Reviews with content warning for Gore - A Desolation Called Peace

An excellent followup. Really interesting themes and plot, and a way different energy than the first book but nonetheless complimentary. I kind of wish we had more time with Mahit and Reed. In general I wouldn't have complained if they gave us another hundred pages to tie up everything even though it wasn't super necessary.

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indeedithappens's review

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adventurous challenging emotional hopeful mysterious reflective sad 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? Yes

4.75

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pvbobrien's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging 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? Yes

5.0

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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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booksthatburn's review

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adventurous emotional 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? Yes

4.5

*I received a free review copy as part of 2022 Hugo awards voting.

A DESOLATION CALLED PEACE is a collision of cultures bleeding into war, trying to find the bounds of personhood in more than flesh and bone.

The plot follows several parallel threads, centering on various characters. I love Twenty Cicada’s storyline. He’s one of my favorite characters, followed closely by Eight Antidote. Mahit and Three Seagrass are working together again, this time to find a way to communicate with the aliens whose proximity Mahit had used as leverage in the previous book. The worldbuilding focuses on intra-empire politics as much as it focuses on the empire’s communications with Mahit and with the aliens. It balances stress and war with levity and intimacy, exploring connections and communication as characters with conflicting methods and competing aims collide.

This answers a few things left hanging from the first book, showing the next steps without closing much off. There’s a new storyline involving aliens which is almost entirely new (the existence of those aliens was pivotal in Mahit’s big move at the end of A MEMORY CALLED EMPIRE). A few major things involving those aliens are both introduced and resolved. It specifically leaves aspects of Mahit’s relationships to other characters to be resolved later, but with substantial changes from how they were at the start of the book. Some of narrators are the same, with the addition of a new perspective between sections. I don’t think Eight Antidote was a narrator last time, if he was it was brief, but he, Mahit, and Three Seagrass are all narrators this time.

This story likely wouldn’t make sense to anyone who hadn’t read the first book. Because Mahit was on her first journey as an ambassador last time, A MEMORY CALLED EMPIRE had a lot of exposition which could fit naturally into that story. A DESOLATION CALLED PEACE is therefore (assuming one read the first book) free to focus on building up descriptions of the fleet, the Shards, and the aliens, leaving the Empire and its basic details to be shown but more rarely explained.

The ending utterly devastated me, wrapping up the main story and leaving me sated, but promising more in the vast future now made possible by the resolution.

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