The Unbroken

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.