The Unbroken

Love, Revolution and colonialism.

So I have literally just finished reading The Unbroken, and I have to say my thoughts are mixed on this one. There is quite a lot to like about this book, and these things outweigh some of my reservations about the book.

As with many books by an author that I am unfamiliar with, my interest was piqued by the gorgeous cover art by Tommy Arnold. I love the way that the cover captures the desert setting of the book and the inner strength of Touraine pushing against both sides of the conflict that she is placed in the middle of.

The story takes place in Qazal. A country that is viciously governed by the expanding empire of Balladaire.

It???s main characters are Touraine, a conscripted member of Balladaire's armed forces, stolen as a child to be used as a frontline soldier in the ???Sands??? regiment of the army. The children are ???educated??? from an early age, with their belief systems and personalities modified to believe that they are fighting their former home for the greater good.

The other is Luca, the young monarch of Ballardaire who is sent to Qazal in order to quell the rebellion and prove her ability to rule Balladaire to her uncle, who is currently the regent and does not want to relinquish the power of the throne.

The Unbroken is quite an interesting read. It is based in a North African setting with the Balladairans resembling the French empire of the late 19th Century. Now, I found this to be quite an original premise and not one that I had seen in a fantasy book before. Clark does an amazing job of building an extensive and believable world that lies outside a normal fantasy setting. She catches the vibrancy of the country that she is describing, even though the country of Qazal is a suppressed country. She also captures the cruelties of the ruling classes and the poverty of the people. She regularly highlights the disparity of the situation, showing the nihilistic attitudes of the nobility on the one hand, with lavish balls and the like, and the abject poverty of the people that are being oppressed.

Additionally, she shows the dehumanisation of the Sands (the regiment of the army that is made up of the conscripted nationals) and theQazali people, regularly peppering the book with descriptions of the casual cruelty that is metered out to both the everyday people that live there and also to the ???Sands???.

The basis of the plot revolves around Luca???s obsession with her obtaining her rightful place as leader of the Balladairan throne.However, Luca wants to step away from the normally brutal methods that have not worked and actually wants to negotiate with the rebels. In order to initiate this plan she needs an intermediary to go between both parties.

This is where Touraine comes in.

At the very beginning of the book, Touraine foils an assassination attempt on the Princess???s life. Thus gaining her some favour with the princess who grants her a boon for her valour. When Touraine is disgraced in an incident later in the book,she calls in the Boon and the princess sees her chance to set her plans in motion by employing Touraine as her personal emissary.

What ensues is a story of two individuals that come from vastly different backgrounds learning about each other and the feelings that grow between the two, as well as learning about different cultures and wrangling with the political machinations of both the Empire and the rebels.

Like I said there is a lot to like about this book. The setting, the romance between Luca and Touraine, the political wranglings and the effervescent plot that takes you in lots of different directions.

However, I did find it a little hard to get into at first, and I found it difficult to relate to the characters initially. The pacing at the beginning of the book revolves around a lot of plot building. And at times, I found that this hampered the pacing for me, thus adding to my difficulty in relating to the story.

However, when we get to the second half of the book, the pacing picks up and I have to say it leads to a pretty climactic conclusion that had me turning pages at a rate of knots as I wanted to find out how the book will end.

On the whole, I enjoyed the book despite my initial difficulties with the pacing and I eventually related to the characters.

I have a feeling that C. L Clark will be a fantasy writer to keep an eye on, and will go from strength to strength.

This is one of those reads that I spent a considerable amount of time getting through, but have little to say about it by the end. I felt like the bones, structure, everything about this story should have been good, great even, but it just wasn't.

Touraine is a lieutenant in the Balladairan army - a powerful colonial empire that took Touraine from her home country, Qazal, as a child, and made her into a loyal soldier. Which she is. She wants nothing more than to rise in the ranks and prove herself worthy. As you can imagine, that's not what happens. In fact, almost as soon Touraine sets foot in Qazal, as part of a battalion of other conscripts like her, things start to go wrong. Sure, she saves the life of the princess, or at least helps a bit. But within a week, she's on trial and facing execution. Instead, Princess Luca plucks her from the military's clutches and makes her her personal assistant, in the hopes that Touraine's inherent ties to her country will help Luca quell a growing rebellion. This will prove to not be a great plan.

There was something I found myself craving while reading this book. Something about it just needed to be...meaner. Maybe. There's grit and death and war, yes, but none of it really seems to land. One of my biggest points of frustration was that whenever a major event or action sequence happened I often came away from it confused rather than excited. It's not like the plot is particularly complex or anything, but whenever some twist happened I would spend several pages going, “Wait, what?”

I also never found Touraine particularly compelling. She's not really impressive at, like, anything. Most of the book she spends forced around by events, changing sides and allegiances, and dying and getting saved repeatedly. Luca I wanted to like more, I liked the promise of a princess that is sharp and weary, rather than, well, princess-y. But she's still pretty naive, and it undermines anything that would be intellectually interesting about her. Also, I never really felt any chemistry between them.

This is a political thriller with pretty thin politics, a military-fantasy with not a whole lot strategy and confusing action sequences (though Touraine's one-on-one fights with Jaghotai and Cantic were definite highlights). For all the effort put into the world, the meat of the story felt pretty anemic to me. It premise and setting had a ton of potential, but I felt like it just never went anywhere.

This could absolutely have taken some bad, tropey turns but Clark managed to avoid them splendidly imo.

Take Luca, who could have been childishly good or cartoonishly evil. She struck a balance between ‘self-intrested' colonialist who doesn't hate the people she's colonizing but also isn't willing to give full sovereignty. The argument she makes for the Qazali to just wait until she gets power and ~then~ they'll receive basic human dignity, sorry about the people who'll die in the meantime, tho. That feels so painfully real.

And Touraine's constant struggle between the Sands, Luca, and the Qazali makes so much sense. Of course her loyalty would be split.

Did knock a point off because I really feel like the first 100 pages could have been condensed to some degree

Seriously, I'm mostly disappointed that it's a triology and book two isn't even out yet