The demon Vitrine has been watching over the city of Azril for a long, long time.
She has seen lineages rise and fall. Over the years, she has witnessed buildings and storefronts unfurl across neighborhoods. She is an unconventional guardian, watching the good and bad happen in equal measure right in front of her eyes, curious about the ways that human lives unravel whenever she offers a suggestion or subtly influences the course of their next actions. She is in love with the city she’s called home, and the people in it.
But in the opening chapter of Nghi Vo’s standalone novel The City in Glass, it all comes to a head when the angels arrive and set it all to ruin. Every human in the city, dead. The city’s storied structures are reduced to complete rubble. The rest of the story follows from here: Vitrine, a lone survivor stirring in her grief, is now left only with the resolute will to rebuild it all from the ground up.
The City in Glass is unconventional in its storytelling. The big event shaping this fantastical word happens immediately, and in its wake is a slow, thought-provoking, and detailed recollection of a demon’s grief for the home she found in the humans she has lived amongst. Told from Vitrine’s perspective, the chapters are episodic; one chapter will begin with a town resident, while the one after will follow their descendant and reflect on the ways Vitrine has been building relationships with the family for generations to come.
There is an indifference here to telling a rousing, plot-heavy epic about rebuilding a foundation or seeking justice in the aftermath of a tragedy. Nor is the novel particularly concerned with explicitly outlining the specifics of the conflict between the angels and the demons, and what makes them angels or demons in the first place.
The story often meanders, as Vitrine toils back and forth on the full scope over what she lost and the uphill challenge of even knowing what she wants for the future of the city’s return. This tempered, quiet story will definitely not be to some readers’ taste, but if you can accept the ambiguity and the stillness, the work is evocative and stirring.
Vitrine’s only companion in this centuries-spanning saga is an angel — one of the few who destroyed the city. Cursed by Vitrine, he spends his days often by her side, trying to understand her ways and allegiance to the city, often coming up blank in his deductions. He is moved to help her rebuild, even if she spurns him away and never makes motion to forgive him for his crimes. It’s in their relationship that the novel opens up its most open-ended questions: What is the responsibility of those who commit an atrocity in the wake of their actions? What is atonement, and is forgiveness something that can always be earned?
The only answer that The City in Glass offers is that change is inevitable. Cities are defined by their change, as are relationships that span the long-term. “Moving on” from the grip that memories have on us is not a universal possibility for all of us who experience grief. But, as is told throughout these pages, our remembrance of the past can lead us to be resolute in the future we want to build, and only then do we begin to feel hope again.
The City in Glass is a unique reading experience, one that spurs a reader to consider their relationship to land, community, and memory. While potentially polarizing in the starkness of its setting’s tragic landscape and in its prose’s quiet, slow-moving darkness, the result of this tale of divine beings navigating a human’s world is a powerful one.
