After carrying this book around from apartment to apartment for thirteen years, I finally made it beyond the first hundred pages and have finished the first book in the quartet. At this pace, I should be done in about 39 more years, so there’s hope! I think this really is a case of a book needing to be read at the right time. With a long train commute and a sudden urge to read Tad Williams, the stars aligned.
City of Golden Shadow is set in a near-future world dominated by virtual reality. Renie is a teacher at a university in South Africa when she meets !Xabbu, a Bushman who has come to the city to learn. He is basically the last remaining Bushman and serves as a way for Williams to explain the history and theory of VR to the reader without just narrating straight at us. !Xabbu helps Renie try to rescue her little brother from a misadventure in a VR club, but her brother ends up in a coma and Renie becomes determined to try to figure out why he’s not waking up and what the mysterious golden city she saw has to do with it. This is a long and complex book with a lot of characters, and it’s the setup for the next three books in the series. Williams is clearly setting up a quest narrative and spends 1000 pages maneuvering everyone together, but he’s such a good writer that I enjoyed the whole thing immensely. The Dragonbone Chair is my favorite fantasy series for the same reason — I love his ability to really build a world and make it seem effortless. If you don’t like long books that take their time, he’s not the writer for you. My mom has never been able to make it past the first 100 pages of The Dragonbone Chair because she finds the level of description boring, but it fully engages me, so your mileage will vary depending on your desire to be immersed. I do think he could have probably sped City of Golden Shadow on a bit, but life’s about the journey and so is this series. You can really tell his epic fantasy tendencies here, as the book is a mix of sci-fi and fantasy throughout, which I enjoyed.
Recommended for the epic series aficionados among us. Warnings for children in peril, murder, serial killer scenes of violence and murder against women.