Devices and Desires

Basically, it's a love story, which is why tens of thousands die, cities are torched, nations overthrown, and everybody betrays everybody else at least once.

If I had to choose only two adjectives to describe this book, I'd go for "dense" and "compelling." The political fantasy part was great, although I'm not 100% sure if the fantasy label applies here; it's the kind of fantasy where the author didn't want to set the story in any actual real-world historical period/country and came up with his own early industrial setting with zero magic or dragons or whatever else you might expect from the genre. I admit I skimmed some particularly long-winded sections on the intricacies of engineering or hunting.

The story is well-crafted, with all the right tension points and plenty of cases when each of the many prominent characters wields their own subset of information and is unaware of all the forces scheming against them, effectively placing the reader on the edge of their seat. The one part that felt off to me occurred near the end. Without going into any real spoilers, I believe there should have been a better way to reveal the final chord of the big intrigue without the schemer sitting down with the victim and laying it all out in plain words.

Like every good political story, the characters are where this book really shines: their goals, their motivations, the conflicts where their interests intersect. I strongly relate to the way Valdes thinks about the world, and Miel is exactly the kind of noble person whose high moral ground is both his strength and his undoing that I love to root for, even when they're headed to be doomed. What really struck me, though, how this book is so full of complex, fully realized male characters—Valdes, Miel, Orsea, Vaatzes, and others—and there's not a single woman in sight to stand on the same level. The only truly prominent female character is Veatriz, and she has very little agency and her entire role in the plot is to reveal things about the men who surround her, or be a catalyst for their actions and changes. One can argue that it's "period-specific" and "historically accurate," but by making it low fantasy and not historical fiction, I feel like an author loses that excuse. Besides, this setting isn't exactly 100% a man's, man's world. There are, for example, all those nameless "women in red" smuggling letters beyond borders and making the entire plot possible. They're supposed to have a lot of agency, a lot of money, and probably quite a lot of adventure... somewhere off-screen. Unfortunately, they're collectively used merely as a faceless plot device.

Regardless, this was a pretty engrossing read, and I expect to pick up the rest of the trilogy later.