The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth DickinsonMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
I read this one on Alta's recommendation and my feelings about it are...decidedly mixed. I mean, she compared it to The Fifth Season - pretty high praise. And when the book opens up, it pretty well lives up to such a comparison by plunging the reader straight into a world where a distant empire enforces an oppressive regime, forcing its colonies to adhere to a certain unreasonable standard of racial and sexual "purity." No shit, they have institutionalized conversion therapy, among other horrifying tools in their bag. It's dark as hell, and that for me is a point where I find myself a little overwhelmed, in fact. Not least of which because they start with the conversion therapy - Baru, our protagonist, being gay and hailing from a land where the population is pretty much queer by default. And while I do feel that after a while, the characters devolve into more chess pieces than anything else - a case of the Ann Leckie effect where the author's better at writing machines than people - that's also pretty much the point. After all, a lot of the best dystopian narratives involve members of the oppressed underclass rising up and finding some way to infiltrate the privileged - Red Rising still being my top example, itself taking a ton of inspiration from Gattaca. This, though, is probably the only time I've seen someone use the power of math to pull it off, so props to Dickinson for that clever and original spin on the formula. Hopefully I'll be able to read the second book soon, but I'm also hoping The Monster Baru Cormorant is a much-needed improvement.
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