Ben's Reviews > The Houses of the Curious

Four stars is possibly a little overly generous for this, but three felt a little stingy - and I really did enjoy it. One of the things I really liked about this book was the fast paced dialogue which kept things moving along. There was a surprising amount of characters talking in comparison to prose descriptions. At times I felt a little more painting of the world could have been good, but given how the story flowed and the characters felt quite real in their words, I was happy to let the style take me along for the ride. That is not to say that the characters are not flawed - the main character, Aurora, is quite irritating in parts. Being told specifically not to do certain things because it will endanger her and her family and friends, she is almost guaranteed to blunder around doing exactly what she should not do. However, this is fairly understandable given her age, inexperience, and the fact that the people who really should know better seem to consistently put her in the position to do so.

The plot of the book is sadly its weak point. It is not only nothing special, it is an extremely well worn path of tropes which will be familiar to anyone who has read their share of pulp fantasy - which is really what this book is, not science fiction. You see, there is a boy with a sword and birthmark who was spirited away from the evil overlord when he was young by a good wizard because he is destined to overthrow the evil empire, but only after meeting various monstrous challenges and dealing in near escapes along the way as he comes of ages, coincidentally around the same time the evil overlord learns of his existence. These will temper him and help him learn how to use his special gifts and fight for truth, justice, and goodness. Oh sorry, it is not a boy but a girl, and she has some tech in her head, not a magic sword... and yeah, the old wizard is not a wizard, he is actually a scientists who uses technology which has an incredibly unscientific way of working to allow him to do all sorts of amazing things (yeah, read magic here - he is a wizard). She has an unlikely group of companions. She fights evil monsters... er robots... and meets spirits and capricious gods along the way...

OK, now despite all this, and it goes on. This is not actually that bad. I kind of like this sort of fantasy, and here Bowie has dressed it up and given it a new set of clothes. It is still very much the same beast. He is not reinventing anything here. He is not doing anything which has not been done a thousand times before. However, he is is giving it some new colours, or a new flavour. It is fine. Sometimes this kind of pulp type story is exactly what I am looking for. Here I was in the right kind of mood for it, and the new take on it was fun and interesting enough to pull me along for the ride.

I felt the world building was a little on the sloppy side. You had the general feeling that this was supposed to be Earth, some time in the future after climatic disaster, wars, and who knows what else. However, it could just as easily have been another planet settled by colonists from Earth, or to be honest, a random fantasy world with nothing to do with Earth at all. There seems to be no explicit link in culture, or anything else. I felt that this very much just left it up to the reader to fill in things with the broad strokes that Bowie has provided. On the one hand this is a good thing as it lets the reader do the the work with their imagination, which is sometimes so much better than having it curtailed by too much from the author. On the other, it gave the setting a bit of a two dimensional feeling which only played into the pulp fantasy feeling. Do not scratch the surface too hard, or the flaws will begin to show.

Yet, despite this, The Houses of the Curious is nicely written and I was happy to continue reading on. I am not totally sure I will bother to read any continuing parts to this if they eventuate, but I may do. This was very much the introduction to this story and I suspect it is intended to be a trilogy. We get the introduction of the characters, they learn their place in the world, they are tempered and finally... they are thrust into greater things. It is all very predictable, but that does not mean it is not fun. I think this is a debut novel, and it has a certain self-published feeling about it - and if so, this is all the better, because it really a lot better crafted than I would expect.