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The Palace Job (2013)

by Patrick Weekes(Favorite Author)

3.74 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

1477848207 (ISBN13: 9781477848203)

languge

English

genre

Fantasy

publisher

47North

series

Rogues of the Republic

review 1: This book has a great premise... What if you took the classic ensemble heist/con concept of Ocean's 11 and Leverage and set it in a fantasy world? And on that premise, it delivers admirably. Unfortunately, it's rather lacking in a few areas...1. The book has a very large cast of characters but doesn't spend a lot of time giving them more than the most basic development. We rarely get to truly see into their heads. It's like the author was thinking too much about what it would be like as a TV show, movie, or video game (the latter being what he usually works in, as a writer for BioWare), and not enough about what it should read like as a book.2. Because we don't really get to see into the characters' heads, the way they pair off into couples just seems arbitrary, and left m... moree not caring if anyone got together, even though it was painfully obvious that they would. Likewise, the few conflicts between the protagonists felt like they were just thrown in to pad things out.3. Things are very black and white in this book. The bad guys are very bad, and the good guys are a cast of loveable rogues who all fell into a life of crime accidentally, more or less.4. Speaking of black and white... Ugh. This is a biggie. Kudos to the author for choosing to make the leader of the gang of loveable rogues a black woman instead of the default white man. That was a good choice. Unfortunately, the racial politics of this fantasy world are pretty much identical to our own, which felt like really lazy storytelling. Plus when describing a crowd scene, he said it was a mix of "white and Urujar", which tells me two things: there's only two kinds of people in the country, and the default is white. (There are actually three kinds of humans in the world, the other being Imperials, who are clearly an Asian analog, and the one major Imperial character in the book is of course a martial artist. Of course. And the only minor Imperial characters we meet are three sexy female assassins. Of course)5. The book starts out with this really cool setting, with a couple of the characters cleaning the magical crystals that keep the capitol city afloat. It left me hopeful that the world of this book would be really different and full of other interesting details, but outside of the floating city and some airships, it's basically the same old same old (and even airships are increasingly common in the face of steampunk's popularity).I don't think I can really recommend this book to anyone, as the weak writing and the clumsy attempts at handling race issues (not to mention some clumsy handling of female characters, which I'm sadly used to by now). I'm glad I didn't buy the second one when they were both on sale.
review 2: This is a good crime caper. There were several one-liners that made me laugh aloud. The pacing is excellent. The characters are a bit one-dimensional, but not distractingly so. The world is described well enough that the magic is understandable, but not so much so that it gives away its mysteries. The twists in the plot are a bit too pat for a book, where there are all sorts of extra ways to hint to the reader. Once I finished and read the autho's bio, it made more sense. It is cinematic, as you might expect from a video game (or movie" writer. less

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