What I'm reading
Jun. 16th, 2019 04:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
readerjaneThis morning I finished The October Man, the new novella from Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London series.
This feels like a hinge book. Until now the series has centered around Peter Grant, a London police officer, and his lieutenant Thomas Nightingale. October Man only has a brief mention of those characters, being told from the point of view of Peter's opposite number Tobias, a police officer in Germany.
Both are trained magical practitioners, the first new apprentices in their areas since WWII. In fact, the opening of TOM was a little disorienting because it wasn't until a couple sentences in that I realized it wasn't Peter's viewpoint I was reading. I suppose I should have noticed right away, since Peter's voice is pretty distinctive. But Tobias' voice is less so (possibly because Aaronovitch has left his own London environment?) In fact, Tobi feels to me like Peter Lite - a good guy, who knows what he's doing and knows his strengths and weaknesses, but with much less evident ties to the community he polices, to his family, and to his supervising officer. Which is a lot of what I read the series for.
But while this story itself felt a little flat, the things it's setting up are promising. New river goddesses are appearing, not just in the Thames river valley, but in Europe as well. More magical things are awakening. There seems to be significant leftover suspicion post-WWII between the magical branches in law enforcement in England and Germany (this is less surprising when you consider that several characters are very long-lived and remember that struggle clearly), but I'm wondering if they will need to band together to face some new threat.
I hope this is an appetizer for an exciting new course
This feels like a hinge book. Until now the series has centered around Peter Grant, a London police officer, and his lieutenant Thomas Nightingale. October Man only has a brief mention of those characters, being told from the point of view of Peter's opposite number Tobias, a police officer in Germany.
Both are trained magical practitioners, the first new apprentices in their areas since WWII. In fact, the opening of TOM was a little disorienting because it wasn't until a couple sentences in that I realized it wasn't Peter's viewpoint I was reading. I suppose I should have noticed right away, since Peter's voice is pretty distinctive. But Tobias' voice is less so (possibly because Aaronovitch has left his own London environment?) In fact, Tobi feels to me like Peter Lite - a good guy, who knows what he's doing and knows his strengths and weaknesses, but with much less evident ties to the community he polices, to his family, and to his supervising officer. Which is a lot of what I read the series for.
But while this story itself felt a little flat, the things it's setting up are promising. New river goddesses are appearing, not just in the Thames river valley, but in Europe as well. More magical things are awakening. There seems to be significant leftover suspicion post-WWII between the magical branches in law enforcement in England and Germany (this is less surprising when you consider that several characters are very long-lived and remember that struggle clearly), but I'm wondering if they will need to band together to face some new threat.
I hope this is an appetizer for an exciting new course
