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4.12 AVERAGE
4.12 AVERAGE
adventurous
dark
emotional
mysterious
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:
No
”dearest joe,
come home, if you remember.
m”
joe tournier isn’t sure if he remembers. he finds himself on a train platform, unsure exactly how he got here—in a french london that feels wrong somehow. like a different version of reality. in flashes and half remembered dreams, he sees a different life. a man waiting on a beach. a single name. and a postcard out of time from a lighthouse, with a message calling him home.
the kingdoms is. a story of love and its transcendence—across realities. across timelines. across differently lived lives. it’s about the truth slowly unspooling—like an impossibly knotted rope, or like a spiraling staircase that goes up and up with no end in sight.
it’s about what lengths we’ll cross—oceans and battles—to find home. to find family. to find love.
it’s about having what you have always wanted right there in front of you, close enough to touch. but not close enough.
it’s reaching out with shaky fingers, some broken, to try and hold on to a ghost of sea mist.
it’s being pulled magnetically, inexplicably. but even still it feels right. because part of you, the part you can’t understand, tells you it is so.
the kingdoms is historical fiction. and a love so powerful it changes the course of history, time and time again.
(maybe this time, i whisper again)
it’s a book that begs to be reread once you have taken out the knots and reached the glass lantern room. when you have the whole picture, you’re ready to descend down again.
it’s a book that makes me feel more in hindsight. as i reflect on it i feel the feelings hitting me harder than they had whilst i read it. it seems fitting that the memory of the book should do this to me. that when i give it its second life in the future, it’ll make me feel more still.
also fitting—to read this book across time zones. to read this book late into the night and to know that on the other side of the world, across the sea, someone was reading it with me. thank you cel for listening to every unhinged thought, every prediction. maybe in another version of our reality, we share a time zone. but i also would not trade what we have right now for anything. thank you for sharing this story of magic with me.
i’ve now added this book to my favorites shelf. i know it will stick with with me in the best and worst of ways. i don’t know if i’ll stop thinking about it. i can’t wait to climb the stairs to the lamp room again in the future, and go back to the past.
Natasha Pulley does it again.
Another truly extraordinary work by Natasha Pulley, keeping the subtle thread of not-quite-time-travel from her previous novels but taking it in a whole new historical, seafaring direction, the excitement and mystery elements are all there along with a fine, tender strand of romance similar to her other works that creates characters that live on in your head long after reading.
Another truly extraordinary work by Natasha Pulley, keeping the subtle thread of not-quite-time-travel from her previous novels but taking it in a whole new historical, seafaring direction, the excitement and mystery elements are all there along with a fine, tender strand of romance similar to her other works that creates characters that live on in your head long after reading.
honestly not super interested in time travel in books or an amnesia trope so i was skeptical but this felt different. i loved it and how it continuously made my heart hurt and now i want to read natasha pulley’s other books. also everyone who loved ofmd please read this now!!!
Really interesting take on alternate history -- we start out in the late 1890s in an England occupied by France, after a French victory at Trafalgar changed the course of the Napoleonic Wars. We come to find out this is due to a strange (and unexplained) time portal in the Hebrides, that connects to 90-odd years in the past -- critically, AFTER the battle of Trafalgar (the time period traversed by the portal is fixed, so the first travelers arrived in the late 1790s and changed history starting then). That means by any point in the story the point of divergence has already occurred -- it's not your standard alternate-history-with-time-travel story (as if there is such a large body of those types of story for there to be a "standard," but bear with me) where obviously the end goal is to "fix" the timeline and restore recognizable history. (At most, characters want to avoid a full French victory -- the French here take on a villainous role that seems a little out of character with my admittedly spotty knowledge of French occupation elsewhere in Europe at the time, so that's a little odd -- but there's no notion of saving the world by restoring the original timeline.)
As with any time-travel fiction, the logistics end up a little spotty, although the book does a good job of explaining paradoxes -- people from the future don't get affected by changes to the past as long as they stay IN the past (for whatever reason), and changes to the past propagate through to people living in the modern day as weird attacks of amnesia or epilepsy (where you remember the original past temporarily and take some time to "remember" the new timeline). The problem is that the ending of the book confused the hell out of me, in both mundane and chronological senses, which prevents me from giving the book full marks. Still a great read.
As with any time-travel fiction, the logistics end up a little spotty, although the book does a good job of explaining paradoxes -- people from the future don't get affected by changes to the past as long as they stay IN the past (for whatever reason), and changes to the past propagate through to people living in the modern day as weird attacks of amnesia or epilepsy (where you remember the original past temporarily and take some time to "remember" the new timeline). The problem is that the ending of the book confused the hell out of me, in both mundane and chronological senses, which prevents me from giving the book full marks. Still a great read.
What a fantastically strange book. I'm not sure I understood all of it, but I loved it anyway.
adventurous
emotional
inspiring
mysterious
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:
No
The beginning of this book feels like when you've been out drinking and you have too much and you black out but don't pass out and then you sober up a little bit and regain your consciousness some time later and you have no idea how you got where you currently are. (Not that I've ever had that experience.)
