A review by kentanapages
The Unbroken by C.L. Clark

adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful 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

5.0

“Give me hunger on my own terms”

The Unbroken will break you over and over again, but hold you while you heal. Its magic will mend you when it can, but you’ll be left scarred–yet grateful for the experience. Ready for revolution. Absolutely ready for the sequel. 

“And you couldn’t own anything if you were owned yourself.” 

The Unbroken is a North African inspired military fantasy novel, with a complex and layered entwinement of magic and religion, incredible world-building, and deeply flawed, deeply human (and therefore deeply relatable) characters. It is also, at its core, an excavation of the brutal truths of white settler colonialism, of the violent “civilizing” of  indigenous peoples, and of the ruthless tidal wave of white imperialist values trying to reshape a world in its own image. The setting is a queernorm world, in which there’s no stigma related to gender, romantic, or sexual choices. I love experiencing a world this way, and I find that it also sharpens the contrast to other prejudices. As in our world, racism is alive and well in the Balladairan empire, as is religious persecution. 

“Touraine was starting to think it was impossible to come from one land and learn to live in another and feel whole. That you would always stand on shaky, hole-ridden ground, half of your identity dug out of you and tossed away.”

We are, so many of us, products of settler colonialism, and this book not only holds up a mirror to that past but dares us to deny the echoes that reverberate through the years and decades since, that we still see every day today in our societal codifications of right and wrong, intelligent or brutish, safe or dangerous, good and bad, civilized or not.

“Like everything else Touraine had taken from Qazāl when she was a kid, the language had been culled out of her.”

We meet Touraine–a good soldier, taken as a young child from her homeland in Qazāli and conscripted to serve the Balladairan imperial military. With no real memory of her own cultural history, she hangs her hopes on the goal of obtaining captain in the army of her people’s oppressors. She has grown up surrounded by reinforcing images of the Balladairan ideal for what is good and brave and successful, and she strives to be these things, desperate to belong. She’s determined to prove her worth by molding herself into what others think she should be. She strives to demonstrate that her people, people of the former Shālan empire, can be civilized, can succeed, can be good enough–her world has taught her that this is something that must be earned, must be proven... unless, of course, you’re simply born into it. 

“Balladaire was a land of gifts and punishment, honey and whips, devastating mercies.”

Touraine is wrenched between her loyalties–to the empire that raised her, to her people and her roots, to her fellow soldiers and friends, to her newly rediscovered family. She grasps at the right thing to do in a world with no right answers, and has to live repeatedly with the painful results of her choices. 

Qazāl meets Luca, a princess, a well-meaning white savior, an embodiment of colonialism. 

“And when she stopped the rebellion and eased the unrest in the colony’s capital city, she could show her uncle that she had the skill to rule. She would claim the throne that was her right”

Luca is the heir apparent of the Balladairan throne, except that it’s no longer so apparent; her uncle and former guardian rules in her stead, and shows signs that he may contest her fitness for the crown. Luca is in Qazāl to squash the sparks of rebellion and restore peace–by which of course, Balladaire means restore control, eradicate practices deemed uncivilized, and restore the colony to its compliant subjugated position. Luca has spent her life knowing that the crown is her birthright; she has spent her life learning about war and politics and conflict and how to rule from books and from tutors. Like Touraine and the conscripts, she has internalized beliefs: religion is uncivilized, Balladaire is the civilized ideal, those of less civilized births are inherently less intelligent and able to rules themselves. Unlike Touraine and the conscripts, she benefits personally from the systems in place, and has spent much of her life blind to the extent of her own privilege and role in perpetuating these injustices. 

“By the sky above, she wanted to be enough. No. More than enough. She wanted to be a queen for the histories. Someone who changed Balladaire for the better. Someone who changed the world.”

Luca is also deeply conflicted, and beneath her stoically armored exterior she cares painfully for other humans; yet she repeatedly struggles to shake those internalized biases and beliefs. We watch as she offers a modicum of empathy and respect for the Qazāli, and then feels she deserves gratitude for doing so, because recognizing them as human is more than others have offered. We see the backlash in her actions, as she shifts blame elsewhere, to those who should have wanted less. Luca’s internalized superiority comes across in myriad small ways, such as how she brushes off the medical knowledge of the Qazāli (who have learned that exposure to a milder form of a disease can create immunity against a worse one), thinking it sounds unlikely and unscientific. At her core, she believes it is her birthright to rule, and that supersedes all else. 

“She could see the shape of empire in Luca’s words.”

Clark’s writing is incredible. The scenes are brutal, gritty, bloody, sticky, painful. So much of the story, when summarized, is heartbreaking–but there are these moments of humanity and joy that act as salves, that restore faith in individual humans, if not in civilization. I also appreciated that the the way differently abled individuals are represented makes mentioning it here almost an afterthought, not because their unique differences weren’t inherent parts of each character’s experiences, but because they were portrayed as similar to any other physical or character differences, and weren’t depicted as weaknesses by default. The characters are so very different from each other but all relatable in their fallible humanity and their most desperate desires and motivations. It’s all so f%*&ing (sky-falling) real.

Clark doesn’t pull punches or coddle the reader. You’ll mourn the casualties along with the characters, find yourself absently stroking a ghost of a mourning ring as you think of the losses. This book emotionally massacres me every time I read it, but I keep coming back. It’s a devastating, beautiful sandstorm of a story and I can’t wait for there to be more. 

"We pray for rain"

PS: now there's more! The Faithless is out March 7 and I have already pre-ordered 2 different versions.