One chapter's shabby but earnest priest become's another's pitiable, misguided beggar. Many of those new chapters contradict, whether in assertion or emotional tone, what has come in the previous one, and so we have to reassess what we know and what we have seen, who has said what and to whom. And as such, it takes a long time for the reader to find their feet, because the carpet is always being pulled out from under them. The story starts slow - we spend a long, long time on a different character's perspective every chapter, picking up a small figure encountered in the previous one and following them to the next. how one fact of existence can shatter and refract and become a hundred different perspectives on the same set of events, a thousand different responses. An account of a stunningly wide variety of people's experiences in a city under occupation. and all of whom are connected by threads of politics and obligation and camaraderie and rivalry and the shared experience of being in this city, at this time, under this regime.įundamentally, that's what it is. A city of immigrants and occupiers and rich and poor and workers and feudal overlords and scholars and priests and gods and all manner of people in between.

A city of various magics, both familiar and strange. A city of many factions, for the occupation, against it, neutral and just. It tells the story of Ilmar, a city chafing under the occupation of an invading Palleseen force for the last three years. with an accompaniment of interesting magics to back it up.Ĭity of Last Chances is a somewhat complex book. A web of interlinked stories and moments that's brave enough to try to encompass the totality of a city under occupation.

City of last chances tchaikovsky