A review by youcancallmefi
The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson

5.0

 

 

Please check TW for this series before reading it.

3 words for this book: unhinged, political, mind-blowing.

I don’t know if I have the intelligence to write a review for a book that melted all my brain cells with its grandiosity, but I shall try.

I have read a few political fantasy books, but somehow I was unprepared for what I encountered in The Traitor Baru Cormorant. First of all, it’s frustrating to realise I haven’t harnessed any emotional tools to deconstruct this at this stage of my reader life whilst it emotionally devastated me. I stared at a wall for a full hour after finishing this one, trying to make sense of how this book latched itself on the shelves where I keep my thoughts.

Baru’s home, where she lives with her two father and mother, is colonised by the empire and from early on, you realise that Baru will be a traitor and a villain no matter what. She leaves her home, she trains to become the Empire’s accountant and infiltrates herself in the deepest webs of the world, never losing sight of her goals to destroy it all. I lost my shit right here. THE MC IS AN ACCOUNTANT. HELLO. WHAT?

This is one hell of a dark book. It’s about power, about the limits of what you would do to meet your end goal. About corruption, colonialism, machination, love and war and the most perfect portrayal of revenge and betrayal I have ever read.

I loved how at every chapter you would face a new angle of the story and how twisted it became. How Baru and her supporting characters were both so human and such monsters. It was brutal to have a thought hovering over me whilst I was reading these pages and the thought was “who is the puppet and who’s the puppeteer in this story?”

Baru is devious, formal, cunning and intelligent beyond measure. What a character. I truly have no words to describe this force . I felt the more I drank her in, the more poisonous it felt and more in love I became. There is hardly a character that has ever made me feel like this.

This book broke something in me. Maybe that is why it took me so long to articulate my thoughts and this review.

And that ending. Slaps you with the force of a thousand sea waves whilst making you believe in love beyond words. I had to muffle a scream when I finished it and realised how far Baru went.

Subtly brutal is the best way to characterise this masterpiece.