Hearts of Oak

by Eddie Robson

Architecture, Automatons, and Talking Cats.
The buildings grow.
And the city expands.
And the people of the land are starting to behave abnormally.
Or perhaps they’ve always behaved that way, and it’s normality that’s at fault.
And the king of the land confers with his best friend, who happens to be his closest advisor, who also happens to be a talking cat. But that’s all perfectly natural and not at all weird.
Iona, close to retirement, finds that the world she has always known is nothing like she always believed it to be. There dark forces . . . not dark. There are uncanny forces . . . no, not uncanny. There are forces, anyway, mostly slightly odd ones, and they appear to be acting in mysterious ways. It’s about town planning, it’s about cats and it’s about the nature of reality.

• ISBN10: 1250260531
• ISBN13: 9781250260536
• Publish Date: 6 April 2020
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: St Martin's Press
• Format: Paperback
• Pages: 272
• Language: English

Reviews

[Quirky Cat]

Book Summary:

The city has always been here, and that’s how it feels to its residents. Iona has designed so many buildings that she can’t remember which are hers and which are her students. Meanwhile, older buildings keep coming down to allow for newer (and larger) displays.

Meanwhile, the king hasn’t left his tower in ages. He largely trusts the letters that come through his door to tell him how the city is doing. He also trusts his cat to respond to most of these letters, as he’s too tired to do it himself.

My Review:

Huh. I don’t know what I expected from Hearts of Oak, but I got an experience reading it! Nothing is what it seems in this book, and I rather loved that! It took me a few chapters to get into things, but then I was hooked.

There are multiple perspectives in Hearts of Oak, but the two primary are Iona and the king. They offer very different sides to the same story, as both find different avenues to learn the truth about their city.

While I began to suspect some elements of the story early on, I had no way of planning or preparing for everything that unfolded. Some of it felt like it came out of left field…but it was still oddly fitting? I can’t quite explain it without risking a major spoiler.

Hearts of Oak is not a Doctor Who story. But if you were looking for a novella that had Doctor Who vibes, this would be the book for you. It was a mind-bender, but in a fun and different way, much like the twists in this beloved series.

Highlights:
Science Fiction
Speculative Fiction
Nothing Is What It Seems
Multiple POVs
Doctor Who Vibes

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