A Reader of Else

There have been three books doing the rounds on the bit of book twitter I inhabit. Well, more than three, but three that are notable in their confluence – they’re all yellow, they’re all epic fantasy, they’re all queer and they’ve all been getting a lot of hype*. So, because marketing absolutely doesn’t work on me, I decided to read them all.

They are:

The Jasmine Throne by Tashi Suri
The Unbroken by C. L. Clark
She Who Became The Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan

I started with The Jasmine Throne. I’ve never read any Tasha Suri before, but her work has been mentioned on and off a fair bit among people I know, and I follow her on twitter for excellent bunny content, so it felt like About Time I got around to her.

The story follows a maidservant and a sidelined, scheming princess who have been thrown together in a rebellious province of a politically tumultuous empire. They have to work together, despite their goals being disparate, to fight against the emperor and win their individual/people’s freedom. I’m normally tentative about spoilers but I think it is super obvious, even from that scant blurb, who’s gonna be the queer romance here. Plus I knew that before I read it. It does not spoil it at all to know that, I promise.

Unfortunately, I was a bit meh on this one. The setting is cool, and the political scheming is entirely reasonable (you’d think this would be a low bar but I’ve read some things…), everyone’s motives make sense and it’s a good web of who wants what and why they’re all working together politically… buuuuut I felt very little chemistry between the two love interests. And outside of that, I felt very little chemistry in most of the personal relationships, even the ones where there was a lot of heated feeling described. It just didn’t feel there, even as it was stated. The prose is also… perfectly fine? There’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s very fade-into-the-background, which isn’t my preference. I’d like to occasionally go “ooooh, that’s a nice phrase”.

But! The political stuff is the mainstay of the plot, and I think the multiple viewpoints and the pace of the reveal of past incidents, really do that part of it a lot of justice. It’s an excellent take on someone who’s been wronged by power but struggles with what the impact of fighting that will be on those around them, as well as seeing people for whom that maths weighs up differently. There is also an amount of religious conflict touched upon which, when we see it, is done very well, but I feel could have been explored further without detriment to the rest of the plot. It does a good line in including both the belief and the cultural sides of a religious conflict, for me, and manages to rescue itself from straying too far into “strong belief always leads to bad things”, though that’s definitely a risk at times.

There was one character I did like though (Bhumika) – she’s someone who has managed to retain privilege under an oppressive regime in her own country, by selling out to them to some extent, in order to use her (limited) power to help her own people. There’s plenty of critique for this path as a choice she made, and I feel like the exploration of her role, and of that critique, is well crafted, and makes her a sympathetic character, even as you disagree with her choices – you see why she’s put herself where she is, why she thinks it’s the best path… and I’m not sure one could honestly argue, come the end, whether she was always wrong about the outcomes. It’s a take I was really interested to see, in a book where it might be easy to come down hard on a side of a single, unnuanced, moral right.

Aside from the political parts of the setting, the book is also reasonably strong on conjuring a sense of place. I had no real trouble visualising what and where things were happening, and the images conjured were ones I feel will linger with me, I think in part because the description focusses strongly not just on the visual – there is a lot about rain and heat, and being in the weather, that roots the narrative into its ground, as well as the descriptions of plants and places.

All in all, it was a very easy read, I blitzed through it when I did sit down to read it… but I didn’t find myself super excited to do that, and that was mainly down to the lack of character relationship chemistry, I think. It got three stars, and I was never really torn on giving it anything else. It hasn’t made me super excited to read the sequel(s?), or anything else by Tasha Suri, but I’d also not object if circumstances put me in a position where I had to do so.

Next up – literally, it was the next book I read – The Unbroken by C. L. Clark. This is the one I’d been seeing most doing the rounds on twitter, with a Lot of high praise from a lot of people. I’ve heard the thing about how marketing needs you to see something five separate times to grab you, and it’s been way, way more than that, so I guess it was inevitable I’d give in and get it?

Trigger warning for this one (not for this post, but for the book) – mention of/flashback of attempted rape.

In a very similar vein to The Jasmine Throne (and this won’t be the last time I’ll be saying that), The Unbroken follows a woman who was taken from her home as a young child to become a soldier of the empire that conquered them, and the princess-regnant, seeking to claim the throne of her empire from her regent uncle, as they navigate trouble in the rebellious province from which the soldier, and many of her fellows, were taken. They too are thrown together by circumstance and necessity to try to bring peace where outright rebellion is threatening to boil over.

