City of All Seasons by Oliver K. Langmead and Aliya Whiteley is dreamlike story. The cities are unsettling and the book had a creepy, overall Return to Oz/Pan’s Labyrinth element that I really appreciated. I agree that it fits more into magical realism than it does with science fiction or fantasy, but I (a mostly fantasy reader) enjoyed it nonetheless. Thank you to Netgalley and Titan Books for the ARC.

Thank you Netgalley and Titan Books for the free eArc in return for an honest review.

“It’s the job of the artist to create, not to tell other people what to do with the creation"

Jamie's Fairharbour - constant winter
Esther's Fairharbour - forever summer

When a cataclysmic event separates Fairharbour into two separate worlds, existing within the harshness of constant climates, cousins Jamie and Esther reconnect through the medium of artistic creation, fed through the cracks.

Throughout the story you find out how the cities were created and what survival means to it's citizens.

I agree with some other reviews I have seen. It is incredibly vibey. I was very onboard with the world's created by the author. The plot was a little obvious (though absolutely fine) but the characters lacked depth. I feel like I didn't get to know them at all. Hopefully the finished version will be a little more fleshed out.

What I really loved though was the theme of art being an important constant throughout trauma and difficult living situations. It may not be a priority for survival, but can provide connection between people and small relief.

3 stars for the massive potential this book has. The concept , name and cover has me since I came across this book. A city split in two –of constant opposite seasons –mirror worlds exactly like the seasons that each half hosts. However, for quite a significant chunk of the first half I felt like swimming towards the shore except the shore was nowhere near visible and i was grasping at water in the name of support. I enjoyed the swim, it was vibes galore, but I would have liked some direction a little early.
Certain places felt repetitive but I am yet undecided if that was a stylistic choice keeping to the theme or a consequence of two authors collaborating.
However, for my dystopia with a dash of steampunk lovers I would recommend they give it a shot.

Great concept, but needed some more editing.

Unfortunately this one wasn't for me. I love the idea of the same city split into two (Winter and Summer). Dystopia mixed with steampunk vibes was great. However it took almost one hundred pages for the story to feel like it started. The beginning is very much vibes, but it also felt repetitive, like the first author would write a description and the second author would mirror it. Again, lots of potential, but the story didn't move fast enough for me.

4⭐️, but only just.

Thank you to NetGalley and Titan Books for providing this book for review consideration. All opinions are my own.

I was pleasantly surprised by this rather introspective, character-driven tale of two cousins separated by a mysterious event that splits their city in two - one version of it ends up in eternal winter, the other in eternal summer.

The writing was solid throughout, and I felt that the two authors were very much in sync with details, style and vibes. However I felt that one character had a slightly stronger voice than the other, and more seemed to happen in their chapters. The main characters were on the bland side, but at no point did I find them annoying and I did appreciate their shared vigour for uncovering the mysteries of the city.

The setting was beautifully described. In fact, this was done so well that I could often see myself in the space with the characters.

The big themes I took from this book was the fractious nature of familial relationships, and how emotional ties can be as strong as blood ones. There is also a love for cinema and art that really shines through. It examines how our true feelings can be easier to show through our creativity rather than difficult conversations.

The ending felt a little rushed, and there was probably an overload of flashbacks to show the bonds of the rather extensive family. I think the book could benefit from a family tree as I did lose track occasionally as to who was married to who, and the parents of the group cousins.

Overall this was genre-bending and beautifully told. It is marketed a sci-fi/fantasy, but I'd say it feels more like a dystopian family drama - not sure I've ever read anything quite like it.

2.5 stars

the Pike family is famous because of their grandmother, who was a movie director. when she dies, the world gets split into two. i really liked the concept of this book, with the two cousins who are separated in these mirror worlds of each other. one in endless summer, while the other is constant winter. there’s a lot of familial drama, but i never got invested in the characters. Jamie and Esther were fine, I just think since the book is written by 2 different authors it wasn’t as seamless. i was curious to see how things would turn out but it also wasn’t hard to figure out how the book would end. i don’t even think this is a bad book, just a little underwhelming for me.

