In The City We Became, N.K. Jemisin writes of entities that are the personification of cities, which emerge once a metropolis grows large enough to safeguard it against predatory forces. Nghi Vo’s most recent work, The City in Glass, inverts this, proposing a city that was created by a magical being—in this case, a demon. In Vo’s telling, demons have a magpie-like love for shiny, exciting things like stories and romance and betrayal. Deeply intertwined with humankind and the world around them, they can build, lose and grieve just like anyone else. So when angels descend to smite the demon Vitrine’s beloved city of Azril for some arcane transgression, she stands in their way, for what little good it does. And then she sets out to rebuild from the ashes left behind.
The City in Glass isn’t really about Azril; it’s much more about Vitrine herself, because her city is as much a part of her as anything. It is the physical manifestation of her sometimes capricious desires, constructed in defiance of the demon’s past and all its traumas. Azril grows and changes along with Vitrine, functioning as an extended metaphor in this character study of a novel. An entire city’s history may play out in the background, but only two figures are at the forefront: Vitrine herself, and the nameless angel she curses after he and his brethren destroy Azril, trapping him on Earth with her.
Already a Hugo Award-winner for the novella The Empress of Salt and Fortune, Vo is at the peak of her craft with The City in Glass, tackling the impact of war and the way even deep-seated ideological enmities can crumble in the face of individual relationships with flowing, often meditative prose. In a genre so often characterized by complicated magic systems and dystopian politics, Vo’s insistence on dwelling entirely on people making the best of things is both refreshingly straightforward and oddly hopeful. Sometimes, in a fantasy landscape suffused with thousand-page installments in epic, connected multiverses, a short and beautifully written tale of a bereaved demon and a cursed angel finding ways to coexist is all you need.
