The Traitor Baru Cormorant

2.5 stars

Hmmm. So: it's a high fantasy political intrigue thing, featuring a hard-assed lady, Baru Cormorant, trying to rise the ranks and take down the Evil Empire (here, “the Masquerade”) from within because (1) they took over her island home (VENGEANCE!), and (2) disappeared one of her dads, cuz he was bi and the Masquerade is like, wow, big time homophobic.

They're also eugenicists and basically an 18th century colonial super-power (with smallpox blankets, without slavery), and thus very easy for a Modern Person to despise. Too easy! And that's kinda the problem with this book: it's a book about nuance, subtlety and intrigue, all presented in LOUD, BLUNT, ALL CAPS EXCLAMATIONS OF TELLING (not showing!). Much like Tyrion Lannister in Game of Thrones, we have a Modern Person juxtaposed against a caricatured historical setting, and all our Modern Ideas - about sex, about gender, about politics - are put into conflict that feels facile. (Like, yo, marriage being about love and sexual fulfillment is a very recent (Victorian?) idea, so why all this terrible fuss about who Baru's gonna marry?! Lady, it's Medieval Hyper-politics Land, you marry the duke with the most land and then you do whoever you want! Who cares! argrhghgh)

And speaking of “facile” (instead of “easy”): It also dresses up this really blunt, declaratory storytelling with a thing I can't stand: an over-reliance on $1 words, in the style of Gene Wolf. This is a cormorant, people. “Abeam” means you're looking out the side of the ship. And other tedious roadblocks to my reading experience. :/ And don't get me started on how everyone had the same voice... and how there's the grizzled spy Duke, the grizzled philospher Duke, and the grizzled Duke we meet this one time on the road. Good Lord!

Beyond the ALL CAPSness of this book is the coded story between the lines (in SMALL CAPS, shall we say). Dickinson passes Bechdel with flying colors (yey), and there's some wonderful subverting of gender norms: like, imagine lots of strapping naval officers in dashing naval uniforms, imagine corpulent rulers with limited morals and outsized personalities, imagine Rohirrim-type/Genghis Khan-type warriors of the steppes. You're probably thinking of dude, dude, dude. But they're all ladies! That was nice, I +1 that with my heart.

But then the niceness evaporated when Dickinson beat me over the head with his THIS EVIL EMPIRE OMG stick.

But let me recap the plot (briefly): Baru Cormorant is a super-genius “savant” type girl who grows up in Haiti Oppressed Tropical Home, has her family unit destroyed and shamed by the homophobe imperialists, and is raised in an imperialist school (one-room!? white-washed walls?!) where she aces the civil service exams and is sent to be the Federal Reserve person ODI Fellow Imperial Accountant at this other land of mountains, steppes, and mighty, rowdy, throwback Medieval types. Much is made of basic economics: like, Baru's SAVANT-LIKE GENIUS to realize that money is the source of all power - and money > tribe in conflicts. Even when people think it's about tribe. No, srsly, it's money. MONEH. See Paul Collier for much more on ideas of this nature.

Baru has various political designs, figuring out these Medieval people who also have political designs, and eventually she becomes the figurehead/leader of this big ass rebellion. There is much high fantasy fighting stuff: horses! rape and pillage! banners flapping in the wind! If you're into that, there's also a veeeery long climax fight in the end which is basically like the last scene in Henry V where they fight in the mud for like half the film (yo, and I'm into that scene).

I couldn't help but compare this book, somewhat not favorably, to a slew of other high fantasy political intrigues featuring interesting sex/gender politics: Floating Worlds is probably the closest (also featuring a hard-ass lady subverting a Medieval steppe warrior people in a quest to overthrow a larger-scale evil empire), but I also felt shades of Ancillary [something] in its sneaky gender surprises, sneaky non-white hegemony and parallels with colonial history, and even The Goblin Emperor, also fairly blunt political high fantasy. And, of course, the Great Masters of this genre: Ursula Le Guin and Kim Stanley Robinson.

So I love me a good political high fantasy/spec book that subverts gender/sex norms, hence - perhaps - my acute disappointment. What Le Guin and Robinson always did so well was show, not tell; and not cast judgment so obviously. There was a LOT of gray on that crazy Red Mars, or that crazy planet called Winter; even if, at core, they were making socially/politically liberal/left-wing points, there was no use of straw man stuff. The Evil Empire-analogue in Le Guin's The Dispossessed is also kind of a stupid, sexist place (and an obvious commentary on 1960s America); but we're not beaten over the head with it, and the alternative (that crazy anarchic moon from whence the protagonist comes) is presented in rich, three-dimensional variety (including the shortcomings). I just didn't feel that same grayness in Oppressed Tropical Home, or in the book as a whole.