In City of All Seasons, we see our main characters Jamie and Esther, as cousins separated in cities of totally different kinds. Jamie is in a city that is stuck in perpetual winter, and Esther is in a sweltering summer city. The premise of this book sounded so amazing! And there were parts that I really enjoyed. However, even as someone who enjoys a character driven narrative, I still felt this book was slow for most of it. I enjoyed the set up of the book and the first 30-40% of this book, but this is just felt like it dragged on some.

For the first third or so of this book I was mildly invested. The premise - two versions of the same city, one in perpetual summer and one winter - was off the rip very interesting. Our POV characters were fine, and there was a cool back and forth going on between them in which they tried to communicate between the two different versions of the city.
It pretty much entirely lost me soon after. I found the characters to continue on to be rather bland, I don't know much about any of them really. We focus a lot on flashbacks and the POV characters memories of their grandmother and other family members, and I just didn't care about any of those characters AT ALL. It felt impossible not to skim from about 40% onwards, because there was so much description against little dialogue and it made the prose feel heavy and uninteresting. The description was GOOD, the authors write very well and some of the weather description allowed my imagination to flourish, but the story was very slow and not a lot happened even though there was lots of blocks of text.
The chapters being so long also made reading feel like a drain, sometimes I would be forgetting what character B was even doing in their last chapter, because character A's chapter took so long to finish.
All in all, an interesting premise but a, personally, disappointing execution.

Unfortunately this book wasn’t for me. I didn’t really enjoy it at all.

However, I did enjoy the writing style and would read more from the author but sadly this just wasn’t for me.

This took me a while to get into, but once I was in I was in!! The ending was really interesting and well done. All the characters were well fleshed out and I got really invested in the story. I also really liked how each author did their own perspective!

City of All Seasons drops you into a split world: one scorched by unrelenting summer, the other frozen in an endless winter. In the middle are cousins Jamie and Esther Pike, unraveling family secrets and long-buried memories as they try to figure out what happened to their once-unified city. It's part science fantasy, part generational mystery, and part fever dream.

The concept? Very cool. The idea of two mirrored cities, divided not just by climate but also by memory, grief, and fractured history, feels fresh and layered. I especially loved the depth of the Pike family legacy; it added weight to the unfolding drama and gave the world a lived-in feel. There’s a strong emotional undercurrent throughout, and the sensory writing made both the summer and winter cities pop off the page. You can feel the heat and frost.

That said, sometimes the book moves too fast for its own good. There were points where I was totally caught up, and then the next moment I’d be flipping back like, “Wait, what just happened?” Some big plot moments didn’t land as hard as they could have because they didn’t get room to breathe. The ending, while not bad, felt a little too neat or muted for how wild and ambitious the rest of the book was. I wanted more oomph to the finale, especially after everything these characters went through.

Also, while I’m down to roll with a little mystery in my world-building, there were definitely a few pieces that felt underdeveloped or glossed over. Not everything needs to be explained but I wouldn’t have minded a little more clarity in places.

All in all: this is a compelling and creative debut with a killer setting and emotional depth, even if it occasionally stumbles in execution. If you’re into speculative fiction that leans character-first and isn’t afraid to get a little weird with its world, it’s absolutely worth checking out.

City of All Seasons is one of those uniquely imaginative and unapologetically unconventional genre blenders that just refuses to be put in a box. It’s got a bit of sci-fantasy, dystopia, mystery and magical realism, but at its heart it’s just a beautifully human story about family, oppression, corruption and the power of creation and storytelling.

Now, the premise of two cousins trapped in alternate dimensions of the same city, one sweltering summer and the other freezing winter, had me extremely intrigued. And in a way, I think City of All Seasons is exactly what it promises to be, except the execution just so happened to be not entirely my cup of tea.

