I’ve put off reading Addison’s Goblin Emperor a long time; I had heard it was lovely, but also disjointed and inconclusive. It’s taken the book’s inclusion in a list of Becky Chamberesque “novels where people are nice to each other” for me to finally take the plunge, and the only thing I regret is I didn’t do so much earlier.

I can see how people have a hard time adjusting to this novel: the intricate, Elven steampunk world it builds and the high stakes court setting seem to promise things the novel never tries to hold itself to. Instead, we are treated to the story of a young man who, motherless at an early age, despised by his cold and all powerful father who banished him to the shticks at the hands of a violently abusive tutor, finds himself on the throne. Faced with the barely hidden contempt of the court, ridiculed for his mixed ethnic origin, alienated from simple social contact by his exalted position, the new emperor slowly, quietly turns things around by repaying contempt with empathy, hate with forgiveness, coldness with kindness.

If you do not like your Fantasy to suggest people might not be unconditional products of the world they live in; if you prefer characters to have no moral autonomy; if, simply put, the idea that people, even the most powerful ones, might aspire to do better, is one you disagree with, stay away from the Goblin Emperor. I, for one, know that, of the things I heard about the novel, only “lovely” is true, and that is selling it short.