Where It's Nine Hibiscus's Story

A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a good book, in a lot of ways, which I was expecting; the first book was really great. But even though I mostly enjoyed reading this, the flaws and bad decisions (as always, in my opinion) nearly overshadowed everything else. This was a four, but a disappointing four, which is my rarest score...

Arkady Martine is a wonderful writer of prose. Sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, cool idea by cool idea, she is great writer. Her style is brisk and entertaining, even when little is happening, and that kept me coming back.

But.

Okay, for one thing: Eight antidote, the little kid who will be the next emperor, is just a really boring character. Every time the POV switched to him, the book slowed to a crawl. At the very end, the author gave him something cool to do, an interesting bit of action, and that almost redeems the long, dull pages filled with trivial nothings. Except no, it doesn't. Almost every page devoted to him, except the last handful, could have been simply cut to improve the pacing a ton without losing anything.

Worse, Mahit Dzmare is supposedly the main character, but she's entirely forgettable and pointless in this novel. She's there for a lot of the action, like a fly on the wall or a purse under someone's arm, but she contributes almost nothing. She's spoken of and treated like she's brilliant and special and remarkable, but the author gives her nothing brilliant or remarkable to do. Three Seagrass drags her along on this war adventure, and everything they accomplish could have been done by Three Seagrass alone. Except for their love scenes, obviously. I wanted the Mahit we had in the first book, and she just wasn't here.

The real main character is Nine Hibiscus, the fleet commander, and she is interesting. If the book had been just about her, leaving Mahit out of it entirely, it would have made more sense. She makes a sort of Jean Luc Picard series of decisions, and that was the best part of the book.

If you want an action story with movement and brisk pacing, it's a bit hit-or-miss. If you were looking for spectacle, which an interstellar war promises, you'll get very little, hardly more than a few scattered pages. If you want to see your favorite MC be awesome, you'll have to squint, because it's kinda there, but it's more suggested than shown. But if you read the book for fine prose, or for ideas on language and identity, or for themes such as sacrifice and nationality and cultural hegemony, you'll probably be rewarded.

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