See, the storytelling is exceptionally introspective and reflective, to the point that even my character-driven loving heart started to have issues with the pacing. Moreover, the focus lies so much on dwelling on the past that I felt like we almost forgot to develop the characters (especially the side characters) and main conflicts in the present, which made it really hard for me to stay (emotionally) engaged despite the captivating storytelling.

I mean, I quite liked both Esther and Jamie as protagonists, and I thought it was beautiful to see their strong connection to each other despite living in mirror worlds and having been separated for so many years. However, despite the fact that they live in diametrically opposite settings, I found it surprisingly hard to distinguish between their perspectives; if their names hadn’t been mentioned at the top of each chapter, I wouldn’t have been able to tell who we were following, because their personality just didn’t come off the page for me. Also, it took me about half the book to realise that Jamie was a boy, oops.

All that said, I think Langmead & Whiteley both have an incredible imagination, and there is no denying that the atmosphere absolutely drips off the page. The prose is beautifully lyrical and immersive, which really fits with the magical realism vibe that permeates every aspect of this story. I might not have been invested in the plot and the characters, but I sure loved revelling in all the wonderfully nonsensical marvels.

To me, the ending was somehow both frustratingly rushed and surprisingly satisfying, which is honestly impressive on a whole other level if you ask me. While City of All Seasons was a bit of a mixed bag for me personally, I think it's worth giving a shot if you like highly imaginative, atmospheric, and theme-driven stories that leave you with more questions than answers.

Thank you to NetGalley and Titan Books for providing me with an eARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own. City of All Seasons is scheduled for release on 29 April, 2025.

DNF at 56% - (I'm not giving a rating on Goodreads or StoryGraph, but Netgalley requires a rating)

I really wanted to enjoy this one, but I think my expectations of it were totally different from what this book was giving me. I was expecting more of the science fiction and fantasy elements, but halfway through the only magical or scientific thing is still that there are two mirrored cities - and there has been no explanation or really any actual questioning as to how it happened or how to reverse it up to the point that I read.

I did enjoy the premise of this city that was split into two 'universes', for lack of a better word, and I loved the mystery surrounding how it happened and what it has to do with the Pike family. However, it just was taking way too long to get to any answers for me, let alone to the point where the characters start to truly question their situations.

I also thought things started getting way too repetitive, with these two cousins just sending things back and forth, going to another location and repeating that. It also felt like I was being kept at arms length from both the characters and the story, and I'm not sure if that was due to the writing or if they wanted to have this big reveal at the end (but from other reviews I've seen, the ending was a bit disappointing).

The pacing also felt wayyyy too slow, which wasn't helped by the long chapters, and since I didn't feel connected to the characters and there wasn't a lot of plot happening, I really struggled with this one.

I'd say that if you enjoy slower paced stories and more literary fiction/magical realism kind of books you might enjoy this one, it sadly just wasn't or me.

This novel reads more like a fable or a parable than anything rooted in complex world-building and new ideas. I can easily see how this might have arisen from a simpler writing exercise and grown into something more. Nonetheless, I enjoyed the visual and atmospheric contrasts between the two cities, bridged by several ongoing mysteries. Several unexplained plot contrivances made this at times closer to magical realism than science fiction, but I enjoyed getting to know the two isolated halves of the Pike family, united by tragedy and their grandmother's complex legacy. Some of the pacing fell apart near the end, with too many events happening too quickly, but I still found this novel a worthwhile read.

City of All Seasons is a reading experience that is based on an original concept, wantonly crosses the boundaries of genre and delightfully baffles with absurd logic, surreal imagery and a touch of macabre.

It is a unique and puzzling book, entirely in a league of its own. Since my firm belief is that life is too short to read the same books, City of All Seasons is my kind of book. I won’t read another one like that any time soon.

