A review by extemporalli
The True Queen by Zen Cho

4.0

My last read of 2020, and a thoroughly enjoyable one at that. 'Ordinary, long-suffering' Muna reminds me of many people I have known and enjoyed - both gentle and accommodating of the kind of adventure that their more chaotic counterparts tend to wreak. My favourite Muna moment was when she enters the hallway of magical portraits of old white men who start hurling sexist and racist abuse at them and she's taken aback because... it's honestly very embarrassing in her culture to lose control like that. Which I guess really summarises what I think Zen Cho was trying to do w/ whiteness and empire in this novel: describe the centre from the point of view of someone decidedly not of the centre, *becomes* marginalised through travel to the centre but wasn't brought up in that marginalisation, and so is able to shrug and turn away from these non-hometown foibles. Which is a pretty neat contrast to what she did in The Sorcerer Royal!

Anyway, this was only one aspect of the novel, but it's one that struck me as especially impressive. Overall a fun, light-hearted novel, and one that has unexpected resonances for me because of Zen Cho's extratextual description of her 'ordinary, longsuffering heroine, with no memories or magic'.