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    The Shambling Guide to New York City
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    The Shambling Guide to New York City
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    The Shambling Guide to New York City
    Audiobook9 hours

    The Shambling Guide to New York City

    Published by Hachette Audio

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    A travel writer takes a job with a shady publishing company in New York, only to find that she must write a guide to the city – for the undead!

    Because of the disaster that was her last job, Zoe is searching for a fresh start as a travel book editor in tourist-centric New York City. After stumbling across a seemingly perfect position though, Zoe is blocked at every turn because of the one thing she can't take off her resume – human.

    Not to be put off by anything – especially not her blood-drinking boss or death-goddess coworker – Zoe delves deep into the monster world. But her job turns deadly when the careful balance between human and monsters starts to crumble – with Zoe right in the middle.

    A Hachette Audio production.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHachette Audio
    Release dateMay 28, 2013
    ISBN9781478977674
    Unavailable
    The Shambling Guide to New York City

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    Reviews for The Shambling Guide to New York City

    4/5

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    • 4/5
      Fun, and with less zombies than I was afraid of (zombies being my least favorite fantasy monster). Content warnings: attempted rape by magic, sexual harassment, major character death, zombie killing, discussion of killing/eating humans (by nonhuman or formerly-human people)
    • 4/5
      Fun adventure story complete with fight scenes. Wish there were more books in the series (it ends at book two)
    • 5/5
      I loved it. Fun times for a smart girl who just wants an editing job and ends up working for the monsters doing things she would have never believed. She was educated in the school of hard knocks at her last job and is not going to be fooled again. She faces some paranormal super evilness and lives to go on to the next guide book on New Orleans ! Yes, I am ordering the New Orleans book today
      There is every kind of 'monster" you've heard of and many you might not have. What a great cast all with their own issues you'd expect in their species. Well done fun.
    • 4/5
      3.5/5 stars. Zoe is an out of work travel writer who moved home to New York City. She finds an ad for a job she's sure she's perfect for, only to be told she wouldn't fit in. Zoe doesn't take no for an answer and scores herself a job interview and an introduction to the coterie--all the supernatural monsters (don't call them monsters!) humanity doesn't know exist. While planning and editing the ultimate coterie travel guide to NYC, Zoe gets entangled in a dangerous plot, discovers something about herself, and saves the city.

      The action is interspersed with segments from the travel guide. It's cute, but the travel guide sections often come before the related action, somewhat spoiling it. But that's basically my biggest complaint about this book, which I couldn't put down and ended up reading long into the early morning.

      I really enjoyed Lafferty's versions of vampires, elementals, and all the other coterie. The travel guide format creates an opportunity to learn things you otherwise wouldn't learn, such as coterie history and dining habits. It's a lot of fun.

