Well this certainly had a unique premise. Our nameless narrator, top in his field of linguistics, along with 11 other top-of-their-field scholars, is voluntold by the tyrannical king of Aelia to create a city. The king wants an excuse to attack a neighboring country that won’t get pushback by the citizens of Aelia, so the group has to literally design and build an “ancient” city that can be “discovered,” complete with language, art, etc. While this is technically a fantasy, that label is based on these countries not actually existing. Don’t go in expecting the typical trappings of a fantasy (e.g., magic, mythical creatures, etc.).
My favorite part of the book was the detailed descriptions of what some of the scholars would need to do to accomplish their task. Many descriptions were focused on linguistics, but one of the narrator’s fellow scholars also described what he had to do to make the city look like it had actually existed (e.g., buildings that might have been destroyed in a fire or earthquake and then built over again). There were some twists I didn’t expect and a moderately ambiguous ending that I didn’t mind.
The main reason I didn’t rate it higher is that there isn’t much character depth or emotional connection to the narrator. I don’t think there was supposed to be, so it’s not a weakness of the book, but that is partly what tends to draw me into books. This is also a novella, so there was limited room to work with from a character standpoint, anyway, although some authors still manage to do that quite well. Overall, I enjoyed the book enough to try the author again. Which is good because without realizing it, I happened to already have another one of his novels in my bookcase. 3.75 stars.
