Jessica

Despite a slow start, this proved to be a fun book. Amina al-Sirafi herself is a great, unconventional, adventure hero. She's a forty-something mediaeval Muslim woman, a single mother, and at the novel's beginning a reformed character: a retired pirate captain who's given up the grog and her past habit of making poor choices in men. But of course she gets sucked back into the game, and basically in the form of a fantastical heist novel, she gets the old crew back together for one last mission... which turns into the first of five last missions because this is the first instalment of a series.

So, in this instalment, Amina is offered a more-than-life-changing amount of money to retrieve the teenage grandchild of a fabulously wealthy woman, who has apparently been kidnapped. As if the money weren't enough, the teenager is also the child of one of Amina's former crewmates – one who died in some horrible gruesome way that Amina feels is ultimately her fault, because the culprit was her husband. Of course there are twists and turns, and the supernatural comes to play an increasingly large part in the storyline, drawing on Arabic mythology familiar to me only from Chakraborty's previous series, the Daevabad trilogy. But whereas that series included a lot more political scheming, this book was much more straightforwardly swashbuckling adventure.

One of the elements of this book that stood out to me was Amina's demonic estranged husband, Raksh... from the moment he came back and the narrative started to emphasise how unimaginably attractive and incredibly good in bed this guy was, I was like, "Oh no, they get back together, don't they." And they don't, really (although they do have sex again, in a scene which is elided over) but it is obvious that this guy is going to reappear in future books, with tension arising from his unreliability as an ally as well as how attracted Amina obviously still is to him. So yeah, that's a thing. I will say that once he came back, he didn't seem nearly as awful as he'd been built up to be in that first half of the book. I thought he was going to be some kind of out-and-out sadistic abuser, but he's not really. He's flighty and deeply selfish, and more to the point he's a demon, so when people "jokingly" offer their souls to him he can't resist. It's a bit unserious but I guess the alternative would've been a reconciliation plotline with a sadistic murderer, and that might be a bit dark for this style of book.

Something else that I think is worth mentioning is just how refreshing it is that this book doesn't pander to Orientalism at all. Lots of people in the West have this idea that the Islamic world is somehow fundamentally different from us: eternally backwards, bound by tradition, with people who are somehow not driven by the same human nature that drives all of us (you know, where people like merriment and sex and having some degree of agency in their own lives). While this novel is very much rooted in its mediaeval Indian Ocean setting, it also tells a story using (mostly) realistic characters instead of Orientalist caricatures. Amina is (in her own words) not a "good Muslim", what with her weakness to booze and men. There is a gay character, and a trans character. While the book doesn't try to glorify that time period either (there are numerous references to slavery, extreme poverty, various manifestations of sexism, interreligious violence, and so forth), it reflects the fact that there have always been people defying traditional norms, and that a life of piracy on the open sea is a pretty liberating, if dangerous, choice for such a person in that time period. Muslims have never been inherently more pious or traditional than anyone else, and in fact most people throughout history have been much less devout than we're typically told they were in school. I mean, the novel is also a swashbuckling fantasy adventure, so it's not very realistic in the sense that most people throughout history didn't have personal dealings with supernatural creatures, but still.

Having said that, the strongest character in this novel by far is Amina herself. Now, there are practical limits on how much the rest of the characters could've been fleshed out, because there are a lot of them and there's also a lot of plot to get through. But certainly the villain is pretty 2D, and you know, it just felt worth noting, even though it seems in keeping with this kind of adventure novel.

Overall, I enjoyed this. I'll definitely be reading the next one.

More of a 2.5 star book for me. I feel like the quality of the prose was quite good, there was some interesting detail there, but the book unfolded at such a painfully protracted pace and the characters never quite came alive. Werner Pfennig is a tragic orphan who joins the Hitler Youth to escape poverty; Marie-Laure is a blind girl who's only lost one parent by the start of the story but soon enough loses a second; and the villain could easily have come from a children's movie: he is a Nazi who wants to track down a jewel that, according to legend, will make the beholder live forever.