      Also, I really like Zoe's friendship with Gwen (the Welsh death goddess) and Morgen (the water elemental).
    • 4/5
      An experienced travel writer, Zoe just wants a job. But when she accepts a position as editor for a series of travel guides aimed at coterie (werewolves, vampires, demons, gods and goddesses, etc) her life becomes more interesting, and more dangerous.
    • 4/5
      The ending felt a bit rushed, but I liked the story a lot.
    • 5/5
      I have listened to Mur Lafferty's Pod casts for the heaven series and fell in love with how she presents her characters. This is her first book in print and I think it was a smash hit. I fell in love with Zoe and all the characters that made up the story. Looking forward to reading Zoe's next travel guide writing assignment.
    • 4/5
      I've been a fan of Mur Lafferty's podcast, I Should Be Writing, for a while now, I've listened to her Marco and the Red Granny and Playing For Keeps (both available on Podiobooks), and was very excited when she sold her first book to a publisher. Mur loves her fans, so one of the things she did was podcast her book for free. We're on an extremely tight budget right now, so although I wanted to buy the book I had to listen to the podcast and console myself that I would buy the sequel. The best thing about The Shambling Guide is that it's fun and fast-paced, and the main characters are colorful and engaging. I particularly liked Morgen the water sprite and the baker at the cafe, they stole the show at least half the time for me. There was snappy dialogue, descriptions that set the scene just enough without taking away the readers' ability to fill in some details on their own, and enough humor to make me chuckle on a number of occasions. I had a blast listening to it. Of course having the author read the book is an extra bonus because they put the emphasis where they want it to be, and the whole experience feels more intimate than when there's a professional voice actor in the picture. Lafferty's world-building skills deserve a special mention. There are zombies, vampires, golums, all of which roughly follow the traditional lore of being dangerous creatures, but the author has made them her own and humanized them along the way. Of course this happens when you are looking at them from inside their world and witness their weaknesses and their struggles to make it in a world where nobody's supposed to know about them. There's a lot to recommend this book, yet there was enough that didn't work for me to spoil the experience. Some characters came to life and some were pretty flat. Take Arthur the love interest, he was just a generic hot guy with a bunch of preconceived notions. The protagonist, Zoë, is too comfortable too soon in her new job and with her co-workers. Yeah, the pay is good and she needed the job, but she is almost blasé when it comes to the world of monsters where she suddenly finds herself. Would you be totally cool if you found out that your boss is a vampire (not vegetarian either) and that every one of your coworkers can kill you without exerting themselves too much? I know I wouldn't. There was a sex scene, which, although well-executed, didn't have to be there and didn't really do anything to move the story forward or develop any of the characters. (For fairness' sake I do have to admit that this is my usual complaint about sex scenes, and unless the book is a romance I'd rather authors kept them out of the story. After all, what exactly has to happen between the sheets to serve the story or character development? Off the top of my head, not too many options there.) The mystery at the center of the story was interesting and I was surprised to find out who the villain was, but there was so much going on during the final battle that frankly I lost track of it all and just waited for it to be over. If it was a paper book I would've skimmed the pages and gotten to the end. All in all I thought her shorter works were tighter and therefore more effective, the novel format allowed for too much room for digression. The Shambling Guide is a fun read and if you've had a stressful stretch it's just the thing to get your mind off the problems. Get the audio book to give you a charge for the work day or to help you unwind during your commute in the evening. It's not great, but for all its faults it is good enough to make me want to pick up the sequel, Ghost Train to New Orleans, and to hope that there will be a third book. After all, I believe writers get better with every new novel. Unless their work becomes formulaic, but that's a topic for another time.

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    • 5/5
      An interesting idea with fun characters, and the right amount of ridiculousness ("Does a fing look swart to the zooloofills?"). The pacing felt a little too fast at the end, though perhaps that's because I was enjoying the characters and setting more than the main conflict by the end of it.
    • 4/5
      Zoe Norris narrowly escaped a bad job and a bad relationship in Raleigh and moved back to New York City, where she grew up. But now she is completely desperate for a job - any job. Imagine her good luck when she stops in a creepy hole-in-the-wall bookstore and sees a help-wanted notice for a guidebook company. Zoe persistently applies for the job, despite repeatedly being told that it is "not for people like her". After wrangling a meeting with the president, she discovers the job is actually editing a city guide for monsters - vampires, zombies, dragons, golems, deities, etc. - but they prefer to be called coterie. They end up hiring her, figuring it will be useful to have a human on staff. Plus, unlike everyone else who works there, she has actual experience writing a guidebook. Zoe has a sometimes grand, sometimes dangerous time learning about her "interesting" coworkers' lives and their favorite places in the City. Soon, however, strange happenings and signs begin pointing to some impending disaster in which Zoe is more involved than she could have imagined.The world-building here is amazing. The plot was perfectly good, but the world-building! The coterie New York City is fully of interesting details from a maze of tunnels under the city built by rats to the New York Department of Public Works which, along with fixing sewer lines, maintains the delicate balance between humans and coterie in the city. In between chapters is a paragraph excerpt from the guidebook that is eventually written, detailing a coterie-friendly restaurant or coterie-related history of Central Park. The writing is good, and there's just the perfect amount of humor that doesn't overshadow the danger Zoe sometimes finds herself in. I loved all the characters, from Morgen the water sprite and Fanny the fertility goddess to John the sometimes-sexy incubus and Benjamin Rosenberg the zoetist. Highly recommended if you like the supernatural - especially with a dash of humor.
    • 3/5
      The first few chapters were intriguing enough that I went ahead and upgraded from listening to the podcast reading of this book to the audiobook. That same curiosity kept going for a few more chapters. But once the plot started to unfold and the characters were moving in predictable ways the story started to become a bit bland.

