Reviews with content warning for Violence - The Shadow King

This book wasn't much like what I expected, and I'm trying to figure out how I feel about that. At least on my advanced reader's copy, the description focused on Hirut and her work to pass off the "shadow king" as the absent emperor, her work guarding him, and the contributions of women in war. All that's there, but the description gives these things much more prominence than they get in the text.

Yes, Hirut is probably the character who gets the most page space, but Ettore Navarra, a photographer with the invading Italian army whose Jewish ancestors are only now becoming relevant, gets a significant amount of page space as well. So do Kidane, Hirut's employer who becomes the leader of their branch of the Ethiopian resistance (and a complete !#$%$# to Hirut), and Carolo Fucelli, an absolutely horrendous Italian colonel with an odd mix of barbarity and civility. (

He has Ettore photograph each prisoner before and while he has them thrown off a cliff, but when Hirut and Aster, Kidane's wife, are captured, Aster is raped once and then both women are kept alive in prison, repeatedly photographed half-naked, but physically unharmed. I think Mengiste wanted us to have mixed feelings about him for the protective and paternal feelings he has for Ettore, but that never got to me--the guy throws people off cliffs and photographs their deaths. No, it was the fact that Fucilli kept Hirut and Aster alive and unharmed that confused me.

) Others who get some page time include emperor in exile Haile Selassie, who gets quite a few "Interludes"; Aster, Kidane's wife; Fifi, Fucelli's Ethiopian mistress; and a "Chorus" of Ethiopian women who try to reassure Hirut and Aster that they they have shared their domestic horrors, like wedding night rape, and who refer to the songs that they will someday sing about Hirut and Aster's roles in the war…though given that Mengiste starts the book with a foreword saying that she had no idea of her own great-grandmother’s participation, it’s hard to find these choruses that inspiring.

The structure of the book is interesting in its own right. While most chapters are given over to one character or another, as the book goes on (and especially in the battle scenes) the point of view will switch without warning from one paragraph to the next. This certainly speaks to the confusion of battle, but it feels more like a matter of convenience when it starts showing up in the quiet parts of the second half of the book. In addition to the emperor's "Interludes" and the occasional "Chorus", there are also several "Photo" vignettes describing in emotional as well as visual detail the photographs that Ettore takes of his surroundings, from innocent things like the camp cook and the Italian army on the move to horrors like Ethiopians on display before death, hanging from a tree, hurtling over a cliff. Photography and image-building are incredibly important to the story, so the descriptions aren't relegated only to these spaces, but the "Photo" sections do give space for the subjects to stand on their own, outside of the context of Fucelli's artistic interests and Ettore's (ugh) aesthetics. Ettore is one of those people who's "just following orders" but also enjoying his art even as he tries to hide behind his camera to wall himself off from what happens in front of it. (I did some searching and found out that the photo bits are inspired by Mengiste's collection of <a href="https://lithub.com/writing-about-the-forgotten-black-women-of-the-italo-ethiopian-war/">real photos from the war</a>.)

Oh, and there are no quotation marks around dialogue, which I'm seeing so much in newer books that it's starting to feel more like a sign of, "Hey, I'm being literary here!" and less like a thought-about choice. That's kind of rude of me to bring up here, because if there's any book where a lack of quotation marks is appropriate, it's The Shadow King. I already mentioned that battle scenes get split into multiple points of view, but there are also a few places where I think the reader is meant to confront their assumptions about who, exactly, is speaking--enough to interest but not annoy me, despite my opening to this paragraph.

The writing itself was beautiful but, I must admit, it felt overwritten in just a few places in battles and landscapes, where I had to reread a paragraph or a page to parse through the imagery to get to the substance. But overall it was much more lovely than purple.

So I got a fantastic, thoughtful, beautifully structured and -written book that, had I known what to expect, I would have appreciated much more. But I went into this expecting a story "by" and about the women who challenged their supporting roles in the resistance in order to do the actual fighting. Instead,

Hirut and Aster take part in only one battle, in which they are captured. They escape, but then there's a big jump to the end of the war when we're told that Aster had been leading the guerilla resistance with Hirut's help--but we see none of it.

I would have liked an author's note with some history. [HUGE caveat here--I'm reading an ARC, it's entirely possible one was added later.] I went to the Wikipedia page about the Second Italo-Ethiopian War looking for more information and felt a bit of dissonance. Some of the atrocities the Italian army perpetrated on the people of Ethiopia felt almost glanced over in the novel. Yes, we've got one Italian officer who's sadistic one-on-one, but the extent of the use of poison and mustard gas felt underplayed, there wasn't mention of the deliberate three-day massacre in Addis Ababa, and in real life there didn't seem to be as much of an organized resistance during the bulk of the occupation (skipped over the plot) as Mengiste suggests. Was the first big battle we read about the Christmas Offensive? Was there really a "shadow king"? Was there an individual officer who inspired Fucilli, or a place in Ethiopia that inspired his prison? Where can we learn more about the women like Mengiste's great-grandmother who fought in the war? There isn’t much to be found with a simple search so a little help would be nice.

Still, it's a rare book that makes me miss by subway stop, which I did in the last 40 pages of The Shadow King.