Of the three, Werner is probably the character with the most potential to be interesting: he joins the Hitler Youth for reasons which are fundamentally apolitical, and witnesses a lot of nastiness from those compatriots of his who are more convinced of the Nazi ideology. Nonetheless, he feels he cannot do anything to resist this system he's become a part of, so even as things get worse and worse he continues filling the role he believes he's been assigned. Predictably, a clichéd sequence of events causes him to change his mind at the end of the book, and then apparently Doerr didn't know what to do with him after that, because the character randomly dies when he feverishly walks into a minefield. Much more interesting ends up being the minor character of his sister, Jutta, who was critical of the Nazis all along... but she only plays a small part in the story.

Probably the main aspect of this book that was good was the way it conveyed the everyday experience of life during the war: the German occupation of northern France, the low-level operations of the French resistance, the horror of loved ones going missing and you never finding out their fate, life as a soldier. None of this was particularly groundbreaking, but it maintained my interest through stretches.

There was also an ongoing theme about Marie-Laure's eccentric family: her great-uncle who never leaves the house after he was traumatised in WW1, her locksmith father who continually devises puzzle boxes for her and creates scale models of the places she lives so she'll be able to navigate them independently... and places like like the tall, tall house in Saint-Malo and the attic with a radio broadcaster capable of reaching Germany. That was all right, too.

Overall, despite some good aspects, I felt like this book was overly long, with simplistic/cliché and (for me) unengaging major characters. There are far worse things you could read, but I'm sure there are better, too.

I never really got into this book because the first two POV characters (Miryem and Wanda) were just so cold-hearted at the beginning, even though they were both described as having rough upbringings (in different ways) that made them that way. As the book went on, they both developed an ability to care about a wider layer of people than just themselves and their mothers, so that was good. And you could say that I complain all the time about fantasy feudal settings that idealise feudalism, and at least this novel depicts feudalism as brutal and hard... which is like, yeah it does... but maybe what I really want is to not read books about feudalism at all, I dunno.

Anyway, the book engaged me enough to read it to the end, but in addition to the hard-to-like characters, I did find it fairly complicated with a lot of overlapping subplots and POVs (not all of whom had very distinct voices – I confused Wanda with her youngest brother Stepon more than once, since the book never uses chapter headings or anything to tell you whose POV you're about to read), and in the end I did not even understand the magical process by which the villain was defeated. I wouldn't say this book is bad, just that it never grabbed me, which was disappointing after how much I loved "Uprooted".

Really enjoyed this, although it’s not without its flaws. It combines a kind of tropey gay romance (as in, they start in an arranged marriage that becomes a real romance, and they spend way too much of the book not communicating about how much they really like each other) with court intrigue. The main characters, Kiem and Jainan, have to unravel the mystery of why Jainan's first husband was killed, and of course poking their noses into the conspiracy sees the two of them come under attack. It is one of those books where virtually every named character is a royal or a noble or a general or a diplomat (plus one professor), or an assistant to one of the above, but I enjoyed it in spite of its fixation on the ruling class.

Really enjoyed this, in large part due to the shining beacon of chaos that is Tennalhin Halkana. At the start of the book he's in hiding for unspecified reasons, but making use of the time to go on a self-destructive bender. But as it turns out, his aunt is the legislator, which seems to mean the ruler of this corner of space, and to get him out of the way and make him stop embarrassing her, she arranges to (illegally) conscript him into the army… and Tennal's smiling defiance of military authority is one of the best things about this book.

There's a lot more to it, of course. There's the legacy of sinister "neuromodification" experiments, by which the government created a number of "readers" (who can read others' minds) and "architects" (who can psychically control other people). Tennal is a reader, and then Surit, the other main character, is an architect. Surit is a good character, too, very caught up in his sense of propriety, and trying to escape the shadow of his mother (who was a traitor to the regime). As the novel progresses, a political struggle takes place between the legislator and another contender for absolute power, which Tennal and Surit find themselves involved in. There's a lot of Weird Space Stuff, which actually reminded me a lot of the narrative-heavy game "I Was a Teenage Exocolonist" with its wormhole. So if you enjoyed one, you might well enjoy the other, idk.

The weakest element of this book was probably the romance between Tennal and Surit. I feel like the potential complications of any romance between them were developed pretty well, and then the whole issue got pushed to the backburner as so much else was happening in the story. Their inevitable hooking up got relegated to the epilogue because there was just no room for it any earlier. I have no constructive suggestions for how it could've been done differently… I just feel like it wasn't ideal, the way it was. Still, there was a lot else to like in this book. Four stars!