Book Review: The City in Glass

Fantasy. Fiction. Mythology. Five out of Five Stars. Must Read.

Dec 02, 2024

TLDR: Five out of Five Stars. Must Read.

The City in Glass1 by Nghi Vo is a stunning tale about a demon, an angel, and a city told from the point of view of the demon. I read it in two short evenings, not because it's insubstantial, but because it’s just that wonderful. In her interview with Paul Semel,2 Vo describes this book as her “pandemic book, written mostly in 2020.” The work is apocalyptic and begins with the end of the world as the narrating character, Vitrine, knows it. The City in Glass explores what happens after that profound ending from the premise that there is always something after, just as there is always a before.

“For one terrible moment, Vitrine allowed herself to believe that it was not as bad as she knew it was.”

― Nghi Vo, The City in Glass

Vo is a multi award-winning queer American writer born and raised in Illinois and now living in Wisconsin on the shores of Lake Michigan.3 She’s been on my radar for a couple of years due to the 2021 Hugo Award she won for The Empress of Salt and Fortune.4 For several months, I kept The Empress in my digital to-read list at my local library,5 automatically renewing the hold6 on it when it would cycle through. But I never got around to actually reading it, and it eventually dropped off the list. Given this hold-renewal history, when The City in Glass landed in the library as a new release a couple of months ago, it popped up in my notifications as something that might interest me. I didn’t think it would, but I clicked it open to give the blurb a quick scan just in case.

Right at the top, it declared: “In this new standalone novel, Hugo Award-winning author Nghi Vo introduces a beguiling fantasy city in the tradition of Calvino, Mieville, and Le Guin.” Calvino and Le Guin are both big influences on my own writing, and so I stopped reading the blurb and added my name to the waiting list for the book. I wanted to see how the influence of Calvino and Le Guin moved through the work of another writer. I wondered briefly, “Who is Mieville?” and I got on with my day.

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When my turn came round to check out The City in Glass, I left it untouched for nearly two weeks and almost did not get to it before it was due. But the end of year is drawing near, and, as usual, I have not read nearly the fiction that I had hoped at the start of the year given all the more pressing non-fiction that I have needed and wanted to read for one reason or another. So where I meant to return the book unread, I opted to settle into my favorite reading chair and I opened it. Just for a minute. Just to get a general sense for the style.

A day later, The City in Glass had become a firm favorite, and as end-of year weekend fiction reads go, this one is golden.

It opens with a flourish and a curse as it introduces the main characters, the demon, Vitrine, the angel, known only as the angel, and the city, Azril. Azril is utterly destroyed, burned to the ground by angels, one of whom is the angel, from across the sea. The book tracks 300 years of Vitrine’s retribution, grief, and bitterness, as well as her ancient and enduring, but not unchanging, love. The book is carried by tone and atmosphere, and when action is introduced, it leaps us backward and forward through decades and centuries of time. It’s mythic, but this is not a hero’s journey. It’s a character study, a study in character, a series of object studies, a philosophical study.

We explore the characters of the demon, the city, and the angel, each of whom we come to know through the eyes of the demon only. We see artifacts unearthed, excavated, remembered, and preserved along with the memory of the people who once owned or created them. We turn page after page through questions about mortality and immortality through different lenses. What is mortality to a demon? To a culture? To a single individual in a given place and time? What do growth, development, transformation, exchanges, new iterations, and fresh incarnations look like from these different perspectives?

The City in Glass is a love story, but it’s not a romance novel. And it has a redemption arc, but it does not adhere to traditional moralistic good-evil binaries within that arc, despite (or because of) the demon-angel opposition.

Is Vitrine going to forgive the angel? Is this going to be some pat story of healing and moving on? It is not, thank goodness, anything so simplistic.
– Jake Casella Brookins, Locus Online7

Language, word choice, and in particular, names and their meanings, play a subtle but interesting role through the work.

