City of Thieves

In City of Thieves, author David Benioff uses the unlikely friendship between two teenage boys on orders to find a dozen eggs to tell a larger story of the absurdities of war and humankind's seemingly endless capacity for cruelty.

In order for me to like a book, I've found that I need to like the characters. In sexually inexperienced and self-conscious narrator Lev and sexually confident and dashingly handsome Kolya, Benioff presents characters who are each other's opposite, and yet who are equally likable and charming. He fulfilled my requirement immediately and with ease, and I was able to delve into the story.

Despite its violence, City of Thieves is marked by warmth and humor. The nightmare of war is amplified by Lev's innocence, but his kind and gentle nature keeps the book readable and strangely upbeat.

Some scenes, however, were difficult for me to get through, regardless of how much I enjoyed Lev's voice. The story of Zoya, the 14-year-old sex slave, was particularly challenging, and I had to set the book aside for a while. More than what happened to Zoya, it was the pleasure her tormentors found in her pain that disturbed me.

Overall, I enjoyed reading City of Thieves, but I struggled with what I felt was a change of pace at the end. The final chapters felt theatrical to me, compared with Benioff's earlier descriptions, which were vivid but felt natural. The last pages read like a movie script, which isn't off-base given that Benioff is a screenwriter, but I felt a twinge of disappointment at the drama.

That aside, I enjoyed the rest of the novel so much that I added Benioff's debut novel, The 25th Hour, to my list.