(May 2022) I DNF'd this several times last year for reasons of pacing and a feeling that, though certainly intense, the book lacked depth. I have been unable to stop thinking about why this book didn't work for me ever since, so I picked it up one last time to push through to the end. I'm glad I did. My opinions have not changed, but as is often true with me and three-star reads, I learned a great deal about why the craft in this book didn't come together for me despite a fantastic premise, attractive themes, competent writing, and obvious intention in the execution. If you're only interested in what I liked about the book, skip to the last few paragraphs, but apart from the themes, I think the magic in this book is some of its strongest stuff.

A. Pacing & POV

This book changed POV every chapter. There are more than 70 chapters in this book. That means this book shifted POV, sometimes across time and space, more than 70 times. For a 530-page book, that's a POV shift more often than once every ten pages.

It was too many. Even if there were only two POV characters, it would be too many. The fact that there were at least 5 POV characters of differently weighted importance made this story feel fractured and denied a reader investment in the actual plot.

What readers enjoy about this book is its characters and themes, which are arguably served by this structure! There is a point near the end where, alternating between Priya and Malini's POV, themes are paralleled between the two series of events. I love that sort of thing, and it's times like those that an alternating POV can become an asset to a story. Sadly, I don't think this potential was actualized through most of the book.

Why switch POV so often? I wonder if the author was approaching her book with a certain high concept in mind: showing imperialism and/or uprisings against it from every possible angle. A noble project, and one that high fantasy is perhaps uniquely able to address; it's one of the reasons I keep reading high fantasy, to explore exactly this. If this had pulled off what it wanted to, it could have felt like a holistic tale of a nation coming to terms with how power works within it. Instead, even though threads converged from 5+ into 2 by the end of the book, I felt like I was reading several different stories that happened to take place in the same setting.

Because we hopped between them so often, complete understanding of what each character's POV was intended to accomplish thematically felt elusive, while reader investment in the primary story was deprioritized. Throw in that changing POV between chapters came to feel imperative—even if it interrupted flow and momentum to do so—and this book felt incredibly slow. At times it also felt bloated with filler chapters that, while accommodating theme, again killed any sense of movement. Conversations felt repeated, particularly in the middle when Malini is imprisoned (and thus stripped of agency) and Priya, for reasons I still don't understand, only enacts agency within the boundaries of the existing situation instead of, oh, I don't know, getting Malini out of prison.

Conversation often felt prioritized over action by this structure. When we flipped POV, it was to get to different people interacting with each other: forming alliances, launching offensives, making decisions. That's good stuff, but it created an emphasis on dynamics at the expense of story propulsion and deeper character motivation. When we did see action, it felt unsupported by scene infrastructure—flat, or otherwise marooned—because there was no sense of building tension or movement between states.

Which brings me to—

B. Propulsion/Momentum/Movement: Limited Scope & Fits and Starts

It's not right to say that characters weren't motivated, because they were. I spent the first two-thirds of this book puzzling over why it felt like they weren't motivated when I could identify their motivations on the page. Eventually it clicked: characters were motivated only by what they could see or feel directly in front of them. Priya is motivated to stop Malini from dying when she is in prison because she can see Malini is in prison, she can see her dying in front of her, and she thinks this shouldn't be happening. Getting her out of prison doesn't seem like an option because she can't see beyond the Hirana.

There was, in other words, no overarching story momentum—no plot propulsion. Malini is motivated to get out of prison, but Priya doesn't share those motivations. As a result we spend 200 pages repeating conversations and turning in circles. This goes back to the feeling like everyone is living in a different world that happens to be the same world: There is propulsion and forward motion in individual scenes but, thanks to too-frequent POV switches, not in the book as a whole.

Where is the plot push to get Malini out of prison? It comes, but too late. Where is the push to find Rukh a cure for his condition? There is no sense of urgency in this book. Near the end it finally occurs to Priya she could find a cure for the rot; and maybe she needed to undergo her character evolution before she felt capable of doing that. But there was no tension presented to this arc. Rukh and the rot is something we see at the very beginning of the book, but Priya gets distracted by a 300-page sideplot in the form of an imprisoned princess whose life she has to save... but like, also she has to stay in jail and wait for someone else to rescue her though. (You can see what I've been hung up on for the last several months of not reading this book.)

Both main protagonists undergo a significant process of change through the book. They are not stagnant. They are both acting, trying to move toward something. But it was as though, in each scene they were in, they were standing at a fork in the road with the options, "Do what's expected of me" and "Make a different decision." Each time they only make decisions that resolve that individual scene fork rather than looking beyond the room they're in.