Again, this is a multiple viewpoint narrative, so we get to see the perspective of both the ruled and the ruler (again, although currently marginalised and trying to regain the power she believes is her due). And again, I think the switches between when we get those viewpoints are good, as are the political stakes set out at the start of the story. The soldier – Touraine – has, for me, a strong narrative of confused loyalties and difficult choices, made by someone who’s been put in an impossible position. She doesn’t always make what I would say are the right choices, and I certainly think the narrative disagrees with some of them too, but it’s easy to sympathise with her, easy to see why she chooses what she chooses, and feel how difficult some of those choices were to make. It never feels like any of the decisions she makes are for bad reasons, and it’s very easy to feel for her when other people… aren’t so keen on her choices.

The princess… is more complicated on that front. I think she starts out well, but I feel by the end of the story, she loses some of her coherence, and not all in a way that can be excused by the events of the plot (although some of it certainly implies an attempt to). While she certainly is pulled in several different directions by the events of the story, some of her vagaries feel as though the author wants her to fill multiple roles, some of which are at odds with one another, and so leave her feeling morally/politically chaotic, rather than the person struggling with different wants and needs that we’re told she is.

That being said, I feel like the chemistry between them, at least some of the time, is more palpable than that of The Jasmine Throne, and this is doubly true in Touraine’s relationships with other characters. There’s a good amount of stuff about community and family and how one finds them and feels with them that I think is well explored and feels real, which it needs to to fuel some of the less fun (i.e. most of them) parts of the book. Those other characters are also a good selection, many of whom manage to be pleasingly complex, even when they don’t get a lot of page time. There are two in particular who impact heavily on Touraine’s worldview, and their conflicting influences play out, for me, super well.

The religious conflict – another similarity – which features heavily is also… interesting. The conflict between an emphatically a-religious empire and the so-called “uncivilised” subjugated nations who still follow (now banned) faiths is one I wasn’t expecting to see, and I do think is a great concept. But like a lot of the book, I think it loses its coherence towards the end. It sets up some good and interesting ideas, and definitely resolves some of them… but not all. There are lingering questions, or areas of lacking clarity, and not in a way that suggests a sequel will swoop in to resolve them.

Once again, though, there is a very strong sense of place and atmosphere – there are some really strong images of buildings and locations in the narrative, and one in particular that does a great job of conveying the wonder of religious architecture, and again, the weather and the climate play strongly into this grounding. The main setting is on the border of a desert, and the heat and the sand and the vagaries of that geography are looped in in the right places to make envisaging how it fits into the plot super easy. You could very easily feel being there, as well as see, and I really like that.

For the first two thirds, I think The Unbroken does a lot of stuff better than The Jasmine Throne, and for me particularly, the realness of the personal relationships is what tips the scales. I cared far, far more about Touraine and a lot of the people around her than I did about most of the characters in The Jasmine Throne (Bhumika notwithstanding). But… the last third of the book really lets it down. Things seem to spiral outwards, and the author doesn’t seem to have a firm focus on drawing all those threads in together, nor feel for pacing once the crescendo starts to build. I was convinced, at several points, that we were going into the big dramatic end-game par- oh wait no, never mind, back again. Which was somewhat frustrating.

So in the end, it got 3 stars as well, although a much more divided one. 4 stars for the beginning and 2 for the ending, perhaps.

Third of the bunch, She Who Became the Sun is very much the different one of the three (and, getting it in now, in my opinion the best). The big difference I noticed is the extent to which the central queer relationship was much less the focus of the book. I’m not saying it’s totally sidelined, because it’s not, but it takes us a lot longer to get to it and it feels a lot less… inevitable? Tropey? Than the other two.

She Who Became the Sun, a queered reimagining of the founding of the Ming Dynasty and expulsion of the Mongols from China, follows a peasant girl (Zhu) who, after her brother is prophesied greatness and herself nothing, chooses to seize her brother’s name and fate as her own and claim the greatness fate has not offered her on her own terms. She has to work against everything in the world that would hold a young, poor, ethnically Chinese girl back in a world where she is a second class citizen to those in power, and do so by the sheer force of her will to live, and keep on living.

I don’t know how closely the story cleaves to the actual historical events of the period as it’s not a bit of history I know a great deal about, but there are definite wanders into… historical ambiguity? Without going into too much detail, I don’t know the extent to which some of the fantastical elements are intended to be ahistorically fantastical, or simply a literal portrayal of symbolic/other occurrences through the eyes and context of someone seeing them at the time. Honestly, I like that ambiguity. I say this as someone with a deep and abiding fondness for things like paladins, wizards, witches, vampires and the like, simply for their own sake, but I’m not sure the story needed anything much in the way of the explicitly fantastical, or certainly no more than it has. It would get in the way of what’s already there… which feels odd to say, but I was so gloriously invested in the internal life of the protagonist, and the events of the rebellion as she becomes a part of it, that I didn’t want something shiny and distracting to come along and dilute that.

