Thursday, April 19, 2018

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Markswoman by Rati Mehrotra





Markswoman was yet another book I wanted to like more than I did.  The book is a postapocalyptic scifi/fantasy genre story (as is common with this subgenre, elements of SF and Fantasy are so mingled here as to prevent this book from being distinguished as one or the other) that takes place in Central Asia (here known as Asiana) in a distant future.  More importantly, it's one where the mythology of the story is based not on an all-too-common European background, but more on the culture/mythology of southeast Asia (particularly Indian/Hindu mythology).  Add in a setting featuring Orders of female assassins (the "markswomen") enforcing justice in the world, and well, I really wanted to like this book.

Unfortunately, Markswoman has a lot of flaws.  The first in a duology (whose second book's publishing date is still unknown), Markswoman features a lot of worldbuilding but a plot that is incredibly simple and predictable, with characters who are pretty shallow at heart, absent maybe one or two.  Add a cliffhanger ending which is completely unsatisfying, the end result is a book which seems to waste all of that worldbuilding that could've led to something special.  The book isn't offensively bad, but it has little to recommend as a result.

Note: I read Markswoman as an audiobook, which is narrated proficiently. But having done so, I'm almost certainly going to get the spelling of various characters/places wrong, so forgive me where I do.


 -------------------------------------------------Plot Summary--------------------------------------------
In a distant future, humanity in the land of Asiana has lost much of its ancient technology and knowledge, after the result of The Great War some 800+ years ago.  Now, justice in the villages and clans of Asiana are enforced by one of the Orders of Markswomen - women who have bonded themselves to special telepathic blades - the "Kataris" (brought to the land by now long gone beings from Space known simply as "The Ones") - who eliminate individuals (the "Marks") who disrupt the peace more than can be handled by an individual village/clan.  There are Five of these Orders in Asiana, four comprised of women and one, the Order of Kuhr, which is made up of men instead, but is distrusted by the others as a result.

Kyra Veer is a member of the Order of Kali, the oldest Order of Markswomen, even as its numbers have diminished over time to become the smallest.  When she was little, her clan was slaughtered by the bandit clan of Tau using alien guns that drive their users insane.  Since then she has been taken in by the leader of the Order of Kali, the legendary Shirin Mam, and given her first assignment to become a true Markswoman - to assassinate the son of the leader of Tau, and only him.  Despite some difficulty in convincing herself to do the deed, Kyra accomplishes that task and becomes a true Markswoman.

But when Shirin Mam is soon found dead under mysterious circumstances, Kyra knows in her heart that the culprit is the new leader of the Order - the Mistress of Mental Arts, Tamsyn, who is famous for her deadly blade and for her formidable mental powers.  In order to stop Tamsyn, who is clearly up to no good, Kyra flees to the Order of Kuhr, where she obtains training from a guilt-ridden marksman named Rustam so that she can defeat Tamsyn in a duel.  But in the process, she may find herself learning parts of her past that will greatly affect how she sees herself in the world.  And in the process, Kyra and Rustam might start having feelings toward one another, despite the Orders' strict laws of celibacy.

And then of course, there's Tamsyn to consider - does Kyra really have a chance at winning a duel against her?  Or is she simply marching toward her own death?
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Markswoman is told near entirely from the perspectives of Kyra (about 65% of the book) and Rustam (30%), with small bits here and there told from other perspectives.  I liked Kyra a good bit, she's a pretty interesting character with pretty reasonable struggles between her want of vengeance, her fear of certain truths, her insecurity with her chosen profession's dark side (you know, killing people), and feelings for others.  If there's one thing that might make me want to read on, it's to find out the end of Kyra's journey (and this being a duology apparently means that I wouldn't have to read more than one more book, which is tempting).

The worldbuilding is also excellent, there's a lot of interesting ideas here, between that of the ancient weapons left behind by now-long-gone aliens, to the codes set down by an ancient King who may not have been as righteous as people now believe, to that of the conflict and work done by the Orders.  There's definitely an interesting story to be told in this world, I'm just not sure that this book does that due to its many problems.

Those problems stem from the book being incredibly predictable and having very few characters besides Kyra, if any, with any depth whatsoever.  While I enjoyed the main protagonist, our secondary protagonist Rustam doesn't quite work as well.  You'd think from the start he's being set up for some redemption journey, having wrongfully taken an innocent life and being beset with guilt, but none of that setup actually changes anything - his entire story is basically just that of his heritage (which readers will guess fairly quickly) and of his training Kyra (and their falling for each other, which readers will again see coming fairly quickly).  He doesn't really have an arc of his own, and it weakens the book as a result.

Another problem character: the main villain Tamsyn.  There's no evidence that she actually committed the killing that ignites the plot of this book (and I'd be unsurprised to find out it was a suicide in the next book) but she is so blatantly evil in her actions it is kind of unbelievable that there isn't a revolt of the remaining markswomen in the Order of Kali in the span of this book as she takes her actions.  It's one thing for our main character to be the only one suspecting her of murder, but it's another for basically everyone else to go along with what is so blatantly evil.  She's the bad guy, the obvious bad guy (with some apologies to the greater scope villain left for the next book) and the book isn't interested in subverting that.

And while none of the plot from the mid-point of the book onward is anything but predictable, the book has an offensive cliffhanger ending.  The good news is that the fight that the book is building to the entire time DOES happen in this book, so the book isn't being an ass about teasing something that never happens, but the book ends as soon as the fight does, such that the massive fallout is left entirely as a cliffhanger.  Since there's nothing to the final half of the book other than building to the fight, it results in an incredibly unsatisfying ending.  Again, having a cliffhanger isn't a bad thing per se, but if you choose to end a book with one, you need to still have an ending that makes the reader feel satisfied.  And Markswoman fails at that.

I might read the next book just to finish the duology to see what happens to Kyra, and to see how that worldbuilding pays off.  But I probably won't, due to how sour the ending made me feel.



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