Posted by I’ve seen quite a bit of hype for this book. There are many bloggers with similar taste as myself who have enjoyed this one and raved about it. I’ve also read books by this author before and liked them quite a bit. For that reason, I was intending on leaving this book for last, letting other books have a chance to wow me before I got to something I figured would be a strong contender for a semifinalist spot.
Oh well, I had the best intentions. Then I had a series of Life Fires which caused me to fall out of the mood/ability to read. Covid brain fog is no fucking joke and I’ve been on the struggle bus for almost a month. I needed a book to jumpstart me and to do that I have to really enjoy it. So, here we are, with my review of However Many Must Die.
This book is violent.
You should expect all the worst parts of war portrayed in detail here, but what I really loved is that it wasn’t just the violence that gave the book its tone, but the damage it does to a soldier’s psyche. There was a strong focus on what war does to the hearts and minds of soldiers forced to fight them. This is a story of an all female troupe in a war similar to WWI, but this isn’t a WWI retelling/alt history, it’s set in a different world entirely.
This is the story of an all-women battalion in the middle of a nasty entrenched war, they’ve been assigned a suicide mission to make it across enemy lines to stop the opposition from creating a war-ending, possibly world-altering weapon.
I’ve seen plenty of women soldiers portrayed in SSF where it’s totally normal to have women in the military, and I’ve also read stories about the first woman/one of the first making her way into the military as a kind of unicorn thing. I don’t often seen a whole battalion of women framed as a bit of an oddity in their world and being sent to the front lines along with their male counterparts. This scenario has actually happened in WWI at least once by the Russians in 1917. I’m not sure if there are any direct comparison between the Russians Battalion of Death and this book’s Blood Scouts, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some inspiration drawn from them.
Wish is our main character, and she was definitely a rough around the edges person. She’s a killer and good at it, but being a killer is not her life’s goal. She doesn’t want to continue with service when the war is over, she has peaceful dreams of a farm. She’s taken more lives than most in the war, a big part of that is because she manned the machine guns and kill hundreds of men, popping them like balloons by the hundreds in a matter of minutes. She uses a lot of darker humor to try and mask an undercurrent of guilt, and there’s definitely a lot of trauma she hasn’t fully processed. She’s a bit obsessed with the farm idea and it’s clear that it’s a support-beam type of coping mechanism, and as she loses people along the way holes begin to appear in this imaginary farm as those who would have been performing certain jobs are now deceased.
There’s also an issue of race brought up that I don’t see happen often when it relates to WWI and WWII. We treated Black soldiers like absolute shit despite their service and sacrifice, and it’s a topic worth exploring if you’re writing in this era. There’s a character here that wants to join up with the Blood Scouts but faces a fair amount of racist bullshit from the team. You want to like the Blood Scouts and all the members therein, but there are constant reminders that they are a group of grey characters with their own prejudices and faults.
We also get to see two sides of the war because we don’t just follow Wish and her battalion, but also a character named Maringdale, a horrific figure from the Dralian Empire. She’s able to read intentions, not necessarily thoughts, but it’s enough to give her an edge during interrogations. She can catch glimpses of what they’re thinking as she tortures them, and it doesn’t give her a moment’s pause when the person she’s torturing is thinking of home and family. She’s an easy character to hate, and she may be easy to dismiss as over the top, but if you look at history, any horror imaginable has been made possible somewhere throughout time. If we were given magical ways to do it, we would probably bring down horrors upon ourselves.
The world building elements are intense and come at you from the start. I would not describe this as a book with a ton of exposition, either. So, you’re just kind of thrown into the middle of a war and have to figure shit out for yourself. There’s a few different sorts of magic, some people are able to move earth/dirt-minders, others can be healers, some are mind-readers/mood readers, and others can commune with spirits and use charms. There are several different sorts of giants, different creatures that draw from classic fantasy and others unique to this world. There’s a race of fish-like people, and you meet one as Maringdale is torturing him to death. There’s also a race of people known as the “waders” who are small and could be great at being spies, but really they’re shy and conflict averse and so people who blame the “waders” are usually just making excuses for their failure. Kind of like the “gremlins” in the system being blamed for failures.
The connections I can make to WWI were the weaponry and the idea that the whole globe was at war, there were gasses and chemicals being used, artillery, machine guns being a new horror introduced on the battlefield, and this idea that “honorable warfare” where two sides line up and shoot at each other is fucking dumb and sacrifices too many people. Sharpshooting is a new skill and so the world’s first snipers are coming into the picture. The warfare is mostly land based without a big air force presence but there are certain creatures capable of flying and being used as informants and spies.
So, the pacing for me was a little weird at the start even though we get dropped into action. As mentioned, this is not a book that uses a lot of exposition, and there is so much to take in all at once … I got a touch lost the first time and restarted after a couple chapters to try and get my bearings. This was probably also exacerbated by the fact I was using text-to-speech and the character’s names were things like Wild Wish, Loose, Four Skills, Small and other things like that, so I didn’t always catch we were talking about a person. This may also be exacerbated by Covid brain fog. When I went back and re-read the first few chapters I got the hang of things and moved through the rest of the book fairly quickly.
I enjoyed this book enough to slam down my first semifinalist announcement!