Foundryside

Fantasy Renaissance Italy! Rival merchant houses! Cool programmatic magic! We finally get the dark backstory of all those guys Dante Aligheri put in Hell. (I know, I know--it's the wrong time period.) I ate this 500-page novel up in a few sittings. The ragtag gang of misfits and the world-building will please fans of [a:Megan Whalen Turner|22542|Megan Whalen Turner|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1489507023p2/22542.jpg] and [a:Leigh Bardugo|4575289|Leigh Bardugo|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1534446099p2/4575289.jpg].

The MC, Sancia, is your basic dirty, saucy, pocket-rocket girl-thief. Deeply competent. Not good at making friends. Special trauma powers that she hates but needs for work. Cool facial scar. Doesn't mind getting covered in blood and feces. All good ingredients for a blorbo. We also have a magical talking key named Clef who serves as Sancia's Disney princess animal companion. From what I've gathered, everybody who reads this book loves him because he is in many ways just Morte from

Planescape: Torment. (I am saying this with heart-eye emojis.) We also have Sancia's love interest, Berenice, who is the apprentice to this universe's Top Mage because she doesn't blink and can type at 100 WPM. (Finally, some hot autistic girl representation in the media.) She talks like a worn-out receptionist, and I love her. Then we have Gregor, who is a rich white Dude with a weird military background, but don't count him out; the plot happens to him big time. Finally, there's the aforementioned Top Mage who is your classic arrogant old asshole wizard. He plays off the rest of the gang nicely.

The main characters and world-building--namely the magic system, but also the religious metaphysics--are worth the whole book. They are also carrying all three-point-five stars like pack mules, because everything else is only halfway there.

Sometimes the writing sounds like a journalistic podcast a la

This American Life or

Revisionist History. I actually like this style better than, say, the vast majority of dense and regal high fantasy writing. It makes for a much brisker, cleaner read. But it doesn't always work. The action feels under-described; the subtext is over-told. RJB will occasionally forget his own style and dip into a, "For who could ever love a beast?" sort of tone. Overall, it reads very YA, which is dissonant with its adult subject matter--rape, slavery, gore, child sex trafficking, etc.

Also, oh my god, forget everything else I say in this review, because my #1 biggest problem with

Foundryside? Scrumming. !!!!! This universe has invented the word "scrumming" the same way ours has invented the word "fucking," which leads to every other sentence sounding like:

Get your scrumming hands off of me. I can't scrumming believe this. Scrum it, we're all scrummed anyway. Are you smurfing me Smurfette? etc. There are 87 instances of the word scrum. Some of them occur during the dramatic climax. Why? Why did he do this? Other curse words from our universe remain: shit, hell, damn. He doesn't always use these gracefully and there's no in-universe explanation for them like there is for scrum. I never once got used to it. So scrumming stupid...

Other issues. Frequently, there will be a scene break in the middle of a chapter (denoted by a blank line), and then the scene will literally pick up the exact second it left off, like he just wanted certain lines to have room for impact. But the impact is always minimal and would have been better served by just continuing. For example,

"...the small, red ball that had once been Tomas Ziani simply...popped." Line break here. "There was a loud, curious coughing sound, and the room instantly filled with a fine, swirling red mist."

Yet sometimes it just continues where other novels would break. Eg: ""Great," said Sancia faintly. Another hour ticked by. Then another." Why not take out the description of time passing and just put in a break there?

RJB will also take every opportunity to stop and explain how cool and well-thought-out his world-building is. Often in the middle of an action scene. His world-building is indeed cool, and the expository style reaches its peak utility in these sections, but it feels like spoon-feeding. I'd rather a nice drip feed of information when relevant that leaves me with just enough to put things together myself. Readers want to be a part of the story-telling process. Also, sometimes the things he explains are just what people are doing with their shit. Like, dude…it’s shit. I get the feeling that the author is the kind of Fantasy Bro who loves thinking about the nitty-gritty minutiae of, say...shit...but his style and action-y subject matter doesn't match the genre where it's usually found.

