Kate Elliott (1) (1958–)

I do not think that [b:Cold Magic|7114825|Cold Magic (Spiritwalker, #1)|Kate Elliott|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1323994929l/7114825._SY75_.jpg|7374960] is a YA novel, as the protagonist Cat is twenty years old. However, the choice to give Cat sole first person narration duties definitely reminded me of YA in a slightly frustrating way. The novel is set in a fascinating alternate world with ice mages, trolls and goblins, industrial revolution, a Napoleon analogue, social upheaval, a parallel spirit world, shapeshifters, counter-colonialism, no channel between England and France, dragons, and Scotland completely shrouded in ice. There is so much going on within the world-building that I really enjoyed. Particularly pleasing details included a substantial West African diaspora in Europe after many fled Mali due to a plague, the fraught legacy of the Roman Empire, and a legal code that integrates magical contracts. The drawback of the first person narration is that the reader only gets Cat's angle on all this and she has pressing survival concerns throughout. Her dramatic escapes and efforts to flee are compelling and exciting, but I would have preferred multiple perspectives on events. There is a great deal of social unrest going on that Cat freely admits to knowing nothing about. Although it impinges upon her life, I would have liked this to be more central. Nonetheless, Cat is an appealing protagonist and I really liked her dynamic with her cousin and best friend Bee.

What took the book down from four to three stars for me was the romance subplot. At the start of the book, Cat is uprooted from her comfortable life and forced to marry a cold mage, Andevai. He kidnaps her while acting in a needlessly harsh manner. Most crucially, he doesn't explain why the sudden forced-marriage and Cat doesn't ask. It subsequently becomes clear that this lack of questioning is for plot twist reasons: Andevai has accidentally kidnapped and married the wrong person. He should have gone for Cat's cousin Bee, so is instructed to kill Cat and marry Bee instead. Much of the book is taken up with Cat trying not to get killed. After making a concerted effort at murdering his new wife, which would have succeeded were she not magic, Andevai is shamed into a change of heart by his family. At the end he instead helps Cat and Bee, as well he should to make some amends for ruining both their lives.

To my annoyance, the narrative makes this forced marriage and deadly conflict into fodder for romance. Cat frequently reflects on how handsome and well-dressed Andevai is; I do not see how this could possibly compensate for his shitty behaviour. I assumed that this romance would be drawn out in subsequent books in the series to give him time to build some trust, but was wrong. At the end Cat thinks they may never meet again (which seems far-fetched given they are still married) so kisses him. Then he makes the astonishing admission that he fell in love with her at first sight, 'as if I were seeing the other half of my soul'. Why act like a complete arsehole and try to kill her then, my guy? Even if you have to kidnap and force-marry a woman, you could at least tell her what's happening then avoid murdering her! I am not morally opposed to enemies-to-lovers or forced-marriage-to-lovers plots, but did not find this one at all convincing. Andevai just isn't likeable. Given my enjoyment of the world-building and dislike of the romance elements, I'm torn as to whether I'll read the next book in the series.… (mer)

Promotional copy glosses the far-future adventure Unconquerable Sun as "a genderspun Alexander the Great," and the protagonist Sun Shān is indeed a young woman set up to lead the interstellar Republic of Chaonia (Greece) against the Phene (Persian) Empire that overshadows it. Many more specific parallels are present, along with clever allusions to the ancient model. When not simply inverting historical types, gender identity and sexual preference seemed like they were chosen by dice rolls. To the extent that I enjoyed the "gender bending" elements of the story, I liked them far less than comparable features of Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota, where they were more consciously relevant to the business of the books--which had besides a more sophisticated relationship to classical antiquity.

The interstellar setting is in something of a renaissance after the prior collapses of the original Celestial Empire and the subsequent Asparas Convergence. There doesn't seem to be any life that isn't of terrestrial derivation. The flora all have familiar names, and there are instances of modern animal types and assorted dinosaurs, along with explicit reference to terraforming. The various sapient races are all "human," although they are actually a wide variety of post-human types, adapted and engineered, some of them inventive and intriguing. I wasn't so inclined to credit the persistence of 20th-century popular songs, nor the sustained popularity of "badminton, volleyball, and basketball" (185) many millennia hence.

The book is thick, with fifty short chapters of fast-paced prose, frequently with cliffhanger chapter endings. A single battle can take three or four chapters to describe. There are plenty of episodes of combat, from the personal level to that of interstellar fleets, and the latter are pretty conventionally space-operatic. The story also has healthy doses of intrigue, and for all of the conspicuous world-building, the narrative focus is really on character development and action. There are three principal viewpoint characters. Sun herself gets the heroic center-of-the-tale treatment, her near-peer Persephone narrates her own chapters in the first person, and there are interlude chapters featuring a Phene "enemy" in her own separate and parallel adventure.

Although Chaonia is a rigid caste-based society with a militaristic monarchy, the author frequently inserts left-ish ideological reflections, such as having a character remark with astonishment that a planetary government makes "people pay for medical care" (433). Inconsistently, there was no such surprise at making the same people pay for air, so it came across more as a barely-cloaked remark about the US in the 2020s than as a political awakening among the companions of Princess Sun.

Knowing that this book was the first volume of a trilogy, I spent the first few hundred pages ambivalent about whether I would proceed to its sequels. By the end, though, I had been sold on the characters and I enjoyed the dramatic payoff of this volume, while appreciating the tensions that it set up for the later story. I won't make Furious Heaven a priority, but there's a good chance I will get around to it--probably only after the third book Lady Chaos reaches print, so I can read the last two at a gallop.… (mer)

I'm sorry for giving a low rating to a well-written series like this. But I grew frustrated with it and after book 2 I decided not to continue.

Make no mistake, this series is very good in some senses. It is well-written, and Kate Elliott is a master worldbuilder. She bases her books on medieval Europe, which is a trick used by many fantasy writers to help them in their worldbuilding, but she uses that technique very well, making her secondary world strange and magical enough that this never feels like a historical novel. It's a complex and intriguing world, that always invited me to find out more about it.

The characters are also good. Not perhaps the best feature (that would be the worldbuilding) but interesting and perfectly serviceable.

So if the writing, the worldbuilding and the characters are good, then what's the problem? The problem is the storytelling. Mostly, the pacing. This series includes 7 very fat novels, and the payoff after reading one of these massive doorstoppers often feels slight. The plot advances at a slow pace, things do happen, but it does not feel like the overall plot moves much.

After two books I took a break, and when it was time to return to the series I found the prospect daunting. Since reading is supposed to be a pleasure, not to feel like a duty, I decided to let it go. It did not help that I couldn't find anywhere on the internet or at the start of the books themselves a good recap of the previous books so that I might refresh my memory before starting book three.

All in all, there are many worse things to read, but there are better things too. You can give it a try, you may well find that immersing yourself in this complex, fascinating world is a real pleasure for you, and that you do not mind the pacing. But it did not work completely for me. I'm always sorrowful when I don't complete an attractive story, but it was just too many pages, too many fat novels, for too little real advance of the story.… (mer)