The Traitor Baru Cormorant

Wow this was one of those "can't put it down" books for me. It's hard to review without spoiling but basically it is a fantasy novel with extremely interesting and incisive things to say about how imperialism works. Most of the action takes place in a federation of dukedoms that is currently being occupied by a big bad Empire. When I looked at the map at the beginning of the book I thought "there is no way I am ever going to remember who these dozen different dukes are and where they sit politically" but by the end of it I was like "oh my god I can't believe Duke So-and-so decided to ally with Duke Whats-her-face! That will have horrific ramifications for petit bourgeois craftspeople!"

Anyway this is one of the best books I've read in years. The human drama is really gripping and it also has left me chewing on all sorts of thoughts about human nature, politics, and economics.

This was a very plodding story. And the big twist? Well, for me there was no big twist in the end. There is a lot of color language and I felt like I was listening to one of those PhD thesis that use nothing big words and are actually about nothing at all. You know the ones that they exposed the process for a dissertation can be just a big pile of doo. Well, this wasn't doo, but it just seemed for all the interesting world building that this story does have there is no real exploration into that world. There is so much political back and forth in Ardwin (sorry, I listened to it so I don't know how anything was spelled) that I wasn't surprised by anything the main character did. She was a child put into a situation that was just too boring to be a fantasy.

I was glad when this was over. I'm happy to have listened to it but I'm so much happier that I completed it.