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Home›Book Reviews›Fantasy›Adventure›Retribution Falls by Chris Wooding

Retribution Falls by Chris Wooding

By Laura M. Hughes
September 6, 2017
4763
0

Retribution Falls (Tales of the Ketty Jay) by Chris WoodingI read a lot of this book on my commute to and from work, and other books I’ve read recently have suffered for this, partly because the structure of the story doesn’t stand up to being read in little chunks. Retribution Falls was actually great for this kind of reading: the characters spend a lot of time hopping from place to place, never doing any one thing for too long, and as such there are lots of short sequences and well-structured chapters that made it easy to just pick up the book and carry on from where I left off.

The characters were a bit hit and miss for me, and I didn’t feel like I engaged with them as much as I’d hoped too. I’d pretty much expected ‘Locke Lamora on an airship’, so it’s no wonder Wooding’s characters didn’t quite live up to my expectations (then again, even the last Scott Lynch book didn’t live up to my expectations, so maybe the problem lies with me . . .). The main character here, airship captain and smuggler Darian Frey, is likeable enough, but not quite as roguish or interesting as the blurb suggests, and I actually found myself more invested in the secondary characters, mainly Crake and Jez, than in Frey. Even they didn’t feel fleshed-out enough, though. I think all the characters were lacking depth in one way or another: it felt to me like I was playing an RPG, and the characters were ‘companions’ who eventually revealed something about themselves depending on what you said to them. I also found it highly unbelievable that Frey had spent so much time with these characters before the events of the book, yet was only now starting to care about them enough to take an interest in them.

Criticism aside, I enjoyed reading the book, and am looking forward to getting hold of the second one in the series sooner rather than later.

TagsadventureAirshipsBook ReviewsChris WoodingDarian FreyfantasyRetribution FallsSteampunkTales of the Ketty Jay

Laura M. Hughes

Laura works as a freelance editor beneath the grey, pigeon-filled skies of northern England. When she isn’t working on a manuscript or writing for the Hive, you're most likely to find her on Twitter, playing Dragon Age, or hoarding polyhedral dice. Laura also writes LitRPG under the pen name Demi Harper; her first novel, GOD OF GNOMES, was published in September 2019. She created The Fantasy Hive in 2017; her sanity has been steadily disintegrating ever since.

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