      By the end of the book I was glad it was over and ready to move on. Would I retread this story? No. Would I read a sequel of it? Possibly. I like the authors podcasts and there is humor to her writing style. I'm just disappointed in how this one ended up when it had promise to be a fun read from start to finish.
    • 3/5
      The first few chapters were intriguing enough that I went ahead and upgraded from listening to the podcast reading of this book to the audiobook. That same curiosity kept going for a few more chapters. But once the plot started to unfold and the characters were moving in predictable ways the story started to become a bit bland.

      By the end of the book I was glad it was over and ready to move on. Would I retread this story? No. Would I read a sequel of it? Possibly. I like the authors podcasts and there is humor to her writing style. I'm just disappointed in how this one ended up when it had promise to be a fun read from start to finish.
    • 5/5
      This was such a fun book, I was so engrossed in this book I would think about it at work and wish the day was over so I could go home and keep reading. I loved how the conceit of the travel guide allowed for world building throughout the entire book, from beginning to end, and it never felt forced or like an info dump it all just flowed naturally.The whole book flowed naturally between the world building, the humor and romance, the mystery and dangers, all of it felt like it happened at just the right time and pace. I have to admit, I was so enjoying Zoë’s introduction to the world of the coterie that when the main mystery and conflict in the story really started revving up I actually resented it for a few paragraphs, I think I could have read a whole book just on learning all the different coterie and how they interact with the human world. I am glad it was more than that, but it’s rare I find myself not wanting the main point of the story to really get started. I did have two small problems with the book. There was one scene in a sex club that felt really out of place and unnecessary and in a completely different tone than the rest of the story. I really don’t know why it was there and it was a bit uncomfortable to read.I am also not so sure about the romance between Zoë and Arthur, it wasn’t horrible or badly written so much as fast and without enough interaction between the two characters to really make it feel believable. I like them together well enough, it just felt like it went way to fast for what we were actually shown of them in the book. I loved this book, I love the whole concept of this book and I am very excited about the planned sequels.
    • 4/5
      Zoe is looking for a job and has experience in writing travel brochures. She doesn’t realize she’s in a bookstore that only caters to the coterie (monsters) when she sees a flyer for just that position with a new publishing company. Even when told she wouldn’t fit in, she’s determined to get the job and vows she’ll fit in no matter what. Welcome to New York where vampires, zombies, sprites, demons, gods, incubus and succubus live unseen amongst humans. When interviewing writers, one of the things Zoe needs to keep in mind is that she shouldn’t discriminate and take eating habits into consideration. Phil, a vampire and head of the company, assures her he can guarantee that no one in the company will eat her, but can’t guarantee what others she meets will do when she’s out doing research for the book. Definitely a light, funny read for the most part. I enjoyed the ridiculous situations Zoe finds herself in and how she handles things. The characters are fun and we’re given some really good sexual tension. But for me the story started to wane about halfway thru. And I have to say I got really tired of seeing the word coterie – the only description the supernaturals will accept to describe them as a whole. This looks like it’s a series with the 2nd book taking place in New Orleans.
    • 3/5
      Title: The Shambling Guide to New York CityAuthor: Mur LaffertyRelease Date: May 28, 2013 jusPublisher: OrbitSource: NetGalley ARCGenre(s): Urban Fantasy, Paranormal Fiction, Chick LitRating: ★★★☆☆Review Spoilers:I came really, really close to giving this book a four star rating because it was really, really good. At first, I was not sure if I was going to like it because I tend to avoid most Urban Fantasy series in general. They just have a tendency to get too romance heavy and never in a good way. I’m okay with romantic plots but the ones in Urban Fantasy novels just have a tendency to come off a bit heavy, be way too sexual right away, and it distracts from whatever story they are trying to tell.Which is why I thought The Shambling Guide to New York City was pretty much the perfect departure from the norm. Yeah, sure, there are the very sexually active vampires, incubi, and succubi. But our heroine Zoe wants absolutely nothing to do with romance or sex or anything. It’s gotten her into plenty of trouble and she’d like to avoid it for a while if she can. See, Zoe is a travel book editor and a very good one at that. But after an affair with her boss (her married boss) she wound leaving her old, pretty awesome job and found herself looking for another one. Que the Shambling Guide to New York City. Just