City of Blades

This book hurts.

At first, I was disappointed that the main character shifts from Shara (whom I adored) to Turyin Mulaghesh (who was fine but not Shara). Then I realized exactly how few books are written from the perspective of an over fifty, black, female, one-armed war general, and I got over it. Mulaghesh's perspective is not like anything I've ever read before, and that alone makes this book a great one.

City of Stairs was a book about Diplomacy, about secret wars and manipulation and cultural absorption. It was about how conquerors and conquered moved on after the wars had been one. City of Blades is about war in a much more raw and primal sense. It does not sugar-coat, it does not pull punches, and it does not hide the horrific acts humans commit under the conditions of war. It's about soldiers as human beings instead of pawns. It's about living with yourself after doing wrong things for what seemed like right reasons at the time but who can be sure. It's about how society treats its veterans when they are of no more use to us. In short, it's an extremely timely book that a lot of people would benefit to read before they cast more stones.

At times, it actually gets too bloody for me, which is unusual because generally I can self-censor the gore down to an acceptable level for my stomach. Maybe I've just been watching too much Game of Thrones, but I had difficulty not imagining a lot of the more vivid descriptions in here. Bennett has a visceral tone in this book that I don't remember from Stairs. Maybe it has to do with Mulaghesh being so much more raw a character than Shara.

I read an article the other day about non-gender roled societies in fantasy and how few of them there actually are. The cultures in this series all value people on their merits rather than their gender. There are major female characters and throwaway female characters, female guards and soldiers, and a female engineering head (who happens to be Sigrud's daughter and amazing). A lot of bit parts that would normally be painted as stereotypically male are given to women which adds a normalcy to the idea that so much fantasy literature lacks. There are also at least three distinct races in the books and numerous nationalities. Culture clash was a theme in Stairs and it is continued here through the violent, death-obsessed culture of Voortyashtan.

The themes are not as much about religion in this book (though Voortya and her followers provide an epic backdrop to the events) but more about the humans and the reasons and ways we wage war. It's a remarkable book, and it hurt me page after page in a way few books do. That's a good thing, I think.