Foundryside

Starred review from June 18, 2018
Bennett’s stunning fantasy, the first in a series, is set in Tevanne, a city-state run by four merchant houses, funded by pillaging nearby lands and powered by scrivers who use sigils to make devices that defy reality. When talented thief Sancia Grado steals a sentient golden key named Clef, she’s pursued by paladin-like police captain Gregor Dandolo, scion of the Dandolo merchant house. Clef and Sancia are both shocked when they find they can communicate telepathically. This and Sancia’s other abilities—linked to a painful scar on her skull—hint at strange, terrible things in her past. When someone tries to kill Gregor to get Sancia, they discover that a very ambitious and powerful figure is building something that could “annihilate scriving on a mass scale,” a disastrous disruption of Tevanne’s society. With a little help from Gregor and Clef; Orso Ignacio, the eccentric Dandolo head of research; scriver Berenice Grimaldi; and other singularly skilled allies, Sancia sets out to pull off the most dangerous theft of her life. The endlessly inventive Bennett (the Divine Cities trilogy) brings humor and empathy to his portrayal of Sancia, a dark-skinned woman who bears substantial physical and psychological scars from being enslaved and experimented on, and who deeply resents her unwanted talents. Sancia and Clef’s friendship is poignant, and her journey of self-realization serves as a backbone for nearly nonstop, cleverly choreographed action sequences. This is a crackling, wonderfully weird blend of science fiction, fantasy, heist adventure, and a pointed commentary on what it means to be human in a culture obsessed with technology, money, and power. Agent: Cameron McClure, Donald Maass Literary.

June 15, 2018
Bennett (City of Miracles, 2017, etc.) inaugurates another series of imaginative, thoroughly idiosyncratic fantasy novels.Mona Lisa meets The Matrix in Bennett's introduction to the carefully constructed world of Tevanne, a city-state dominated by four merchant houses--literally. The four big boys (think Amazon, Google, Facebook, and...well, Penguin Random House, maybe) occupy fortresses that, though stoutly built and heavily patrolled, are no match for Sancia Grado, a gamin version of the Tom Cruise of Mission Impossible, if not Spiderman. Sancia scales walls and penetrates castle keeps with ease, and she's not above dispatching a guard or two in the pursuit of her work: "She did have her stiletto, and she was an able sneak, and though she was small, she was strong for her size." Bless her heart, Sancia shows mercy, pulls off the heist she was hired for, then retreats into the teeming, seething world between the walls of those great houses, whose masters have made a killing with a thing called "scriving"--"instructions written upon mindless objects that convinced them to disobey reality in select ways." Thus a carriage on a horizontal plane might be commanded to roll as if on a steep slope, removing the need for horses to pull it. But what if some corporate villain were to scrive a person in such a way that he or she might become a soldier impervious to pain or discomfort, an arrow that might travel with the wall-breaking force of a cannonball? That's the scenario Sancia tumbles into when she discovers that she's stolen--wait for it--a talking key named, naturally, Clef. The baddies want Clef to complete their job of world domination, Clef wants to find the lock of his dreams, and Sancia--well, Sancia has many a fish to fry, alternately helped along and hindered by fellow criminal masterminds, proletarians, a well-connected cop worthy of Umberto Eco, executives of ill intent, and a few other talking inanimate objects.If you accept the notion that the laws of gravity are just suggestions, this makes for a grand entertainment.

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July 1, 2018

Industrialized magic, applying a technology called "scriving," is what makes the city of Tevanne run. Four merchant houses have monopolized and become wealthy by wielding this power, which imbues ordinary objects with sentience. Outside of their prosperous closed-off enclaves live the poor in crime-ridden communities; one of these residents is thief Sancia Grado, who ekes out a living using her own special talents for reading objects. When she steals a magical artifact from a heavily guarded warehouse on the city's docks, she comes into possession of an object that could change the world--or destroy it. Now someone wants her dead. Sancia joins forces with police captain Gregor Dandelo to stop those in power from achieving complete domination. VERDICT This engaging new series from Bennett ("Divine Cities" trilogy) features a masterly blend of fantastical magic with sf technology that will engage readers to the final page. [See Prepub Alert, 2/19/18].--Kristi Chadwick, Massachusetts Lib. Syst., Northampton

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