Senlin Ascends

On the fence about this one. Praised/hyped widely, this debut was first self-published in 2013, and picked up by Orbit in 2017. You've probably read it elsewhere, but Senlin Ascends is the first in a four book series - The Books Of Babel - about a headmaster on a quest to find his wife, which he lost while on their honeymoon in the Tower of Babel. Not the biblical one, but a mammoth with an unknown number of 'ringdoms', in a steampunkish setting. Thomas Senlin transforms from a quiet armchair bibliophile to an air-balloon pirate in the process. While lots of reviewers rave about the prose, to me, it felt different. It's generally okay for sure - it does the job telling an escapist story which main goal is entertainment - but it didn't ring truthful to me. I guess I should not expect natural speech in a fantasy story like this, but there's an artificiality to Bancroft's wordiness that made me aware of the fact I was reading a 21st century book trying to masquerade as something set in a secondary world at the dawn of electricity.

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