Content Warnings

brogan7's review against another edition

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challenging dark informative medium-paced

3.75

Very difficult book. Trigger warnings in every moment.

Perhaps the difficulties with this book lie in the difference between the expectations as set up by the blurb versus the reality of the story as it is told?
Maybe this is meant to reflect the difference between war propaganda and the realities of war itself?

I'm not one to say: well, you can't like a book if you don't like what happened in it. If that were the case, there would be no books about incest, war, sexual assault, and a good number of other things. But then again, when you have a book that is so graphic and so detailed...not only in elements of historical veracity, but also in details that are to do with the fictional world that she created...I don't know, maybe it takes someone with less sensitivity than me to read such things? And if so, what is the point of writing them?
In Jarhead, the military guy says: there's no such thing as an anti-war movie. The military guys watch anti-war movies like they're porn, to get themselves hyped up for a battle.
I have a feeling that this book suggests to me there is a point where an anti-war, anti-violence-against-women book becomes itself an object of violence against women. (The (male) commentator on the cover says: "Beautiful and devastating." I wonder by what objective measure you can call this book beautiful? There were parts, certainly--I read it because of the beginning, because of how Mengiste pulls you in and the character of Hirut is so strong and so compelling and so downtrodden, that you are already caring about her before you even have a chance... but this book is not beautiful. In fact, I hate that he calls it beautiful because in a way I find this story hugely patriarchal. It says, it doesn't matter what you do to women, they will survive. It doesn't matter how trashed they are by men, they will survive. They won't be broken, they'll be survivors. And I just have a little more rage left than that, this kind of "all-forgiving," very martyr-mother-Mary kind of legend, where at the end of it, she's still standing, as though that is okay, then, that we as human beings read all of the ravages done unto her and other women, we're still goddamn well forgiving the heinous crimes of the men around her, because she comes out triumphant.
I call bullshit.

The book jacket says this book is "an unputdownable exploration of female power."
I would have to say, at close of reading, that if that is the extent to which we can imagine female power, we are in major trouble. It is an examination of power, certainly. But an exploration of female power? No. It is overwhelmingly about male power and the will to exterminate and destroy. It is about, as she says more than once in the book, those who are born to own things and those who are born to be owned.

I wanted to like this book so much more than I did. I wanted to learn something about the history of Ethiopia that would help me understand what is happening in the Tigray, now.

Content Warnings

annreadsabook's review against another edition

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challenging dark sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

Maaza Mengiste’s writing is stunning in this book about women soldiers who fought during the Italian invasion of Ethiopia leading up to the Second World War. The Shadow King details a young girl’s fight both for the country and people she loves as well as her own agency in a world that often treats women as second-class citizens.

Something I found interesting was Mengiste’s characterization of certain players on the Italian side, particularly a young Jewish Italian photographer who usually complies with his orders out of fear of being returned to a dangerous situation at home and occasionally finds himself questioning the morality of his position. I don’t think Mengiste means to absolve folks like this man of their culpability and complicity in the human atrocities that took place during the invasion—instead, I believe she sought to show the complex nature of evildoing. In this same vein, Mengiste depicts the leaders of the Ethiopian factions as being deeply flawed characters themselves. Even the people we tout as heroes, Mengiste shows us, are humans who, behind closed doors or even in the open, can be destroyers.

Still more fascinating is the fact that Mengiste modeled this story on the experiences of her own great-grandmother—I can imagine the kinds of emotions Mengiste must have felt during the writing process. This novel is a challenging, beautifully written tribute to the Ethiopian women whose contributions and experiences have often been overlooked.

I would definitely recommend this to people who enjoy historical fiction—a word to the wise, though, that this is very heavy on the historical component! Please also be sure to check out The Storygraph for content warnings on this book, as it deals with some heavy subject matter.

Content Warnings

tenten's review against another edition

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dark emotional slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

Content Warnings

booking_along's review against another edition

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dark emotional sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

the shadow king tells the story of those ethiopian women who fought alongside men, who even today have remained no more than errant lines in faded documents. what i have come to understand is this: the story of war had always been a masculine story, but this was not true for ethiopia and it has never been that way in any form of struggle. women have been there, we are here now.

in the acknowledgments:

to those women and girls of ethiopia who would not let themselves be completely erased by history, who stood up when i was looking for them and made themselves known. i see you. i will always see you.

i think i wasn’t in the right headspace to read this book when i read it.

the story and how the author talks about why the book was written and all that sounds fantastic.
but i couldn’t get into the actual writing and keep losing interest in the book for no good reason other then that i kept noticing my mind would wander while i tried to read this book.

i did read it and finished it but i feel like i missed parts.

so i don’t feel like i can give review until i reread it or looked up if others had similar struggles with this book and it’s not me but the writing.

as i feel about this right now?
great idea, important story, but told in a way that made it hard for me to want to read it

Content Warnings

zoes_human's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective sad

4.0

A beautifully written story of Ethiopia's fight against Mussolini's invasion. It is brutal and heartbreaking, but I don't think the truth of war can be told in any other way.

Content Warnings

frankieclc's review against another edition

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as beautiful as the writing is, (i’m listening to the audio book), i couldn’t get through some of the scenes (had to skip) and the subject matter isn’t something i can currently comfortably listen to

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