Related to this problem, and I touched on this above, but RJB cannot stop spoiling the subtext, which feels juvenile at best and condescending at worst. For example: "...it could also control her. Which Sancia found deeply horrifying. She'd grown up in a place where she'd had no say in her decisions. To have someone literally take her will away from her..." This would have been more satisfying to put together myself, thanks. Also, it wouldn't have been hard. Even, say, I don't know, "She could feel the plate pulsing underneath her scar," would work better than, "This reminded her of being a slave again, which was very bad." Put some symbolism into it.

Foundryside feels very

Save the Cat! or

Hollywood Formula, which has its place, but it's so transparent that it gives you the deja vu of, "I have read many, many stories about a ragtag team putting on a heist with impossible odds, and structurally, this is just another one."

Despite it being formulaic, the final act comes out wonky. There were satisfying payoffs--but it's like he traded them off for the pacing. In the first two acts, the stakes manage to build steadily from, "one last job and then I'm gone," to,

"ah, fuck, you're saying I gotta take on a whole merchant house?"

Obviously, things are going to move faster and faster as we near the climax, but the acceleration should increase linearly, and RJB seemed to understand this until we get to the third act. In the third act, there are a lot of fun twists and events that get paid out, but they don't all feel earned.

For example, Sancia and Berenice have been flirting the whole novel. Right before Sancia is sent off on Mission Infiltrate Mountain, Berenice says that they should get a drink sometime. Cool. But the next time they see each other, a mere few hours later, they have a big damn kiss where Sancia thinks to herself, "...after tonight, she wanted to touch no one but Berenice; how hungry she felt for Berenice's enthusiastic glow, this raw desire to snatch a piece away from herself, like a demigod stealing fire from a mountaintop." Whoa, girl. A few hours ago you were just talking about maybe possibly exploring your connection. Then the NEXT time they see each other they're like, "I told my boss that I'm only staying if you do because I go wherever you go." UHaul lesbianism or forced pacing? Like, what happened to the drink, girls? I get that ~life or death stakes~ can make people reprioritize, but *I* didn't reprioritize! I wanted more build-up! More tension! I wanted it stretched over the next novel!

It's hard for me to overlook the writing issues today, but I think that I would have loved this book uncritically in 7th grade. Anytime you find a book that appeals to your inner 12-year-old, you have to hold onto it and never let it go. Even when the word "scrumming" appears 87 times. (If I didn't make it clear, I will be reading the next one.)

Overall, I thought it was fun, but not revolutionary or captivating. It felt like there was too much focus on the mechanics of the magic system, and I would've preferred spending more time on character development. The voice was a little too modern for me in a fantasy setting, with lots of "okay"s and "yeah"s that were probably meant to make it feel grounded, but for me made it feel less serious than it could've been.

didn't like the author's simplistic writing style

3.5 rounded up

Idk it was pretty cool. My favorite part was the worldbuilding and how it connected to the plot. Also the key. Everything else, I struggled to connect to, which made things boring during the middle.

Wow.

I feel as though I’ve finally come up for air after reading this book. I can’t believe it took me this long to even hear about this book, much less read it.

Anyhow, this was a truly unique, richly designed, flash-bang of a book. I don’t want to write a description of the plot because really, you’re here on Goodreads and don’t need another one of those.

Read this book!

I loved the intricate “magic system”, though in this case I really hesitate to call it magic. In this world, the fantasy comes from altering reality and convincing objects that they can do things or that they ARE things that they aren’t. This is done by scriving, a kind of writing that changes the very nature of an object.

I loved the characters, and loved how none of them were typical. They’re all nuanced, with no “beautiful girl who doesn’t know she’s beautiful and eminently powerful” and absolutely no “foreboding dark king with a heart of gold”. Thank goodness.

Interesting plot, enough action but not too much, and decadent world building without mindlessly veering into fairyland or completely alien territory. I was surprised at every turn of a key (wink) in this story, and I loved every minute.

