The House of Shattered Wings

I wasn't sure what I was expecting when I started this book but what I found definitely wasn't it. That said, I'm totally glad I picked this book up. It is completely different than anything else I've read or seen on the bookstore shelves recently. This is dark fantasy with a side of post-apocalyptic, with a side of murder mystery and political shenanigans.

This is the second de Bodard I've read (the first being her Hugo and Nebula award-winning On a Red Station Drifting), and I will definitely be looking out for her other works.

The world-building is phenomenal. This is a world in which World War Two gets interrupted by fallen angels, who appear on Earth with no memory of their previous lives, have amazing magical powers, and continued show more their war in our world. In Paris, a kind of detente is reached with different angelic factions forming a kind of feudal system of Houses that each hold power in the city. House Silverspires was once the greatest of these houses and was founded by Morningstar, who has long disappeared and presumed dead.

The story is told in shifting POVs among Selene, the current head of Silverspires; Madeleine, Silverspires's alchemist with a secret addiction; and Phillipe, a Vietnamese outcast immortal who was kidnapped to take part in the Fallen war decades ago.

There is a released curse, a murder mystery, political machinations, and a blending of Christian mythology with Vietnamese mythology. It is utterly fascinating. And the plot is really good too. Those who like their books fast-paced may not like this one. The plot is definitely on the slower side, with incremental reveals and regimentation of information based on who is the current narrator. But the end result is completely worth it.

This is a gorgeous book. It's a very dark book without a happy ending, but in a world that has been torn apart, the ending is fitting. I'm very looking forward to book two show less

I’ve been looking forward to this book for so long that I was nervous about starting it, and it took me a while to become immersed in it. But then I fell, and fell hard, into the story. It felt like the beginning of a longer text-reader relationship, but without any obvious cliffhangers. In addition, there is an audiobook read by one of my favorite narrators. I've read Bodard's Aztec trilogy and several of her short stories, but this is a quite different book.

The story takes place in an alternate late twentieth century Paris, a city peopled not just by humans but also by fallen angels cast out of Heaven by the Christian God for reasons they themselves do not recall.

The Fallen and some of the humans are divided into groups called show more Houses. Sixty years before the book opens, the Houses began to fight among themselves, the genesis for a Great War which unleashed magical weapons on the city. Now Paris is run down, studded with magical booby traps, and the Seine, the river which was once its heart, horribly polluted.

We see the story from the POV of Philippe. He has a fascinating backstory, and as the wronged outsider from an exploited culture, he’s sympathetic to me even when he’s behaving badly. It’s an interesting choice, and it made me forget that he was a powerful man within his constraints. The men in this story feel more structurally powerful than the women, and there are several instances where it’s clear that the even the relatively powerful women are subordinate to men’s choices and whims.

I read the book as being about power and the ways in which power shapes relationships and identities, so I didn’t notice the repetition you did. Philippe’s relationship to Selene and Silverspires is analogous to the Paris/Annam one, so the power issues are always front and center, and his liminality between the two societies meant that he often saw the contradictions more keenly than the characters who were firmly in one or the other.

I found the integration of the supernatural and the aristocratic aspects intriguing. The little touches, like the carriages, the clothing choices, and the manners of address all contributed to a Fallen (heh) Gilded Age feel that worked well with the Parisian setting.

And it’s not surprising given De Bodard’s other work that the Vietnamese parts were so well executed, but it was very rewarding. As in the real world, the Viet people and cultures understood the Fallen/French people and cultures better than the reverse, and I liked the way the different POVs offered different levels of understanding. show less

