Red City by Marie Lu
The balance Lu crafted between Sam and Ari is pure perfection, you could even say it’s alchemical. I should have prepared myself for how entranced by this world that I would be, but I was taken off guard in the best way. A fresh addition to fantasy that I can’t and won’t stop thinking about.
Red City by Marie Lu, (List Price: $29.99, Tor Books, 9781250885678, October 2025)
Reviewed by Sarah Hudson, M. Judson Booksellers in Greenville, South Carolina
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I wrote it in a month-long spurt, and sent it to the publisher. I didn’t do any research for the book, but I drew upon years of personal experience, and the history of disabled people that I studied at university helped me, too. I was conscious that it was special in the sense that I knew Shaka was a protagonist of a kind that hadn’t been written before.”
There are books whose urgency barely needs to be articulated because it’s so evident within the work itself, and Hunchback seemed to me like one of those: it burns itself right into the mind of the reader. It’s a cinematic work, that conjures up a dense and vivid world with very little, so the language needed a lot of honing, to make sure that it was hitting all of those imagistic notes in the way that they needed to. I’d say the principal narrative voice came to me quite quickly and intuitively, but there are lots of shifts of register within the span of the book, which took quite a lot of time and attention to capture. ”
