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fwcu ([personal profile] fwcu) wrote2020-12-21 06:52 pm

the tyrant baru cormorant....a reflective

sorry for always updating on monday not-funday even though FRIDAY was spoken to be my funday of choice. whatever it is, anyway. I really did not read anything this week ..... I think it was the combination of being sucked into hades_hell again [haha do u see how reductive that is, it's like saying chai tea, cuz hades is ... hades is -] and uhm, good old kpop nostalgia. I did a very little amount of writing... uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. anyway, instead for you, I have highly coveted baru cormorant review that is very incoherennt and I apologize I did kind of give up at a point and you can tell.

this review is about 3k words but I'm sure it is not the most concise it could be ;;

I challenged myself to write this review; mostly because I don’t really write reviews and never bother to organize my thoughts farther than a twitter thread and a few scattered qrts clarifying tangents. also, I hesitate to call this a ‘review’ … I would prefer reflection and/or retrospective. but mostly, books get reviews.

some things of note:
  • I think ultimately any criticism I may have, or anything I say does not matter. books like this need to exist, books like this are finally starting to exist, books like this Should exist. I would like lesbian on lesbian backstabbation [lesbian on lesbian violence is gt9’s domain], I would like cruel-hearted, At All Costs womengirls being horrible sociopathic repressed mathematicians. etc etc. I think we’re like reaching the point at which these things are being published and pushed and gaining fame/popularity/recognition/success. Etc etc etc. it doesn’t matter whether i think it’s bad, or whether it’s actually bad, It’s allowed to be. it’s something that barely exists so I don’t give a shit if it’s bad, it’s allowed to be as bad as it wants. you know this argument.
  • I hate not liking things my friends like, it gives me Complexes. even worse, I'm critical about everything like an idiot. and even, even worse, I’m like an honest bitch. my brain is like I Refuse To Lie About Not Liking This Thing… so here we are… I walked into this book predicting that I would not like it — you are like ‘okay miss biased’ and I am like ‘I truly can admit that I like things even though I want to not like them’ I’m not very complexed in that regard. still, I read it really carefully and I read it well to make up for that. usually, I let books wash over me, or like I just speedread to get to the end. with this one I was like, okay I’m going to keep myself entertained by trying to figure out the last-minute reversal and look for foreshadowing. all my highlights were for insurance. LMFAO
lastly, here are questions i don’t think are relevant but will answer anyway:
1. did I like this book?
(a) Not...particularly?
2. would I recommend this book?
(b) no.
and some clarification:
(1) the thing is, my ambivalence is wholly preferential. there isn’t like, an objective flaw about this book that makes it worthy of dislike or whatever, it’s a story that’s well-told and well-written, it’s just not a story that struck at me or that I particularly enjoyed.
(2) things have to be given from the hand of God for me to rec them. if someone was like ‘I want a book about a #Girlboss/tragic lesbians/political intrigue’ I would mention baru cormorant. Recs to me, are things that I want other people to read without care for what they like or what they asked for. things that I would announce to the world for other people to read.

brief summation:

things I liked…
which is like, did i genuinely like things or like, am I looking for things that I *probably* liked.
  • I liked tian hu. I think she was the only character of note, and the only one that paid off.
  • I also liked the Xate siblings.
  • I liked when tian hu died at the end, that was so epic.
  • I liked the beginning up to — That was her first exercise in power — so like when the teacher is discharged … I think that was the moment I started to look forward to the recall gimmick.
  • some of the writing was really good and quite poetic — I think it would have more of an impact on me, had it not been something I could emulate. not to be like I could’ve written this book, it’s just that the writing style is similar to mine...i think. Dickinson likes the same patterns and sentence styles I do; which is probably why I enjoyed some of the throwaway descriptions and moments that were just there to add something on the set.
things I did not like:
  • Baru being so committed to the image that it allowed the author to excuse not giving her a character/character arc/character development
  • there were no ‘characters’ in this. characters do not have to be ‘people’ to me, like someone does not have to write a fucking Dostoevsky study; it just needs to be a a person with a name, a personality, a purpose — whether that purpose be metanarratively [i.e ‘love interest’/’rival’] or within narrative [‘save the common people’, ‘get to Falcrest’] — I do not need a fully realized, person, I just need something with depth and some dimension. something recognizable, perhaps even easily. this book did not have characters, this book — as Baru so often mistook them for — had chess pieces. paper men with names, description, and nothing more. I’m willing to contest this point; you can argue this is an unfair criticism, and I could explain why.
  • Logistics. this was not a narrative. this was a play by play about what could happen in a narrative and why. this was someone’s well-written summary of their history class content. again, this is completely preferential — other people/you/whoever, can enjoy this — I don’t.
  • the lack of feeling. this was so dry… maybe it was a constraint of the narration style — not like Baru could ever let herself feel too deeply, maybe there is nothing to excuse it. this book was just so devoid of any real emotion, or connection for me...like at no point was I like ‘I Am So Invested In X Thing’ — which BTW! it’s not hard for me to do that!!! in fact the closest I got was with Muire Lo & Baru lavender friendship/kinship/whatever. I don’t know, maybe I did close my heart off to Traitor Baru Cormorant but I feel like I tried so hard to like it, and to find things to like within it.
  • this book only works because it’s a First Book.

