A review by becsmarg
Abounding Might by Melissa McShane

2.0

I’m torn on this book! On the one hand, I raced through it in a day. It’s got a very cool magic system and it’s clearly got the same inspiration as Naomi Novik’s excellent Temeraire books (what if the Napoleonic war adventure novels of my youth had magic and girls in them). On the other hand- the comparison to Novik does McShane no favors. She’s a beautiful descriptive writer but she handles the politics and implications of her world building significantly less deftly than Novik. Novik manages to have her characters have era appropriate prejudices while making it clear that sucks and giving them opportunities for growth, and she doesn’t whitewash ugly parts of history, while still showing how dragons would change the balance of powers and make an alternative history. McShane doesn’t nail this balancing act *at all*. She just includes an authors note “if everyone had magic, probably racial prejudice wouldn’t be as strong? So in this world the East India Company is actually doing good things in India, like they are depicted as doing in British propaganda to this day”. Sexism still exists even though women can have talent, so that reasoning simply doesn’t track. Seems the author is interested in the inner experiences of white women and maybe white men and absolutely no people of color. Plus, the first person narrator has extremely Orientalist views on India that are never challenged. They are, in fact, held up by the narrative as enlightened, compared to actively racist other Europeans (who are still the good guys). Because the East India Company are the good guys of a story written in the 2020s, while an uprising of the colonized is described as “evil” and then turns out to not even be the work of Indians at all (they’re simply the credulous pawns of Bad Europeans). Truly wild stuff. It all comes across as sloppy at best and colonialist apologia at worst, and significantly took away from my enjoyment of the story or desire to continue the series.