by chance she sees an advertisement for a book editing job working on a very… unique guide to New York City. Everyone keeps telling her that it’s not her kind of job and that she never should have seen the advertisement in the first place. But as a spunky, bad ass early thirties heroine, Zoe isn’t taking that kind of sass.Though, maybe she should have. Because suddenly, in just a day, her world changes completely. The guy she forces to give her an interview for the book? He’s a vampire. Her co-workers? Zombies, vampires, and death goddesses among other things. Zoe goes from just a regular editor to suddenly realizing that the undead and supernatural? They’ve been living all around her without her – or the rest of the human world – being any the wiser. What I love about Zoe, though, is that she doesn’t jump right in and act all, ‘OMG THIS IS AWESOME’ or turn and run away. She takes it all in, processes it, and then just sort of accepts that in this economy a job is a job and damn it she’s not going to be scared away by the fact that the things that go bump in the night are real.Honestly, I kind of loved the world that Zoe found herself suddenly immersed in. And I LOVED the venue through which we got to learn about it. We sort of learned along with Zoe as she went about trying to prep herself so she could write this pretty awesome book which would cater towards the needs of clients she really hadn’t even thought about before. The Shambling Guide to New York City packs in a lot of stuff in a short period of time. While she may be new to this whole world of the supernatural, she pretty quickly finds herself at the cent of a lot of pretty peculiar activity. She finds this old ninja lady looking after her, is shocked to find a familiar face popping up unexpectedly, sorta kinda flirts with the cute neighbor, and in the end finds herself facing an old nemesis that she never would have even thought capable of the things she winds up doing.It’s crazy how much happens and how naturally it all flows from one point to another. Zoe really comes into her own and makes a place for herself in this whole crazy world, too, which is fantastic. She never just runs away from the issues. She powers through. Even with those issues could, you know, kill her. Very easily.There were some really great characters in this book, too. Besides Zoe – who is basically the best female urban fantasy main character I’ve come across in a long time – I really thought Granny Good Mae was pretty cool. I also liked a lot of Zoe’s co-workers though not really John. Paul was cool. I’ll be honest, some of the secondary characters were a bit ‘meh’ and forgettable but for the most part they were all pretty cool and well developed. Like, Ben! He was actually really cool as a ‘zoetist’ who creates gollems and what not. The author just does a really great job of working in characters, species, and everything and making it all mesh together.And I’m totally shipping Zoe and Arthur forever, by the way. Just because I really need to say that.Also, I think one of my favorite parts of the whole book was Public Works. The paranormal/supernatural underground is often actually underground and who better to deal with it all than the sewer workers and blue collar folks who never seem out of place in a city like New York? I thought that was incredibly clever. I also liked that Public Works served as a well known, official sort of regulatory body. Too often in these sorts of stories there are a lot of just random hunters or there are shadowy organizations that, honestly, I just can’t see managing to keep the peace on their own in modern, urban areas. Public Works, though, makes sense. Really, I just thought it was cool. I’d totally join Public Works.So, the real problem I had with this book? My eARC copy was terribly formatted. It was hard to read it because of how bad the formatting was with big gaps between sentences and random spacing issues. Also, the excerpts from the actual Guide at the beginning of the chapters? Totally unreadable. For whatever reason the formatting melded together paragraphs so one sentence would be from one paragraph, the next from the other. It was impossible to figure out exactly what they were saying. So that was a big disappointment because I think that would cool to read. I’m going to have to track down an actual print copy at the Tempe library at some point because I really want to get the full experience! Hopefully the actual eBook versions that went on sale didn’t have these problems.Final Thoughts:Get this book and read it! Don’t think that it’s just your usual sort of urban fantasy, romance fanfare because it’s not. It’s sort of paranormal chick lit at it’s best in my opinion. Zoe is a real, hardworking, relatable heroine who I think embodies the best in most people. She makes mistakes, she knows she makes mistakes, and she deals with them the way anyone would deal with them. The story is awesome, the premise is great. Really, this is a solid book that I think most people will enjoy. Well, female fantasy fans anyway. I’m just saying, Zoe and Arthur? Adorable. Shipping it so hard.
    • 4/5
      An absolutely delightful almost-debut from RPG writer, Escape Pod editor and podcaster extraordinaire Mur Lafferty, whose career I’ve been following for some time.

