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    City of Bones
    City of Bones
    City of Bones
    Audiobook16 hours

    City of Bones

    Written by Martha Wells

    Narrated by Kyle McCarley

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Khat, a member of a humanoid race created by the Ancients to survive in the Waste, and Sagai, his human partner, are relic dealers working on the edge of society, trying to stay one step ahead of the Trade Inspectors and to support Sagai's family. When Khat is hired to find relics believed to be part of one of the Ancients' arcane engines, they are both reluctant to become involved. But the request comes from the Warders, powerful mages who serve Charisat's Elector. Khat soon discovers that the deadly politics of Charisat's upper tiers aren't the only danger. The relics the Warders want are the key to an Ancient magic of unknown power, and, as all the inhabitants of Charisat know, no one understands the Ancients' magic.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateDec 2, 2013
    ISBN9781452686332
    City of Bones
    Author

    Martha Wells

    Martha Wells is the author of five previous novels: The Wizard Hunters, the first book of the Fall of Ile-Rien, The Element of Fire, City of Bones, Wheel of the Infinite, and The Death of the Necromancer, which was nominated for the Nebula Award. She lives in College Station, Texas, with her husband.

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    Reviews for City of Bones

    4/5

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    • 4/5
      I don't know what to think of this book. It's my first Martha Wells book, and I'm promised some of her others are even better: this one is beautiful in its attention to detail, its careful worldbuilding. I enjoyed a lot that this is fantasy and post-apocalyptic work at the same time: we're talking magic here, not science, not even science that looks like magic. This is what I've hungered for -- a one-shot fantasy story that isn't focused on romance or anything other than solid characters and a solid plot.There's a lot of really fascinating aspects to this world. There's some interesting gender stuff going on with the main character, Khat. He's part of an engineered race who are like humans but have various modifications to better suit the conditions of their post-apocalyptic world. One example being their ability to tell where north is by instinct. Another being the fact that both men and women can bear young in pouches. Then there's the fact that the kris -- Khat's people -- are sought after by some high class women because they can't interbreed with humans: it's not high class men taking advantage of poor women, but the other way round (in effect). And the high class women all have very short hair, while high class men wear veils. One of the main characters, Elen, has a powerful role to begin with and becomes more powerful in her society as the story goes on; the ruler's heir is a woman.At the same time, there's some possessiveness around women and an expectation that they'll stay home and have children, so it's not quite turned completely around.Khat is a great character: tough, smart, but not infallible and not all-knowing. I can believe in the people around him, the bonds he has to others -- I love the awkwardness with Elen at the end, and the comfortableness he always has with Sagai because Sagai understands Khat isn't going to confide everything in him. I liked that the "bad" characters aren't completely one-sided (except the Inhabitants and perhaps the Heir), and though I saw it coming, I liked what became of "mad" Constans.I love the details of the world, the fact that water is a commodity -- which isn't a hugely original idea, but which fits so well here and isn't used as some kind of dystopic problem, but just as a background to the story, a part of the system of commerce and trade.I really enjoyed the fact that this is sort of a fantastical Indiana Jones with aristocratic scheming moving the pieces, too. The details of the relics, the academic discussions around them... That's my world, really, at least on the literature side of things, and it's lovely to have a hero for whom that is a big draw.There's a lot of genuine sense of wonder and beauty, here, and the author steers away from a too-convenient ending. People die, friendships are stillborn, and the world ticks on as before with the person who made that possible barely rewarded. Very enjoyable, and I'm looking forward to reading more of Wells' stuff.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      I want to give the book a 4, because I am enjoying it as I am enjoying everything Martha Wells writes (though I dislike some of the narrator's character voicings) but I want to give THIS COPY of the audiobook a 1. Chapters 18 and 19 cut off prematurely, losing some really important and presumably climatic content! I could kind of assume what happend at the end of Chapter 18, but I really don't want to continue into Chapter 20 without hearing the rest of Chapter 19. So I have to stop listening until I can get my hands on an intact copy of any format of the book.

      I have to imagine the problem is with Scribd's copy, and not with Tantor Audio (who generally do an amazing job with audiobooks). Scribd, any chance you can correct this?

