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A review by diana_dea
The Alcazar by Amy Ewing
4.0
I loved this conclusion to the duology! The Alcazar did a good job at elaborating on what The Cerulean set up. I really liked the characters and the development they showed as the ventured farther out of the lives they're accustomed to. I sometimes got a bit bored by Leela's chapter, not because I didn't care about her character or what was happening in the city in the sky, but just because I was used to the switching of perspectives in the parts with the other characters' chapters. So I would have preferred if Leela's chapter had just been mixed in with the others as well.
My favourite part about this duology is that it shows different kinds of societies in its world building and they don't all work the same concerning norms or power structures. There's Kaolin, which is most like our society, with a patriarchal structure and one single ruler. Then there's Pelago, which embraces its diversity more (without necessarily being a perfect country, the power struggles show that there's definitely other issues) and leans more on matriarchal structures, with three queens ruling over it that make decisions among them by majority vote. And then we have Sera's city in the sky, that consists only of women, that usually enter marriages of three and are ruled by a high priestess chosen by the deified sun. And it's really interesting to see these different variations on society - that challenge the assumptions we are used to and are not just copies of our own world - and how they interact when faced with each other. Could the world building have been elaborated on in some points? Yes, definitely! But we got enough so that I could fall in love with this concept.
Slight spoilers: There are a lot of negative reviews for the first book complaining that Sera is straight when we're promised a society of lesbians. But I don't really get the problem? We're explicitly told in this book that she is not the only straight one, that there are other straight Cerulean, as well as asexual and aromantic and pansexual and bisexual ones etc. They just don't really use labels for this and it hasn't really been known in the recent generations because they didn't visit the planet and therefore didn't even meet any men, and the high priestess has been suppressing the Cerulean's unique identities. So how is this different from our world, where the statistical majority is straight, but there are other identities that are just as valid but, as we all know, often suppressed and not talked about? It's only that the norm here isn't heterosexuality. (And there's still plenty of queer characters, so it's not like we were robbed of the representation.)
My favourite part about this duology is that it shows different kinds of societies in its world building and they don't all work the same concerning norms or power structures. There's Kaolin, which is most like our society, with a patriarchal structure and one single ruler. Then there's Pelago, which embraces its diversity more (without necessarily being a perfect country, the power struggles show that there's definitely other issues) and leans more on matriarchal structures, with three queens ruling over it that make decisions among them by majority vote. And then we have Sera's city in the sky, that consists only of women, that usually enter marriages of three and are ruled by a high priestess chosen by the deified sun. And it's really interesting to see these different variations on society - that challenge the assumptions we are used to and are not just copies of our own world - and how they interact when faced with each other. Could the world building have been elaborated on in some points? Yes, definitely! But we got enough so that I could fall in love with this concept.
Slight spoilers: There are a lot of negative reviews for the first book complaining that Sera is straight when we're promised a society of lesbians. But I don't really get the problem? We're explicitly told in this book that she is not the only straight one, that there are other straight Cerulean, as well as asexual and aromantic and pansexual and bisexual ones etc. They just don't really use labels for this and it hasn't really been known in the recent generations because they didn't visit the planet and therefore didn't even meet any men, and the high priestess has been suppressing the Cerulean's unique identities. So how is this different from our world, where the statistical majority is straight, but there are other identities that are just as valid but, as we all know, often suppressed and not talked about? It's only that the norm here isn't heterosexuality. (And there's still plenty of queer characters, so it's not like we were robbed of the representation.)