And Put Away Childish Things
Adrian Tchaikovsky
Weirdly logical
Yes, that is a wardrobe on the cover, and yes, if you are a fan of portal fantasy, it means what you think it means. There is a connection with Narnia.
Sometimes you read a book, then, when it's done, you put it down and think, "Wow! That was weird!" Different people feel differently about this. Personally, I love it. I think the last book I read that weirded me out like this one was Every Heart a Doorway, by Seanan McGuire. Neil Gaiman's Coraline also comes to mind.
This is much harder to do than it looks. You can't scale the heights of Mount Weird just by throwing a lot of random stuff up. That yields something different, nonsense. (Edward Lear was the master of this.) Nonsense is cool, but it is not weird, in the sense I mean. To be weird, you have to subvert expectations. To subvert expectations, you must create expectations, which requires predictive logic. To be weird, you must make sense, but in an unexpected way -- in a way that at first appears to make no sense. That feeling of weirdness comes from seeing totally foreign but entirely logical ideas connect up.
Mathematicians learn to love this feeling, because it is the sign that you are on the threshold of deep new truths. I'm sure Gerolamo Cardano was weirded out when he realized that he could reduce cubic polynomials by imagining that negative numbers had square roots. and that Évariste Galois had the same feeling even more strongly when he found the edge beyond which Cardano's idea would fail.
From Adrian Tchaikovsky I have previously read only his Children of Time series. There is a kinship between those books and this one, in that Tchaikovsky's interest in philosophy, particularly the ontology of imaginary things, shines through and gives him a logical backbone on which to build a story. (Indeed, as a writer of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Tchaikovsky is a professional in the field.) He also makes claims on the field of folklore. Here I felt a sort of dilettantism show through that I don't perceive with Gaiman or McGuire (who has a degree in folklore from Berkeley).
I am not going to go into the plot or characters at all. The publisher's blurb (not to mention other reviewers) will give you all the background you need on that. I ask you only this, "Do you want to be weirded out?"
I thank NetGalley and Rebellion Publishing for an advance reader copy of And Put Away Childish Things. This review expresses my honest opinions.