Reviews with content warning for Injury/Injury detail - A Desolation Called Peace

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A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine

14 reviews

eudaemonics's review

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adventurous emotional funny tense medium-paced

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

4.75

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maddiebusick's review

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adventurous challenging tense medium-paced

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

4.5

I loved everything about this except for the ending. This entire universe from this book and the previous book was so fascinating as were the characters and it will stick with me forever.

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tangleroot_eli's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated

I enjoyed A Memory Called Empire, and this book blew it out of the danged water. The world-building was even richer, the characters more distinct, the perspectives more tightly controlled, and the intrigue more intriguing. Basically, Martine took everything she did well in Book 1 and did it even better here. Gosh I hope there's more.

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just_one_more_paige's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark mysterious tense medium-paced

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

5.0

The first book in the Teixcalaan series, A Memory Called Empire, made my favorites of the year list in 2020. It was such a phenomenally detailed space opera that totally swept me off into its world (but also really made me work for it, with the intensity of the world-building). That being said, I bought myself a copy of the sequel as soon as it came out. Though as I'm sure everyone could have predicted, it took me much longer than that to finally get to reading it.

A Desolation Called Peace throws us right back into the Teixcalaan Empire, as fleet commander yaotlek Nine Hibiscus is facing down an enemy armada, one that communicates in an unintelligible language that makes listeners feel physically ill and whose weapons are nigh on unbeatable. As more of her people die every day, Nine Hibiscus reaches out to the Information Ministry for help, and is answered immediately by Three Seagrass, whose life has felt quite mundane since the events of the last book and Mahit Dzmare's departure. She decides to answer the call by heading to the warfront herself, with a stop along the way to pick up Mahit from her home Lsel Station. Thoroughly surprised by Three Seagrass' arrival, Mahit takes her up on the (only sort of optional) invitation to head to the front as a reprieve from a tense political situation at Lsel (related to the suspected poor integration of herself with her imago predecessor Yskandr). Together, under Nine Hibiscus' tight watch, the two women enter into an unprecedented and very precarious attempt to make first contact (and negotiation) with the aliens attacking Teixcalaanli's fleet, attempting to do the almost impossible and prevent what looks to be an inevitable violent conflict (while simultaneously figuring out what their own interpersonal relationship reality is).

I feel like that was a super long summary blurb, but it also feels ok that I said that much. There's no real secret or twist in this novel that could be given away. And if you read and liked the first one enough to want to read this one, you're in it for the detail, the language and the political intrigue and the continuation of the wonderful subtleties in Martine's world-building. And to get that, you really do have to read the full book anyways. So, all that having laid the foundation, let me just say that this is quite possibly one of the best sequels I've ever read. It builds perfectly on the Teixcalaanli world we were introduced to in the first, all the intricacies of setting and communication and politics internal to the empire, and expands it outward, external. It's the perfect way to grow that both complements and doesn't repeat anything. With that expansion in scope comes an expansion in lingual understanding, Martine's particular speciality, based on how elaborate that aspect is in both novels now. The coded ways of talking, of sharing meaning without saying it directly, but rather approximating the words you actually mean, is masterful and fascinating. And I love the way language is presented in conjunction with cultural ideology here, like the idea of having a word for loss being innately and necessarily connected to the people having the concept of loss and/or pronouns being necessarily preceded by the concept of a self. Amazing and such intelligent writing/philosophy.

I enjoyed watching the way Mahit got to grow in this one, since the shell-shocked "new ambassador" reality was less immediate (though she moved into "shell-shocked for other reasons" pretty swiftly). The point is, though, she had a little more space to work to comes to terms with the duality of her love for Teixcalaan everything (language/culture) and her anger at the way it colonized and labeled her and her people barbarian, along with the additional complications of her feelings for Three Seagrass and the further intertwining of herself and Yskandr's minds. Related, the push and pull of Three Seagrass and Mahit’s emotional connection to each other, despite all ingrained social reasons against it, was written so well. This particular relationship is tightly intertwined, thematically and representationally, with Martine's conceptual exploration of colonization: a nuanced look at colonizers/the colonized and the complex relationships between them, as affection and interest grow, but a deep lack of awareness of how to correctly respect/acknowledge from the colonizer (to the extreme that they don’t even understand how minimizing/insulting they are being), that the gulf between is potentially uncrossable despite all individual want to the contrary. There were some other newer, or more fully developed, characters that I really enjoyed reading as well. Nine Hibiscus and her adjutant, Twenty Cicada, were fascinating to read. And I actually liked Eight Antidote’s narrative sections as well. They were a humorous and mature-childlike way to learn and tell a story to make the political complexity of this story and Teixcalaan's foreign relations, diplomacy and internal affairs, accessible to readers (similarly to the way seeing it through Mahit’s fresh ambassador eyes did in the first book).

Overall, this was a most spectacular, very original, first contact story. The feelings of excitement and terror intermingled and communicated so well that I *felt* them myself. All the pressure of international conflict, mass casualties, time crunch and myriad other horrible outcomes riding on whether or not successful contact/negotiation could be made was intense and I loved it! Plus, all the interpersonal stuff and ideological compulsions and nuances on top of it: nonstop reader engagement. This sequel, expanding on the first but really a standalone in its own right, was simply magnificent.

“This was definitely true and also not very comforting at all. True things weren’t, mostly.”

“…a person who so loved […] that she’d replaced her ethical responsibilities with the appalling brightness of that love, and didn’t care what she burned out to preserve it.”

“For assuming she would come with her, of course she would – and not thinking that when the Empire asked, even in the person of a friend, a maybe-lover, there really was no way for a barbarian to say no and keep being the kind of barbarian the Empire thought of as a person.”

“Language is not so transparent, but we are sometimes known, even so. If we are lucky.”

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