The Broken Crown by Michelle West

People recommend books to me a lot. It's hard to know when or how to fit them all in! And then there's the worry I won't like a book that is very dear to a dear friend's heart. For a long time, I just avoided reading books that had been recommended to me, unless someone pushed a physical copy into my hot little hands. (This is still the fastest way to get a book to the top of my list.) So I started a new list to read of books friends recommended. If you want to get in on this, you can recommend a book on this post.

This book was recommended to me by Shawn

There are a lot of things I liked about this book. I can be seduced by sprawling fantasies (more so if they're not a quest narrative), strange lands with political intrigues, magic that is secondary to politics but not irrelevant, and interesting gender politics. The Broken Crown has that, in abundance. And yet, at the same time, I don't know if I'm running right out to get the next one. I haven't quite been convinced to add Michelle West to my list of authors I need to follow fervently. That might happen eventually, and I'm certainly happy to read more in this world, or more of her books, but I have not yet hit the point where a switch is flipped and I become evangelical.

(Oh, oh, just wait for a review next week of a book that immediately did make me evangelical. I can't wait to tell you all about it.)

I think where I did struggle a bit was that this was one of those books with such a huge sprawling cast across countries and principalities, and a few names or ways of naming each character, that it took until I was a good 500 pages in that I really felt like I had a grasp on what the everloving hell was going on. I got there eventually! But it was a bit of a slog and a lot of "who the heck was this again?" The cast of characters included at the front of the book was very much less than useful - I think everyone I tried to look up I couldn't find there.

Now having a bit better grounding of the history and sort-of the geography of this world (as good as my not-visual-thinking self will ever have), I might do better with the next book, now I know the players and the fault lines. There were times near the beginning where being a bit more straightforward would have been good.

But let's go on to what I did like. I really liked the juxtaposition of the relative powers of men and women in this largely patriarchal society, but one in which there are kinds of power, oblique though they may be, to which women have recourse. And I particularly liked the nuance West threw on to the harem - that it is the primary wife's harem. Her husband may have access, and use his other wives for whatever he wants, and that is ugly. Despite this, they are her wives, first and foremost, and the women know what that means, but the men might go their entire lives unawares of the primary emotional and sexual attachments within the harem.

The world in the north, too, seems to be more egalitarian, which pisses off those in the south to no end. So much so that some are willing to ally with demons in an attempt to further enforce the rule of the solar Lord at the expense of the Lady. The women aren't too fond of that idea, obviously, and neither are some of the southern subjects, but those in power will trade much to get more authority. It's all heading to war.

In this, there are a couple of women around who the story revolves, although they are not always present. Primarily, it is the story of Diora, the most beautiful young woman in the South, married to what is more or less the high king's son. A coup leaves her alive, but she's meant to be a pawn in the struggles for control after the royal family is all but wiped out. She's not, but the weapons at her disposal are subtle ones.

Now that I get what's going on, I am willing to go further in this world. Just maybe not right away.