'In this fast-paced dark fantasy debut, the Fae seek to rebel against their Goblin oppressors over one long bloody night.
'The Iron City is a prison, a maze, an industrial blight. It is the result of a war that saw the Goblins grind the Fae beneath their collective boot heels. And tonight, it is also a city that churns with life. Tonight, a young fae is trying to make his fortune one drug deal at a time; a goblin prince is searching for a path between his own dreams and others' expectations; his bodyguard is deciding who to kill first; an artist is hunting for her own voice; an old soldier is starting a new revolution; a young rebel is finding fresh ways to fight; and an old woman is dreaming of reclaiming her power over them all.
'Tonight, all their stories are twisting together, wrapped up around a single bag of Dust--the only drug that can still fuel Fae magic--and its fate and theirs will change the Iron City forever.'
So often in fiction we see revolutions being led by a strong central figure, some lone hero who's risen up to become a beacon around which everyone else can rally behind in their fight against an oppressive regime. These tend to be the main characters for dystopian fiction, and it's something that I kind of expected from City of Iron and Dust; but I was pleasantly surprised to find that not only was I wrong, but that the book delivered something completely different.
City of Iron and Dust takes place in the Iron City, a vast, maze-like place where the Fae, various races descended from fairy folk, have been forced to live following their defeat in a war against Goblins. Due to their connection with nature, and the fact that they can draw magic from it, the Goblins have constructed the city so that the Fae are trapped away from the outside world, surrounded by Iron, a substance that's deadly to them.
Forced to work in huge factories, refineries, and other gruelling areas of production, the Fae have been ground under the heels of their Gobln masters, treated as second class citizens to be looked down upon. Despite so many of the Fae having never known any other life, some still fight for the freedom and liberation of their people, and we join the city on the night that these feelings swell to a breaking point and violence breaks out across the Iron City.
Instead of following the leader of this revolution, one lone hero who's banded everyone together, we follow several characters; most of whom are regular people. This is because J.P. Oakes has taken something of a more realistic approach to the story, because quite often in revolution it isn't about one person, and it's the combined efforts of dozens, hundreds, or even thousands. These people, sometimes only united in their desire for freedom, and with no formal bonds between their cells or groups, are the real force behind change; and that's who this book focuses on instead.
There's a variety of people who we follow across the course of the story, on both sides of the conflict. There's a low level drug dealer who finds himself in possession of a huge quantity of Dust, a drug that allows the Fae to access their latent magic abilities, who ends up being wanted by both sides of the conflict because of what he has. There's a young artist, who wants to use his skills and his vision to inspire those around him to rise up and fight for their freedom, for a better world through his art rather than any action he could take. We follow a member of a small group of revolutionaries who end up getting involved in the citywide fight, and we see how this small cell act in the face of full scale uprising.
We also follow some figures who aren't Fea, who are in difficult positions because of who they are. There's the daughter of one of the five main Goblin houses who rules the city, a woman who's set to inherit her father's vast wealth and power but doesn't want to be a evil overlord like him, and wants peace between the Goblins and Fae. We also get to follow her sister, a half Goblin half Fae who's been broken and beaten into being the perfect weapon, tasked only with protecting her sister at any costs. We also spend a lot of time with the former head of one of the other Goblin houses, an aged woman who not only hates that she's no longer in control of her house, but sets out to use the revolution as a means to gain control of all of them.
The book jumps between the various characters across the course of the story, and we get to discover that no one character, that neither side in this conflict, really knows everything. Everyone has their own plans and their own schemes, and whilst some of these are pretty sound, through our unique perspective as the reader we see that all of these plots are balancing on the edge of a knife; that so many of them are at risk of falling apart. The revolution depicted in this book is messy, it's chaotic, and everyone is scrabbling simply to survive the night, and a who does or doesn't seems to very much be down to luck.
It felt more real because of this, that there wasn't some big villain somewhere who'd plotted everything out, who'd anticipated all the variables and was pulling the strings the whole time. Instead, people were left on the back foot, were having to bluff their way through, and left reacting to what their enemies were doing a lot of the time. Despite it being a fantastical story, filled with inhuman people and magic, it made it feel more real that a lot of books like this.
The story also used its fantasy elements well. It's full of creatures like Goblins, Kobolds, Selkies, Gnomes, and other fantasy races, and it made good use of magic, but for the most part it was a very modern story. There were mobile phones, cars, and guns. It was less a fantasy story, and more a real world story that just happened to replace the humans with other races. This combination was something that felt odd at first, as I've rarely read stories where it's done, but it felt right for the kind of story that Oakes was trying to tell; and come the end it felt completely natural to see a Goblin firing a gun from the back of a tank.
There's a lot to City of Iron and Dust, a lot of characters with their own stories and motivations, lots of plots and themes that all weave in and out of each other to create this story that whilst covering only one night also encompasses several stories; all of which could have had its own book. It's a book that feels really dense, that packs the content in. It also makes many fantasy elements accessible for people who might never had tried the genre before, thanks to its hybrid nature. This is a book that managed to subvert my expectations a number of times, one that was never what I expected, and one that I'm sure will intrigue a lot of readers.
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