      Zoe’s last job was a train wreck. She’s back in her home town of New York City,
      desperate for a new start, but running out of cash fast. So when she finds an ad for a seemingly-perfect job as a travel guide editor, she’s not going to let the excuse that ‘she’s not the right type for the job’ and ‘wouldn’t fit in with the team’ stand in her way. Sheer determination wins her an interview in a dilapidated theatre and dinner with her potential new boss.

      It turns out the job is to write a guide book for New York’s visiting monster population, who have been The boss is a vampire and the payroll includes zombies, an incubus and a death goddess. Zoe has to come to terms with the existence of another world, hidden in plain sight in her city, and learn to deal with her new co-workers often-disturbing feeding habits. When the balance between humans and coterie – monster is an offensive term – starts falling apart, she finds herself caught in the crossfire.

      This is not Mur Lafferty’s first published work – she has self-published the Heaven series and her novel Playing For Keeps came out from Swarm Press in 2008 – but it is her best yet.

      She presents us with a rich supernatural underground to New York City, full of hilarious anecdotes and smart tweaks to reality (the MoMA’s closed galleries are really hired out by visiting demons who are too big to fit in human-sized hotels) told through excerpts from the book Zoe is writing.

      As a protagonist, Zoe is made even more likeable by the fact that is allowed to showcase real strength of character, even as she has to accept her weaknesses in dealing with an overwhelming situation. After her engrossing and thought-provoking novella Marco and the Red Granny, Lafferty gives us another kick-ass elderly woman to love and cheer on in the hilarious and irreverent Granny Good Mae. The rest of the varied cast of characters is also handled perfectly so that even the brain-eating zombies become relatable.

      This is also a very funny book, Lafferty’s humorous touch is spot-on throughout and her dry observations on the human or coterie conditions made me snort out loud several times.

      In short, I can’t wait for the second instalment in this series, The Ghost Train To New Orleans, and you should all go read The Shambling Guide To New York City, out in UK and US bookshops now. You can also go to Mur’s website to listen to a chapter of the audiobook for free every week.
    • 5/5
      One of the best things about this urban fantasy is that Zoe, the main character, isn’t paranormal herself. She doesn’t even know that “monsters” really exist until she’s hired by a vampire to edit a series of city guides aimed at the zombies, death goddesses, water sprites, and other supernaturals who are able to hide in plain sight among us on crowded streets and subway platforms. Sharing a workspace with creatures who would enjoy drinking your blood or eating your brains has complications, of course, but times are tough and Zoe is paid really well. And though Zoe doesn’t have any cool special powers herself, she is hardworking, competent, cautiously open-minded about alternative lifestyles (or in some cases, death-styles), and resigned to acts of bravery when human decency requires jumping into the fray. Though the pace is fast and the tension is kept high with one inventive surprise or crazy crisis after another, the style is breezy and funny. And the characters, human and not, are wonderful. I hope to meet most of them again in the sequel which looks like it will be set in New Orleans, a city with a lot of paranormal possibilities.