Reviews with content warning for Confinement - The Raven Tower

Reviews tagging 'Confinement'

The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie

7 reviews

lucystolethesky's review against another edition

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dark mysterious reflective tense slow-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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secondhandbookshelves's review against another edition

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dark slow-paced

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

3.75

A very slow burn. Things didn't really get moving until 80% of the way through - and at first flipping between the narrator and "you" was very disconcerting.
Once I got the hang of how it was written.... I still struggled. The entire book is backstory & build up to book two.
There are many gods in this land, typically they focus on a specific thing (weapons, food, weather, etc) but others are more broad (the Forest protects the town from sickness)
This story follows Strength & Patience of the Hill, who is a rock god & her story over time.

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quirkykayleetam's review

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challenging mysterious reflective 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

4.5

This is an extremely cool book for an extremely niche audience. Do you love Shakespeare, specifically Hamlet? Do you love creative forms of storytelling? Do you love fantasy books that involve epic world building? If you said yes to ALL those questions, then you will love this book. If not, stay away. Why? Because The Raven Tower is a retelling of Hamlet set in a fantasy world and told through both first and second person point of view SIMULTANEOUSLY in which "you" are a transgender version of Horatio being watched over by a god who is also a rock. I loved it! It got me out of a three week reading slump and falls into the category of books written by people whose favorite Shakespearean character is obviously also Horatio, but it is not for everyone.

This is a slow-build of a book as the storyteller reveals the world building and their place in it gradually until everything slots into place at the very last second. It envisions Ophelia as an incredibly implacable badass who both Hamlet and Horatio are at least a little bit in love with and in awe of while turning Rosencrantz and Guildenstern into interchangeable cronies devoid of any and all of the humor from the original play. Unlike The King of Infinite Space, the novel does not reword or rework any of Hamlet's original soliloquies or speeches, instead commenting on the scope of the play and how personal the action is to its characters. While it may not have added anything profoundly new to conversations about Hamlet (which it is hard to do these days), I nevertheless found it engaging and engrossing. Both the novel's last line and its meditation on the connection between living and caring will stick with me for a very long time.

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laurareads87's review

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adventurous dark mysterious 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? It's complicated

4.0

Having previously read and loved Leckie's science fiction, I was happy to pick up her fantasy novel The Raven Tower and thoroughly enjoyed it. The Raven Tower contains so much of what I've really loved in Leckie's other work -- skillful and innovative multi-POV storytelling, compelling worldbuilding that feels unlike anything I've ever read before, and power politics on a grand scale. The religious/political intrigue really worked for me. I feel like Leckie's done something quite interesting here with time scale -- with the story spanning a few different time periods, I feel like Leckie's really effectively incorporated the divergences in experiences of time between the human character and the god characters (who vary in lifespan but who are far far more long-lived than humans). I will note that much of this book is told in second person, which isn't my favourite (and I know some readers really don't enjoy) but in this book, for me, it worked: it is a choice that has a clear reason behind it in the context of the book itself which makes complete sense to me. Definitely recommend.

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lipstickitotheman's review

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mysterious tense medium-paced

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

4.0

The final quarter of the book was incredible. Dare I say brilliant writing? The setup was done perfectly in the first 3/4 for it, but I found that space often quite boring. The world setup is cool as hell, and I really loved that part. Eolo is cool, I liked him. I confess to cheering a little when Myriad returned in the last pages, and when TSAPOTH our POV character said their last line--tear it down!

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octopus_farmer's review against another edition

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dark mysterious reflective tense fast-paced

Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

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bluejayreads's review against another edition

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adventurous dark mysterious medium-paced

Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

I picked this up because I needed an audiobook to listen to on a long drive and this was one of the few that my library had immediately available (because I was looking the day before the drive - I am not great at planning). The back cover copy was mediocre and didn't have a lot of expectations, but I figured it had to be on my to-read list for a reason.

This book was incredibly unique and surprisingly engaging. For starters, it's told mostly in second person. The narrator is unnamed (although it's slowly revealed through the story who they actually are) and Eolo's part of the story is told in second person, as if it was told to him. The story alternates between Eolo's story and the narrator's story. While Eolo works through the main plot - a usurper to the throne of the Lease, plus a plot to majorly screw up Iraden in pursuit of personal power - the narrator's parts fill in the world and how the system of gods works.

I'm a total sucker for worlds with really unique takes on gods. Part of the fun of this book is discovering how the gods fit into the world, but I will say this: It is possible to kill a god, and that's a very important fact to the story.

The interesting part about the narration being mostly second person is you don't get a whole lot of characterization. Eolo is clever and the reasonable voice to Mawat's hot-headedness (and also a trans man, although that's just a part of who he is as opposed to anything relevant to the plot). Eolo tends to be withdrawn and not speak up, while Mawat plunges ahead and sometimes acts rashly. They're really good foils for each other, and I enjoyed seeing Eolo step up and assert himself a little bit more as everything goes to hell in a handbasket.

The plot is delightfully complicated, and you don't find out how the narrator's story ties into Eolo's until the very end. Now that I think about it, that's really what kept me engaged in the story - the many layers of complexity to the story (and also the question of how the narrator fit into the story they were telling to/about Eolo). That and the really awesome concept of gods and how they fit into this world.

My only real criticism of the story is the ending - it seemed to come out of nowhere, with the narrator doing something that seemed wildly out of character. I would have accepted it if it had felt like the narrator was building towards something like that, but I didn't get any foreshadowing. (Although my husband, who was listening in the car with me, said he saw a lot of similarities with Hamlet in the story so maybe the author ended it the way she did to keep up the Hamlet parallels. I've never seen/read Hamlet so I can't comment on that.)

This story is highly engaging and very unique. I don't know that I particularly loved it, in the sense that it inspired feelings of enjoyment, but it held my interest the whole way through, kept me curious and anticipating the conclusion, and then satisfied my curiosity with an (almost) completely satisfying conclusion. I thoroughly enjoyed the read.

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