Rated: 4. 5
I don't rate many books this highly.
A read that is emotionally stormy and tortuous. To comment on any of the directions of the plot would give too much away. Just read it.

This book describes a horrible world with terrible people who do terrible things to each other and yet I was compelled to finish it, even though I had to take it in small doses (which probably didn't help me keep the various plot threads clear in my mind). The writing was brilliant. I honestly can't say right now whether I hated it or not.

More talk about inflation and taxes than a Ron Paul book

This is an odd one. Depending on where I was in the book, my star rating wavered between a 3 and a 5. The book starts off well but drops off in the middle (to the point where I considered giving up). Fortunately my patience was rewarded by the blistering conclusion.

The Traitor Baru Cormorant is a fantasy novel about a young girl who wants to overthrow the empire that has colonized and destroyed the culture of home. Baru is a very intelligent child, and asks probing questions about the nature of the new people who have come to trade with the people of her home nation. Trade, of course, is only the start of the interactions between the empire (commonly called the Masquerade), and the people on her home island of Taranoke. Baru is aware of the problems that the empire will bring to her home, and vows to find a way to stop them. She is chosen to attend the empire-sponsored school, where she is an intellectual prodigy, and earns a position as an accountant in another of the empire's holdings. While there, Baru uncovers the plot for a rebellion, and must choose when the time to strike out against the empire is right.

There are a lot of things I really loved about this book. The first section of this book, when the empire was taking over Taranoke, was heartbreaking and beautifully written. The reader was given the perfect amount of space to take in what was happening to the people of Taranoke, without the revelation feeling either too graphic or too cold. Anyone who has ever studied any sort of history of colonization could have seen the disaster coming, and also known there wasn't anything to stop it. I also really liked the general concept for the book - a woman on a mission to bring down an empire from the inside. It is an interesting revenge story and provides a great framework for intricate political plots full of intrigue, double-crossing, and betrayal. I also absolutely loved the very end of the book. I thought the way the afterward was presented in the form of letters was brilliant, and succinctly tied up any loose ends that may have been left at the end of the story.

All that being said, there were, however, a lot of things that I thought could have been better about this book. Much of this book focuses on the time that Baru spends as accountant, and the rebellion she must deal with in that position. This meant that much of the book was political and economic discussions being held between one or two characters at a time. Now, I'm as excited about a good cost-benefits analysis as the next reader, but I feel that this hindered the world building and that is made the “intrigue” not quite as intriguing as it could have been. I also think that it was probably more of a let down because the introduction to the book was so brilliant. At a certain point I stopped reading because I was enjoying it, and was reading it because I felt I needed to get it finished. There were a lot of moments of dialogue where I felt I could have mentally swapped names of the characters in the scene and it would have played out the same. It wasn't that I couldn't keep track of all the dukes and duchesses and governors running around - it was that I just kind of stopped caring. I think the characters just needed to have more character. I know that part of the plot device was to have all of their motives be secretive, so that the reader could never be sure of what was going to happen, but I think I've seen that sort of device used better. If the reader doesn't have a chance to establish what they think a character should do, then they can't really get that feeling of being blown away when they see what a character does do. This problem bleeds into the end of the story; the novel ends with a very dramatic event that should have been absolutely gut-wrenching, yet I couldn't feel the anguish I wanted because I just didn't feel that invested in the characters. Similarly, I thought that Seth Dickinson's idea for a masked empire was wonderful, and worked very well thematically with the story, but I wish it had been developed a bit more. The mask was something that should have sent fear or terror or hated up my spine by the end of the novel, but was visually absent for much of the story, and sort of lost its punch by the end of it.

I do, however, have to commend the book for striving to focus on issues of gender, race, and acceptance. Baru is already a strong, smart, ambitious woman, who also happens to be from a repressed and broken race of people. She also happens to be a homosexual, which is violently discouraged by the empire. Much of the story centers around her trying to hide this fact for her own self-preservation, and dealing with the expectations of leaders trying to promote a heterosexual society. I think that the science fiction and fantasy communities have been clamoring for more diverse characters for a while now, and I think it is great to see them starting to appear in books that are being promoted by several of the more main stream fantasy publishers.