Golems from Jewish folklore have always fascinated me, with their heads full of instructions written on a life-giving scroll. A golem is both the creation myth in miniature and a way to codify magic, a sort of early computer programming where the processors are clay giants. It’s strangely comforting to imagine that human beings could control the world in such a fashion, while also terrifying to imagine the many ways it could go wrong.

In Foundryside, Robert Jackson Bennett takes some of those basic elements and introduces a world where craftsmen use the art of scriving to write a reality-controlling language on inanimate objects and give them a form of consciousness; everything in creation is nothing more than a golem waiting for its instructions. Then, he imagines all of the ways that this power could and would go sickeningly, catastrophically, heartbreakingly wrong.

Sancia is a thief, and a damn good one, all thanks to her ability to touch any object and understand how it works. When she touches an object, understands everything about it, which comes in handy when she needs to pick a lock or avoid a trap, but makes it hard to focus when she has to tune out her own clothes.

When the book opens, Sancia is about to start a seemingly mundane job for a mysterious client: steal a small wooden box from the waterfront and deliver it unopened, no questions asked. As you might imagine, the heist goes catastrophically wrong, and Sancia decides she needs to know what she went to all that trouble to get.

Inside the box, she discovers a bizarre scrived key that can open any lock and that also happens to speak in a snarky voice that she can hear in her head. Sancia quickly realizes that she is in deep shit with any number of people who want to kill her, and she sets about trying to find a way to survive.

This wouldn’t be a book about a thief if there wasn’t eventually a bigger, more dangerous heist in the cards. As Sancia comes to understand the true stakes of her situation, she slowly but surely builds out a crew of friends and allies while Jackson Bennett unpacks her history and reveals the horrors of her former life.

Meticulous worldbuilding always feels like the “fun” of an epic fantasy novels, the part of the book that the author obsessed over, sometimes to the detriment of the story. Jackson Bennett’s worldbuilding is fun, but scriving is also the rotten core at the heart of Foundryside.

Sancia’s world and its wonders exist only because of atrocities that seem like ancient history but that happened not so long ago. The worst part is the revelation that the modern-day scrivers only understand a tiny fraction of the language of their ancestors, and all the power will go to the first scriver who puts enough pieces of the language together to remake the world in their image.

Foundryside is the first of Jackson Bennett’s novels that I’ve read. I had heard endless praise for his Divine Cities trilogy, and I’m sure I’ll read it before too much longer, but for whatever reason, I was more drawn to Foundryside’s fascinating premise and high-stakes magical heists. Highly recommended.

Full disclosure: I received a free review copy of this book from NetGalley, but I listened to the audiobook from Audible.

2.5* I can see why people love this book, but I just didnt feel any real connection to it.

****4.5****

Bennett is a new author to me. Most of the people have read

The Divine Cities by him.

In the city Tevanne,ruled by Merchant houses, Sancia Grado is considered a top thief and always gets the top jobs. This time she is supposed to steal a package under a mechanthouse's nose and she does. But what shocks her is the small package that she stole has a golden key and it can speak to her telepathically and the key has a name,Clef!

Sancia has her own special powers where she can speak to the things around her. She lands into a cat and dog chase with different powerful entities around Tevanne and also makes new friends.Her friendship with the Key, Clef is amazing.

Narration is fast, conversations light, witty and high with emotions. Good characters and world building. First in the new series, this one has action-packed fight scenes, high magic,technology

and fight for Power.Its a crackling debut with no doubt.

Happy reading!!

I will give this a 3.5

It has a decent magic system, Clef is interesting, the other humans not so much.

I kept mapping Scriving to Coding which was fun.

May or may not read the net one in the series.

This book didn't blow me away, but there were some aspects of it that I really enjoyed. The magic system is fresh and interesting, the main character is easy to like, and there was plenty of movement in the plot.

I'm not really sure why I didn't LOVE this book, but I thought it was good! Definitely worth reading.