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Enjoyed, well no written. Ended a little incomplete is there a sequel?
    • 4/5
      I didn't like the voices the narrator uses, but the story itself is excellent.
    • 4/5
      Excellent fantasy. In a post-apocalyptic wasteland, water is scarce and humans barely cling to civilization. Thief, historian and outcast Khat is hired to find a relic for a rich Patrician…thus setting off an ever-escalating adventure. I loved the characters, who clearly had lives of their own outside of the plot, and the dialog was realistic and often funny. Add to that Wells’s gift for world-building and an exciting plot (ghosts! Ancient technology! Internecine feuding! Academic infighting!), plus a main character I *loved*, and you have a novel I’d recommend to anyone.
    • 5/5
      Martha Wells never disappoints. I am so, so glad that her backlist is getting rereleased (and revised! So it's up to her current awesome writing abilities!) because I've been wanting to read them and they're hard to find. On to the review:City of Bones is about Khat, who is a very Martha Wells main character, and by that I mean that he is a bit of an outsider, both from his own people and from the city he lives in, and has some past trauma which makes him angry, snarky and mistrustful of others. Literally my favorite character type, a thing I did not know before reading her books. This city is a city-state in a dry and barren world, centuries after a cataclysmic event burned up the seas and destroyed the ancient civilization. Khat is a krismen, a people descended from magically bio-engineered humans to be able to survive in the toxic desert wasteland that is most of the world now. They are mistrusted by ordinary humans for this ability, and the regular humans all live in tightly packed cities with strict water regulations for the poor. Khat and his partner, a scholar from another city-state and therefore almost as much of an outsider as Khat, trade in relics of the ancient peoples. It's a living, and it allows them the opportunity to get to see and study the fascinating ancient civilization without being in the scholars guild. Then Khat is hired to take a nobleman out to a ruin left from the ancients, and inadvertantly gets involved in a struggle for power and magic which goes up to the highest levels of the city. Literally, because the city is tiered, with the ruler living in lush tropical luxury at the top.I just love Khat as a character. And I love the consistency with which he is characterized. There is something that happens towards the end of the book which in nearly every other story would have gone a certain way, but Martha Wells doesn't force her characters to change to fit society, and readers, expectations and it works so well. The world building is also fascinating. The current state of the world is grim, but people persevere as they do, and adapt, sometimes well and sometimes ruthlessly. The glimpses of understanding we get of the ancient world adds depth to the current state of things. but there is a huge amount people do not know about them, which from an archealogical standpoint rings very true. Most of what Khat and his partner trade in are pottery shards, tile pieces and bits of metal. What they, and we as readers, know about the ancients is so small compared to what there is to know, but watching things unfold and slowly getting to glimpse more is riveting. The only downside is that this is a standalone. I know! Usually I would not complain about that, there are so few. But I love the world and the characters and while I am glad this particular story of theirs is complete, I would love to read about their next adventures. Thank you thank you to tordotcom and NetGalley for access to the eARC in exchange for an honest review.
    • 4/5
      One could consider this a post-apocalyptic future tale, but I lean toward identifying as a fantasy. It isn’t clear that the world involved is our earth, although it is populated with human beings – which is often done in fantasies anyway. While there is much talk about the “engines” built by the ancients, there is no scientific basis offered for this “technology”, which might as well be magic. Add functional ESP and divination of the future and the fantasy label feels appropriate.The world created by Wells is richly imagined, the characters are well-drawn, vividly portrayed, and interesting in their variety. The protagonist and his friends are appealing. The plot is intricately woven, without discernible flaws, a mystery-thriller with plenty of action. The writing is confident and clear with vivid descriptions of the city and its various levels and complex social strata. I had a little trouble, however, understanding what the “Waste” was. My best guess was that it was supposed to be a massive area of lava flows, but its three-level physical structure was poorly described and not really explained. I also wondered where the water went, although both of these concerns are lessened by viewing the story as a fantasy. They then don’t have to make sense. The extreme scarcity of water is an interesting element that is made much of at the beginning, but its importance seems to diminish as the story progresses.Overall, I found this an enjoyable read.
    • 5/5
