A two-sided novel that defies expectations—in structure, genre, worldbuilding and more
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.
The Math
Highlights:
- Taking a premise that could sound silly and somehow rendering it entirely serious
- Atmospheric description of locations
- Family: together, apart, whole, broken and complex
Nerd Coefficient: 8/10
Reference: Langmead, Oliver K, and Whiteley, Aliya. City of All Seasons [Titan Books, 2025].
POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social
