Rating: 
Summary: Fantastic literature at its finest!
Review: First-time novelist K.J. Bishop's The Etched City achieves what all great fantasy stories set out to do: grab the reader with storytelling that transcends reality with the tools of the fantastic, while examining the grandest metaphysical themes - good versus evil, the existence of God, free will, etc. And boy, does Ms. Bishop achieve this heightened state.
The episodic narrative, following the professional killer Gwynn and professional healer Raule, rings like a fever dream, as Bishop's prose perfectly aligns itself with the decadent and ornate city of Ashamoil - a dilapidated landscape, fully peopled with riffraff of all spiritual and economic sorts. The cover blurb compares The Etched City to China Mieville's creation of New Crobuzon in Perdido Street Station and to Stephen King's The Dark Tower sequence. But, while the comparisons are accurate to a degree, Bishop's novel deserves to stand on its own, un-needing of comparisons - especially when the comparisons are lesser works than the book at hand.
In fact, Bishop's novel is nothing like King's Dark Tower universe. Certainly the desert landscape and Western motifs are present in The Etched City, but Bishop's preoccupations are more mature than King's (she relishes metaphysics as opposed to meta-fiction), and her story is more swift and maturely edited than anything Mieville has yet produced.
The Etched City, with its expert storytelling and seamless melding of metaphysics into the story fabric, ranks as one of the best fantasy novels of this millennium. K.J. Bishop is not an author to watch, but an author to cherish.
Rating: 
Summary: Wonderful prose, wonderless plot...
Review: For most new authors plot is hardly a problem, its the character developement, setting the scene, and the use of vivid language that prove to be obstacles to the newly published writer. However, Bishop proves just the opposite. She paints a vivid picture of her world with words that would make your mouth salivate, your eyes captivate and your breath alleviate.
Bishop languishes in beautiful descriptions of her characters and their surroundings. She wonderfully illustrates the metamorphosis many of the characters go through. Her characters are extremely life like and wonderful to watch and develop. Yet what are they developing for and why.
The Etched City lacks any and all plot leaving the reader trapped in a labyrinth of description and development with no payoff. There is no story only illustration. I would love to return to Ashamoil again or revisit the characters of Gwyn and Raule but with no story there is no chance. This book is a great read for someone who relishes in description and cares little for plot
Rating:
Summary: Classic, And I Don't Say That Lightly
Review: I can only think of two books that seems to me to be in The Etched City's weight-class, and that's Gormenghast and Paul Park's Soldiers of Paradise. The Etched City has that same quality of dreamy, otherworldly skill in using prose to suck the reader seamlessly into another mentality. It's the opposite of Tolkien-esque world-creation, and far less often accomplished or attempted. The Tolkien-type fantasy, even the very good ones, approaches world-creation as a matter of comprehensive scholarship and geek-friendly mastery of consistent detail. Bishop's Etched City is no less a masterful creation of a world, but it accomplishes this through simply beautiful, utterly original prose and equally memorable characterization. Reading it is like drawing deep in an opium den, a sort of delirum contract between reader and writer. Seen in the cold light of the morning after, there are weaknesses, in particular a plot that seems to be moving langurously towards the convergence or closure of two parallel tracks but ultimately spins out (in a rather life-like manner) into a whimper rather than a storytelling bang. But just as Gormenghast in the end doesn't really seem to be about that much, or Soldiers of Paradise is just a retelling of the French Revolution, the narrative weakness of The Etched City ultimately seems irrelevant. I can't recommend this book highly enough.
