Book: The City in Glass by Nghi Vo
Reviewed by Rallie X
Rating: 5/5
Azril was not special, but it was unique just like all the rest.
I love Nghi Vo's writing so much, and this novella is just another example of just how good she is. It's such a lovely character driven piece about grief and loss, mourning and survival, growth and change. Like. I feel refreshed in a way that only a really good novella can do.
The City in Glass is a lyrical exploration of loss, survival, and the process of grief and healing (with a nod to the masculine impulse to "fix" rather than process), a critique of colonialism, and just an overall beautiful story by a master of her craft. Vitrine may be a demon but we see in her a love for humanity and human things for their own sake - encouragement, gifts (some sensical and others deeply inhuman in tone) - whereas the angels come to destroy without ever asking questions; just following orders.
I loved watching the angel change as he was forced to open his eyes to the world; a journey he undertakes both because and in spite of Vitrine. And seeing Vitrine slowly finding space in the great book inside her chest for new people, new names was such a powerful meditation on what it means to survive trauma and continue living anyway.
Vitrine experiences her grief as being literally so large that it would crush her if she allowed it to, questions why the world is allowed to continue as "normal" (the sky is still blue) in the face of calamity.
The stages of growth from Azril-that-was to a new Azril are non-linear, and Vitrine lives through the memory-ghosts of her city as part of that process - from the artist and the botanist whose stories were written in her book in full to the would-be librarian whose story was cut short. And new Azril might not have her artist, the legacy of flowers remains. They do not dance the same dances, but they still dance.
This is definitely a book to return to again and again, because there is too much in the text to really absorb it the first time.
Vitrine loved her city like demons and cats may love things, with an eye towards ownership and the threat of small mayhem.
— Page 69
Demons learned humility with their first mouthful of dirt, their first mouthful of blood, and angels had never learned it at all.
— Page 11