Faith Erin Hicks’s The Stone Heart (The Nameless City #2)
Description
The Nameless City has always been fought over, the ruling nation being defeated only for another ruling nation to come in. But now it may be moving toward stability.
Kaidu left his homeland for the city to be trained as a soldier. In the four months he’s been there, he’s made friends, found family, and discovered firsthand the turmoil and conflict brewing beneath the city’s peaceful surface.
As Kaidu’s father struggles to bring the ever warring nations together to govern the city in a unified council, Kaidu continues to discover more hidden tensions that threated to destroy not only his father’s proposed city council, but the very city itself.
Disclosure
I borrowed this book for free from our library system, it was provided for my personal use. There was no agreement with the author, publisher, or any third party that I would publish a review. The following review is unsolicited, unbiased, and all opinions are my own.
Review – Spoiler Free
The Stone Heart is the second book in Hicks’ The Nameless City series. I really enjoyed book 1, The Nameless City (read the review here), and while The Stone Heart didn’t quite live up to the precedent set by The Nameless City, it also didn’t disappoint.
The main thing I enjoyed from book 1 was the growing underlying political conflict that Hicks expertly wove through the story, it wasn’t the whole story but it was there in the background adding depth and context. The Stone Heart is very much the middle book of a trilogy as it primarily builds on the threads set in motion in book 1, and ends looking to book 3, The Divided Earth, to resolve almost all of the story. Despite this, readers aren’t left with a cliffhanger at the end of The Stone Heart, but rather a heavy feeling of foreboding.
Also as in book 1, I loved the characters in The Stone Heart. Many already had a wonderful introduction in The Nameless City, and now are further developed. Their backstories provide easily understandable motive for their actions, and Hicks’ illustrations again provide wonderful facial expressions that only further the characters while also giving the story a strong sense of movement and action.
How The Stone Heart stumbles where book 1 didn’t, is in the storytelling. Hicks is still weaving a complex world, but where it was done quite seamlessly in book 1, many parts of The Stone Heart feel choppy, jumping to moments when characters have conversations that basically spell out the storyline. Some of this can be excused by the fact that the main and secondary characters are both young and dealing with big questions and big changes, which can naturally lead to a plot heavy conversation, but overall these scenes just feel forced.
And some scenes that start with a more natural feel, break down along the way – like a scene where Kaidu is introduced to a group of friends and the conversation develops a secondary character’s background and reinforces the xenophobia so present in the storyline. But then in a throwaway line it reveals one of the newly introduced characters to be gay. Dropped in at the end of the scene, and with the reveled fact not coming up again in any way in the rest of the book (or in book 3), it feels like lip service.
As with book 1, I read The Stone Heart with my children, who were able to easily follow the storyline and needed very little explained. And while there is more physical violence and bloodshed in The Stone Heart, and our youngest chose to step away to not see a scene play out, it didn’t strike me as going farther than an average superhero comic might.
Overall, I liked Faith Erin Hicks’ The Stone Heart. Aside from the choppy, forced narrative, I enjoyed the continued developing story that highlights the nuances of people and the motives behind their decision making. I would recommend The Stone Heart to anyone looking for a good fictional graphic novel, but I would strongly recommend reading book 1, The Nameless City (read the review here), first to get a better feel for the layers to the characters, the city’s history, and the developing tensions.
Quote
“Ruling the city is a burden. Maybe now it is one you won’t have to carry.”
Arik (The Stone Heart, Faith Erin Hicks)
Ratings
- Quality of Writing – 3
- Plot – 4
- World Building – 4
- Characters – 4
- Ease of Reading – 5
- Pictures/ Illustrations – 4
- Overall Enjoyment – 4
- Final Rating – 4.0 (Actual: 4.0) – Really Liked It
Want to learn more about the numbers I use for rating, and the qualities I’m thinking about when writing a book review? Check out my post How I Rate and Review.