Then there’s magic and a cat and, really, it’s so hard to resist a book with a cat in it. Considering I live in California where we’re in various degrees of drought, reading about a water shortage kind of felt up my alley. The Splendid City caught my attention right away when it mentioned there’s a water shortage. But they quickly get more than they bargained for when a treasure hunt piques Stan’s interest and there might be a connection between the missing witch and the water shortage. When New Yorker witch-in-training Eleanor accidentally turns her irritating jerk of a co-worker, Stan, into a cat, her coven leader punishes her by limiting her powers and sending Eleanor and Stan to Liberty to find the witch. But, underneath, there’s a serious water shortage and a missing witch. Texas has seceded and renamed itself Liberty, where the president ostensibly wants to make everyone happy so constantly asks their opinion via strange animatronic heads. Still, the social commentary was interesting despite keeping more to a surface level. But the entire middle dragged on for entirely too long. Eleanor’s story felt like it wandered a little too much, but I enjoyed Stan’s story and, especially, how Stan adapted to doing things as a cat instead of as a human. The characters, Eleanor and Stan, were both deeply flawed and not completely redeemable or even very much likable, but Liberty was a fascinatingly strange place. The Splendid City presents an interesting social commentary using the backdrop of Liberty, which is the former state of Texas, where misinformation is rife and a witch and a cat are on different hunts, one for a missing witch and one for treasure, that inevitably have them crossing paths. One Sentence Summary: After accidentally turning Stan into a cat, witch-in-training Eleanor is sent to the new country of Liberty with Stan in tow to help find a missing witch, who might have something to do with the strange water shortage in Liberty.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |