Review: Shadow of the City: A Rocío and Hala novel

Shadow of the City: A Rocío and Hala novel by R. Morgan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A word about the worldbuilding first, since that's what I had the most trouble with.

The setting is an alternate-world South America. Several analogs of European countries are mentioned (with names that struck me as linguistically unlikely in some cases - Enkladt for England?), and while the Spain analog did not colonize South America as such, it did have a cultural influence at least on La Bene, the city where the story is set. Some names and words are Spanish, there are theatres and various other European-style cultural features, and so forth. However, nobody is Catholic (and the character with the Arabic-sounding name isn't Muslim); everyone - except for a recent immigrant - practices a form of ancestor-worship which allows them to speak to their departed ancestors, and at least some also practice what seems to be some kind of paganism.

At the same time, the cultural norms and mores of the city's inhabitants are a remarkably close match for US progressive politics as at right this moment. I managed to be more amused than annoyed by that, though it means the book will date very quickly.

The author's note at the end makes it clear that the reason sexism, homophobia, European colonialism, and organized religion don't exist in this setting is that the author was sick of them and wanted to write a setting that just didn't contain them. Which is not an illegitimate wish, but if you edit out so much of what has shaped our world, you're going to end up with a world that is difficult to account for.

Magic plays a key role, and part of the setup is that magic works differently in different places. It's never explained why this is, or what the underlying mechanism might be. It's clear that magic works differently based on where you are geographically, because immigrants' magic only continues working as it usually does for a short time before shifting to work like the local magic, but the divisions coincide with political, not physical, geography. La Bene has previously been part of both of the neighboring empires (which appear to be uninterrupted local empires; one of them uses the Mayan calendar). I had the impression that it had swapped between the empires several times, before being settled by refugees and allowed to become its own entity as a buffer between the empires (which itself felt somewhat unlikely to me). Yet the magic in La Bene is distinctly different from the magic in both of the empires.

So I had some significant questions and hesitations about the worldbuilding. Apart from that, it's a decent mystery novel in which good-hearted detectives face their own issues while tracking down the criminal. I felt that the pacing of the mystery plot did suffer from the amount of time devoted to the protagonist's personal conflicts, which, while well portrayed, were not as interesting (or important) to me as the resolution of the crime. What that did provide, though, was more depth to the characters; there was more of that than I usually see.

A competent editor has done a good (but, inevitably, not completely perfect) job with the manuscript; in the pre-release review copy I received via Netgalley for review, the errors were few.

Overall, then, a sound plot (if with some pacing issues for me), characters with depth, and capable prose. If the worldbuilding had been less of a problem for me, it would have landed easily on my Best of the Year list. As it was, it still gets four stars.

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