A City Dreaming is such a strange and intriguing book, I admit that my expectations picking this up bear no relation whatsoever to the read itself and yet I found that I really enjoyed this nonetheless.  When I started reading my first thoughts were ‘what am I reading’ and yet just a few pages into the book  I found myself really keen to pick it back up.  It defies description in some respects and I think this will probably turn into a bunch of random thoughts but I’ll do my best to keep it coherent. The jacket for A City Dreaming talks about two queens poised on the brink of war.  A world with divinities, wolves and phantom subway lines.  Reading the description you will probably imagine this is urban fantasy and to be honest it is although it might take a little time for you to become accustomed to that fact when you first pick it up.  It reads like a collection of short stories and yet that’s not really the case.  Basically the story  covers (roughly) a twelve month period in the life of ‘M’.  The chapters are all self contained but the characters from certain stories crop…

Funny how I’m generally not big on anthropomorphism but at the same time I do seem to love a lot of books featuring fluffy, furry adorable sentient animals (Redwall, Watership Down, Mouse Guard, etc.) Thus the draw of Daniel Polansky’s The Builders won out, and it was also perfect because I’ve been meaning to check out his work for a long time. The animals in this book are far from soft and cuddly, though. A mouse, a stoat, an opossum, a badger, a salamander, a mole, and an owl all walk into a bar. This however is not the beginning of a joke but a start of a Kill Bill-style tale of vengeance and bloody destruction. One upon a time, all of them stood united against a common enemy, until treachery destroyed the group from within. The last job they were all on together didn’t end so well, so now the battle-hardened mouse known as the Captain is rounding up his old pals again for one last hurrah. But alas, you know what they say about the best laid schemes of mice and men. Before long, both bullets and fur will fly in abundance, as the Captain and his ragtag…