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I took a three-month break from reading and reviewing. I got caught in a cycle of re-reading Pratchett and Dungeon Crawler Carl over and over for months as a self-soothing behavior for extreme anxiety. I feel the “why” of that is self-explanatory when I say I reside in the USA. However, I am back to reading things outside of comfort books and hopefully this page will pick up its usual pace of weekly reviews 🙂
I have no idea why I chose this book as the book to try and break myself out of a comfort reading cycle… because this book was not comforting at all, and I knew that going into it. It’s designed to be very uncomfortable. Sometimes, honestly, it’s torturous to read, but I mean that in the best possible way. It’s supposed to be a painful read, so just keep that in mind if you’re picking it up. It covers a lot of deeper topics, it digs deep into a lot of trauma-related topics, which are common in warfare, and so basically almost all the standard trigger warnings apply to this one.
This is a story about a kid born into an old school village that is set in a modern world, but his people take it as a point of pride that they are a people apart from the rest. They typically don’t play video games, they don’t have a lot of tech in their homes, a lot of things are crafted and made in the old ways. They’re not soft like the city folks. Yeah, no, they are a people that still climb a fucking mountain each morning to get to school. It’s hard to say who the “main” character is in this book since we follow several different POVs, but we start with Mamoru. He’s a teenage kid living in this old school village who has a very powerful and respected father – but his father is a cold, distant dickbag. This whole society is emotionally muted, to be honest. They don’t embrace large displays of emotion, even during extremely sad events like miscarriage – stoicism is what’s normally valued. Mamoru is supposed to respect his elders, his society, and his role in it. However, things start to take a turn when a new kid shows up at school, and he’s one of those soft inner-city kids. He doesn’t just bring a modern way of thinking to the small village, but a lot of “dangerous” views as well. He doesn’t think the emperor has their best interest at heart, in fact, he thinks of Mamoru’s village as a bunch of folks who have been brainwashed into giving their lives for an emperor who doesn’t give two shits about them. He’s espousing these views to a people who consider themselves to be respected and honored warriors who all have a huge deference for their almost god-like emperor. These views go over how you’d expect. Not well.
However, Mamoru and his new frenemy stumble upon some tech from the old war, a plane that had crashed and had been left in its resting spot undisturbed for decades. Turns out there’s a lot of stuff that Mamoru was told was “impossible” by the emperor but is staring him dead in the face when he discovers the wreck. Maybe his people aren’t the most advanced in the world, maybe other cultures are capable of great feats, maybe his people did suffer more losses than they had reported, maybe the emperor is lying to him. Propoganda and the government fucking with it’s people is a huge theme in this book and ho-ly-shit does that just hit real, real close to home. I believe everyone, regardless of where they are residing in this world, are experiencing epic levels of propoganda force-fed to them daily.
This discovery leads to self-doubt, and that self-doubt leads to a lot of tension for the rest of the book as an invasion happens and shit starts to go down fast and hard with a battle scene taking up much of the back half of the book.
Mamoru has a mom, Misaki, who is also a central character in this book and when I first read this I was a very new mom, my kid was less than six months old, and so a lot of these motherhood themes didn’t hit quite as hard as they did the first time around. Discovering who she was, what her past was like, and comparing it to how she’s living now was such an enraging experience. It’s a common lived experience for many women now, and most of the women in the past. Misaki had potential to be so many things and she limited herself to just motherhood when she married into her husband’s very powerful family. She has a lived experience outside the village and tasted freedom in countries that respected women, let them serve in their military, let them have lives outside of the home, and she gave it all up at the behest of her parents. Misaki is just as duty and honor-bound as everyone else in this book and the amount of suffering she goes through is intense, and the way everything climaxed at the end was just so god damn powerful.
The pacing for this book is so wonky, but honestly, so is life, things don’t generally move at an even pace in life. I often experience long lulls of “nothing” where every day is much the same and the sudden Life Drama happens and it feels very chaotic and fast-paced. I generally prefer a more evenly paced reading experience, but there’s something unique about a very slow build-up only for a 300-page rampage at the end.
The world building in this was a bit confusing to me at first, I kept thinking we were in Japan since much of the world building is Japan-adjacent, but this is set on a totally different planet and I believe there are more books set in this world but not with these characters – I’ve meant to read these books but there are so many books and so little free time now n’ days. The magic in this is subtle at first but grows throughout the book with more displays of magic that grow in intensity and frequency as the battles commence at the end. There’s a lot of elemental type magic with ice, water, fire, etc. There’s even a little bit of mimicry and illusion spells at the end, too. There’s not just magic, either, there are specialty weapons and crafting, too — things like unbreakable glass airplanes or swords.
I feel like I’ve utterly stumbled through this review because there’s a ton to cover but I try not to leave novel-length reviews because most folks will only read so many words until they skip to the end for a score/TLDR. I am not particularly emotional when it comes to books. It really takes a lot for me to become emotionally invested in a story, especially if that story is self-contained and not built up over the course of a series. I very nearly cried during this re-read because of where I am in life now.
TLDR: If you want strong, strong character development, a slow burn that builds to a crescendo, a self-contained story about pain and growth – this one is for you.