Scion

Azure isn't the reason to read this book. The world he's trapped in is, and it's good enough to earn five mugs almost on its own. I went in knowing this wouldn't be another Hierarchy book. This is Islington's first stab at science fiction, a fraction of the scale, none of the sprawling structure his fantasy is known for. Lowering my expectations on that front paid off. What actually surprised me was how much world he packs into so few pages. The premise carries the whole book. Wealth buys immortality; everyone below that line lives against a visible countdown to death. Islington keeps finding new angles on that setup, chapter after chapter, and it ends up mattering more than Azure, the guy we're actually following. He never quite landed for me. That's a bigger problem than it sounds, because the plot is slow to get moving, and I spent a good chunk of the book waiting for it to actually start. Here's the strange part: this is a five-mug review, and my biggest complaint is that the book needed to be longer, not shorter. Triple the length and the setting has room to breathe, Azure has room to become someone worth rooting for. Islington is clearly sitting on a much bigger story than the one he told here, and I liked what he gave me enough to follow him through a full series to get the rest. Two hundred and forty pages just isn't enough space for what Scion is trying to be. It wants to be a fully realized cyberpunk dystopia, but the mechanics of how the world got this broken never really come into focus. At one point a character mentions that at least in the cities, the poor don't have to worry about their air getting cut off for stepping out of line. Then the book moves on. That happens more than once, a flash of something enormous, dropped in and left alone. The ending mostly makes up for it. The last stretch turns genuinely thrilling, and the revelations there change what you thought the first two hundred pages were about. Scion still needed more room, for its world and for its lead. I'm in for whatever Islington writes next anyway. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the advance copy. Scion publishes September 1, 2026.