I read Senlin Ascends

This week's novel is Senlin Ascends, fantasy by Josiah Bancroft.

Senlin and his wife, Marya, travel on their honeymoon to the Towel of Babel, an engineering marvel and center for culture and advancement.  No one knows how many levels there are, stacked on top of each other, and each level is like its own kingdom. They've heard stories about the marvels of the tower all their lives.  However, when they get there they find that it's full of miscreants and con-artists, tyrants and systems designed to entrap you.  Also as soon as they get there, Marya and Senlin get separated, and Senlin must make his way up to tower to find her.

The thing I liked most about this one was how Senlin's bright eyed expectations and the realities were juxtaposed.  Each chapter starts with an excerpt from Senlin's guidebook, which makes the tower sound fun and quirky.  But then once you get into the chapter, the tower turns out to be terrifying.  For example, there's a marketplace at the base of the tower, and the book describes it as a place where you can buy all sorts of exotic wonders and have fun haggling.  In fact, it's a maze that changes every day, chunks from the sides of the tower fall and smoosh people, airships fall from the sky and are then scavenged for parts, and then there are the pickpockets and thefts and kidnappings.  People walk around tied together with rope so they don't get separated.

I liked how in the beginning, Senlin clings to the guidebook and his belief in the stories that the Tower is amazing.  He thinks maybe he's just had some bad luck or that the tower will get better as he goes along.  But over time he realizes that the guidebook, his ideas, and he himself are wrong, and he has to come to grips with that.  And it's neat how his distancing himself is paralleled with how ridiculous the guidebook's bad advice and uninformed descriptions at the beginning of the chapters sound, as the reader sees that it's more and more out of touch with reality.

I enjoyed it a lot.  The worldbuilding is atmospheric and pervasive.  And each new level of the Tower is new and interesting and refreshing as he travels, without feeling jarring.  They fit together in nice ways and there's always some consistency around to hold the book together.