The premise of it is pleasingly simple and somewhat symmetrical: a town of Fairharbour is struck by a weather bomb (or something much more human and sinister) and, all at the same time, it is shackled in the permafrost of winter and dissolved in the unbearable heat of never-ending summer. The town is not divided between the two seasons, not in a physical sense. Both the winter and summer Fairharbours retain their original streets and buildings. But the people are separated, assumed dead and grieved for, families torn apart, with the focus on the Pike family. Cousins Jamie and Esther are trapped in their respective versions of the city: Jamie in wintry one, Esther in the summery. Soon they begin to suspect that there is the other Fairharbour and test their suspicions by sending small tokens by which they can recognise each other. Their work towards understanding what happened to their town, and most of all towards bringing it together again, begins.

As I said at the beginning, City of All Seasons doesn’t subscribe to any particular genre. It could be a fantasy novel but, apart from its obvious idiosyncrasy, the city could be any ordinary coastal town with a harbour, a factory, a fish market, a theatre, a post (or Patent) office and a throng of mere mortals caught in extraordinary circumstances.

It could pass for sci-fi, but not quite because there is a distinct retro feel to it. It is by no means futuristic. For one, it lacks modern-day modes of instantaneous communication which could easily resolve a lot of the problems the characters are hindered by. In their ingenious exchanges, Jamie and Esther rely on such vintage props as a kaleidoscope, a deck of Tarot cards, a projector with reels of films, a door. They make those yesterday objects with their own hands, taught by Pawel, a man who is missing from both sites but who still, from beyond, brings that sense of calm competency that guides the two protagonists in their efforts.

It carries elements of magic realism, macabre and gothic horror. It is also an exploration of family ties and conflicts, human resilience, power vacuum and struggles to fill it.

City of All Seasons isn’t a fast read, and it shouldn’t be. It doesn’t lead neatly to any direct answers to questions the reader may have asked at the start, but it doesn’t promise to answer anything. And why should it? It also doesn’t provide a clean, satisfactory to all resolution, and that is very true to life.

It's less, like, proper sci fi and actually more... whimsical magic realism, I guess? With the description I thought this would be a fast, reality bending story of the two cities in some sort of uprising against the "oppressive powers".

It's actually a meandering tale with a lot of reminiscing about family and not much action.

I didn't really enjoy it because of the plodding pace. If the description reflected the proper whimsical tone I think it would do great with its intended audience, because some of the writing and imagery is quite lovely. This is why I've given it three stars - it's a "not for me, but not awful" book.

Imagine a city sliced in two: one half trapped in perpetual, burning summer and the other in bitter, scouring winter. Neither half is aware of the other, only the calamity that befell them, and the loved ones lost, their bodies never recovered. Jamie and Esther Pike, cousins who grew up close, each inhabit one half of this divided city, and slowly begin to uncover the existence of their lost mirror, the rest of their family, and the calamity that caused the division in the first place.

It's already an interesting concept, a novel I might like to read. But the reality of reading it —and the draw that actually brought me to pick up the book— was in the authors, and the extent to which their previous work felt entirely oppositional to handling this kind of concept at face value. Neither of them is particularly notable for works of core genre, uncomplicated fantasy.

City of All Seasons is no different, and the primary driver for the complication sits within a tension at its very core, between the ways much of the premise and worldbuilding are fundamentally silly, and yet rendered serious by their handling in the text. It begins with the "weatherbomb," that we are told at the start of the novel is the cause of the calamity in Fairharbour. It's never explained beyond the very basic concept, which is graspable from the name alone: a bomb you set off that changes the weather. But it continues in the details. Winter Fairharbour is plagued by a growing threat of the Doormen, who brick up the openings and burn the doors in the frozen city, supposedly to protect, and they are paralleled in summer by the Fenestration, determined to knock the glass from the windows and holes into the walls for spurious claims about health and cooling breezes. It's just silly, right? The big bads are the men who brick up doors and the men who knock holes in walls. What kind of antagonist is that? And yet, even when they are described in frankly comic ways —the vests and shorts that render the Fenestration overgrown schoolboys, and the prop guns that emphasise the performative nature of the Doormen's power— they are sinister. They are threatening, in both halves of the story. This permeates throughout, in worldbuilding details, in the coincidences that go unexplained but must be accepted, in the artificiality of the narrative in places, and in the very concept of Fairharbour and its history. If I had to describe it all in detail, it would come across as ridiculous. And yet, in the writing, in the way Langmead and Whiteley have set an atmosphere, it always stays just the right side of the line. Never fully, never diving headlong into the grim and the awful and the real, never letting go of that tension, that feeling that at any point it might tip over the edge into nonsense, but never quite doing so.

