I have a new love...Asmodeus, be thy name! The villainous and stylish head of House Hawthorn is back and taking (somewhat) centre stage in this second novel in The Dominion of the Fallen series and it is fabulous. Once again, de Bodard has crafted a beautiful narrative, weaving in aspects of Vietnamese culture seamlessly with French creating a melange of the two that just works so well. There were some aspects of this book that were a little jarring at first, but once I reconciled myself to the way the story was going, I found myself re-immersed in a wholly original and utterly compelling world. de Bodard's prose is just exquisite and her characters are fully realised with believable motivations. All in all, this was a fantastic book and I will be following this series with great interest.
I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for a fair and honest review.

The House of Binding Thorns is the sequel to Aliette de Bodard's debut novel, The House of Shattered Wings.  Binding Thorns (review copy from Gollancz) picks up immediately after the cataclysmic events of Shattered Wings.
In de Bodard's post-apocalyptic Paris, wealthy Houses are ruled by the Fallen, angels ejected from Heaven, but with no memory of why they were cast out, or their former lives.  The major houses provide a measure of protection for them, and a way of using their magical talents.  But as Shattered Wings showed, there are dark forces at play seeking to undermine the House structures.
But Binding Thorns takes a different tack to its predecessor, focusing on the much story of a strategic alliance House Hawthorn is seeking to make with the Annamite dragon kingdom under the Seine.  The existence of the dragons is known to very few and the product of France's colonial past.  Paris has a substantial Annamite minority, living on the margins of society, many of them migrants or the descendants of migrants unable to return home.  It is natural that they would have brought their beliefs and supernatural beings to their new home. 
It's always exciting to find a work of speculative fiction that deals with post-colonialism, let alone one that does it so well.  As de Bodard makes clear in her Afterword, this is a novel that draws on the experience of colonial control through things like the Opium Wars.  Except the drug of choice that is slowly destroying the Paris dragon kingdom is angel essence, not opium.  And just like China, the trade in angel essence is a deliberate attempt to weaken and undermine the kingdom, making it ripe for a takeover.  The dissonance between Fallen and Annamite culture is portrayed incredibly well throughout the novel, whether through the starkest incompatibilities in the two magic systems, or the subtleties of cultural constructs.
The chance to explore another House is an exciting one.  House Hawthorn is an interesting contrast to Silverspires in the first novel.  We learn much more about its enigmatic leader Asmodeus.  Cruel and self-serving he may be, but he turns out to be much more complex than the pantomime villain of the first novel, and an incredibly sympathetic character. 
The overall cast of characters remains strong and diverse.  It's good to see motherhood portrayed, along with older women in positions of power and influence.  There are gay, lesbian and bisexual characters, as well as the obvious racial diversity of the Annamite and Fallen characters. 
With the groundwork laid in its predecessor, The House of Binding Thorns is a much more interesting and powerful novel.  de Bodard's series is shaping up to be extremely interesting indeed.
Goodreads rating: 4*