      Reading through Martha Wells’s back list has been one of the best book related decisions I’ve ever made. So far I’ve liked everything she’s written, and City of Bones was no exception.City of Bones is a stand alone fantasy novel set in a post-apocalyptic world where the seas have drained away and stone desert has risen in their place. The plot combines a treasure hunt with intrigue and was always entertaining.Khat is a krisman, a group of people genetically engineered by ancient wizards to be able to survive the wasteland. He lives in Charisat, a tiered city where social status depends on how high up you live. However, he’s not a citizen of Charisat and thus occupies a precarious position, especially as the bones of krismen are favored for fortune telling. Despite the danger, he lives in Charisat, working as a relics trader, seeking out and dealing artifacts left from the ancient civilizations that existed before the creation of the wastelands. He’s hired by an upper class Patrician as an escort to an Ancient ruin and becomes unintentionally involved in the search for relics of unprecedented power.A large part of the reason I enjoyed City of Bones so much was the protagonist, Khat. He’s got a proficient skill set, a mysterious backstory, a love for learning and relics of the past, and a heck of a lot of sarcasm. He’s the main source of humor for the book, though it does become clear that his constant sarcastic comments are a defense mechanism to stop him from feeling helpless. In some ways, he reminds me of Moon from Well’s Raksura books.There was one other POV character, Elen, a wizard from the upper tiers. She’s determined but rather naive and grows a lot through the story. I didn’t find her as captivating as Khat, but the same can be said for any of the characters in the novel. Most characters were well developed, although a few of the villains (the Heir in particular) felt somewhat flat.As I’ve come to expect from Wells, the world building was amazing. The setting she creates is deeply original and well crafted. The sheer imagination on display is wondrous, and she never resorts to info dumping to convey the particulars of the world. Instead everything develops seamlessly as the story progresses.I found the plot interesting and gripping to the point where I was having trouble putting the book down. However, I feel the story flags some at the end when what the relics actually do is revealed. A large part of that is probably personal preference on my part, since Wheel of the Infinite had a similar sort of situation and I didn’t care for it then either. The very end of the book also felt a bit abrupt, and I thought there was something off with that scene between Khat and the Heir.Overall, I would highly recommend Martha Wells’s City of Bones. While it is a stand alone story, I would really love if she ever decided to return to Khat and the world of the wastelands to write a sequel.Originally posted on The Illustrated Page.
    • 4/5
      I too was suprised by this story. I found it hard to put down, and enjoyed all the characters. After a long dryspell, its nice to happen upon a good fantasy story.
    • 3/5
      The premise: ganked from BN.com: Charisat is a city at the Fringe of the Waste, a rocky and treacherous area of desolation formed more than a thousand years ago when a mysterious holocaust drained the sea and destroyed the flourishing civilization of the Ancients. It is a city which survives by trade, and its most valuable merchandise is relics, artifacts from the remains of the Ancient city that once occupied Charisat's present location. Relics are priceless, and in a city where living space is at a premium and water is a scarce and valuable commodity, they are dangerous to own.Khat, a member of a humanoid race created by the Ancients to survive in the Waste, and Sagai, his human partner, are relic dealers working on the edge of society, trying to stay one step ahead of the Trade Inspectors and to support Sagai's family. When Khat is hired to find relics believed to be part of one of the Ancients' arcane engines, they are both reluctant to become involved. But the request comes from the Warders, powerful mages who serve Charisat's Elector. Khat soon discovers that the deadly politics of Charisat's upper tiers aren't the only danger. The relics the Warders want are the key to an Ancient magic of unknown power, and, as all the inhabitants of Charisat know, no one understands the Ancients' magic.A beautiful woman and a handsome thief will try to unravel the mysteries of an age-old technology to stop a fanatical cult before they unleash an evil that will topple Charisat, a place where silken courtesans and beggars weave lies side by side, and where the tier that you live on determines how high up the food chain you are.My Rating: Problematic, but PromisingIf you have not yet Martha Wells' fantasy, I would not suggest starting here. AT ALL. Instead, go pick up The Cloud Roads and prepare to enjoy the hell out of it. City of Bones is a much earlier work, and while I definitely see the glimmers of the author Wells becomes in The Cloud Roads, reading City of Bones was a chore more than anything else. I ended up napping more often than not while reading this, and that's never a good sign. Truth be told, if Wells hadn't already proven her value in The Cloud Roads, City of Bones would've easily been a DNF for me. I didn't connect to the characters, the stakes weren't very clear to me, and was simply very disengaged with the book as a whole. Some of this might be my own fault for falling asleep at a crucial time in the text, but there's something to say about the fact I kept falling asleep during crucial points in the text, you know? That being said, it's not going to stop me from reading The Serpent Seas, which Amazon DID end up discounting to super-cheap prices for the Kindle a few weeks ago! I'm just sorry I impulse-purchased this…it should've really waited until I'd read the Wells book I really wanted.So yeah. Start with The Cloud Roads. You won't be disappointed. And when you do get enough of her work under your belt and you consider yourself a fan and want to read this, just do yourself a favor and don't get the Kindle copy. I know it's cheaper, but the messed up formatting really makes for a trying read, so go for the hard copy instead. :)Spoilers, yay or nay?: Nay. But I will talk at some length about why I wish I hadn't given into impulse, so if you're interested in the full review at my blog, just click the link below. As always, comments and discussion are most welcome. REVIEW: Martha Wells' CITY OF BONESHappy Reading!