Cloudbound
Bone Universe, Book 2
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Cloudbound
Buy Now for £18.99
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Narrated by:
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Raviv Ullman
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By:
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Fran Wilde
About this listen
After the dust settles, the City of living bones begins to die, and more trouble brews beneath the clouds in this stirring companion to Fran Wilde's Updraft.
When Kirit Densira left her home tower for the skies, she gave up many things: her beloved family, her known way of life, her dreams of flying as a trader for her tower, her dreams. Kirit set her City upside down, and fomented a massive rebellion at the Spire, to the good of the towers - but months later, everything has fallen to pieces.
With the Towers in disarray, without a governing body or any defense against the dangers lurking in the clouds, daily life is full of terror and strife. Naton, Kirit's wing-brother, sets out to be a hero in his own way - sitting on the new Council to cast votes protecting Tower-born, and exploring lower tiers to find more materials to repair the struggling City.
But what he finds down-tier is more secrets - and now Nat will have to decide who to trust, and how to trust himself without losing those he holds most dear, before a dangerous myth raises a surprisingly realistic threat to the crippled City, in Cloudbound.
©2016 Fran Wilde (P)2016 Audible, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
Plot wise... this carries on from the first book, and we have a new protagonist! Nat! We also get a new narrator who is... fine. He did a terrible job at differentiating the different character voices, which is a problem for reasons I'll get into.
Story-wise, this book is about the city tearing itself apart after the revelations of the first book. Not a bad direction to take things in. However, the political manoeuvring gets dull very quickly. I love that the author managed to portray a story about how centrists enthusiastically jump into bed with fascists if it lets them hold onto power in the short term. We need more books that tell stories such as that. However, to tell that story, we were given Nat as a new protag, and he's naïve to the point of farce. It's weird that the protag of the last book saw through the Evil Organisation she was forced to join after only a few chapters, but Nat never seems to actually work out what the problem is with the government he's so keen to uphold. You know, the one that's eager to execute a few dozen innocent people to make everyone else calm down.
It's really weird to have the protag of the first book - a wealthy, sheltered, noble, be canny and switched on, whilst Nat, the working class kid who's live in poverty and understands how power in the city works, is naïve and blind to how corrupt and obviously fascist-leaning the Council is.
There's a big shake-up in the last quarter, and whilst that's appreciated, it came far too late for me. The politicking and ineffectual centrist hand-wringing about standing up to fascists in the first half was just too tedious for me. A good half of it could easily have been cut. The next book might be a return to form, but I doubt it.
A mess of a sequel
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