VO: I really like playing with words, and more specifically with what we name things. I call Vitrine a demon, I call the angel an angel, and then I wind them up and let them go. Do their actions match what we call them, and what do we make of those expectations? I think if I called Vitrine a god or a goddess, if I call her an alien, if I call her a guardian spirit, all of which are probably legitimate ways to address her, the expectations are different.
- Nghi Vo, Exclusive Interview with Paul Semel8

The history of the word vitrine9 is reflected in the book beyond its modern meaning, “glass showcase.” The demon, Vitrine, shapeshifts frequently and with ease, as a city shapeshifts through the passage of time according to the process of cultural development and the rate of cultural exchange, as a word shapeshifts through the same. But whatever form Vitrine takes, she has within her being, as her name suggests, a glass display cabinet. Within this glass cabinet, this root word, vitre,10 at her core, she keeps a prized and precious book, the book in which she writes the names of every person born in Azril, the names of her people. "Vitreous11" is derived from the same root. It means "resembling glass,” "relating to glass,” “derived from glass,” or “consisting of glass," and it’s where the term vitreous humor,12 the clear substance that gives the eye its shape found between the retina and the lens, originates. Eyes, along with glass, transparency, and perspective are motifs in the book, all of which would make a fun study in their own right, but that’s outside the scope of this book review.

The name of the city, Azril, is described as an Arab name and translated as “God’s Help” and “One Who is Helped By God” on websites for parents looking for baby names.13 Coincidentally, there is an angel, Azrael,14 The Angel of Death, whose name translates to “God Has Helped,” “Help from God,” “The One Whom God Helps.” According to Wikipedia, Azrael is “the canonical angel of death in Islam and appears in the apocryphal text Apocalypse of Peter.” Azrael is a psychopomp and keeps a great book in which, like Vitrine in the novel, he records every birth and every death. The angel in The City in Glass is unnamed, and the city, Azril, bears the name of an angel, The Angel of Death, who performs roles much like Vitrine’s and her angel. Vitrine’s angel carries within himself a piece of Vitrine, her curse. And Vitrine will eventually carry a piece of the angel within herself, his sacrificial offering. The symmetries here are artful and beautifully balanced.

An array of concepts are similarly touched upon and subtly worked into the narrative. Vo explores dualities and unions of opposites; attraction and repulsion; destruction, construction, and creation; the underworld, the otherworld, and a world seen absent a veil between the living and the dead; death, resurrection, oblivion, fresh incarnations; the rise and fall of civilization and wilderness; global geopolitical concerns of humankind and the hyper-localized; unique births; population growth and immigration; settlement; asylum seekers, refugees, cultural identity, nationalism, and war; cultural exchanges and trade; empire; power; property; gifts, sacrifices, and offerings. And on and on. The world building she performs to showcase the collection is astounding.

“No one loves a city like one born to it, and no one loves a city like an immigrant.”

― Nghi Vo, The City in Glass

While The City in Glass is not plot driven, it remains firmly in the tradition of the novel. As we view the strata of the city along with its ghosts through Vitrine’s eyes, grow accustomed to her interactions with the angel, and come to know the newcomers as she does, a cohesive narrative, storied through the vast expanse of time, develops between city, angel, and demon. Ultimately, the fragments and the vignettes unify in a purposeful and climatic way.

Did I see the influence of Calvino and Le Guin in The City in Glass? On every page, yes. Calvino’s Invisible Cities15 can be understood as a poetic predecessor to the spirit of the work. And the anthropological studies found throughout the body of Ursula K. Le Guin’s writing contribute to the form and style that give the book its backbone. But The City in Glass is its own unique, not-to-be-missed, expertly crafted thing with its own marvellous accomplishments and outcome. After finishing it, I immediately added myself to the waiting list for The Empress of Salt and Fortune and looked up Mieville. I found all of Mieville’s work similarly checked out and happily added holds to them as well.

The City in Glass. Five out of Five Stars. Must Read.

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