Part, I think, of what drives it is that I'm not sure quite how genre this book truly is. I mean, on the face of it, the answer is "entirely." Parallel cities stuck in perpetual seasons is absolutely genre, right? But while genre may be what City of All Seasons does, it never quite feels like what it's for. That, instead, is the stuff of purest family drama, going back right down to the classics. All this mystery, all this peril, all this technomagic that never quite gets explained, all exists to serve a far more mundane (but no less compelling) story of a family stuck within its own narratives and cut by the sort of divisions that plague families all the time—sometimes you get siblings who just Do Not Get On, for no real reason, and who cannot ever let up, let it go, and leave each other alone. Sometimes the legacy of a powerful, capable and well-regarded matriarch is too much for her children to bear. Family is what defines us, what makes us, and a thing we may want to leave behind or cling to. All of this is there in the core, wound up close with the encroaching danger of people gone mad with power and stagnation. There can be a frivolousness to the trappings of genre, and a seriousness to the core themes, and they can be constantly pulling at each other for dominance.

But it's not quite that simple either. Because some of that family drama is also, quite frankly, silly, and not just in the way that many family dramas seem trivial to someone looking in from the outside. Jamie and Esther each reminisce at various times over incidents from their childhoods, before the city split, and their recollections range from a genuinely quite scary incident with a raging dog and four children desperately hiding behind a bathroom door, to a man always making a wineglass sing before speaking at family events, or two brothers always needing to do the opposite of the other and outdo them besides, no matter the outcome.

So too, some of the fantastical in the story has real power—it is a novel full of people who make things that can do something more than just their strict purpose, and there are some truly beautiful moments of those inventions in action that bring about some of the loveliest descriptions in the book. The first, where Jamie makes a kaleidoscope out of scavenged glass and glimpses a fountain that has lost its lustre in his city, is the one that sticks strongest in my mind, but there are many—glimpses of the natural world or moments of stillness and beauty, where the SFFnal is instrumental in rendering the meaning of the scene.

The complexity bleeds through into the tone as well—there are moments when it feels truly SFFnal (because "feel" is how I find myself defining these kinds of things, usually), and others where the weathervane swings in a heavy breeze and points due litfic with certainty. Not because the story is uncertain of what it's trying to be, or meandering wildly between two extremes, but because what it is is always ambiguous, and slips easily across a boundary it refuses to be defined by. There's a tonal layering going on, where one sometimes slips above the other, but both are always there.

This is never more clear to me than in the magic that appears sporadically throughout the story. I am generally not a fan of scientified magic at the best of times, preferring the more intuitive, fluid style that I associate more with the mythic and the folkloric. This is she. And yet... not? Magic absolutely happens in the story. The characters acknowledge that an effect has occurred that is at least... implausible or unusual. But it's not quite rareified up to the level of "magic." It's more... a knack? It's part of life that sometimes, there are people who can do things that... do things. So it's not just rejecting systematisation, but also in many ways acknowledgement of its own mystique, while never making magic the norm in the world. It is neither one thing nor the other, nor a secret third thing. It simply is, and that must be sufficient. Which, for me, it absolutely is.

And so the story really shines there—in its core family drama, in its worldbuilding and in the way it plays with expectations around genre and tone, while creating for itself a very specific yet hard to define, consistent atmosphere.

However, there are some things being done a little less well.

