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A review by adularia25
City of Broken Magic by Mirah Bolender
3.0
First, I'm going to start with what I like. I like Laura as a character. The casual sexism she puts up with resonates all too well.
The book started well, but has a couple of really big flaws. One isn't so much the book as the cover: the blurb reveals a major plot point that doesn't occur until the end of the book. Do yourself a favor and skip the last paragraph so you don't get a mistaken notion of what is going to happen.
But the bigger issues for me are the cavalier use of terms, and how the book skirts into colonization narrative territory with the west conquers the east backstory.
The book is set in a fantasy world - but it's not. The map is based on Japan. It's called the "Orien" which is one letter away from Orient, which is a term fraught with problems.
And spoilers, since these aren't revealed until partially through the book:
But that's not all. The terms for many things in the world are French (Malamare for the "Bad Sea", Beaumaris for the "Good Sea", argent for the silver money) and early on the readers are told the land was colonized from the West, the natives almost entirely wiped out by the crusaders that brought with them magic weapons. What few natives that still live are described as having dark hair.
And the evil they are fighting? That was created by the natives as a magic-eating monster to cripple the magic of the invaders. Which it did - but they had no control over it so it ate them too - and now the entire island is under quarantine from the West and any ships who head that way will be shot on sight. So the deeper problem of magic-gone-wrong was created by the natives... which doesn't sit well with me.
And this is more problematic because the main character Laura is clearly from western descent. Though Okane is not and three-fourths of the way through the book Clae is revealed to be only partially of western descent, and partially native. The racism that comes from that is handled well once it is revealed.
I think the story would have been stronger without the sort of obvious ties to the real world.
And the use of colonization as it keeps coming up in the book is... jarring, to say the least. Especially when western views on colonization is so insidiously pervasive in fantasy literature.
I understand this is a first book, but I sort of stopped cold about halfway through when I hit what I put in the spoiler above. I still finished it, but I wasn't enjoying it as much anymore.
There are some ways that could help the above issues
The book started well, but has a couple of really big flaws. One isn't so much the book as the cover: the blurb reveals a major plot point that doesn't occur until the end of the book. Do yourself a favor and skip the last paragraph so you don't get a mistaken notion of what is going to happen.
But the bigger issues for me are the cavalier use of terms, and how the book skirts into colonization narrative territory with the west conquers the east backstory.
The book is set in a fantasy world - but it's not. The map is based on Japan. It's called the "Orien" which is one letter away from Orient, which is a term fraught with problems.
And spoilers, since these aren't revealed until partially through the book:
Spoiler
The monsters, which don't have a name for the first half of the book, are revealed to be called bakemono. The native language is clearly Japanese when a few other terms are revealed.But that's not all. The terms for many things in the world are French (Malamare for the "Bad Sea", Beaumaris for the "Good Sea", argent for the silver money) and early on the readers are told the land was colonized from the West, the natives almost entirely wiped out by the crusaders that brought with them magic weapons. What few natives that still live are described as having dark hair.
And the evil they are fighting? That was created by the natives as a magic-eating monster to cripple the magic of the invaders. Which it did - but they had no control over it so it ate them too - and now the entire island is under quarantine from the West and any ships who head that way will be shot on sight. So the deeper problem of magic-gone-wrong was created by the natives... which doesn't sit well with me.
And this is more problematic because the main character Laura is clearly from western descent. Though Okane is not and three-fourths of the way through the book Clae is revealed to be only partially of western descent, and partially native. The racism that comes from that is handled well once it is revealed.
I think the story would have been stronger without the sort of obvious ties to the real world.
And the use of colonization as it keeps coming up in the book is... jarring, to say the least. Especially when western views on colonization is so insidiously pervasive in fantasy literature.
I understand this is a first book, but I sort of stopped cold about halfway through when I hit what I put in the spoiler above. I still finished it, but I wasn't enjoying it as much anymore.
There are some ways that could help the above issues