I’ve noticed that when authors run out of ideas, their books paradoxically tend to become longer. Not that the length is in itself a sign — sometimes the author is on a roll and just can’t stop writing. This is not one of those books — it really feels like Aaronovitch is idly typing, typing, typing away in the hope that finally he’ll get an idea for the book.
I first happened upon Aaronovitch’s books when I had a cold back in 2022, and I just wanted something easy on the brain to read, and his books certainly delivered — I gulped down eight books of his over a few weeks. This book is more of the same, but it’s just so listless.
Aaronovitch’s books seemed from the start to be based on looking at what the marked was clamouring for, so we ended up with a Harry Potter/police procedural thing, and the surprising thing was that it worked. I wonder if the sales are flagging, because in this book Aaronovitch seems to be side eyeing the lucrative YA romantacy market, and tries to shoehorn that into the series, too. It doesn’t really work.
Like most books that are this far into the series, it gets an absurdly high Goodreads score (because by this time, there’s only die hard fans that are reading). But this highly rated review pretty much sums up my feelings about this book:
The book finally starts for real after 200 pages, and I wish I could say that the rest is a rollicking fun adventure, but it’s kinda not. But it’s pretty OK from that point on.
One thing before I go:
Aaronovitch tries really hard to be witty, and sometimes he is. But it mostly takes the form of using impenetrable police jargon, and worse — youthful West-Indies language like the kids today use. So above we have a teenage girl describing being attacked by a wyvern (it’s like a dragon, but has two legs), and this is set in 2025.
Yes, it’s exactly this:
And:
Even I know that it’s gyaldem — it’s already plural, so gyaldems is like writing womenses. (This particular word stuck out for me because I bought a rather spiffy compilation from Soul Jazz Records a few days ago that’s called Queen Dem, so I looked it up… “dem” is of course “them”, but is used as a general pluralisation, as far as I can tell — “man dem”, etc.)
I have absolutely no idea why I randomly included a picture of the writer here! It surely has no relation to what I was just writing above! At all!
Stone & Sky (2025) by Ben Aaronovitch (buy new, 4.25 on Goodreads)