Chris

I want to start off by saying I liked this book. I read it in about a day and a half, which is pretty normal for me. However, I loved Ancillary Justice. I have read Justice twice now, and I am sure I will read it again in the future. It truly deserved all of the awards it won,

Sword pulled me from page to page as a good space opera should, but it didn't quite stick with me the way that Justice did, and I have put off writing this review until I could figure out. And I think that I finally know what struck me the wrong way. Before I get to that I want to talk about the things that I liked, because as I said, this is a good book. I liked is Tisarwat. I love the idea of her needing to re- find her identity after being briefly taken over by the multibodied Anaander Mianaai. She is no longer who she originally was, and she is no longer Anaander Mianaai, but some of both. Part of what makes her interesting, I think, is that her experience is really not that alien to us. I think most of us have probably had at least one experience where our worldview, or personal narrative has been challenged or broken in some way. And after the shock wears off, the only thing you can do is figure out how to move on, often reconstructing your own identity in some way. I think Anne is doing a great job of exploring this with Tisarwat.

Others have commented that Sword suffers from “middle book syndrome”, and while that may be true, I felt like the whole plot is really a side quest rather than a middle book. The main threads left unresolved from Justice dealt with Anaander's war with herself, the Presger, and for Breq, contacting Awn's younger sibling. Very little of this was dealt with or expanded upon. I was expecting the complexity of all of these three plots to increase substantially so that they could be resolved in the final book. Instead, what I get was a story that seemed really more about describing the abominable sharecropping practices of the reconstruction era South. Not that the story was poorly written, or wasn't a good story to tell, its just that it was a left turn, and in a lot of ways did not fulfill the expectations that were set up in the first book.

We did get a few tidbits however, and I am looking forward to the third book, and hopefully a return to the main story threads. Anyway, in summary, I think it was a good story, I just didn't necessarily think it was a good sequel.

In all honesty, I'm not sure why I liked it so much. It did so many things that I have learned over the years indicate a painful reading experience, especially with authors I have never read before.

Before I dive into what I liked and didn't, a quick summary: The gist of the story is that a young half-elf prince in exile finds out he has inherited the rule of the whole elven kingdom. His father, the emperor, and brothers die in a mysterious airship accident (yes it has airships) leaving young Maia as emperor. As he clearly does not have the training or experience necessary to do the job, the book is primarily about Maia figuring out how to rule a kingdom and how to survive the process.

There are two red flags that I found in the first few pages of The Goblin Emperor that tend to make me want to put a book down before I waste too much time on it. The first one is elves for the sake of elves. Nothing about this story (that I can see) requires that Maia and company be elves. Usually this is indicative of either a) continued unoriginality or b) an inexperienced story-teller whose story will have more serious issues down the line. And the second red flag is the use of a bajillion names. So many names that it is impossible for those uninitiated in certain subgenres of fantasy to keep track of.

However, I think what kept me reading at first was the sheer quality of the prose. Usually, the red flags I mention also coincide with clunky prose and sketchy characterization. That was certainly not the case with this book. The prose was fluid and in some ways transparent like a majority of so-called “popular” sci-fi and fantasy, but in others ways Addison's prose tip-toes close to the border of “too lush” but it never quite crosses the line. I think this is a most difficult balance to achieve, and Addison did it very, very, well.

The other thing that kept me attached to the story is Maia himself. He is kind of a tragic character, but in the softest most upbeat sense. He struggles to be kind and compassionate where everyone in his life except for maybe his mother did the opposite to him. The best parts of the book were when we get to see Maia take the high road when it would be easy to be vindictive, or even violent to those that caused him pain before he became emperor.

The only small gripe I have about the book as that there really was no mystery. The guy you thought was behind the airship crash, was indeed behind the airship crash. There was not a whole lot of misdirection that happened, and I guess I had expected a deeper level of subterfuge coming from a book that was ostensibly about court intrigue. However I think all of this could be put on my expectations of the book and is not really a fault in the book itself.

So in summary, I loved it. The Goblin Emperor is a smooth read. Its an in depth exploration of a sympathetic character, but at the same time the pace never seems to lag. So if you are in the mood for something a little bit mellow, but still engaging. I highly recommend you pick up a copy.