A world of angels and demons exists in a war-torn Paris around the turn of the twentieth century. Those who must, seek to live in one of the Houses led by a Fallen. A power struggle between them means a constant flux. Newly Fallen are used for their magic. No one is safe. Under it all the dragons keep their kingdom unseen to prying eyes in the River Seine but they are being destroyed as well.
After the terrible events of The House of Shattered Wings we find Madeline has returned to the House of Hawthorn where she suffered so much before being taken in by Silverspires. She is once more under the control of the Head of the House Asmodeus who will control her both in life and death. Her addiction to angel essence, drawn from the Fallen after they die, makes her fatally weak. Her friend Elphon has been resurrected by Asmodeus but retains no memory of his previous life, the knife twists a little more. Selected to be part of a delegation to the dragon kingdom Madeline is worried she might not survive and added to this the newly made Elphon is also to accompany her.
Thuan is part of the retinue of House of Hawthorn and to all observers he is training to be a complete dependent of the House. But Thuan is a dragon from the kingdom under the Seine. He is trying to find the source of the angel essence that his taking over and killing his brethren. He’s a spy and he is putting his life on the line for his family and his world. Thuan has made friends in the house who treat him as a surrogate son but he may have to betray them at any time. When he first encounters Asmodeus Thuan is overwhelmed by the Fallen’ s raw power and he cannot begin to imagine how much his future will be tied to his master’s.
Phillipe, who was at the heart of the previous book has suffered a terrible loss. Working as a Doctor to the poor of Paris he nurses a hope of resurrecting his love but at what price will this come? Encountering another fallen who is surviving outside of the protection of any House he is offered a bargain but it means he will come to be noticed by the House and being noticed is never a good thing.
This does a very good job as a follow on to House of Shattered Wings. With new characters and new problems alongside our original protagonists this makes a very intriguing and pacy adventure with the denouement being both satisfying and leading to the next book. The story feels fresh and we do get invested in the trials of the characters. Its descriptively dense with some excellent word pictures creating a world at once so familiar and so different to ours. The underwater world where everyone can breathe it as if it is air is beautifully thought out and just when you forget they are under the river something happens that breaks them and you out of complacency. There are no saints in this book of angels but there are certainly characters we can identify with and this empathy is half the battle in getting the reader onside.
I think this is an excellent series with lots of variety and it feels more inventive than many books I come across. It’s an exciting world to fall into and I am looking forward to the next book.

was not quite won over by the first book in this series. Sometimes, it was a struggle, but there was enough there to make me want to read the next volume. And here it is. Sadly, I have much the same reaction, and I could almost copy my previous review over. Once again, there are a lot of machinations and intrigues that our characters are only partly privy to, if that, meaning that the first half of the book ends up as a load of disconnected scenes where nothing much seems to happen. We spend a lot more time in the dragon kingdom under the Seine this time, which is a good thing, as it is evocatively described and a genuinely unsettling location, fishscales and all. This stands in contrast to the Paris of the books, which should be a real winner - one of the most beautiful cities in the world ruined by magical war, peopled by enigmatic Fallen angels? I'm in. But somehow, this just doesn't come across on the page. It should be the defining feature of the books, a landscape that becomes a character like Gormenghast, but it is annoyingly vague throughout. This and its predecessor are decent books, but they could have been great, and they fall short of that. A frustrating read, but not a futile one.

I haven't read the previous book so a lot of the impact may have been lost on me, but I really enjoyed this book. It was well written, the world was well formed and the characters are incredible. It definitely makes me want to go to the first book and read this as should be intended just so I can fully understand everything that happened.

Any book that has me trying not to make squeaky noises on public transport is likely to put me at risk (narrowly averted) of missing my bus stop and (inevitably) falling in love. I loved Aliette de Bodard's blasted, magic-torn Paris and returning to it I delighted in the new perspectives on one of its darker Fallen Houses. Just because they're the protagonists doesn't make House Hawthorn heroic - here it's clear that Asmodeus is Up To Something and that those on the receiving end are unlikely to appreciate it. But I love nuanced villainy, and by the end de Bodard had me caught neatly in the trap of wanting Asmodeus's plans to fail (because surely our new dragon prince is too adorable to die) and not wanting Asmodeus to fall to his enemies (although it was hard not to appreciate their point of view).

The triple narrative of the political fate of House Hawthorn, Philippe's attempts to raise Isabelle, and the survival of a Houseless Fallen and her wife and child were all equally compelling, and I found them well-balanced and neatly interwoven. As usual, it was a wrench to be torn away from this dark, unpleasant world - I'm agog to discover how the twists and turns related here might change the political landscape of Fallen Paris. Fingers firmly crossed for another stand-alone story in the Dominion in the future...

The House of Binding Thorns is the sequel to Aliette De Bodard’s extremely well regarded debut, The House of Shattered Wings. The central conceit is that angels have fallen from heaven – short on memories, but filled with supernatural power.

Like its predecessor, the book is set in a Paris of the last century, of top hats, tailcoats, salons and oppression. But here, if there is a ruling class, it is those surviving fallen angels. They’re radiant, often charming creatures. Most seem to have a streak of cruelty running through them – and where that isn’t immediately the case, their power comes at a price. This is a broken world, as well. Factions of the Fallen waged war on each other for years before the current situation. As a result, Paris is devastated, broken into enclaves, islands of stability protected by Fallen magic. Between these Houses are magical landmines, absolute poverty, a poisoned river and other, darker threats. If the Fallen have blown apart the city, they are now the only safety from the results. That safety is, though, rather tenuous. There’s enclaves of another culture entirely lurking beneath the waters of the Seine.