I Will now Go More In-Depth.
I swear I am not here to commit #baru_haterism, I’m kind of just using it as an opportunity to explain my criteria and likes, and what standards I hold things to.

let’s cover the good stuff first

tain hu
the closest I feel that the book gets to a ‘character’ … I think, I was never fully satisfied with any of the characters in this book but the very last of Tain Hu’s last moments really cemented her as something else. Baru’s own line says it:
You go to your death with exquisite loyalty. I measure my treason against your faith and it eats me up, now and for the rest of my life. It is the most hurt you can manage.
She Has It. what is It? The Conviction, the Loyalty, the Honour … her final choice, telling Baru to let her die — it works well:
  • from the start Tain Hu’s Want is a free aurdwynn — free aurdwynn also means free self, if she dies, well they can’t keep her locked up in falcrest! the [I’d rather die free than live chained]. — her last stand is effectively also, aurdwynn’s last stand — aurdwynn cannot be ruled — so instead it’s killed. but...is it? Tain Hu betrayed three times by her Love … also refuses to give up in her faith. for Baru to accomplish a free Taranoke, and therefore a free Aurdynn, she needs to as powerful as possible — and her willingly going to her death allows that to Baru. OH TAIN HU…
  • her conviction was strong enough, she was strong enough. walked to her death with her head held up high … tain hu, you are the resilient north with it’s spindly evergreens and hardy people, you know the winter, you’ve lived through it. You are the best this book and Aurdwynn had to offer.

Xate siblings
  • It was like, at Xate Yawa’s 2nd or 3rd appearance where I was like ‘ahhhhh She is the Parallel’ … honestly I was not expecting to be So Right but like… every instance of the Xate siblings onscreen was very fun, just because of the layers of meta added. like Baru would be like [breaking down the room, scrutinizing everyone] and then she’d be like…. Xate ___ is Looking At Me with a Piercing Gaze. every interaction was like, so funny because Baru is like "I know They are the smartest people in the room" and then [pause] "I’m gonna be Smarter Anyway" and then she just never is. even in the second[?]-last exchange with Xate Olake where she’s like ‘I already know he knows everything I could say, so I’m just going to say dumb shit’ and STILL that man is like ‘I Knew…’
  • it’s interesting because obviously baru is just set-up to be OP main character, and she is so #analytical and #on a 8d playing field while everyone else is still playing 1d chess that like, it’s obviously harder to have someone smarter than her in the room … so instead you get these 60 year olds and her having staring offs, knowing they’re reflections of each other cut through time. I feel like it just never worked on a level where you, as the reader, went OHHHH HELLL YEAH — which is simply what I want to do as a reader.
Wow... that kind of concluded what I liked about the book. everything else will be a discussion about, well… everything else. again, it isn’t that this stuff didn’t have merit, just to me, didn’t have either the payoff I expected or the payoff I wanted.

recall gimmick
for a book that drops lines like: She regretted this later / This was her first (...) / Later, she hated herself for this… I just feel like, (a)You never really know at which point from the future she’s speaking from, and (b)When the resound hits her. I think, since this is obviously a series, the payoff will come Later [or maybe I missed the tense change]... but again, that doesn’t help the enjoyment of this book in the singular.

honestly, the first few chapters were very good — the start and end were probably the parts I enjoyed most, I think because they noticeably took place in the Present, and things were happening to Baru and they’re both acts of discovery where she has to react. versus the rest of the book [tragically long compared to the pitifully short sections childhood and tain hu execution are] which is just A List of Events That Happened That Made Baru Fisher Queen of Aurdwynn. I think had some of that been interspersed with things happening to Baru — which could’ve been personal conflicts rather than political ones, that she has to deal with — but like… the little that Was Happening [ballroom introduction, intermissions, nayauru being a bitch] was never any of that. they were simply More Logistics but presented A Little Differently.

my other favourite part, would be the ‘cryptrach’ intermission. which was not a logistics section, but a ‘foreshadowing’ bit… this book is so on-the-nose about foreshadowing and so like, easily rewarding of it’s readers in that regard because it’ll hint at something like the first 1-3 times, and on the 3-4th time, it’ll straight up just say so. which offers no real satisfaction, because the satisfaction is when it Allll Comes Together...but like, making it clear is not the same as completing the puzzle yk.

