Thu Feb 11, 2021 2:00pm
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After an interminable time where reading was a challenge, or I could only read nonfiction, or my brain simply refused to remember anything about the books I read, I picked up
City of the Uncommon Thief and read it in two days straight. Lynne Bertrand’s first YA novel is a puzzle box, a mystery, a feat of constrained world-building, and a tale about growing up fed as much on old tales as on anything edible. It’s not a pandemic novel. But it does involve a lot of people who can’t go outside.
The inhabitants of a walled city live in a thousand doorless towers. There are no animals here, no plants. Each tower is home to a guild, and each guild produces a certain item: barrels, beads, fireworks, astrolabes. Once a year, ships come bearing everything they need to live and keep working. The sailors, who fear the city’s residents, take all their beautiful creations out into the world. Names and languages suggest there are people from all
Camille Durbonne gambled everything she had to keep herself and her sister safe. But as the people of Paris starve and mobs riot, safety may no longer be possible… Not when Camille lives for the rebellion. In the pamphlets she prints, she tells the stories of girls living at society’s margins. But as her writings captivate the public, she begins to suspect a dark magic she can’t control lies at the heart of her success. Then Louis XVI declares magic a crime and all magicians traitors to France. As bonfires incinerate enchanted books and special police prowl the city, the time for magic and those who work it is running out. In this new Paris where allegiances shift and violence erupts, the answers Camille seeks set her on a perilous path, one that may cost her the boy she loves even her life. If she can discover who she truly is before vengeful forces unmask her, she may still win this deadly game of revolution.