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The Traitor Baru Cormorant
3/5. Baru is very young when the Masquerade Empire colonizes her home, bringing its eugenics and its social conditioning and oppression of queerness. She joins its ranks as a technocrat, bent on learning its secrets and destroying it from within.
I feel I can't adequately judge this book in the absence of its sequels, which are not published yet. It's a complicated, chilly machine that grinds every character into so much blood and dust. But is it to a point? That's the central question – the book is pressing at complicity and asking if it can ever work. Baru does horrible things to survive, but the interesting part of this book is not the whole does she become the monster to fight the monster thing – yawn – but instead a much more interesting question. Baru is living at the intersection of various kinds of oppression – she is colonized and closeted, and also a woman – and the book is asking about the value of these narratives of colonization and oppression. Can we tell them and subvert them in the same breath, it's asking, or are we just repeating them over and over again?
It's a really good question. I've struggled with it a lot for years. I don't have an answer.
And my judgment of this book is going to turn almost entirely on how that question is answered in the end. We'll see.
3/5. Baru is very young when the Masquerade Empire colonizes her home, bringing its eugenics and its social conditioning and oppression of queerness. She joins its ranks as a technocrat, bent on learning its secrets and destroying it from within.
I feel I can't adequately judge this book in the absence of its sequels, which are not published yet. It's a complicated, chilly machine that grinds every character into so much blood and dust. But is it to a point? That's the central question – the book is pressing at complicity and asking if it can ever work. Baru does horrible things to survive, but the interesting part of this book is not the whole does she become the monster to fight the monster thing – yawn – but instead a much more interesting question. Baru is living at the intersection of various kinds of oppression – she is colonized and closeted, and also a woman – and the book is asking about the value of these narratives of colonization and oppression. Can we tell them and subvert them in the same breath, it's asking, or are we just repeating them over and over again?
It's a really good question. I've struggled with it a lot for years. I don't have an answer.
And my judgment of this book is going to turn almost entirely on how that question is answered in the end. We'll see.