Rating:
Summary: The Etched City: a stunning journey of the mind and spirit
Review: I cannot recommend 'The Etched City' highly enough. This is an astonishingly good book. As I read it I found myself thinking of Dostoevsky's willingness to tackle spiritual and ethical issues; of Bulgakov's surreal whimsy; of the richness of imagery and fable to be found in books like 'The Dictionary of the Khazars'. They are not writers and works to be invoked lightly, but I believe K J Bishop has written a first novel worthy of the comparisons.This is a book that resists easy classification. It is a story set in a surreal world with characters that are refreshingly free of easy sentimentality. There is action, violence, murder; passion, lust, love; there is confusion and clarity, magic and pragmatism. Her main characters, like the book itself, do not fit any recognisable type, beyond the facile one of 'anti-heroes'. Gwynn is a fascinating creation. He is a man of great honesty which he applies to both himself and others, clear-eyed in a murky world. Yet for all his cunning and sharp observational powers, he is capable of being seduced by the intriguing woman who embodies ambiguity. He is paradoxical, amoral; a killer who nonetheless refuses to be callous; an executioner who refuses to be judge, and a realist who embraces the poignancy of love. Raoule is equally paradoxical, a woman who acts compassionately but feels nothing, a callous caregiver. She searches for truth amongst the monstrous remains of the children she delivers, and her relationship with Gwynn is astringent, to say the least. There are men who manipulate wars, reaping rewards and destruction in equal measure; there are zealots, lovestruck fools, women and a priest who fumbles towards heaven and Gwynn's soul even as he fumbles in their skirts. I don't know if time will prove this to be a great book. It certainly has the seeds of greatness within it in its unforgettable scenes and the richness and poetry of its text. If you want to read something that delights, challenges, entertains and moves you, 'The Etched City' is for you.
Rating:
Summary: Virtually plotless -- and would have been better with none
Review: I greatly enjoyed the first half of this book, setting up the characters and the city. It took fully this long, it seemed, for the author to decide that the book should probably have a plot.
This is always a dangerous point in a fantasy novel (do a web search for "The Well-Tempered Plot Device"), and I felt the author stumbled greatly at this point, packing in a number of disjointed fantasy elements of which the first half had provided no hint.
"Kushiel's Dart" is another near-fantasyless fantasy novel which would have been better with still less. "A Song of Fire and Ice" has set the standard there for me. (Don't get me wrong -- I love fantastic-on-every-page novels too, e.g. "Perdido Street Station", just not ones where fantasy gets tacked on in an inessential, off-putting way.)
If you can't wait for more news of Daenerys' continent, "The Etched City" may help ease your suffering for a while. There is real creativity and freshness here, and I will be giving this author another chance.
Rating:
Summary: A little too slow for my taste
Review: I really wanted to like this book a lot with its strange and enticing main character and wonderful background story... But the plot was very slow in developing and I started to lose my concentration in some parts... However, I could not put the book down until I found out the conclusion of Gwynn's and Raule's lives (too bad that the "good" doctor played such a small role overall in this book after the stirring beginning)
Overall, it was a good read (very well written) but pacing was off in some parts... Nonetheless, I would recommend this book heartily...
Rating:
Summary: Entertaining very complex dark fantasy
Review: In Copper Country healer Raule and her superior Gwynn the mercenary fought for the losers in a devastating war that has ravaged the countryside. Now the twosome flees as the Army of Heroes hunt down the enemy like chasing deer. They manage to make it to the city Ashamoil, a place where weird happenings occur.
Raule accepts work as a kind of physician at Ashamoil Hospital where the strange is everyday while Gwynn becomes bodyguard and assassin to the magnate. While she tries to save lives, he tries to take lives. However, both must come to grips with the oddities of a girl giving birth to a baby-headed crocodile, an artist turned into a sphinx, and even weirder phenomena as the line between reality and magic blurs. Whether these events prove miraculous or the end of times does not seem to matter to those trying to survive unless the miracle turns personal and keeps a healing idealist and a gun slinging pragmatist alive.
This entertaining very complex dark fantasy will keep readers alert with several intriguing sidebars within the prime plot that fans will wonder how the meandering sub-branches like maculate horn vines flow back to the main theme. K.J. Bishop succeeds in doing just that so fans obtain a multifaceted tale starring two fabulous opposites struggling in what seems like a world gone mad. The keys to keeping the exciting story line from being overwhelmed by the strong subplots are Raule and Gwynn, the healer and the killer, providing opposite sides of the same coin. Deep and gloomy, THE ETCHED CITY is a terrific tale of a world that feels real even with strange events that shake the heroine and antihero to the core.