For all that the family drama as a whole is very well managed, some of the individual pieces that feed into it don't quite fit. Specifically, the characters of Jamie and Esther, especially in the later part of the book. They are at their best when wondering, musing and trying to get to the bottom of the situations they find themselves in. When they are catapulted into actual action, they are undermined by the sudden change of both of their personalities —up until this point competent and thoughtful, if with different emotional outlooks— into absolute idiots. They make decisions that don't feel quite embedded in the characters that have been developed through the story up to that point, barely seeming to think about fairly momentous things. Problems spiral out of almost random behaviour. It's not so much that they behave suboptimally —though they do— that's the problem, but that it feels as though it comes out of nowhere. These are people who've survived this long in their respective suffering cities. Why does all that good sense that we have seen on the page suddenly go all to hell?

Likewise, Jamie particularly has a loose relationship on page with his cousin Henry, and there is a moment towards the end of the book where Henry has a sudden (and quite justified) outburst about Jamie's behaviour. It's interesting! It's good! I want more on this character whose position within the Doormen is a fascinating one! But it's never really developed, and events move on and away before that reaction can really be explored for him or for its effect on Jamie. It just sort of sits there, without buildup or resolution. There are several pieces of various character arcs with exactly that issue—things I am fascinated by and yet never spend long enough with to see them actually blossom into something complete.

There is also, right towards the end, an upheaval of core concept that undermines a good deal of what the book has told us previously and, while in some ways it suits the narrative very well, it comes with a bonus sense of being cheated, somehow. It breaks some narrative expectations in a way that feels slightly unearned, leaving me a little dissatisfied with the effect it has on the story's resolution. Sometimes conventions are in place —or expectations— because they do sit better with the reading experience of the story. Sometimes, if you break them, you need to do the work to make it worthwhile, and I'm not sure, in this case, that that has been done, especially for the sake of a last-minute red-herring reveal.

Except... maybe the problem there is me? Maybe it's not that there wasn't sufficient buildup and groundwork for the reveal, but instead that I come with too many assumptions about stories, and how the information in them is to be trusted (or not). For a story that is so much about uncovering a mystery, maybe that rejection of assumptions is apt, even if in the moment it feels uncomfortable.

I'd like to believe that, but I think ultimately that would require something else that isn't quite working at full capacity, and that's the crafting of Fairharbour as a place I can intuitively believe in. All that worldbuilding, all those beautiful descriptions, sometimes run up against the barrier of the nascent silliness and leave me with a lingering feeling that Fairharbour doesn't make sense on a human level. It's close, and there are long stretches when it does work, punctuated by moments where it doesn't quite hang together, and where I cannot quite find it in myself to treat this as a viable place in which serious, dangerous things can happen and are happening. To some extent, I need the world to believe in itself, just enough, so that I can believe in the events taking place within it.

And I think some of that comes all the way back to the mirrored cities, and the way their mirroring exists constantly throughout the narrative, not just in events and locations and the physical world, but in the way the story is told, the voices and the tone. If I were to compare it to another split narrative, This Is How You Lose the Time War, the thing that sticks out is how homogenous the two halves are; where Time War's distinct parts have their own very clear voices, Esther and Jamie are too mirrored, too paralleled. Their relation to one another is critical to the core of the book, but it gives them too much sameness and contributes to a feeling that sometimes they, and the place they inhabit, cannot be treated as real in a way that matters to the story.

But those are only moments. Enough to detract a little from the whole, but not to undermine it completely, and very often counterbalanced by some really interesting play with the ideas and shape of the novel. It's not quite like anything else, and very distinctly itself, in a way I found immensely rewarding. It's sort of fantasy, sort of dystopian, sort of literary and sort of none of them at all. It is, more than anything else, interesting, and that drove me to keep turning the pages, wanting to know not what happened next, but how it happened, and I really enjoyed that.

Thank you NetGalley and Titan Books for the ARC in exchange for an honest review!

City of All Seasons tells the story of Jamie and Esther, siblings who have been separated into two versions of the same city. Jamie lives in an eternal winter while Esther is in an endless summer. However, their connection remains as they both fight the oppressive governments that rule over their cities.

The concept of this book is incredible. Switching between the two versions of Fairharbour makes for an addictive plot to keep you reading. This book will stand out with the world it creates and the characters' fight throughout the story.