They weren't one-dimensional; but they were two-dimensional, moving only along two axes. If we spent more time in any one character's head at a go, these sorts of longer arcs might have had time to develop.

C. Character and Relationship Motivation & Depth: On the Utility of Intensity

Right. So. The romance. It did nothing for me. In fact I'm hesitant to call it a romance. Two characters were thrown together by circumstance and they are intense at each other for some time, to the detriment of plot and momentum; finally, alone and free, they kiss.

In theory, I see it. Apart from being about imperialism and agency, this story is at its core about female ambition. Priya and Malini are two women who were hardened by the lives they've lived under patriarchal imperialism and who ultimately take their respective destinies by the horns. It's this that motivates their individual fork-choices throughout the story; I'll spoiler an example. SpoilerAt one point Malini holds a knife to Priya's heart in order to negotiate for what she wants. And she would have killed Priya to get it. It was one of the stronger scenes in the book. It was then immediately undercut by Malini's guilt and sorrow, framed as "I can't believe I threatened the woman I love." I can, and so can you! We were both there! We know exactly why you did that. Own it. Are you ruthless or not, what is this? You can feel like shit about it but at least accept that it was necessary for your overarching goals. It's like she forgot the metaplot right after acting in its service, in order to have emotions; in order to give intensity. That's the kind of thing I'm railing against: she acted in accordance with a fundamental value set, and then wondered why she did it. Stop it! It made sense, and then you undid it just to have a saaaaad conversation with Priya later.

All to say that I wanted more consistency in this ambition throughout. The ambition to move beyond their circumstances should have been made explicit, repeatedly, in all the different ways it appeared, and made the central thrust of the book; provided the story's propulsion. Like other reviewers, I liked Bhumika a lot more than either Priya or Malini, and it was because she knew what she was about, the book knew what she was about, and she did not waver from what she needed to do. SpoilerAt the end of the book she looks at her newborn and decides that she, Bhumika, will still die for her ambitions even if it means leaving her infant an orphan. She does not waver. Thank you! More Bhumika!

Bhumika's intensity came from a different place than the other two: from her pregnancy, and from the fact that she found herself in a different position under patriarchal imperialism than either of the other women. I found Bhumika's to be a very compelling story for a woman who, at the beginning of the story, was straining at the bounds of her wifehood with a ruthlessly ambitious energy.

Also notably, she did not have a romance arc.

And I'm not against romance arcs. Again and again in writing this review, I think of She Who Became the Sun, which balanced gendered storylines in an imperial context with queer romance (in my view) considerably better. Maybe this is an unfair comparison! But I think the romance in this book ultimately softened the themes it so beloved. Each woman undercut her own sense of ambition to have little sidebars that didn't really do anything for the story. I would have found it far more compelling if, recognizing their ambitions were similar but didn't quite align, they had stayed antagonistic and mistrusting to each other instead. It was a fundamentally odd feeling to regard a lesbian romance and think how much the romance was taking away from individual characters' power; that's the sort of judgment I expect to make of female characters in heterosexual romance arcs.

Interestingly, in the acknowledgments, the author suggests she had not originally planned to make this a sapphic romance until editing. That makes sense to me. There was not a significant depth to this romance, but to be honest I felt very little at any stage of reading this book. This amorphous sense of the relationship's conversational intensity de-prioritized a lot of things that make a relationship matter to me: shared plot stakes, shared motivations, shared destinations.

D. I promise I liked some stuff about this book

I'm only hard on this book because I think the potential is so very there. I do plan to read from this author again later in her career. I wanted morally grey lesbians fighting hard for their own ambition under patriarchal imperialism, and I truly think this same book with a different execution—a shorter, punchier book structured in the interest of longer arcs, greater depth, and building movement, for example—may well have delivered on that promise.

When the prose didn't work for me, it was often because the gravitas didn't feel earned because of the reasons listed above. There were some truly gorgeous turns of phrase, and it could have landed a real punch. I also cared immensely about each woman's arc individually, even if I didn't feel they fit together well. It's also clear the author had an enormous, dynamic world in mind, and I want to see what kind of scope she can create when POV switches don't fracture it.

Finally, I loved the rot plotline and how magic worked in this world. It's what sucked me into this book in the first place. I want to see a future for this world with a subrace of rot people. The way magic was communicated through earth and water, the idea of thriceborn and how magic is only granted from flirting heavily with death... what ideas!

I will only read on in this series if I hear subsequent books are structured quite differently, but I have absolute faith this author could be an incredible powerhouse in the genre a few books down the road, and I can't wait to see what else she does.