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After an interminable time where reading was a challenge, or I could only read nonfiction, or my brain simply refused to remember anything about the books I read, I picked up
City of the Uncommon Thief and read it in two days straight. Lynne Bertrand’s first YA novel is a puzzle box, a mystery, a feat of constrained world-building, and a tale about growing up fed as much on old tales as on anything edible. It’s not a pandemic novel. But it does involve a lot of people who can’t go outside.
The inhabitants of a walled city live in a thousand doorless towers. There are no animals here, no plants. Each tower is home to a guild, and each guild produces a certain item: barrels, beads, fireworks, astrolabes. Once a year, ships come bearing everything they need to live and keep working. The sailors, who fear the city’s residents, take all their beautiful creations out into the world. Names and languages suggest there are people from all over the world in the city, but everyone within is cut off from their own history, their own place and time. There’s no way to live as part of the world when they don’t know how they fit into it.

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