Ink and Steel

Amazon preorder

Eh. I wanted to love this, but eh. It's a little overly stylized for my taste and took a while to get going; the last hundred pages are excellent. ( )

It isn't that [b:Blood and Iron|185637|Blood and Iron (Promethean Age, #1)|Elizabeth Bear|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1309286932s/185637.jpg|179435] and [b:Whiskey and Water|185639|Whiskey and Water (Promethean Age, #2)|Elizabeth Bear|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1256079708s/185639.jpg|179437] make more sense after reading Ink & Steel, because they didn't not make sense the first time; it's more that bits of them make a different kind of sense, knowing what you learn here about who some of these people are and where they might be coming from. Things echo. Oh, and now I'm going to have to spend the month waiting for [b:Hell and Earth|2436617|Hell and Earth (Promethean Age, #4)|Elizabeth Bear|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1256152742s/2436617.jpg|2443805] reading the Complete Marlowe. And Shakespeare's sonnets, again. And probably As You Like It... ( )

Ink and Steel was one of the rare books where I realized halfway through that I was not at all sure what the plot was or if there was one and I didn't care. Kit Marley is a delightful character, witty and broken in interesting ways, and while Will Shakespeare himself is a bit flatter, the situations the two find themselves in - together and in parallel - carry the book admirably.

It is a bit of a slow burn, plotwise, and does not come to anything like a resolution - it is the first half of a single book, in my opinion. By the end of it, there are many dominoes standing and they are laid out in patterns that imply all sorts of fascinating things, but they haven't fallen yet. Don't pick this one up without also laying hands on Hell and Earth, is what I'm saying. ( )

This is a fascinating novel in which Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare find themselves entwined in the complicated politics of England, Fairyland, and Hell. Satan himself (or Himself) gets a look in and turns out (in classic form) to be quite the gentleman. ( )