This isn’t Harry Potter where magic is kept side-lined and taped away. I love the fact that there is almost no tiresome passages where one character has to explain the rules of magic, once again, to the latest eye witness or superior who stumbles in their way. The casual acceptance of magic in this world irked my girlfriend, and continued to please me. But I am nevertheless transported to a place I have never been when I read Aaronovitch’s work. There is not as much contextualisation as there is in Griffin, and a little bit more ‘telling’ as he doesn’t have the grip on creating a character out of a setting that she does.

So setting aside Griffin and her contemporaries, in my mind at least, we have in Aaronovitch an author who has a beautiful sense of the city that his characters call home. Tolkien, Terry Pratchett and Brandon Sanderson. I have to agree that, yes, Griffin has a lot over Aaronovitch, but Griffin is one of those authors who I rank in their own category, along with writers like Steven Erikson, J.R.R. In discussing Aaronovitch with my girlfriend – a literary type of a much higher calibre than me and with more literary understanding in her pinky than I have in my whole body – we discussed the question of whether he comes close to Kate Griffin when it comes to writing an urban magic story in London. Only a small amount of time has passed between books, and the excitement and entertainment hasn’t stopped in the slightest. It continues the story of Peter Grant, Detective Constable in the British Police, and the first trainee wizard in fifty years. Moon Over Soho is the second in his Rivers of London series. That is something that Ben Aaronovitch has managed to do both times I’ve read one of his books. I like looking at the good in books, especially if a book simply entertains me.īecause when it all comes down to it, that’s what I want more than anything else to lose myself in a book and be entertained. That being said, I don’t mind that my reviews aren’t designed to tear apart and criticise. This comes down to the fact that I sort of have a different scoring system for certain authors which is to say, if a book gets anything above 9.5, then it’s being ranked in another league.

The thing the musicians have in common is that they all have traces of the same Vestigium the song Body and Soul.It has been brought to my attention that when it comes to reviewing books, I may be a little lenient when it comes to scoring. Several jazz musicians die in London, seemingly of natural causes. 3 List of characters introduced in this story.

Ben aaronovitch moon over soho