Full Disclosure: This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on July 11, 2023 in exchange for a potential review. I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.
The Splinter in the Sky is the debut novel of author Kei Ashing-Giwa and is a novel that deals with a theme that is getting more deserved attention in the books I read these days: the issue of Empire, its treatment of colonized peoples, and how those people can, should, and may be able to react to a foe who sees them as inhuman and seeks to change them to fit the Empire's own standards (as Empires in our world have done, time and time again). The novel is centered around a woman Enitan from such a conquered colonized people who takes desperate action in heading to the seat of the Empire when her sibling Xiang is kidnapped mysteriously by said Empire....and follows Enitan as (in her attempt to save Xiang) she gets involved in the political conspiracies and intrigue of the Empire that she hates so much.
It's a setup that I've seen done a number of times in various and often really interesting ways (see C.L. Clark's The Unbroken, Seth Dickinson's Baru Cormorant, Arkardy Martine's A Memory Called Empire, etc.), and The Splinter in the Sky starts really promisingly, especially as Enitan winds up working for the ostensible leader (but really figure head) of the Empire - to whom she's attrated - as well as sending reports to the Empire's main political rival. But The Splinter in the Sky kind of struggles with what to do with this setup once it's established how awful people are to the colonized people, settling on becoming kind of a conspiracy thriller race to kill the members of a shadow council governing the Empire before they can embark on a new deadly war, and then assuming that with the council dead that the now empowered good emperor can change things for the better. I don't mean to ding a book too hard for optimism (or for being more optimistic than those other works I mentioned), but the Splinter in the Sky's setup suggests a realist view of how things work and how difficult it will be to change them and then its ending just kind of throws that away, and I didn't think that really worked for me, either in fitting the story or carrying the themes.
More specifics after the jump:
Plot Summary:
Years ago, the distant moon habitat of Koriko was conquered by the Vaalbaran Empire, one of the two superpowers of the planet of Gondwana. Koriko has little of material value to offer Vaalbara, but the Empire has subjugated its people anyway, placing them under a half Korikan, half Vaalbaran governor, forcing them to learn a new language (but not the most holy Vaalbaran one), and forced to live under conditions enforced and watched by faceless sentinels. To the people of the Empire, the Korikese are less than people - simply savages - and they are treated as such.
Enitan Ijebu just wishes she could live her life without Vaalbaran interference, but at the same time is entirely willing to keep her head down and continue her job - working as a scribe for a Vaalbaran monastery (to their great annoyance due to her heretical skill with their languages) - and her passion - crafting special teas for customers, friends, and family. She has an on again off again relationship with the governor, Ajana, and is fiercely protective of her sibling, Xiang, who wishes to become an architect...even if that means going off into the Empire.
But when Xiang is seemingly kidnapped by the Empire, Enitan becomes determined to find a way to bring them back and save them from whatever fate may have befallen them. To do that, Enitan gets herself taken back to the capital of the Empire as a hostage, where she hopes to find out what happened to Xiang. But to her surprise, Enitan manages instead to come to the attention of not only the leader of Vaalbara's most powerful enemy, but of the Imperator/God-Emperor of Vaalbara herself, a woman who is surprisingly interested in Enitan and promises her freedom for all of Koriko if Enitan will simply act as her agent in rooting out the most powerful people in all of Vaalbara.
It's a task Enitan is decidedly unqualified to achieve...but one she cannot afford to turn down...even if the most likely outcome is her death....
The Splinter in the Sky is a tale that wants to deal with the harsh truths and dark realities of Empire and Colonization. Our story features a protagonist Enitan whose people are conquered by the Vaalbaran Empire and treated as subhuman just because their cultures are different...even though they have just as many technological achievements as their conquerors (not that that would ever be recognized). And as Enitan moves to the Empire in search of a way to save Xiang, Enitan suffers the reality of colonized peoples living amongst their conquerers - being treated as inferior in all the different ways, even when the conquerors are trying what they think is being good to her. So you have the usual sort of nobles and merchants who treat Enitan as exotic and something to be gawked at, you have some who want to try her teas to pretend to enjoy part of the exotic culture, and you have just as bad those who think they are helping by stealing Korikese artifacts and pretending their research allows them to imitate and understand who the Korikese are. These people are at best willfully blind and at most are openly racist and prejudicial, and Enitan's dealing with it all feels incredibly real and is done very well.
And so when the book provides Enitan with a connection to the Empire's figurehead leader, the Imperator Menkhet, well the book starts at first in a similar vein - that Menkhet, despite her wellmeaningness in her communications and overtures to Enitan (with whom she obviously shares a mutual attraction even if, unlike what the rumors say, the two aren't intimate), can't really understand the suffering that Enitan is going through just being in the Empire and how hard she is affected by the prejudice and the oppression and her people's treatment. And in many other books, that lack of ability to understand, or difference in statures (even if Menkhet isn't really noble born like similar characters in other books) would be a recurring barrier...especially with the Empire being too set in its ways and too systematically incapable of change to really be swayed by Menkhet having a change of heart or understanding.
The Splinter in the Sky is not such a book, but how it tries to go in a different direction doesn't really work. What it does is invent a shadow council of oligarchs who secretly rule the Empire for Enitan to have to hunt down and assassinate, and once that's done, with a little light but not too hard trickery, Enitan and Menkhet are able to reform and dissemble the evils of the Empire. This does create a thriller plot that draws one in, and keeps you intrigued, but at the same time, it feels wholly unrealistic if you think about it for more than one second and feels like a laughable way to resolve the book's deeper conflict and themes. Add in the fact that there's a number of subplots that just don't wind up mattering (Enitan for example gets recruited as a spy for the Empire's democratic rival in a subplot that has ZERO impact whatsoever on the story and could be excised without affecting anything at all) and well, the book kind of feels like it wasted its strong setup to resolve it all with a generic thriller confrontation that's been done time and time again.
This is not to say that a happy ending or a dissembling of Empire couldn't be the end result of such a book - but that such a treatment requires a lot more intensive effort than this book really seems to pull off. And that's a shame given how strong and interesting, if depressing, the start to this book was. Hopefully Ashing-Giwa will manage to pull together her next novel in a stronger fashion, because the potential and promise was here, it just couldn't quite be pulled off.
No comments:
Post a Comment