The Goblin Emperor

Despiertas y plaf te toca encabezar un imperio, tú el cuarto hijo, el relegado, cuasi-exiliado. Nadie esperaba que te tocaría, cualquiera de los otros iba antes, pero así es cuando se mueren todos en un accidente.

Por lo tanto todo es duda y sorpresa, pero cual diplomático japonés te toca ocultar todo estado emocional, ser ilegible conviene a los intereses del imperio. No ayuda que tienes orejas, pues eres un goblin, una raza más oscura de elfo.

En esto ayuda tu inocencia: el imperio no te interesa más que como estructura de poder para ayudar a tu gente. Pronto se nota que no eres como el previo emperador, como los previos: tienes otra sensibilidad, te interesas por todos.

Es que tu guardián hasta ayer era tu primo que te odiaba y maltrataba. Por eso tu capacidad refinada de sentir el dolor ajeno. Por eso serás otro tipo de emperador, nomás tienes que creertela.

En este punto la novela nos ha impulsado a reflexiones interesantes, acerca de El Poder, de los vínculos entre monoteiso y monarquía, de la vida interior y cómo se gobierna como se es.

¡Y apenas va construyendo el mundo! De ahí vienen como tres diferentes puntos de inflexión, cada uno complica la trama, arrecia la crisis, acelera la narrativa. Todo aderezado con dos o tres sub-tramas que construyen al personaje central y a sus cuates y a sus adversarios.

Ahora que trato de reconstruirlos en mi mente me doy cuenta de que cada arco narrativo va trenzado con los demás, justo como se peinaría una elfa cantante de ópera.

En suma: recomendable fantasía para lectores receptivos.

Ada Palmer holds up several novels as examples of hopepunk in "Hopepunk, optimism, purity, and futures of hard work". Hopepunk is a neologism initially intended to be the opposite of grimdark but as she elucidates in that excellent essay, it's come to mean more: stories about imperfection, about the hard work of trying to make things better even as we know they might get worse:

We also need stories of people who are tired like us. Who are trapped between crises like us. Who are grungy, and sweaty, and compromised, and struggling like us.

A comforting read about an unexpected heir ascending to the throne and being a good person.
I saw someone compare this read to a warm blanket, and I think that is as accurate a summation as I could manage. It is a tale of nobles in a fantasy world... but it has more in common with The Crown than Game of Thrones.

The book is a confusing jumble of names and names for things, but that feels appropriate given its context. While I might be unsure whether Drakkar Noir of the Bordelaise family was mentioned before, the main character is new to the whole Bernaise Court or... whatever, so he usually didn't know either. I couldn't even begin to guess at how the names were meant to be pronounced or reproduce any of them on command, but I'm really bad with names and they were all meant to be a confusing whirl anyway.

And despite that, the book was still comfortable. A good person was placed in charge of a messy situation, he rises to the occasion, faces adversities and overcomes them. It didn't feel rushed, or stressful, the action was never urgent, yet it had a hypnotic pull that kept me up late reading and left me feeling good afterward. There should be more books like this. There probably are, but I have no idea how they'd be marketed in a genre that typically only extols earth-shattering consequence and heart-rending drama.

In a world where goblins and elves make up the world and even intermarry, this is a court-intrigue fantasy and a murder mystery in which the outcast half-goblin fourth son of the Emperor suddenly finds himself heir to the empire after an airship accident. Rushed from an isolated backwater to the middle of court intrigue and assassination plots, Maia has to figure out how to gain allies, govern an empire, investigate his father's highly suspicious death, and deal with more than a few elf noble families who are very less than happy to see a half goblin now on the throne.

If you like political scheming and court intrigue then you'll probably like this. If you like grim fantasy and war and battles then probably not; none of these here. Maia is a surprisingly optimistic 18 year old emperor and almost unbelievably so; the plot read a little bit like a fairy tale where the youngest prince or princess who stops to be kind to the beggar woman or the commoners is rewarded in the end for simply being a good person. It was fine up to a point but I think got a little heavy handed by the end, OR, the author should have made a specific point of Maia making this a deliberate choice, rather than just wandering through being generally A Good Person without much reason why he'd choose to be that way.

The language was both beautiful and frustrating. Beautiful, because the author has paid a lot of attention to creating rules of speech between the formal and informal (we are pleased vs I am pleased) as well as the use of archaic English forms (thee, thou, etc) to create layers of formality and meaning. And listening (because I got this on audiobook) to an author who can actually use the archaic forms correctly rather than butchering them was a real pleasure. It's not often I read anyone using the archaic "an" (meaning "if") correctly. It was also frustrating however as the author got a little too carried away with invented names and titles until during some of the grand events it was a word soup and incredibly difficult to remember who and what was which as the polysyllabic names and titles flew freely. A little flavour is good; this was way too much. I gather the printed book had an appendix which would have helped but that was not an option in the audiobook and I won't even try to spell any of the other characters names or titles or any of the places or building names.

Overall it was a fairly gentle-paced book, following Maia who didn't really go anywhere, and who spent the whole time just dealing with plotting and politics and the murder mystery. If that's your thing, it was well-written and a beautiful world, and I'd read a sequel if there is one. But if that's not your thing you'll probably find it very slow.

Editing to add: there's obviously a lot of anti-goblin racism in this book, and there are constant references throughout to the darkness of goblin skin compared to the whiteness of elf skin. The emperor's formal dress colour appeared to be white as well. With all the frequent references to skin tone and anti-goblin prejudice it was a bit odd that this never actually seemed to go anywhere or to develop into an actual clear message about racism. On the other hand, women's rights did seem to get a more clear defense, and there were also some positively described gay and lesbian characters although this world did seem to have some degree of prejudice against homosexuality, though it seemed pretty mild.