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A review by handove
A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine
5.0
Nothing touched by empire stays clean.
19-02-25: the first thing i must say is thank you to the british empire. now i can monologue on twitter or storygraph about colonialism and not a single soul can contradict me.
this was excellent. it delved most into the cultural imperialism side of things, because lsel station (where our main character, mahit, comes from) isn't really a colony of teixcalaan (the empire), but she's grown up under its influence and spent her childhood absorbing that culture, a culture that will never truly see her as a person the same way. mahit you deserved better everything.
even apart from that this is a book about a lesbian (lesbians!!) in space. there's some fuckass communication system centered around bad poetry and there's a character called two cartography, nicknamed map. the side characters, i have conflicted feelings about three seagrass (especially later her role as a romantic interest) but nineteen adze? she and i, we could do lesbianisms together iykwim
i fucking love this book so much. it's excellent. it's brilliant. not to imply that the world revolves around me but in this case it does and this series was made for me in a lab. thank you for your service arkady martine
19-02-25: the first thing i must say is thank you to the british empire. now i can monologue on twitter or storygraph about colonialism and not a single soul can contradict me.
this was excellent. it delved most into the cultural imperialism side of things, because lsel station (where our main character, mahit, comes from) isn't really a colony of teixcalaan (the empire), but she's grown up under its influence and spent her childhood absorbing that culture, a culture that will never truly see her as a person the same way. mahit you deserved better everything.
even apart from that this is a book about a lesbian (lesbians!!) in space. there's some fuckass communication system centered around bad poetry and there's a character called two cartography, nicknamed map. the side characters, i have conflicted feelings about three seagrass (especially later her role as a romantic interest) but nineteen adze? she and i, we could do lesbianisms together iykwim
i fucking love this book so much. it's excellent. it's brilliant. not to imply that the world revolves around me but in this case it does and this series was made for me in a lab. thank you for your service arkady martine
Content Warnings
Graphic: Racism, Xenophobia, Medical content, Colonisation, and War
Moderate: Death, Blood, and Murder
Minor: Alcohol