I stayed up a hour and half later than I usually go to bed to finish this book. It. was. so. good.
I stayed up a hour and half later than I usually go to bed to finish this book. It. was. so. good.
DNF at 30%
I tried, I really tried.
This was supposed to be my first book in months. It was supposed to be gay and all fantasy-esque.
But the writing... What to say? The writing was off. It's hard to pin point exactly what was wrong with it but reading other reviews, I definitely saw my sentiments echoed.
First off, the writing was dry as an English biscuit without tea. It was very simplistic and stripped but not in a good way. Added to the slow pace of the story it made the reading quite a bore.
I don't know if this was done on purpose because the MC is amnesiac but it definitely gave off that feeling of disjointedness and of hopping from thing to thing. We could be talking of one thing and the next line/chapter we would have hopped to a completely new topic without follow-up, closure or warning. For example, we would be dealing with ghosts in the lighthouse but suddenly we transition to a scene with a man drowning in the sea. There is no transition and the way it's written, it's hard to tell whether drowning man is really there? Is he a ghost too? Is that a metaphor? An illusion? Wait there's talk of him being a selkie. Really confusing until you realise oh he's actually a real human but wait now it's night and the MC says he's actually a ghost? Is he? Oh wait no he isn't.
Other absolutely terrible scene : MC is urging someone to run away before getting gunned down. That someone gets gunned down. MC is seemingly and very understandably starting to go into shock : he falls to his knees but wait - now he's reading names off a pillar? Killed man is forgotten and now seemingly MC is explaining to us how these names were written on the pillar by men doing the crossing to remember their wives. How did you understand this so quick? How did you suddenly switch from seeing a man MURDERED in front of you for the first time to now making deductions on why names were inscribed on a pillar. It was just surreal. The writing made the story feel dreamesque but in the worst way possible.
In addition, another main issue, in my opinion, was that everything was tonally flat. Not only the writing but also the characters. The MC is just drab. Once again, is it because of amnesia? Who knows. But also characters direly lacked a human side. Things happen and the characters are just... there? No reaction, nothing. Staggering things happen like hearing ghosts are taking place and the MC just explores, measures the surroundings and then leaves but without panicking or anything. Kite kills a man and the MC who had just been urging said man to run away is just like okay?
Hello? What is going on here.
It's sad because other scenes like the coming winter were really well written and emotionally impactful but the rest? Nada.
I really wanted to continue reading this. It was not bad per se but I was bored and didn't care much for the story and as they say, life is too short...
I tried, I really tried.
This was supposed to be my first book in months. It was supposed to be gay and all fantasy-esque.
But the writing... What to say? The writing was off. It's hard to pin point exactly what was wrong with it but reading other reviews, I definitely saw my sentiments echoed.
First off, the writing was dry as an English biscuit without tea. It was very simplistic and stripped but not in a good way. Added to the slow pace of the story it made the reading quite a bore.
I don't know if this was done on purpose because the MC is amnesiac but it definitely gave off that feeling of disjointedness and of hopping from thing to thing. We could be talking of one thing and the next line/chapter we would have hopped to a completely new topic without follow-up, closure or warning. For example, we would be dealing with ghosts in the lighthouse but suddenly we transition to a scene with a man drowning in the sea. There is no transition and the way it's written, it's hard to tell whether drowning man is really there? Is he a ghost too? Is that a metaphor? An illusion? Wait there's talk of him being a selkie. Really confusing until you realise oh he's actually a real human but wait now it's night and the MC says he's actually a ghost? Is he? Oh wait no he isn't.
Other absolutely terrible scene : MC is urging someone to run away before getting gunned down. That someone gets gunned down. MC is seemingly and very understandably starting to go into shock : he falls to his knees but wait - now he's reading names off a pillar? Killed man is forgotten and now seemingly MC is explaining to us how these names were written on the pillar by men doing the crossing to remember their wives. How did you understand this so quick? How did you suddenly switch from seeing a man MURDERED in front of you for the first time to now making deductions on why names were inscribed on a pillar. It was just surreal. The writing made the story feel dreamesque but in the worst way possible.
In addition, another main issue, in my opinion, was that everything was tonally flat. Not only the writing but also the characters. The MC is just drab. Once again, is it because of amnesia? Who knows. But also characters direly lacked a human side. Things happen and the characters are just... there? No reaction, nothing. Staggering things happen like hearing ghosts are taking place and the MC just explores, measures the surroundings and then leaves but without panicking or anything. Kite kills a man and the MC who had just been urging said man to run away is just like okay?
Hello? What is going on here.
It's sad because other scenes like the coming winter were really well written and emotionally impactful but the rest? Nada.
I really wanted to continue reading this. It was not bad per se but I was bored and didn't care much for the story and as they say, life is too short...