This was an odd duck. That is, it read more like a series of short stories, or episodes, than a novel. For that it worked as it lost me sometimes and when it did it would only be for the rest of the chapter rather than the whole work.

Enjoyable enough and the writing was fantastic. The characters had potential. It just didn't grab me as much as I'd hoped it would. I can take a degree of weird, and the humor thrown in was a nice flavoring.

There was much to enjoy here, but I found I couldn't connect with it. I'd read more from this author in the future though.

Disclaimer: I will not be providing a link for the review since I didn't really like the book. i don't want to publish a negative review (I never do) in my blog or Amazon because I don't want to generate bad attention to the book. I found the pacing to slow and the plot a little bit boring. So much that It was really hard to finish the rest of the book.

I thought I had already sent something in, but I really enjoyed reading this book. I liked it so much that I bought the hard-cover when it was published to lend to several of my friends. I'm looking forward to reading more books by Daniel Polansky in the future.

This was an odd little book, not really my taste though it had some interesting moments. It's I guess a dark urban fantasy? Set mostly in New York and adjacent fantastic realms, about a mysterious character named just "M" who has some kind of magical powers, or as he prefers to refer to it, he's in good with "the Management." The details are never really explained, and the characters are kind of flat, and there's just a lot of drugs and weirdness. The other weakness of this book is that it's not a novel in the slightest, though nor is it an actual short story collection. The book proceeds vaguely in chronological order, but each chapter is basically a separate vignette, and the book just never really coalesces into anything. 2.5 stars.

Early on during my reading of this book, I made the following note to myself: "OMG, Whit Stillman was reborn as a Brooklyn hipster millennial and decided to write a picaresque urban fantasy novel."

Having finished, I stand by that assessment. Main character "M" and his cohort, and the way they interact, remind me very much of the yuppie characters and relationships in Stillman's films of the 1990s. The difference, of course, is that Polansky's characters exist in a magical sub-society of modern NYC. Otherwise, the similarities are striking to me. I also could not help but picture M as a cross between Polansky (because M seems like a bit of a wish-fulfillment self-insert) and the TV version of Quentin Coldwater from Lev Grossman's Magicians trilogy. Not the book version, who has just finished high school at the start, but the TV version, who is about 30. M and his friends are "ageless," and narrative clues put M as at least over 110 years old, and based on how they act and speak I imagine them all appearing about 25 to 30.

The picaresque nature of this novel -- picaresque meant here in the episodic sense -- is interesting, but also a little problematic in that it is hard to connect with characters seen only in vignettes and with little, if any, overarching plot. Each episode is like a short story featuring M and whichever side character makes the most sense. Some of the stories are stellar -- 5 stars for the hilarious bit about the multiplying coffee shops! -- and some are a little meh. I think the problem is down to the lack of detail about the overall magical system (things just ARE in this book, with little background or explanation, but I find this unevenness also tends to be more or less proportional to how much romance and/or sex is involved at any given time. This is partly because I didn't care enough about M's friends to care who was boinking who, and partly because the whole book has an undercurrent of hipster sexism. That is, it has a somewhat sexist view of women, but if a book could argue back it would claim that it is not really sexist and is just being ironic. Or something. I do not think that argument flies.

In any case, this is a book (and an author) that dearly loves New York City, and gets many things right. I don't know how it would speak to someone who doesn't live here, but as a local I was entertained if not by the characters than by the vignettes. I mean, who has not ridden the subway on a particularly bad day and wondered if it could be traveling through the circles of hell?

I started and stopped this book at least 3 times and just couldn't get into it. I'm sure it picks up, so maybe I'll try to read it on vacation.

This book feels a bit like "American Gods" by Neil Gaiman. I might actually like it better; it's better written. The book stars M, a rather feckless magician who has a penchant for trouble and a knack for getting out of that trouble imaginatively.

I love the way the book describes how magic works. It's like getting in good with the bouncer at your favorite club, only in M's case he's in good with the powers that run the universe. This causes things to flow his way. He finds subway tokens when he needs them, a friend has a job for him when he's out of money, and the girl he goes home with from the bar just happens to be leaving the country for 3 months and need someone to watch her apartment when he needs a place to live. M calls this "being in the pocket". He doesn't tax the universe's goodwill too much, coasts along on these chances that break his way, and ends up with considerable power to call upon when reality needs bending.

New York, and especially Brooklyn, are characters at least as much as M is. The godlike powers that have settled in the city have adapted. The great powers of New York and Brooklyn, the White and Red Queens, are a Manhattan socialite and hipster earth witch respectively. A lot of what was enjoyable about the book was exploring this magical city.

The book is a series of loosely connected stories. In one, M must deal with the fact that everything in Brooklyn is turning into a hipster fair trade coffee house. Every single building. Something is awry, and he must fix the problem. Stories like this, along with river pirates who lair under the Brooklyn Bridge and parties with magical fights, are how the book starts out- lots of fun!

Eventually, something of a plot coheses out of these stories. M is not an especially nice guy, and I got a bit tired of his preciousness and casual sexism/misogyny, and that's part of why the book gets less than 5 stars. But I did enjoy it quite a bit, and wish I could find "the pocket" myself.

This "City Dreaming" Will Keep You Wide Awake

While many Polansky fans favor his debut trilogy over this confection, I read somewhere that Polansky lists this book as one of his favorites and I wholeheartedly agree.

Contrary to the jacket blurb it's not at all about two warring witch Queens; indeed it doesn't have much of anything in common with the usual urban fantasy, and it hardly has a plot to speak of. Rather, it's a collection of episodes in the colorful, strange, and wildly fantastic life of our hero "M". He's magical, he's a hard drinking reprobate, and he's always up for a dangerous lark. We follow "M" as he wanders the magical back streets of New York City. He's a bit distant from his own story, so the feel is like listening to his voiceover narration of his own adventures, but in real time. The effect is slightly disorienting because it is both very immediate and confiding and yet somehow detached.

The tone is sometimes snarky, sometimes world weary, and yet often upbeat and energetic. "M" is complex in an unspecified way, sort of like a Marlowe or Spade noir character, where you get a very definite feel or sense of the character even though you don't really know anything about him and he is cagey about his own backstory. He ends up being a sort of tour director leading you on a walkabout through a chapter of his own life. Or, actually, magical, dreaming New York City's life, since that's the real star here.

The episodes are fairly random. You could mix them all up and read them in a different order and it wouldn't matter very much. But that was fine. In addition to "M" you get a few of his friends and acquaintances who reappear with some frequency, and then loads and loads of one offs and one of a kind characters. There's always some drunk demon or other fantastical creature, or thing, around the corner, so there's never a dull moment, (apart from hangovers), in "M's" life.

All of this is done in an exaggerated dry, deadpan style that mostly serves to balance the fantasy and give it all a high gloss and just the right air of plausibility. This isn't gonzo or bizarro; it's more refined and restrained than that. That restraint is what gives the stories added punch and what keeps "M" interesting.

So, a nice tour through New York City in a walk on the magical side style, with a very entertaining companion. A nice find. (Please note that I received a free advance ecopy of this book without a review requirement, or any influence regarding review content should I choose to post a review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.)