The Mirror Empire

Executive Summary: This book didn't really live up to the hype for me, but it might for you. I'd like to give this a 3.5 star rating, but I just can't round that up to a 4 star.

Full Review
This book was getting a lot of hype from my circle of friends. Several of them seem to read nothing but ARCs these days so I always seem to get reviews and recommendations of books that are coming out. That coupled with the very reasonable ebook cost made picking this up a no brainer.

This book took a very long time to click with me. I really liked the last 25% or so, but the first 75% was good but not great. I had no problem picking it up every night, but it was never really a book I hated to put down or was rushing to pick up.

The world building is pretty different from most of the stuff I've read, and that's hard to do these days. I like the concept of mirror worlds a lot. That's probably the thing that will keep me reading this series. It's really a sort of epic fantasy novel with a sci-fi twist.

My main issue with this book was the characters. I just never connected with any of them. It's one thing to make “grey” characters who are neither good or bad, but they have to be likable. I need to understand why they live in that gray area, and it can't be because they are selfish and do whatever they want to without any thought to the consequences or how it will impacts others.

I was pretty excited at the idea of a matriarchal society to change things up. This may be an unpopular opinion, but it just came off feeling gimmicky to me. Maybe the idea was that you can put female characters into the same roles as male ones and nothing would change, but if so that doesn't work for me. I want it to be different.

Her characters didn't feel like women to me. That isn't to say they needed to be defer to a guy, or staying behind while men do all the fighting. Several other writers have created vicious women, strong women, smart women that break the tropes for women in fantasy while still feeling like women to me.

Most of Ms. Hurely's characters felt like male characters shoved in women's bodies. She plays with gender in this book a bit too. People can sort of choose what gender they want to be, and one of the character's genders is constantly changing. None of that bothers me, but I am sort of confused about it's relevance to the story. Maybe there isn't one, or maybe we'll find out later. I'll be curious to see which.

The book is very well written. It's very dark though. I wasn't expecting that. There are a few pretty cringe worthy parts. Overall this book had a lot of potential that just fell a bit short on the execution for me.

I'll likely be continuing on with this series, but I probably won't be rushing out to get the next one when it comes out.