The Faithless

May be a few mild spoilers for The Unbroken (see the replied-to) here, but I’ll try to keep surface level;
Faithless continues the very soured relationship between Touraine – now on the council of her liberated homeland of not-Algeria – and Luca – not-yet-Queen of not-France. While Unbroken was set entirely in not-Algeria, Faithless is based around the court intrigue of not-France as Luca attempts to secure her throne from her uncle who is overstaying his welcome as regent like that friend who just needed one night on your couch while looking for a new place and now leaves a trail of soggy cereal around the flat 6 months later.

It takes a while to get started, with the court intrigue only beginning in earnest with a murder and a quest to track down not-France’s native magic (which they cast off in a bout of magical state secularism to go round banning other countries’ “uncivilized” magical traditions. But it’s threaded by constant tension in Touraine and Luca’s transactional relationship, punctuated by the marquis wine fop Sabine who does not let anything get in the way of her desire for a threesome with them both.
It felt a little less directed than the first due to the nature of being a bit more bottled in court politics than the fate and dynamics of an entire colony of people. But I feel like it sets up a lot for the third (final?) book so might well pay off well there. 

The Unbroken is the début novel from queer Black author [a:CL Clark|8573525|C.L. Clark|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1577864170p2/8573525.jpg]. Her queernorm “muskets and magic” low-fantasy looks at colonialism and identity, with one of our POV protagonists being a soldier kidnapped as a child from her native Qazāl by imperial power Balladaire and conscripted as a colonial soldier.

One doesn’t need to know that Clark learned Arabic in Morocco to see that aspects of her world­building are clearly inspired by Françafrique colonial policy; she talks about that a little more for Color the Shelves and in her Reddit AMA, she says “I mostly read/write/yell about sword lesbians, colonial fuckery, and workouts”. Clark has also said in interviews that she wanted to mess with the ways that women are allowed to be violent in fantasy, as well as exploring the ways in which conscripted colonial soldiers interact with the power dynamics of empire — being both “above” the “natives”, but never being seen as “one of us” by the imperials.

The Unbroken is full of terrible choices — Clark’s characters are delightfully imperfect and fallible, with Touraine simultaneously aware of and naïvely ignorant of how the empire inevitably fucked up conscripted children like her, wrenched from the colonies and trained to be colonial foot-soldiers, their own culture denied to them and — in some cases, literally — beaten out of them. As Maya C James describes for Locus, “colonialism conditions its subjects to villainize their own cultures and adore the dominating class, regardless of how mediocre they might be”; James’s review itself is well worth a read.

Our other POV protagonist Luca is a physically-disabled Balladairan princess seeking to prove her suitability for the throne currently usurped by her regent uncle. Luca is a beautiful example of a “well-meaning white person”, trying to right some of the ways in which empire brutalises its native subjects, but also knowing that there are some lines she cannot cross, some demonstrations of humanity she cannot allow herself. Both characters excel at paving their roads to hell with good intentions aplenty, all their copious bad choices being made for the right reasons. The opening scenes see these 2 queer woman arrive in Qazāl and Touraine saving Luca’s life from an assassin. Hijinks and attempts at revolution ensue, while Touraine tries to resolve that she doesn’t truly belong to either culture. But don’t think that this book will be gentle with your emotions; Clark writes an excellent narrative but she does not give a fuck about your feels. Again quoting Maya C James:

The Unbroken is such a realistic portrayal of colonialism’s genocidal tendencies, that I nearly forgot that I wasn’t reading a historical fiction novel about Algerian freedom fighters, until magic entered the plotline.

I loved this first instalment in Clark’s nascent trilogy: the enemies-to-lovers trope is always entertaining, especially when both characters are well-considered and believably imperfect, as well as examining and subverting the power dynamics between them; Clark saw someone describe her implementation of that trope as “enemies-to-still-enemies-but-horny-about-it” and I can absolutely see why she loves that. Also, as Daniel Roman described for Winter is Coming, “the twists always felt organic and never once jarring, despite how layered things became” and Clark “has a gift for expertly walking the line between lyrical prose and dark fantasy grit”. As Roman continues:

If your main complaint about a book is that you wish you could see more of the world it invents, that’s a pretty good sign that the author knocked it out of the park.

Absolutely; I’ll be pre-ordering books 2 and 3 of The Magic of the Lost the very first moment that I can. (And I’m always going to have a soft spot for books that start with a map.)

CN: racism, colonialism and colonial violence, including death and serious injury; threats of sexual violence.