This review is based on an eARC (Advance Reading Copy) provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. The City in Glass will be released on October 1, 2024.

I first read Nghi Vo back in 2021 when The Empress of Salt and Fortune took home a well-deserved Hugo Award for Best Novella, and the beauty of her prose and richness of her settings invariably makes for good reads. The premise of The City in Glass didn’t necessarily jump out at me, but with it being a very short novel by such a talented author, it seemed well worth a try. 

The City in Glass is a novel that’s a bit hard to blurb, because it’s just not plot-driven enough to produce an obvious hook. “A demon plays Civ” isn’t exactly going on marketing material. But that is in many ways the vibe. The lead is a demon who has crafted a city into a place that she finds interesting—it’s never about what’s good or evil, only about interesting and boring—before a group of angels judge it for its sins and raze it to the ground. And so she sets about the long and slow task of rebuilding, with the occasional help of an angel who became corrupted in the attack. 

I was worried that this would turn into “angels are moralistic jerks, demons are the ones who are actually good” sort of story—something that’s been done many a time before and that I don’t find especially interesting—but Vo manages to turn it in a slightly different direction. Of course, the lead does see angels as moralistic jerks, but that’s mostly because they’ve foiled her own selfish plans, not out of any real sense that she’s the one in the right. And while she certainly influences her angelic frenemy to see perspectives he hadn’t previously considered, it’s not clear whether the change makes him better or whether it just makes him different. 

But this is part of what made it hard for me to really invest emotionally in the novel. There are really two major arcs, and only one of them is going anywhere in particular. The bulk of the story focuses on the slow building of the city, but there’s not a goal in mind so much as there is a series of opportunistic tweaks that will hopefully build something interesting. I joked about a demon playing Civ, but that’s in many ways the flavor of the major city-building narrative. The other arc, the one that does have a modicum of momentum, is an extremely slow-burn enemies-to-lovers romance, presented in little snapshots separated by decades, or sometimes centuries. But even though that plot thread is clearly moving somewhere, it still carries that sense that it’s not going anywhere better, just somewhere different, and that makes it difficult to really care. 

But where The City in Glass shines is in the words and the scenes. Vo writes beautifully and really brings the setting to life, generating an immersion in the individual moments that makes it an engaging read even if the larger plot is absent or underwhelming. We see the city’s growth through myriad little vignettes, whether interactions with the environment or the people. And those vignettes are invariably deftly told and worthy reads. 

Overall, I expect a reader’s opinion of The City in Glass to depend heavily on their penchant for plot-light, “portrait of a city’s growth through the years” stories. But even if there isn’t much of a driving plot, readers can always sit back and appreciate the beauty of the words. 

Recommended if you like: portraits of cities changing over time, slow-burn amoral enemies-to-lovers, Vo’s storytelling. 

Can I use it for Bingo? It’s Published in 2024 by an Author of Color, and it’s a prime candidate for Judging a Book By Its Cover. 

Overall rating: 15 of Tar Vol’s 20. Four stars on Goodreads.