The Emperor's Edge

Rereading The Emperor's Edge after reading it first one year ago. I remember thinking I liked it pretty well on my first read. I did not feel compelled to read the second in the series immediately. However, when months later I picked up the second, due to lack of other reading material, I liked it so much I sprinted straight through the other books in the series without stopping. I am enjoying my second read of this first in the series. The book has a humor as it talks of danger. I like the slow, like molasses romance hints.

Cliche plot, Mary Sue protagonist.

The following contains minor spoilers about the first third of the book.

Amaranthe is the only woman enforcer in town, a position usually reserved for men. She aspires to get a promotion, but her superior dislikes her for not having a dick. Her lazy partner receives the the offer to the promotion she wanted.

One day while dealing with a robbery at a local generic store, she fights off all of the assailants by herself. The young Emperor happens to be nearby, and saw everything. He could have helped, but he got off on watching that kind of stuff. He tells this to his advisor, Commander of the Armies Hollowcrest, lets call him Holly for short.

Holly is worried by the attention the Emperor has taken to the young woman, as he also is upset by her dicklessness. He devises the most mischievous plan in the world to remove her from his way.

“Yo, girly, come here. Want that sweet, sweet ass promotion so you can stop being harassed by every other fellow officer and become their boss? So then they will have to respect you, even though openly resenting your well deserved status, all the while secretly beating off to you?”

“Oh geeze papa Holly, who do I have to kill to have this promotion I already deserve for being the most competent and baddass enforcer in town?”

“Sicarious, the most deadly killer that ever murdered people.”

“Oh golly goodness mister Holly, of course I will... wait what? What makes you think I can kill him? Is it because I'm a baddass karate fu fighter and clever detective who can at the same time beat his ass and out smart him? or is it my lack of di...“

“Lack of dick yeah. Because you don't have a dick.”

dicklessness

This is one of my absolute favorite series of this year! I'd recommend this to anyone who loves adventure, steampunk, a bit of mystery, a little crude humor, and mistaken criminals trying to clear their name. I enjoyed this collection so much and I'm looking forward to reading the rest of the series. You can't go wrong with these books.

A little slow to start as they have to build the team, but it turns into an interesting heist novel. Interesting characters and I hope I'll come to love them more as the series progresses. I like the kind of steampunk setting too! There are so many mysteries and so much to learn about the characters... I really wonder how this series will go!

This book had a bit of a rough start (the Emperor was in love with our protagonist after one conversation by chapter three), but it turned out alright in the end. The side characters were the best part, even if the whole “attempted assassination” plot was only occasionally interesting.

There's a lot of action going on and it is relatively fun, but don't expect there to be much depth to it, or at least not emotionally.

In the beginning, I was skeptical of this book because I knew the first encounter between Sicarius and Amaranthe would be disastrous, to say the least. However, after one of my favorite authors gave the series a wondrous review, I decided to pick it up again. I quite enjoyed this book. There was plenty of action to keep my mind occupied. The subtle growing relationship between Sicarius and Amaranthe didn't hurt either. Amaranthe's team's antics were delightful as well. All in all, a good book, however it did annoy me how Sespian never got the situation straight with Amaranthe and Sicarius. One day...however, I'm about 98% certain it won't end well.

