Traitor's Blade by Sebastien de Castell

I've come back around to my "Read-Alike" project - this is the one where I take my top ten lists, and try books that are recommended by the NoveList database as read-alikes. This has been an interesting object lesson in how much books are how they are about things, not what they are about. (Thank you, Roger Ebert, for putting your finger on this so precisely!)  I can almost always see why the algorithm has spat out the results it did, but the books are often vastly different in how they approach similar subject material.  Some of these books have been downright terrible. Some are pretty good. One made it onto the next year's Top Ten list, so that time, at least, I found a gem.

I wasn't quite that lucky this time, but neither was this one of the read-alikes that I had to pull myself through bodily, to finish. This is quite good fantasy (with a couple of quibbles). It just doesn't in any way live up to the book that sparked the recommendation. Then again, The Lies of Locke Lamora is a pretty damned high bar to live up to.

In the end, Traitor's Blade was never a chore to read. I enjoyed it while I read it. However, and you can probably tell that there's a however, there wasn't much that made me eager to read any sequels, if there are any. Near the end, something interesting happens, and if the whole book had been about that storyline, I think I'd be much more interested. It is genuinely a bit innovative, but the rest is similar enough to things I've read before that I think I'm good having just read the one.

This is one of the problems with fantasy, sometimes. Some of the tropes have been worn so smooth that revisits to this territory are not my favourite thing. Something about those books would have to be deeply extraordinary to add an author to my list. That didn't happen here.

What we have is three men who seem like they're a reference to the Three Musketeers. In this fantasy kingdom (and magic itself is a little sparse on the ground, but not absent), there was a king. That king wanted to reform the kingdom, making it more just for the common folk, taking power away from the dukes and duchesses. In return, the dukes and duchesses had the king killed. The Greatcoats, the king's personal force, trained to be magistrates to enforce the new laws, did not prevent his death.

As the book opens, it's now been many years. Falcio Val Mond and two of his Greatcoat compatriots are reviled as traitors, both to the king and to the power of the duchies. They hire themselves out as mercenaries, but Falcio cannot let go of the dream of his king. When a wealthy trader they were paid to protect is assassinated, Falcio and his crew join a caravan taking a young woman to a faraway duchy, where political intrigue will ensue. Along the way, Falcio will keep getting distracted by injustice, but see no way to resurrect a dead ideal.

So, the quibble. The author makes a point that the Greatcoats were one-third women, and tries to make this a world without gender roles as strict as we might expect in something that seems roughly like Europe in the Renaissance. However, the main character still tries to use "fights like a girl" as an insult, and defends it even when called on it by other characters. Why would that even be an idiom in this particular world? What kind of sense does that make? It's a weird hill for a fictional character to die on, given that it in no way reflects the society that spawned him.

Oh yeah, and as soon as we get the main character's backstory, there's an immediate fridging for motivation.

Outside of that, the women characters are not bad. I don't feel like they're really really deep, but I don't really feel that the men are either. The characters are interesting enough, just not hugely complex. All in all, this is a swashbuckling fantasy that mostly doesn't have much magic, so it is like The Lies of Locke Lamora. Just nowhere near as much fun, or with as much to say.