The Tyrant Baru Cormorant

Long, complex, and grim. You will need stamina to get through all the alliances, betrayals, plotting, and chicanery.

A few times I had to stop and review who was currently on whose side (and if they were still alive!)

A great stormy read.

CAWPILE SCORE
C-9
A-8
W-7
P-5
I-5
L-8
E-3
TOTAL-6.43/10

So this is a book i'm DNFing. I'm not proud about it or necessarily happy about it, but it had to be done. I've been reading this book for 2 weeks, but its less reading and more avoiding reading so i don't have to read this book.

I mostly attribute this to myself and not a fault of Seth Dickinson, but there a couple things i'll talk about as to why it didn't fit with me.

CAWPILECharacters.The characters in this book again are excellent. they truly feel like every character is unique and has their own goals and desires, which we so often see them working towards.AtmosphereYou really get the sense that if you were to pull the world out of the book and into the real world, nothing would change, because the world that Dickinson has created is a fully realized world and everything interacts with and changes everything else.WritingStarting this book with a framing story was very interesting to me, but it removed some of the tension knowing that Baru was going to be ok. not that much tension but some. I again hated the flashback scenes to Oriati Mbo. they were unimportant to the story that i was invested in, but felt like extra information Dickinson thought i needed. I also didn't like the continued and expanding Multiple Viewpoints. bringing in more viewpoints didn't help me connect more with who i need to connect with to continue reading. Dickinson's wordplay and skill with writing is still excellent and perhaps even better than the previous 2 books, but wasn't enough PlotThe plot looks good, but takes way to long to deliver on any of its promises and has so many twists and turns, i'm not sure any direction actually takes me forward in plot movementIntrigueThe intrigue just got to be too much for me to keep track of. there are 5 cryptarchs, no wait there are more than 5 you just don't know of them, and can't know of them, because of how secret they are. plans within plans within plans, and you never know what is going on. I liked the idea of splitting Baru's head in 2 so that some info could be kept secret from the reader, without feeling super unreliable, but it didn't work that well for me. Also there now being a bigger fight over baru between Tain Shir and Iscend just pushed me out of the story.Logicthe Characters act according to their information and personalities and nothing was too unlogical for me.EnjoymentMy enjoyment was little and sparse. I really enjoyed seeing Baru being Baru and manipulating and working and doing things to show her intelligence, but in this book she rarely gets the chance to and it frustrated me.
I will be talking about it on Libromancy 05/23/2021 https://libromancy.podbean.com/

Pros: lots of intrigue, thought provoking, nuanced

Cons: /

This is the third book in the Masquerade series, with a 4th book on the way. If you haven't read the previous two books recently, it's worth doing a reread as there's so much nuance that you'll be lost if you don't remember the details of all that's happened.

The book is told from several points of view including: Baru, Xate Yawa, Aminata, and Svir. There are scenes set in the ‘now', contrasted with a direct continuation of the events from book 2 as well as scenes set 23 years prior, continuing Tau-indi's story of when Cosgrad and Farrier stayed with the Mbo princes.

It's not a quick read. There's so much going on and so much nuance that I often had to stop to process what the characters were doing and what that might mean for their future. It's easy to fall into Baru's trap of forgetting there are other players on the board when she acts. Each time I assumed things would go the way she'd foreseen because she's a savant, but everyone in the story has their own motivations and few align with hers, so there's generally a mess of consequences you don't expect.

It's a book filled with hard truths about colonialism, racism, sexism, and what people and nations will do to gain power over others, and what they'll do to keep that power. As such, it's very thought provoking, forcing you to see people and ideas from varied perspectives. In several instances the author uses reversed language to get these ideas across, so 'matronize' instead of ‘patronize', ‘anti-mannist' instead of ‘feminist', etc.

I was surprised that I still found Baru a sympathetic and likeable character after all she's done. I still want her to succeed. With all the horrors going on (and there are a lot of them) there's still a sense of hope to the story, that in the end things just might work out the way Baru wants. I even started to like Yawa, which was kind of a shock given her previous actions. I really enjoyed seeing Tau-indi's growth, overcoming what happened to them at the end of the last book. It felt like the various characters were all growing as people, learning more about the world and themselves and really taking a look a the world they were making and deciding if their choices had helped or not.

While this isn't the series end, this book does tie up several plot threads into a satisfying climax. I can't wait for the final book to wrap up all the remaining loose ends.