We had a brief glimpse of their environment in the previous book, but are immersed in it more fully here. It’s clearly a distinct culture, with a ritual and cadence unfamiliar to those above; it’s a vivid and thoughtfully crafted society, with its own customs and mores – but it has the same creeping corruption and decay as is occurring in the enclaves of the Fallen. The interaction between these two societies is fraught with opportunities for betrayal and misunderstanding, at least as much as for mutual benefit; watching characters from both societies try and cross the liminal barrier, the gaps in understanding, is intriguing.

The focus though, is on the House of Hawthorne, run by the razor edged, charming and utterly ruthless Asmodeus. I’ve got a lot of time for Asmodeus. He oozes a sort of chilly charisma, mixed with a willingness to embrace calculated brutality. There’s something about him that speaks of razorblades and blood spatter on dark nights. At the same time, he’s a ruler, with a laser-fine intelligence, and an eye for loyalty. All of these facets bob near the surface, and there’s a feeling that something far darker lurks beneath. Asmodeus is a captivating character, effortlessly seizing control of any scene he’s in, and trying to work out what he was up to, why he was doing it, and what on earth he was going to do next was a great reason to keep turning pages.

Madeleine is a returning character from the previous story. She’s fragile, struggling to shake a dependence on a drug which (briefly) provides the user with the powers of the Fallen – and slowly rots out their lungs. She’s self-aware enough to understand her position, and there’s a patina of low-grade fear that pervades her interactions. She’s tied to Hawthorne and Asmodeus, a House filld with horrible memories, and a Head who may not despise her, but of whom she has a well deserved terror. Still, Madeleine is also smart, resourceful, and prone to doing the right thing – in contrast to Asmodeus and his realpolitik, she struggles to do what she things of as both ethical and best. That she may fail is due to the hard edges of the world the author has brought us – the despair of the character seamlessly blending into the society around her. Still, Madeleine shows that if the world is in a state of slow decline, there are still those willing to stand up and be counted, when they feel that they must.

They’re not the only cast of course, and I’m doing the rest of the characters a disservice by not approaching them in detail. But if the faces are different, the depth is the same. There’s one of the people of the Seine, slowly infiltrating and acclimatising to House life, and the housebound Fallen who has created a fortress from a cheap apartment, and wants to live to see her wife give birth to their child. There’s vicious killers, and supernatural monstrosities. This is humanity at its worst and best, and it’s mirrored back to the reader in the faces of the supernatural creatures striding the broken streets of Paris. These aren’t saints or monsters, but complicated people, making decisions for their own reasons, worming their terrible way off the page and into your heart.

The plot spins itself out gradually, luring the reader into the world with old feuds and magical mysteries. There’s a tension wrapped through the pages, as investigation gradually opens up possibilities – usually unpleasant ones. Quite what’s being done, and by whom, and indeed why – all begins extremely unclear. As investigators pick up leads, clash with each other, and follow their own agenda, the story clarifies – or would, but there’s red herrings and quirky actions aplenty. There’s shades here of Chandler and Hammett, as the protagonists dig into the dirty laundry of the past, with guile and magic masking their humanity (or otherwise) and their frailty. It’s a story which rewards close reading, and one which compelled me to keep turning pages; the climax was rewarding and impressive – and left me breathlessly hoping for more.

Como fan declarada de Aliette de Bodard, he de reconocer que esta valoración será bastante subjetiva.

Si bien es cierto que prefiero su trabajo dentro del campo de la ciencia ficción, en el terreno de las novelas la autora francesa escribe principalmente fantasía, así que las únicas oportunidades que tenemos para leerla en formato largo es recurrir a este género.

The House of Binding Thorns está situada en el mismo universo que The House of Shattered Wings, pero no se puede considerar una continuación directa porque aunque comparten algunos personajes la acción se sitúa en otras de las Casas de París, concretamente en Hawthorn.

