Breaking the Lore by Andy Redsmith
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If I jumped right into describing this kind of book, within a razor's edge of genre, I would almost always say that I'm 100% on board with the attempt, no matter what. I like this kind of thing.

We've got us a UF setup with tons of magical beasties that hop right past the story foreplay stage because we've all seen these origin stories a million times before, mix it with a huge dose of dry humor that reminds me a bit of a cross between Discworld and Ben Aaronovitch, and then give us a modern cop drama.

On paper, this sounds fantastic. Like Bright without the racism angle. Add an alcoholic local cop who must work with dwarves, talking crows, and centaurs, and lead up to opened magical rifts invading our world on a nice huge scale. Demons versus everyone else. Sweet!

So why aren't I squeeing about it?

The setup is pretty great, mind you. And some of the humor was good. But this book is NOT a master of the small details like Aaronovitch's novels, nor is it as charming. It's also missing a lot of the heart of Discworld. My care meter petered out several times as I was reading this.

Basically, it's not the premise or the story. The problem is just the execution. Of course, when we're dealing with UFs in general, the first novels are generally the weakest. I think this has a lot of potential. It just needs to live up to it.


View all my reviews