So, overall, I have very mixed feeling about this book. I think that mostly I am disappointed because it was a pretty good book when I think it could have been amazing. The concept for the plot, the characters, and the world was great, and I really liked that this book wasn't afraid of dealing with difficult topics. I just don't think the execution of the story lived up to the promise that the idea of it had. The fact that the writing was so lovely at the start of the story doesn't help, because it just made me want the middle of the story to be as good to match it. Unfortunately, I think this is the sort of story that either needed to be much longer and developed more, to give the reader more time to become involved with each of the characters, or less bogged down in the middle so that the reader could see everything play out from more of a distance. Personally, I'm in the needs more development camp. I wasn't in love with this book as much as I wanted to be, but I am very excited to see what Seth Dickinson writes in the future. I think his ideas are great, I just wish there was a bit more character development and world-building in this novel. I think this is a great novel to recommend to someone who is either searching for more diverse fantasy stories or who is on the lookout for new and upcoming authors. For readers who are looking for more elaborate fantasy worlds with rich histories and complex magic systems, this might not be the book for you. I'm glad I read it, but I'm also ready to move on to another world with new characters.

Very interested fantasy look into imperialism and cultural appropriation and domination.

One of the few books that I could classify as an “economic thriller”

Whoever said economic theory wasn't sexy?

TBC merges the colonialism of dozens of different societies with Nazi-esque eugenics over a vast and diverse empire. The title character, and island girl from a society where two men and one woman is a standard marriage, watches her home be overridden by the Masquerade and decides the only way she can save it is by working within the system. She puts on her own masks, and convinces herself she can commit any atrocities for the greater good. You never realize the amount of atrocities a good accountant can commit.

Dickenson pulls no punches. Do not read this story if you are after a happy ending. Or beginning. Or middle, really. No one gets to be happy long in this novel. But if you're looking for a story about perspective, where love and loathing, help and harm, home and exile, are all just a minute perspective shift apart, try it. You may be depressed, but you won't be disappointed.

Executive Summary: A decent book that felt slow in places, particularly the last quarter or so, resulting in my rounding a 3.5 star rating down.Audio book: Christine Marshall was a decent narrator. She has a good clear reading voice and speaks at a good volume. I didn't find her particularly memorable one way or another. I'd consider the audiobook a fine option if you want to go that route, but nothing special.Full ReviewI knew nothing about this book or the author prior to this coming up for a vote in Sword & Laser. It sounded the best of the choices.Prior to reading it, most of what I heard was that it was incredibly bleak. Maybe I've read too much grimdark that I've grown too indifferent, but I didn't find this all that bad. It's certainly a darker and more serious book than some fantasy, but not nearly as dark as more popular series like Song of Ice and Fire or Malazan Book of the Fallen.The difference may be that I cared less for Baru Cormorant than I do for some of the characters in both of those series. When bad things happened, I wasn't all that upset. And bad things don't happen the whole time, though it may feel that way to some.The main point of interest to me was how the Empire of Masks used clever finance, and not military might to conquer. This reminds me a bit of Dagger and Coin by [a:Daniel Abraham 134 Daniel Abraham https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1207149629p2/134.jpg]. However if I had to recommend one “Fantasy Economic” series, it would definitely be Dagger & Coin over this one.That brings me to my next point. This is another one of those books that I think isn't being well advertised as the start of a series. I shouldn't be surprised as everything is a series these days. Things do come to a decent conclusion, but it's obvious that things are setup for a longer series fairly early on in the series.This could be that this is the author's first published novel (at least I believe it is), and sequels are contingent on how well this one does. However I think it should be made clear to the potential reader that they are committing to “yet another series”, and ideally how long. Standard trilogy? Something longer? One of the reasons I voted for this book over the others, is they were all part of series, and I didn't realize this was as well.I thought the writing was pretty good, especially for a first time author. I don't recall big info dumps or painful dialogue.There were definitely parts of this book I enjoyed, but it was uneven. Overall, I thought the world building of the Masked Empire was more interesting than the plot or the characters themselves. I enjoyed learning about the Mask Empire early on in the book, but by the end I found my mind wandering in places and simply eager to just finish the book. The weaker ending caused me to round down my rating instead of up. At this point I'm not sure I'll continue on with the next book in the series, your mileage may vary though.

somewhat boring.