Se trata de una novela coral, donde de nuevo vamos alternando distintos puntos de vista. Algunos revisten más interés que otros, pero por norma general los cambios de narrador no ocurren de forma abrupta si no ajustada a la narración, dando lugar a pequeños saltos temporales para que avance la trama.

El personaje más fascinante de la novela, a mi entender, es Asmodeus. Dejaré a vuestra elección pensar si esto es una debilidad personal o una opinión generalizada cuando leáis la novela. Lo que parece claro es que la imagen del anti héroe ha evolucionado, hasta el extremo de llamar la atención por la forma en que hace las cosas, no solo lo que hace. En este sentido, la autora sigue explorando las posibilidades de ese París devastado con luchas entre las distintas Casas, con alianzas frágiles y venganzas cocinadas a fuego lento.

Es en este aspecto de entramado político y de negociaciones donde llama especialmente la atención la presencia de relaciones homosexuales. Quizá sea debido a la esterilidad de los Fallen, pero las alianzas que tienen lugar en ningún momento tienen en cuenta el sexo de los implicados, en un entorno normalizado. Me gusta mucho este aspecto de la historia, tratando exactamente igual las relaciones amorosas heterosexuales y homosexuales. ¡Bravo!

En algunas ocasiones Aliette abusa de las descripciones olfativas (no lo he contado, pero la palabra bergamot aparece en muchísimas ocasiones). Entiendo que hay que describir para todos los sentidos para crear una inmersión mayor en la historia, solo que me parece que se le ha ido un poco la mano.

El terreno está preparado para una nueva entrega de la saga Dominion of the Fallen y yo seré la primera interesada en leerla. Pero mientras, ¿por qué no una novela de Xuya?

The House of Binding Thorns by Aliette de Bodard
With the once powerful House Silverspires wrecked, House Hawthorn holds sway in Paris, a city now ruled by fallen angels who vie for control of it. Phillippe, an immortal who escaped his imprisonment at Silverspires is now free, but obsessed with bringing someone he valued back from the dead. Trapped inside House Hawthorn, Madeleine, the angel essence addicted alchemist, is locked in a struggle of wills with its charismatic leader, Asmodeus, who is sending her into the Dragon Kingdom under the waters of the Seine and into great peril.
The scene is set for yet another shift in the balance of power.
The House of Binding Thorns might only be set within the environs of Paris, both above and below water, but there is a sense of epic events unfolding in a place which feels much bigger than it really is.
Asmodeus is writ large in this volume. His presence can be felt on every page, even when he is absent. He is unflinchingly cruel, yet when the threat of similar unpleasantness might be visited upon him you see how logical a part of the political process he considers it. He is a man whose passions, though tightly reigned in, seep through all his meticulously maintained emotional fortifications until his up close and personal scenes with a certain Dragon Prince pretty much make the book a fire hazard.
Yet the quality of the author’s writing means Asmodeus does not overwhelm what are four other main strands involving Phillippe, Madeleine and two new key characters Thuan and Françoise, each of whom are essential to the intricate dance of the plot.
This is not a standalone book. You really do need to read The House of Shattered Wings, which did all the heavy lifting in terms of delivering important world-building. But this means that The House of Binding Thorns can really let rip with developing the characterisation, intrigue and action. There is an elegance to the writing of this novel, which makes the moments of dispassionate cruelty inescapably palpable (for those it is inflicted on), yet rational (from the viewpoint of the perpetrators). The action and danger is intense and draining.
The conclusion is satisfying and leaves the reader impatient for the next volume.

ARC provided by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I probably did not get the full impact out of this book since I haven't yet read book 1 (sonething I will rectify) so I am coming at this a bit out of order. That said picking up the storybin the middle in no way damped my enthusiasm and enjoyment of this book. I love the world building and mythology. Madeleine and Phillippe are great characters and the narrative was character cyntric with sharp, elegant and sensory prose. The nasty aspects pulled no.punches either. In all this was an unusual book in the fantasy genre and a great take on angel fiction which can be rather twee but certainly wasn't here. Will get the seties in order and reread ready for book 3!