By which I mean, the main character is great. The whole story is very very situated within her worldview, and her way of thinking and seeing and feeling, and she’s an incredibly compelling mind to ride inside. But often, when you get that sort of book, everyone else becomes somewhat backgroundy, simple because you’re so involved in the one viewpoint. As well as giving us some other viewpoint characters (particularly Ouyang, a eunuch enslaved by the Mongol rulers in China, and risen to a position as general in their army) to enjoy, this one also does a really good job of showcasing the non-viewpoint characters, even though we’re seeing them through the lens of one character’s viewpoint. They feel authentically like people, even through all that, and it’s really something.

Likewise, and much in contrast to The Jasmine Throne, the relationships feel authentic. There’s palpable chemistry between several characters, not just romantically, and the way people respond to one another… arghgh it’s just so good. I really wanted a book full of people dealing with each other and I got it and that just made me super happy.

As did the prose, which is fucking excellent. It’s definitely not backgrounded, get out of the way so you can enjoy the adventure writing, like the other two. There are noticeable turns of phrase that are just so nice and I wanted to stick post it notes in so I could find them again later to discuss with people. The way Parker-Chan describes the inner thoughts of her characters particularly is just poetic and gorgeous… it’s part of what makes their introspection so vivid, the way she finds words to put to those indescribable feelings of the inner self, and makes them the focus.

I could talk about the pacing and plot too, which are both great – there’s a real sense of slow but insatiable build to Zhu’s progress, balanced by the growing, inescapable, sucking momentum of Ouyang’s fate – or the vivid descriptions of place, but they’re not the thing that will stick with me as time passes. They’re good. I have no complaints. But they’re not what I’m going “oh my god” to. That’s the prose and the people.

I honestly can’t find much to criticise about it. It had the rare quality of a book I liked so much I wasn’t able to just devour it, I had to stop and appreciate it before dipping back in another time, and that was a strange balance of lovely and infuriating. I wanted to want to burn through it in a sitting, but at the same time knew that would be such a waste, as well as emotionally somewhat… traumatic.

Oh yeah, because this too takes place during a rebellion, it is not a happy fun time book. None of them are, nor are they trying to be, but this is the one that really got to me. There were people I was desperately hoping against hope would survive, people I hated, people I loved, and I was just so, so dug into the events, that it mattered to me, in way neither of the other two really fully managed.

I gave it five stars without a second thought, and I fully intend to be nominating it for awards come next year, unless the end of this year has a phenomenally good array of new stuff. Possibly one of the best new SFF books I’ve read this year (alongside A Desolation Called Peace, primarily).

It’s interesting to have three so similar books coming out so close together – not just because they’re yellow and queer, but they all look at power and rebellion, about the sacrifices people need to make to achieve freedom, and what imposed power does to people and civilisations, and about finding love in that context, and how flawed and difficult that love can be when it’s surrounded by conflict. I feel like The Unbroken dealt best with the impact of domination on other peoples, and with the visceral cost to those who suffer under it, but didn’t quite live up to the others in terms of plotting, especially towards the end. The Jasmine Throne did a great job of conjuring politics and a sense of place, but lacked the authenticity and chemistry in its personal relationships that I would most look for. She Who Became the Sun meanwhile feels like the best crafted of the three, the one where you can see the work on every word on the page, as well as the one with the best, or at least most grabbing, characters. The second viewpoint character occupies a similar(ish) role to the protagonist of The Unbroken, but the way we see through his eyes makes him that much more raw, more painful, and it’s heartbreaking.

The fact that it uses real history as its basis no doubt lends a hand to the plotting of She Who Became the Sun, but it’s not in its plot that most of my joy lies. Parker-Chan’s way with words, more than anything, is what is lingering with me after reading it, and it’s enough that, pretty much regardless of topic, I’ll buy whatever of hers I see come out next. Much though I didn’t mind reading the other two, I can’t say the same for either of them. I’ll read something else of theirs… if it comes up. If there’s a reason. But this is the one that will stick with me.

I’m glad I read them all, obviously, but honestly, it would have been worth it even if the other two were awful, just to have got to the third one.

*And references to… I can’t tell if they’re Australian chocolate bars or ice creams? But apparently “Golden Gaytime” is a thing you can buy. Twitter truly is a place of learning.