Review: Amnesty

Amnesty by Lara Elena Donnelly
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The funny thing about this series is that even though it takes place during times of great sociopolitical upheaval in its alternate world, Lara Elena Donnelly makes heavy use of time skips between the books so that all the stories emphasized in her writing are not those of war. Perhaps it's because there are simply so many World War II stories that even making a counterpart story would feel troped to death, somehow? Well, if there's one thing that Donnelly is not, it's troped to death. Not only because of her insistence on building her stories around the big wars in Amberlough and the rest of Gedda, not only because of her focus on the lives and experiences of LGBTQ+ and PoC characters, but also because of the great theme of this book. Even when evil is defeated, there is still work to be done to prevent it from coming back - a lesson that apparently not enough people have learned in the years since the real World War II, or the Civil Rights Movement, or other periods of strife that should've led to longer-lasting social change. To The Amberlough Dossier, I now bid ave atque vale, and wonder if perhaps someday Donnelly will come back to this world and tell those war stories after all.

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