Edited in June 2020 (original review to follow)To quote my guys of Shinedown: Am I a hypocrite to say that I ain't feeling this? ‘Cause I ain't feeling this.I need to give you two different pieces of background before I talk about my reread feelings on this book.First, Lindsay Buroker was one of my two favorite fantasy authors for almost three years. I found her when I was in something of a transitional period in my reading. I first got into fantasy books through the D&D tie-in novels: Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms then, later, Eberron. Years later, I struggled to find fantasy books that were what I wanted to read. I had read so many D&D books that there were fewer and fewer that I wanted to read, but I had no interest in the gritty, grimdark that was, even then, popular. Around the same time, I started branching out to other genre's - some with more success than others. One of the most successful was steampunk. I think at least 75% of the reason I bought this book was because it is subtitled ‘a high fantasy novel in an era of steam.' I think I was expecting something like [b:Retribution Falls 6285903 Retribution Falls (Tales of the Ketty Jay, #1) Chris Wooding https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1338104818l/6285903.SY75.jpg 6470079]. (Those were not realized expectations.)The second background I need to give you is that lately I have been going through things in storage and, both to make room and to see if I can make a little extra money, I have been selling them. Some time back, because I had never reread any of Buroker's books, I put them in storage. (I live with my mom and brother, shelf space is at a premium. Things do have to go, sometimes.) So, in my organizing, I came across these books again and, remembering how much I enjoyed them, decided to keep them and try rereading them.Now, I don't reread often. If I reread a recent book, I remember too well to really enjoy it. If I reread an older book, my reading tastes have changed drastically and I am always afraid I won't actually like the book now that I loved then.Case in point.I started rereading this book and figured that it was no longer a five star book for me, but I was really enjoying it, and could see it being a four star reread. Then my interest started waning. Then I had to deal with a bad guy attempting to rape the main (woman) character. Then I really started to loose interest.In the past two weeks, I bet I haven't even read two pages because every time I pick it up, I read maybe a paragraph and am feeling so bored. The fact is, this book was perfect for me when I first read it. It's fun, funny and has a non-standard fantasy setting. It is so far from perfect for me now though because it features standard straight, white, cis heroes doing standard straight, white cis hero things. There is nothing that makes this book stand out for me any more from all the other ‘not like the other girls' fantasy where the girl is in a ‘men's' profession and ... honestly, this is like if Frodo was a girl. I mean, the rest of the team are guys. I don't remember when we get the only black guy joining the group but he is very much a ‘scary black man'.While I do love diversity, I don't have to have it. I just have to be less bored. (I'll probably be getting rid of this whole series now because I made it to all of page 176 before I realized that my interest will never return. Pity. At least I loved it the first time.)(Maybe I shouldn't, but I'm going to leave the original rating up because, otherwise, I don't know what to do with it.)Original ReviewAll right, girl, we are not going to be attracted to the amoral assassin.Oh my goodness, I love this book. I really wasn't at all sure that I would. Actually, I bought it mostly because of the cover subtitle proclaiming it ‘A High Fantasy Novel In An Era Of Steam' and me mistakenly thinking that meant this was a fantasy/steampunk amalgamation. It's not. Yes it has steam powered devices, but it takes more than just that to make a steampunk world.The setting is rather unique. I've read a lot of fantasy novels and I don't ever recall coming across one quite like it. This is the type of setting you'd get if you take a typical fantasy and force it into the future. This is a world that is still having growing pains - as evidenced by a patriarchal society having to deal with women no longer being willing to stay at home. No, now they want to run businesses and, in the case of our heroine, work for law enforcement.As far as I could tell, the Enforcers were like patrol cops. There were other branches and divisions - such as an Inspector that investigated a crime scene - and different ranks - like sergeant and lieutenant - but the Enforcers seemed to be patrol cops. Amaranthe is the only female Enforcer. In fact, she's the only female of any note in the story. I only learnt the name of two other females. That is probably my only complaint about this story.It would have been nice, and wouldn't have taken away anything in the story, to make one of the other characters female. (I'm thinking Aksytr - that ‘troubled/standoffish teen' works just as well for girls as it does boys.)Now, as I'm on the subject, the characters... I really didn't think I would like Amaranthe much. When you first meet her she is such a straight-arrow and I was hoping she's be a little more rebellious. She really comes into her own as the book progresses though. She has a few odd personality quirks, (ex: an almost pathological need to have things perfectly aligned) a wonderful sense of humor and, for all her starched shirts and hair buns, she is such a girl.Amaranthe tries hard to be straight-laced, especially on the job or during missions, but every so often, a remark of hers will slip by and it leaves her sounding like the twenty-five year old female that she truly is. This was quite refreshing for me as I've read some books that don't really have a gender voice for the characters - and even one book that was told in first person that took until the specific gender of the main character was mentioned for me to realize it was a guy.Besides Amaranthe, the only other character to have any of the story told from their point of view was Sespian, the young emperor. And when I say young, he just ascended the throne last year, on his eighteenth birthday - after his regent ruled for three years following his father's death. He was a surprisingly entertaining character to read about - though we didn't spend much time with him - and it was interesting to see how he really started to... Well, I don't want to give much away. Let's just say he was noticeably different at the end of the book than at the beginning.The other characters all comprise Amaranth's ‘team'. Sicarius, the ‘amoral assassin' who inspired the quote I used - and who I started falling for long before Amaranthe did. Maldynado, a particularly handsome male escort that seems to have a few skeletons in his closet. Books, the former professor turned drunkard with his own axe to grind against the empire. And, finally, the aforementioned Aksytr, a ‘mental sciences' user who practically oozes troubled teen. They all had their purposes for being there and were different enough characters that I always got a real kick out of watching them interact.The plotline was nothing new. I don't want to say much more than that because a couple of things did surprise even me a little. I'll just say that, if you've read enough fantasy books, you've probably already read more than one variation on this plot. However, that didn't effect how much I enjoyed this story.While it's not ‘original' or ‘dark' or any of a dozen other words that the ‘good' fantasy stories have to get these days, it was fun. I liked the team that was organized. I liked the way they played off each other. I liked how it felt a little like some of those Forgotten Realms novels I used to read. I liked how we had the truly hate-able evil villain (possibly a few, depending on your view) that we were so glad to see get his/hers/theirs/its - and not have that story dragged out for more books.In short, I liked the book. Okay, I liked the book a lot.Read this and other reviews on my blog: http://pagesofstarlight.blogspot.com/

The full title (“Lindsay Buroker's The Emperor's Edge”) is awkward and a bit pretentious (perhaps a shared universe in formation?), but don't hold that against the book.

Title aside, The Emperor's Edge is actually a pretty smooth piece of writing. It's straightforward fantasy, lightly steamed. Amaranthe, an enforcer (police), learns of a dangerous threat to the empire, and very quickly is left to her own devices to save it.

The writing is good, with setting quickly established, and likeable, differentiated characters to follow. If it were just down to writing and overall story, I'd be happy to follow this adventure further.

Unfortunately, the plotting doesn't hold up. While seemingly not intended as a young adult book, the plot elements are very YA. For example, the threatened emperor is a genius, a pacifist, cares about working folks, and wants to introduce democracy - and he's barely out of his teens. I prefer my fantasy with a higher level of realism.

Similarly, Amaranthe, thrown out of the force and at risk, is almost immediately able to set up a highly qualified team of experts who all happen to have the skills she needs, and all willing to work for free. She faces almost no challenges on this front. And despite a high price on her head, she's able to wander the streets and go to parties pretty much at will. It just doesn't hold up.

It's a shame the plotting is so weak, because the other elements of the book were a lot of fun to read. I'd like to put this down to first-novelitis, but I see that Buroker has many other books to her credit.

If you like good writing, and really don't care about credibility, check this out. If you demand that things could actually work, I can't recommend it.