Harriet Klausner
Rating: 
Summary: Has the marks of a first novel, but it is a good one.
Review: K. J. Bishop, The Etched City (Prime, 2003) Aussie author Bishop turns in her first novel, and what a first novel it is. The language in The Etched City demands to be savored, lingered over. It is beautiful to the point of astonishment. This is, basically, the fastest way to get a top review from me. The problem being that when held up against such masterpieces of perfect prose as Walker's The Secret Service, Mieville's Perdido Street Station (to which The Etched City is oft-compared), or McCarthy's Blood Meridian, The Etched City suffers in one respect: pace. The first half of the book, give or take, is told at a leisurely pace, to be kind. (It took me over three months to make it to the last half of the book.) Bishop takes her protagonists, the gunslinger Gwynn (who bears a striking resemblance to a more cynical, lighter-hearted Elric of Melnibone) and the doctor Raule, through a few episodes in another land before getting to the city at the heart of the book, Ashamoil. Once in Ashamoil, Bishop takes her time setting up character, setting, and theme before actually getting down to plot. A few subplots are begun, a few episodes spun out (and The Etched City is very much an episodic novel, contributing somewhat to its overall sense of languor), but the biggest ball doesn't get rolling until almost two hundred pages in. If you love language, though, it is doubtful you will care; the book can be put down and picked up at various times allowing the reader to go on to more pressing matters and return at leisure. Perhaps the oddest thing about the novel is that Raule, with whom the book begins, ends up being such a minor character in the general scheme of things. Once they get to Ashamoil, Gwynn quickly becomes the focus of the story, which cuts back to Raule now and again to ensure we remember she exists. Gwynn's main quests are involved in working for a tyrannical slaver, Elm, and trying to find (and considering what to do with) the artist of an etching Gwynn stumbles upon in the night market, an etching that contains him. When not hunting down sex or violence, he's usually involved in theological debate over dinner with a fallen priest, whose name we never know but who grows to be one of the book's most endearing characters. Bishop's ability to draw characters, especially minor characters, puts her into the realm of such authors as McCarthy and Stephen King, much of whose reputations are based upon their ability to create memorable characters. Bishop can certainly be added to this list. The reader will be hard-pressed to forget most of Gwynn's band of cronies, especially Sharp Jasper and Elbows. Lovely folks the both of them. Really. All in all, a good first novel that would have benefitted from better pacing at the beginning. Recommended for lovers of language and strong characters. *** ½
Rating:
Summary: An amazing debut
Review: Really four and a half stars...
K. J. Bishop has crafted a simply amazing debut novel. The characters in this book are remarkable and engaging, if not entirely likable. The settings are wonderfully crafted. The Copper Country is a wasteland of small towns and endless desert from which the characters must flee for their part in a failed revolution. Ashamoil, where the lion's share of the book takes place, is a giant and corrupt city state where life is cheap. While Ashamoil will draw inevitable comparisons to China Mieville's New Crobuzon, this book holds its own.
The story starts out at a lightning pace; I didn't want to put the book down even for a bathroom break through the first hundred or so pages. Bishop's creation does lag a bit in the middle, where I found the philosophical debates between Gwynn, a gunslinger of sorts, and his nemesis the reverend to be a bit much. (They are interesting, just excessive) The ending left me wholly satisfied and eagerly awaiting more work from this innovative new voice. Anyone who likes fantasy that goes beyond elves, towers, and rings must read this book!
Rating: 
Summary: BORING!!!!!! and more of a western than a fantasy novel
Review: This book is boring. Yes the author writes well and uses an expansive vocabulary, but the story suffers. It is 400 pages long and it could have been only 50 pages. The character development could best be described as meandering and the author has each character speak withthe authors vocabulary. Every individual in this book uses very eloquent words to express themselves, that includes...ummm, everybody!!! Even drunken gangsters. If the author had not specified on each line who was speaking then one would never know the difference between the characters. The action is few and far between and I wish half as many words were used on describing the action as on the relationships and the characters philosophical whimsies. If I were a judge of a vocabulary aptitude test then I would rate this book very high. However the authors fails to entertain, enough said.
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