The Tyrant Baru Cormorant

I was really happy to finally read this book, considering Monster left Baru, Tau, Aminata and plenty other characters in really fragile places. This picks up right where Monster ended, and continues to build upon both Traitor and Monster's thematic and narrative throughlines in a very satisfying way, and it even closes a surprising number of them by the end, leaving plenty of blank spaces for book 4, which I find very exciting!

Surprisingly, I feel like this book retroactively makes Monster more enjoyable for me; I thought Monster felt a bit meandering and aimless at times, no doubt a reflection of Baru's own state of mind(s?) during most of that book (which somewhat justifies the criticism, but didn't make it any easier to wade through at the time), but Tyrant does a lot of work to re-contextualize events in Monster in clever ways that make me excited about potentially re-reading the series and redeems most of those moments.

Structurally, I find Tyrant to be a lot friendlier than Monster; it's focused, snappy, keeps the rights things in focus and deploys narrative resources in very effective ways. I find some of what I enjoyed most about the book structure-wise to be clever enough to count as spoilers, so I'm being vague here, but I did find it easier to read overall as someone who's often intimidated by multi-book fantasy epics chock-full of places and names to memorize such as this.

In the end, I absolutely adored Tyrant and am excited for the last book in the series. I like how it thoroughly explores and challenges its own thematic axes ruthlessly, its setting is genuinely fascinating to me and its characters people I've become invested with.