Once one of the most powerful Houses in Paris Silverspires is in decline. Its founder, Morningstar, is missing. Selene, his last pupil, has taken over. For years she has led the House, protected it and its dependents and schemed and plotted on its behalf. Since the end of The Great War that is all the houses do, scheme and plot and pull at one another. No body wants an outright war, the Great War destroyed too much, contaminated too much, but every one is still locked in a struggle to survive, to stay on top.
Into this atmosphere of constant political scheming comes Philippe and Isabelle. He has lived in Paris since leaving his Vietnamese homeland, he has fought for the houses, against his will. He knows what they are capable of and show more wants nothing to do with them. Instead he has survived out among the gangs of Paris, where might makes right. Isabelle is newly Fallen. Full of power but so vulnerable until she learns control and skill. And in a world where Fallen blood and bones can be turned into magic power boosters she needs the protection and guidance of a House.
I first came across de Bodard when I read Obsidian and Blood, a collection of her Aztec stories. And I thoroughly enjoyed them. Since then she has written many fascinating short stories and you should probably go check them out if you haven't read any already. She has a wonderful way of writing, I could read her all day long.
Unfortunately I started reading this book when I didn't have the time, and so was only able to read a chapter or so a day for a while. Once I got a bit of free time however I devoured it, and I think it is a book that I would reread. I loved the world that de Bodard has created here. It is a world without and good choices, just the least worst. All of the main characters struggle with this, and the world in which they live where survival is such a struggle. In order to survive you must seize and keep power. And being in power means that you must take that power away from someone else.
Philippe, and that is not his real Viet name, is introduced to us when he is at the bottom of the pile. Exiled from his home, with no real supports in Paris, an outsider with no power. But is he really that powerless?
In order to live Isabelle must ally herself with a House, but the Houses are inextricably linked to corruption and ruthlessness. If they had not been so in their past they would have been torn down by the others. To ally herself to that is to become a part of the power struggle and all that entails; torture, betrayal, murder and more.
Isablle and Philippe are linked, but opposed. Philippe is so utterly against the Houses he cannot really understand how anyone can support them.
It is a great way of looking at power dynamics and colonialism and racism and how they are all tied up together. Power corrupts, as we all know, the more power the more corruption... but there is also a look at how the lack of power is just as damaging. If you have no options in your fight for survival are you more open to doing the "wrong thing" because it is the only thing you can do?
I think this is the first book in a trilogy, but it can be read as a standalone novel, if you don't mind certain aspects being left open to interpretation. show less

The House of Shattered Wings by Aliette de Bodard is a novel in a new universe that stands alone well. I have, however, been informed that there is a sequel coming, as yet unnamed.

In the late Twentieth Century, the streets of Paris are lined with haunted ruins. The Great Magicians’ War left a trail of devastation in its wake. The Grand Magasins have been reduced to piles of debris, Notre-Dame is a burnt-out shell, and the Seine has turned black with ashes and rubble and the remnants of the spells that tore the city apart. But those that survived still retain their irrepressible appetite for novelty and distraction, and The Great Houses still vie for dominion over France’s once grand capital.
Once the most powerful and formidable, show more House Silverspires now lies in disarray. Its magic is ailing; its founder, Morningstar, has been missing for decades; and now something from the shadows stalks its people inside their very own walls.
Within the House, three very different people must come together: a naive but powerful Fallen angel; an alchemist with a self-destructive addiction; and a resentful young man wielding spells of unknown origin. They may be Silverspires’ salvation—or the architects of its last, irreversible fall. And if Silverspires falls, so may the city itself.

The characters are what really stood out for me in this book. They all have complex motivations that do not necessarily have much to do with each other's. The rich setting comes in a close second. For a start, it's refreshing to have a fantasy book with an urban setting — albeit a ruined urban setting — set in Paris rather than in the US. And then there's the detailed way Bodard has destroyed Paris, and the world, before the opening of the story. The city is in ruins, but they are ruins that people have built lives around. But aside from mentioning that it's also a world in which not everything is as it seems, I don't think I can really do the worldbuilding justice. You'll just have to read the book yourself to see.

On to the characters! There's Philippe, a Vietnamese (or Annamite, as the alternate history of the book has it) ex-Immortal who ended up in Paris thanks to the sweeping force of colonialism. Although on the surface he may seem to have something in common with the Fallen, in that he's on Earth after being kicked out of the Jade Emperor's court, he hates the Fallen for what they've done to the world and their House system for what they've done to him personally. Despite this, the story opens with him getting caught up with House Silverspires, setting the main plot of the book into motion.

Then there's Isobelle, a new Fallen with an unshakable link to Philippe, his efforts to get away from all the Fallen notwithstanding, who is taken into House Silverspires. She unquestionably changes the most throughout the book, partly because new Fallen start off naive and clueless (so there's nowhere to go but up) and partly thanks to the events of the book. She ends up getting close to Madeline, Silverspires' House Alchemist who has secrets and a traumatic past.



As far as these things go, I'd say Philippe and Madeline were my favourite characters. I also found Morningstar, who is not really physically present in the story, to be a very powerful echo of a character, resonating throughout the story. The repercussions of his actions are far reaching and Bodard did a commendable job of making him come to life as not much more than a memory. Selene, the currently leader of House Silverspires, constantly lives in his shadow and measures herself against him while trying to keep the house together. I sympathised with Selene, although she wasn't exactly my favourite person.

The House of Shattered Wings is a gorgeously written fantasy novel set in a world of post-apocalyptic/war decay. I don't usually like angel books, but this one definitely worked for me. I suspect the combination of Christian mythology with Annam mythology probably helped in that area. I have to admit I wasn't sure if it was going to be a stand alone or part of a series while I was reading. The end was quite self-contained but there are a few more minor loose ends that I'm looking forward to seeing explored in a sequel. But there are definitely to cliffhangers and the main plot is resolved.

