rocky41_7

Threw in the towel today on C.L. Clark’s The Unbroken. This is a fantasy novel about Touraine, conscripted into the army of her nation’s colonizer as a child, and Luca, a princess from that colonizing empire, and their political foibles.

I really tried to separate my feelings about this book from how much I hated the audiobook narrator, but I’m not sure I was successful. She reads every sentence as though it were a grand revelation, which gets annoying very quickly, and also loves to drop off into an inaudible whisper, presumably for dramatic effect.

I ended this book just about at the halfway mark, because there were several annoying things about it and just not enough else to make me come back. It just wasn’t interesting.

It’s ham-fisted and painfully repetitive with its themes; it spoon-feeds its readers imperialism 101 as if it were breaking new ground and obviously does not trust its audience to grasp anything remotely subtle. I think it found half a dozen times in the first chapter alone to mention how Touraine was conscripted as a child and therefore has a complicated relationship with her country of origin.

The audiobook is 18 and a half hours long, which is at least partly because the book enjoys bulking itself up with insightful commentary like "It was water--you'd die without it. Especially in the desert." Lines which the narrator manages to read completely straight as if they were as revelatory as Clark apparently thought they were.

We actually have a wealth of options for sapphic fantasy about taking on Empire. Off the top of my head, The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson, Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir, The Jasmine Throne by Tasha Suri, Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee (okay, no romance, but a WLW protagonist), A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine; even The Priory of the Orange Tree is more quality than this. If the pseudo-historical angle is what draws you in, She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan is there.

There’s just no need to settle for this.