Fly by Night by Frances Hardinge
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've read a number of book-centric books over the years and quite a few of them are YA. Some hit you over the head with the book and others are subtle enough to flow right over you and sneak up and bite you in the behind.

This one is the latter kind.

Sure, the power of words is all over the place, but where I like it most is in Hardinge's worldbuilding. The history of this place is not only fascinating and rough, but clever and multilayered. I get the impression we're in an early English period right after the printing press came out. But unlike that period, books soon became anathema. Like religious persecution, even.

Of course, that makes our heroes and villains well-learned action types falling in with thieves and revolutionaries, and that's just plain fun.

So why did I give this four stars rather than five? Because some of the text is a bit dense and the flow wasn't perfect. But I LOVED the world and had a pretty good time with the characters. And the God Goose. :)

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