I highly recommend The House of Shattered Wings to all fantasy fans. Anyone looking for a different kind of urban fantasy should definitely give it a try.

4.5 / 5 stars

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Ugh. It's magnificently written - the characters are vivid, the settings are strongly evoked, the events draw you in...except that everyone is lying and manipulating and behaving foully. The settings are a half-destroyed Paris with "Houses" squatting here and there, in buildings where half the rooms are neglected to the point of falling in - and the ones that are kept up include the dungeons, in various forms. The (or a) main character is introduced to us and immediately commits cannibalism (is it cannibalism if a human eats a bit of an angel? And is he actually human? But nasty, anyway). I read about a third of it, until the healer apprentice is killed; slogged on through the autopsy (which isn't really an autopsy, it's harvesting all show more the useful bits of the dead man)...and stalled. I could not convince myself to go back to the book. Finally I skipped to the end, read the last chapter and a half - and decided that the book hadn't gotten any better, and I was utterly uninterested in finding out what happened between the nastiness I'd read and the end. If you like grim and gory, you'll probably love this - the writing is great. But not for me. My difficulties reading weren't helped by the fact that the publisher (through First to Read) sent me a PDF ARC - PDFs are much harder for me to read than epubs, just because they don't flow to the small-form readers I use (phone and small tablet). But I read two other PDF books while unable to force myself to this one. show less

In a Paris that isn't our Paris, Houses led (mostly) by Fallen angels rule the city, in uneasy peace and much quiet conflict. The oldest of these Houses, Silverspires, was founded by Morningstar, the first and oldest of the Fallen.

But Morningstar vanished without warning twenty years ago, and his last apprentice, Selene, has led Silverspires since then. She's not as hard and ruthless as Morningstar, and that may not be a strength. The House is having problems, and its allies are perhaps becoming unreliable.

Meanwhile, a new Fallen has just fallen to Earth, in a bad section of the city, and a few members of a gang reaches her just before Selene does. Selene wants the Fallen alive and in Silverspires' care and service; the gang wants to show more dismember her for the magical artifacts they can make from her breath, blood, skin, and bones.

One of the gang, going by the name Philippe, is his own kind of strange, neither Fallen, nor ordinary, mortal human with no magic but what he can steal from angels. He's not comfortable cutting pieces off the injured and not yet fully awake Fallen, but he knows that if he doesn't make himself useful to the gang willingly, they'd be just as happy to dismember him.

This doesn't mean he's happy when Selene and her bodyguards show up in time to stop major damage. Other gang members flee, but Philippe, for reasons he doesn't understand, can't leave the young Fallen.

It's a fateful choice, one that draws him, Selene, the new Fallen, and the members of Silverspires and two other Houses into a dangerous struggle and a buried curse. Philippe, the new Fallen (soon named Isabelle), Selene's lover Emmanuelle, Silverspires' human alchemist Madeleine, find themselves caught in dilemmas of conflicting loyalties and duty.

I found myself completely drawn in from almost the first paragraph. This world is not our world, and its history is not our history, though many of the place names are recognizable provided you did not sleep through geography in a school system that actually taught it. There's a claustrophobic feeling to Paris, yet there are reminders of the wider world, and the Houses have had their own colonial adventures, even if not exactly the ones that happened in our world. Every important character here is complex, flawed, and interesting--and possessed of strengths sometimes unexpected even by themselves.

I love this world and this story, and these characters. Highly recommended.

I received a free electronic galley of this book from the publisher via Penguin's First to Read program. show less

Overall this didn't quite hang together for me. In part, that's my own fault, for reading it while trying to read/revise my own fiction. (I only have so much brain.) But in latter stages I had more attention to devote, and it still wasn't ringing like a beautiful bell.

And I wanted it to, because there's a lot to admire about this. I particularly loved the elements revolving around Phillipe - who comes from the French South-East-Asian colonies and carries with him all the associated anger and mythology. The inclusion of a whole different kind of magic and supernatural, of dragon kingdoms and strangling banyans, gave so much extra depth and complexity to this urban fantasy. But he as a character irritated the pants off me. Though I show more recognised intellectually the validity of all his reasons for not playing ball and running away (only to return again), it felt like 90% of the plot spun out of him just refusing to tell people about things, and fart-arsing about.

All in all, there was a little too much mystery clouding everything for me to get a clear grasp on who the characters were, how they burned, and what was awesome. Which is a shame, because on another day I suspect both Selene - the hard-arsed doubt-riddled lady in charge - and Isabelle - new, stubborn, coming into herself - would be right up my alley. show less