A review by ghosthermione
A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine

adventurous dark emotional funny inspiring mysterious tense slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

 As with most popular books, I had a lot of expectations out of this. Also for some reason, after watching the Hugos ceremony, the impression that the author was a good person and I just could NOT not love this book. As always, putting pressure on myself isn't great... and I found myself struggling to get into it, because I did not want to be disappointed. 
But then it caught me off guard and started being funny which was absolutely not what I was expecting, and I loved it from there. I don't mean to say it's comedy, because it's really not. But it has some truly funny moments and I found myself laughing, and I find that it's always a good way to bond with characters. I just. absolutely. loved. Mahit, and her cultural liaison Three Seagrass. 
The plot is a complex political intrigue and it would have been pretty easy to make it confusing, but I was never lost. Or, because Mahit is basically a stranger in a foreign land, despite all her knowledge of their culture, the confusion was always deliberate. I was confused with her. 
There's a lot in this book about colonization, and empire, and culture, which I don't feel I'm in a good position to judge, except that it came across as really well thought-out. 
Without spoiling it, I really liked the way it ended, it was satisfying, and also pretty well-rounded. No cliffhanger, which I'm not sure I could've survived, emotionally. 
I can't say enough how much I love the characters. I had this feeling the whole... last 150 pages really, that I wanted it all to unfold so I could know what happened to them, and simultaneously did not want that because then I'd have no more of them to read. Suffice to say I ordered the next volume before I was even finished with this one. 
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