First disclaimer: I don’t read books I don’t like. Life is too short… you know, the ‘so many books, so little time’ thing. There really are so many things to do, books to read, gardens to weed, and then there’s all that time wasted, sleeping. So, if I read a chapter or two, and I just can’t get into it, I put the book down. Even if it is a gift from my best friend; I do not like to waste my reading time.
I had great expectations for The Secret History of Moscow when I read Neil Gaiman’s comment,
A lovely, disconcerting book that does for Moscow what I hope my own Neverwhere may have done to London… the prose and the atmosphere is beautiful and decaying, and everything’s grey with astonishing little bursts of unforgettable colour… deep dark, remarkable stuff.
And then when I read the blurb on the back of the book, I thought, wow. This is a book for me,
Every city contains secret places. Moscow in the tumultuous 1990’s is no different, its citizens seeking safety in a world below the streets – a dark, cavernous world of magic, weeping trees, and albino jackdaws, where exiled pagan deities and fairytale creatures whisper strange tales to those who would listen.
Galina is a young woman caught, like her contemporaries, in the seeming lawlessness of the new Russia. In the midst of this chaos, her sister Maria turns into a jackdaw and flies away - prompting Galina to join Yakov, a policeman investigating a rash of recent disappearances. Their search will take them to the underground realm of hidden truths and archetypes, to find themselves between reality and myth, past and present, honor and betrayal…in the secret history of Moscow.
Second disclaimer: I don’t like to say bad things about books I … don’t care for. I appreciate how very difficult it is to write a book. What a challenge it is to find an agent. How hard the agent has to work to sell a book to a publisher. I don’t think bad books get published. Who am I to malign something that people have been so dedicated to, that people have spent so much time working on? So if I can’t say wonderful things about a book, I just don’t say anything at all.
I felt I had to stick with this book. It was on my Once Upon a Time Challenge II list, for one thing. I really wanted to like it, for another. I loved Neverwhere, I really like urban fantasy. Unfortunately, this story just didn’t work for me.
One big problem was I could not become fond of any of the characters. One of the gods in the underworld was a cow! Cows, in my opinion, are just not revere-able. When this cow was milked, it splat out stars. I just couldn’t see it. I didn’t have much empathy for the main character, Galina, or any of her side kicks, either.
There was so much Russian history, I was completely clueless. I had to skim over lots of the historical stuff. Another problem for me was I could see Moscow, but I just could not picture the world below the city. There was a lot going on: Russian mafia, fairy tales, gypsies, politics, capitalist Russia, mental institution/prisons, and on and on. It was smatterings of so much different stuff, I became impatient and could read only little bits at a time.
Sedia’s writing is beautiful, but I simply didn’t like the story very much. Sorry. If you are interested, Sedia has a website you can visit.
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