There are so many unique elements to this book. It masterfully mixes so many genres to create a story no one has experienced before. Everything about the world and politics had me hooked until the end.

One of the plot elements I loved the most was the inclusion of film. The role film played in the story is something I've never read before, but something I'd be happy to read in every book going forward.

With such a detailed and intriguing plot, I expected a big ending. Unfortunately, I found the ending to be underwhelming and simple. So much has happened in these two cities and the ending made it feel like not much happened at all. It didn't have the same power that made the rest of the story stand out. It's not bad at all, but it wasn't incredibly impactful for me.

The one element that caused problems for me was the characters. The story is heavily character based, but I felt detached from them the whole book. I can't quite point out what it was that kept me from connecting to them, but I never fell in love with them. I know the ending would have felt so much stronger if I had connected with the characters.

City of All Seasons has so many incredible, unique elements. The plot felt like a breath of fresh air after being stuck inside for so long. I may not have loved the characters, but I know so many people will. If you're looking for a beautiful blend of genres and an original, character-based story, this is the book for you.

Review on Goodreads (sophreadingbooks https://www.goodreads.com/sophreadingbooks) as of 4/10/2025
Review on Instagram (sophiesreading https://www.instagram.com/sophiesreading/) expected 5/15/2025

I received an ARC from the publisher in exchange for an honest review

City of All Seasons by Oliver K. Langmead and Aliya Whiteley is a first person dual-POV science fantasy. The island of Fairharbour has been divided by the long-standing rivalry between two brothers, Remi and Jan Pike, for years. Weatherbombs have made half the town winter and the other half summer full time. Jamie and Esther, two cousins of the Pike family, are going to try to find a way to communicate with the other side.

Film plays a very large part in the plot. Carmen Pike, the mother of Remi and Jan, and the grandmother of Jamie and Esther, is the most famous person to come from Fairharbour and a popular director on the mainland. Her Technicolor works have won multiple awards and depicted the island she comes from in a variety of ways that resonated with the mainland. We get a lot of references to her filmography and some titles, from her full length pictures to her short films that helped build her skills. Because of how important film was in Carmen’s life, it ended up playing a pretty big part in the lives of her family.

Where the film aspects really get interesting to me is the themes of exploitation. For all intents and purposes, Carmen initially seems to be determined to preserve the life of Fairharbour and show off her home to the rest of the world. But then we get examples of the same person who gave her her big break butchering Fairharbour in a way that the island completely rejected and most likely felt betrayed by as the street that was depicted in the film ended up abandoned. We don’t talk enough about how works set in real small towns often only get the one piece of representation and when a creative gets it really wrong to the point that it feels like a betrayal, it cuts a lot deeper than if the town depicted was NYC or Chicago.

The plot is something of a mystery and the relationships of the Pike family are slowly peeled back through Jamie and Esther’s POVs. The weatherbomb aspects are a big part of how the scene was set before the plot opens and they do come up multiple times due to how they affected the lives of the cast outside the Pike. I think this book is a lot more theme driven rather than plot or character or voice-driven as family division really does touch every last piece of what happens.

I would recommend this to fans of science fantasy that feels like it’s set in the early days of film and readers looking for a theme-centric science fantasy

Thank you to Titan for an eArc in exchange for a review of this book!

True rating: 3.75

This book is dual perspective, following cousins Jamie and Esther. The city of fairharbour was split into two versions, Jamie’s being in perpetual winter and Esther’s in an endless summer.

Throughout this book they find a means of communicating, and uncover the secrets of what caused the split.

I really enjoyed the speculative and somewhat historical nature of this book. It’s a really interesting concept and if you like a split dimension story with mystery elements this book is worth a read!

I can understand the authors were going for a solemn feel with this, but I think the language and atmosphere probably could have used some work to really get it there.

I felt that it ended somewhat abruptly, and could have had some more going on the end. Overall a quick and enjoyable read; well crafted and an interesting concept, but it’s missing something to take it to the next level.