Wednesday, June 10, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Rule by Rowenna Miller


Rule is the final book in Rowenna Miller's "The Unraveled Kingdom" trilogy, which began with "Torn" back in 2018 and continued with 2019's "Fray."  The series, featuring a seamstress who can add charms for luck or love into her work who gets involved in rising class conflict, has from the start had an ambitious agenda - using its fantasy story to tackle a number of interesting themes.  It has....not always done well at that, with the first book in particular having a rather unfortunate and i'm pretty sure unintended implication, but I've always appreciated the attempts, and the characters and general story have worked well enough to carry my interest.  So I was curious to see how the trilogy would end - both for the characters and the themes Miller has tried to play with.

And perhaps fittingly for this series, Rule is a bit of a mixed bag.  It's a solid conclusion to the clearly French Revolution-esque story, with the novel focusing on all out war that's broken out between Royalists and Reformists after the prior two novels, and Sophie struggling to find her place in it.  It again deals with themes of incrementalism vs faster-paced reform, as well as themes of the transitions of power, forgiveness, nationalism, and more.  Does it handle each of these themes well?  Eh, as I said, it's a mixed bag, but the result is still an interesting story with characters I did like and care about, so I don't regret the read, and look forward to seeing what Miller will do in the future.

Note: This is book 3 of a trilogy, so spoilers for Torn and Fray are inevitable.

---------------------------------------------------Plot Summary------------------------------------------------------
Sophie Balstrade's efforts to teach charm casting in secret to a convent in a foreign land, where magic is heresy, are not going well.  It doesn't help that while this is going on, her love Theodor and her brother Kristos are fighting for freedom and reform in her homeland of Galitha, against the Noble class clinging to power.  Sophie's work is bringing support to the Reformist cause - cannons, charmed clothing - but being so far away from them is driving her mad.  But just when it seems she might make a breakthrough with her charms, her secret is discovered, and she is forced on the run and to return to Galitha.

There, in Galitha she finds a desperate cause, as men of all ranks try to band together to take on the more trained Royalist fighting force.  To prevail, Kristos and Theodor will have to find a way to band the people together in the face of adversity the likes of which they'v never seen, for the future of Galitha.  And to help them, and to guide them all to a better future, Sophie will have to use her charmcasting...and perhaps even the curse-casting she hates, in ways she once absolutely refused.  Ways which will alter not just Galitha, but the entire wold, forever.
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Rule concludes the Unraveled Kingdom trilogy, which was told from the first person perspective of Sophie Balstrade.  The series has, while also featuring a fantasy romance between a Prince and a woman of low birth - Sophie - dealt heavily with issues of class inequality, with said inequality creating the conflicts in each book: in book 1, it led to a foreign interloper using the oppressed workers to start a revolt against the nobles; in book 2, it led to our heroic noble prince, pushed by Sophie, passing a reform law to grant greater rights to the workers....only for the nobles to revolt by way of military force.  Now, the conflict is directly out in the open - while we're not done with political maneuvering and speeches in this book, the setting of this book is one of outright war and revolution.

And this setting brings our lead heroine Sophie to a new place, one in which she's not sure she's comfortable.  Sophie began this trilogy as a seamstress from a minority population who used her culture's traditional charm magic to make special clothing, able to bring good fortune to the wearer, and she rejected outright the use of such magic for the purposes of helping anyone with violence - to say nothing of using the negative counterpart to charm magic - curse magic - to cause direct harm to anyone.  Since book 1, as a result of pressures, what Sophie can do has massively increased, even as she doesn't fully understand it, and now she's in a war where there's no way for her to avoid doing what she once refused.  And as she sees the war firsthand, she finds herself needing to act directly, but is of course troubled by the implications of what such an act would do - especially with magic previously only having been an international secret kept by certain other nations, one she will bring out into the open through her actions.

Still while this also causes conflict for Sophie, she also has learned to be more active in fighting for the rights of others than she once was - when she preferred mainly to stay on the sidelines in that fight - sometimes for good reason (something that sort of rears its head again in this book, more on that later).  As people are inspired by her, and more explicitly by her brother's fierce rhetoric, Sophie finds herself fighting for causes that others won't pick up - in one case here, for women's rights in the new Galithea, and thus for true equality.  She's a tremendously well done heroine, who has made this trilogy really work throughout despite its other issues.

The other characters are mainly well done, but Sophie is the star that keeps this plot moving, and it works to create a plot that successfully deals with the loose ends in this novel and comes to a satisfying conclusion, with a number of twists along the way.  Don't expect a fairy tale ending if you read Rule, but it's not a pessimistic one either - if anything, it's slightly optimistic.  Some trilogy enders make you feel disappointed in how it all turned out - or well, didn't turn out or get resolved, and that is not the case here.

At least that's the case with the plot elements.  As with in the first book, although to a significantly lesser extent, the book is bursting with interesting questions and themes and more often than not it punts on fully examining them due to lack of time.  So when Sophie's magic and the conflict results in her people's country being invaded, they flock to become part of Galitha, which causes no meaningful conflict whatsoever - there's some lip service about how this causes some dissent but it goes nowhere.  Similarly, an antagonistic character in this book, the revolutionary Niko, who favors a more nationalist and violent approach, has his forces more or less defanged without any hard work - Niko himself becomes a problem in the final act (this isn't a spoiler you'll see it coming), but his movement is so believable in the current day and the book handwaves it away like it's nothing after he's dealt with.  And issues like political rights of women once again seem to be coming as a result of incrementalist action - the type of action this series really cannot quite figure out whether it is in favor of or not (Book 1 suggested yes, Book 2 suggested no, Book 3 suggests "it depends").   And the questions and fear about Sophie's power impacting elections are brought up and then never go anywhere, despite them actually being realistic fears that would have an impact!

Still, none of the way these themes and issues are handled has any potential bad implications as the first book did, and I prefer a book be overly ambitious to well....not at all, so that's hardly the biggest complaint.  And with the excellent lead character, Rule still works rather well, so I'm glad to have read it, and look forward to seeing what Miller pull off in the future.
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