the winner baru cormorant
oh my god...oh my god this book had NO tension beats. like none at all. I was never worried about Baru, not when she lost her chance at Falcrest by killing their economic invasion; not when she could’ve been assassinated by various dukes; not when the pirate king guy got reverse-swept… not even when the priestess was revealed to be a Falcresti agent … everything seriously was just like .... it was a fault of how the narrative presented each isse and then, the fucking Logistical Summary of Events that Preceeded and Occurered. plus like, the thing about political novels…. or novels that attempt to cover Scopes it that there’s always going to be a random ex-machina that the reader can’t be like ‘this was an EX-MACHINA’ because the author will be like ‘no no, the vague off-mention of x territory I made 8 chapters ago? that’s relevant now’ … except I don’t even think this book had that FUCK. this book was kind of just A Series of Obstacles Baru Overcomes … and there’s lines thrown here and there like ‘Baru U Are Treating Them As Chess Pieces Not Opponents’ and then like that never backfires against her in a substantial way you know. it is just at the very end when she gets the head injury that anything of effect happens to her. which is like OKAYYYYY karmic retribution SLAYYYYY but like… we got so little time with it, was it even cathartic?

my point ^ is just, the entire narrative plotline isn’t the usual 3 act [rising action, climax, falling action structure] or any deviations … the plot is just —————————— like you know? it doesn’t even rise. there’s barely any sense of what Baru’s won at, what she’s lost at, or the building breadth of her power… L. though this could all be the fault of how this story is written.

anyway, this leads into the flaw of Baru’s character; which of course is the same as nearly every other character, which is of course, that she barely has one. she counts birds, she’s an accountant, she’s sociopathically repressed. You can’t say much more about her unfortunately and it’s not like any of these things are particularly bad things, in terms of like — character building blocks. it’s just like it never gets farther than this. I remember I was reading one of the exchanges between the two Dukes — the one who is a philosopher and the other one who was not a philosopher but was more successful in every other aspect of life etc. etc. — right and like I remember going ‘is this an attempt to establish character?’ it’s not fair to say that was a bad attempt, but to me it was just so pathetically transparent and it fell so flat because the reason for such a pointless exchange was because the author didn’t wanna put in any other work in establishing the characters in other ways. in retrospect, the reason those characters were made recognizable via their banter was so the betrayal hurt more….but, like did it? Did It Really?

there is no such thing in character in this book — or character in the sense, that someone else’s motivations and personality provide a contrast to Baru’s and help offer a different perspective or person to root for — instead, everyone else is a landmark on a map. Everyone is either falcrest-aligned, or Aurdwynn-aligned … and they are all … just the sum of the power they represent. Nothing more, nothing less. And BARU the main character, doesn’t even get an epic internal dying raging complex as she sees herself fail to measure up, or become monstrous or whatever….so sad…. And it's all because she is TOO REPRESSED!!!! too set on the mask, too refusing to let herself slip. And the moments she does — i.e having sex with tain hu, we don’t even get to WITNESS it.

the prequel
this book literally could’ve been a 0.5 novella of Baru’s First Win and the series could’ve started at book 2 instead. like, I’M JUST SAYING. there is no reason to care about aurdwynn — on the reader’s behalf — it’s a foreign place, and it’s not as though a connection to the people/the way they live/the land is ever made … not in fact, every glimpse of it we get, is instead about why it’s coveted by Falcrest and some of it’s failings and powers. like, the whole thing is just how Baru conquered her first country … and given the lack of character development, or any development….like it’s just so easily read as ⅓ of the story instead of the whole story. it’s not a good standalone book — which is obviously not the point of a series, or any first book, but like on some level it has to be good enough to read on it’s own. there has to be *something* that makes it a good first book.

this book, gets into nothing deeply enough for me to enjoy it or see worth in it as a first book. everything it establishes about falcrest/falcresti practices are all like glancing looks … everything it establishes about what the norms of this world are….also just so glancing. and they’re like details that could’ve been explored or continuously hammered in….but nah.

like I was worried about the sexism/homophobia coming into this book, and then I read it and I was like ‘this had none of the discussions of sexism/homophobia I was expecting’ … like there’s offhand mentions of how men wear makeup in this world [#Feminism] … and then like, no follow-up, no discussion, no … anything about it ever. which is just one of the things….I think like, to maintain a basic level of understanding the author doesn’t ever get too deep into economic theory and/or politics/religion/monarchy intersections… but it all just leads into this very shallow picture of this world with no depth. And I think all of this, is fine for … a prequel, and/or the first third of a book. Not The Whole Book Though.

but I digress. I know I really floundered off at the end here. I don't regret reading this book, I just think ultimately, what I read wasn't exactly what I expected and/or was told to expect.

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