriving" them with a special language. This technology is jealously guarded by the four merchant houses which rule Tevanne. Sneak-thief Sancia Grado steals a powerful ancient artifact from a waterfront warehouse and finds herself running for her life. Gregor Dandolo has turned his back on his heritage as son of a merchant house to bring proper policing to Tevanne, including catching the thief who burned down half the waterfront. But the people behind the merchant houses want to use the artifact to give themselves godlike powers, at the cost of thousands of human lives, and so Sancia and Gregor become unlikely allies as they try to prevent this from happening.

There are some similarities between this book and Bennett's earlier Divine Cities trilogy. Tevanne's got an industrial-fantasy-Italy vibe going in the same way that Bulikov was industrial-fantasy-Eastern Europe, and magic isn't something inherent in people but rather imbued in objects in both books. While each book in the Divine Cities explored a different theme - colonialism, warfare, and family -underlying them all was the question of the nature of humanity, and that is the theme of this book. What are the boundaries between humans and machines; what are the boundaries between humans and gods?

[Some mild spoilers below.]

The artifact Sancia steals is a sentient key that can open any lock, and it does this by talking to the lock in the language of scriving. Sancia can talk to the key as well, as she's got a scrived plate in her head from an illegal operation, performed against her will while she was a plantation slave. The key - named "Clef", which is a bit like a werewolf named Remus Lupin - is a wonderful character in his own right, and his conversations with Sancia and with the various scrived objects he talks to are great fun.

In the hands of any other author, I'd expect (and roll my eyes at) a romance between Sancia and Gregor. I appreciated the lack of romance in the Divine Cities, and the way that Bennett writes his characters such that most of them could be either male or female without changing the narrative much, and for the most part that's true here, though some of the plot is driven by the belief of the prevailing culture that women are not suited to scriving work (and the indignity of the women scrivers who are perfectly competent and perhaps better than the men who replace them). There is a tiny smidgen of f/f, though, which I liked very much.

This is definitely the first book of a series, and it ends with much left unresolved. But I really love this worldbuilding and these characters; it feels a bit as though the Invisible Library series collided with the Gentleman Bastards series by way of the Craft series, though that's selling it short. I'd say that Gregor Dandolo is totally Constable Carrot or Benton Fraser, but that would be selling it short as well. It's a great book, and I look forward to the next in this series.

Yet again, Bennett has created an intriguing world with fascinating magic. Merchant houses run a largely lawless city, because just about the only thing the houses can agree on is that they don't want the others having a say in how they can operate on their property. Thus, each merchant house practically operates as its own mini-kingdom.

More interesting, however, is the magic. Scrivers, who operate in R&D teams for the merchant houses and manufacture their products in foundries, can essentially reprogram objects so that they no longer obey the laws of physics. They do this through the use of magic sigils organized into code that tells the objects that certain aspects of their physical reality are different; the objects then behave as if they were operating in that new reality. This makes for some real revolutions in transportation, weaponry, etc. The whole thing is a bit steampunk, except that these mechanical devices are explicitly powered via careful magical intervention instead of more realistic technologies.

This is a dark and gritty world that doesn't wallow in darkness. That is to say, despite the brutal realities, there's still hope for the characters and some lighter moments.

I love the characters, who are all well-written (especially the women!). I love the way the magic system in this world immediately made me start considering its possibilities and intricacies. (It is, after all, logic-based.)

This book reminds me most of Max Gladstone's Craft Sequence because of the logic-based magic system. It's much less weird than Gladstone's series, though, and this setting can best be described as Italian noble merchant families in a magical early industrial era.

If you enjoyed Bennett's Divine Cities series, you won't be disappointed here. I highly recommend this novel and can't wait to read the next book in the series!