Monday, July 13, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Kingdom of Liars by Nick Martell


The Kingdom of Liars is the debut novel and the start of a new (epic?) fantasy trilogy by author Nick Martell.  I'd seen some recommendations about it from some author I liked on twitter, so even though it really didn't have a clear appeal to me, I put a hold on it in the library when my library hold limit was no longer a problem.  And after a week without reading a novel, resulting in my library loan being a few days away from expiring, I sort of had to read this one quickly, even though it's not a short book (Amazon lists it as 607 pages).

And I liked The Kingdom of Liars for the most part - it's a fun fantasy tale of magical cities with nobles, commoners, conspiracies, magical powers, lethal mercenaries, a mystery, conspiracies, the works.  The narrative, which takes place mostly as a flashback, is really strong at drawing you in and so I actually finished this book in a single day, which was not my intent.  At the same time, the story's only interesting truly fleshed out character is the main one, several others make contradictory decisions at times that feel out of place, and it does rely a bit too heavily on coincidence for my taste.  I'll be continuing with this series, because there's a really good setup here and I do like the lead character a lot.


------------------------------------------------Plot Summary-----------------------------------------------
The Kingmans were once a powerful family in the City-Kingdom of Hollow, the noble family responsible for Hollow's prosperity, and the only ones who dared to act as a check on the Royal family who ruled Hollow for generations.  But ten years ago, David Kingman, the latest scion of the family was found with a gun in his hand, standing above the corpse of the heir to the kingdom, a nine year old boy prince.  As a result, he was executed and three children were branded with the mark of a crown to signify their guilt as part of his family.

10 years later, the youngest son of that family, Michael, is set to be executed for the murder of the king, a murder he claims he didn't commit.

Each of the three Kingman children has grown up differently: daughter Gwen wants to somehow obtain the gun that killed the prince to prove her father's innocence, and by day acts as a nurse in an asylum - an aslyum that includes her mother...a woman whose sanity and memories have been taken away by magic; older son Lyon has become the nobles' pet executioner, and wishes to put his family heritage behind him to make a new life with the love of his life.

And Michael has formed an new family with a few friends from the street, who he will do anything to protect, with whom he cons idiotic Nobles, who he despises for their role in his family's downfall.  Despite his denial, Michael will do anything to restore the Kingman family name to its proper role in society, and when a dangerously mad noble and a powerful unstoppable Mercenary give him the chance to possibly do just that, he finds himself unable to say no eventually.  But his quest will lead to danger not just to himself, but to his adopted family, and he may not be able to live with the consequences....
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The Kingdom of Liars starts basically at the end, before flashing back to the beginning, in a tired but well executed version of a classic trope - it isn't used to do anything particularly special, but it's fine as an intro.  After that it introduces us fully into this world, which has a lot of interesting aspects as part of the setting.  The Kingdom of Hollow is a Kingdom/City whose power in the world is kind of waning, with technology like guns forbidden because it would give the common people - and does give other countries/cities - power to rival the Nobles magic of "Fabrication."  Such Magic can come in many forms, but each person can only have one such form (such as Light, Darkness, Lightning, Metal, etc.), and while such magic might be possessed by lower people, it has the devastating side effect of causing one to forget one's memories through its use - and for untrained common people, that frequently results in them becoming a shell of themselves, everything forgotten.  And then you have one of the world's moons, which has broken into pieces, supposedly (through unreliable sources) as a result of the Kingman family's actions....and pieces of this moon occasionally fall to the Earth within the city and cause calamities.  But these pieces of the moon whisper sentences to their holders for some mysterious purposes.  My point is that there's a lot of aspects of this setting - I'm certainly forgetting quite a few here because a list is not useful in a review - and Martell weaves it together into a real world fairly well.

He does that through the first person narration of its protagonist, Michael Kingman.  Michael is a confused young man - he was too young seemingly to form true memories of his father, so he doesn't know what to think of the man who led to his family's ruin or whether to believe in his guilt.  He desperately wants to save his mother from her forgetting, seemingly caused by someone's use of magic, and is immensely protective of his family - whether that be his blood relations like his sister, brother or mother or the adopted family of lower class kids he's found in his pseudo-exile.  And yet, while he wasn't alive long enough as a kid to truly be immersed in his family's old trade, he desperately idolizes it and wishes to have it back - even if he'll deny that to anyone's face.  The idea of being this force for good, for justice, in a Kingdom of Nobles who he can't help see as greedy and exploitative is catnip to him.  This desperation conflicts frequently with his fierce desire to protect his family, and results in him swinging back and forth in different directions when they conflict and causes so much trouble, especially as he gets more and more temptations of the possibility of pushing him closer to his dream of restoring the family name.  He's an inconsistent hero because he's a young man who hasn't figured anything out with his life enough to figure out what he wants to do, and it works really well.  You wind up rooting for Michael, even as he makes dumb mistakes that hurt people or isn't as good as he seems to think he is in his internal monologue (see below).

The rest of the cast is less of a hit, with characters disappearing from the page frequently or having motives that are deliberately mysterious so as to frustrate Michael.  Still there are a few standouts - particularly an ambitious young woman in the city cops who wants to rise up to power by any means necessary, whether that be by blackmailing Michael or by seducing a royal prince - whose actions are clearly adverse to Michael in large part and yet he can't help coming back to her (even if the feelings are not romantic at all - there is no romance in this book).  Michael's siblings have their own smaller contradictions but are well built as well, and Charles Domet the mad High Noble whose schemes Michael falls into is particularly well done.

But other characters are hilariously shallow archetypes, like an antagonist literally called by everyone "The Corrupt Prince", as well as two High Noble characters who help Michael repeatedly without him remembering who they are, so they don't seem to have a personality or reasoning behind their actions to give them their own autonomy.  And one of Michael's adopted family, who breaks off from him early on, goes back and forth constantly in different directions, with him disappearing between appearances for large stretches of time so as to cause confusion and whiplash when he reappears. 

All this goes in the service of a plot that is an fascinating and enthralling at times plot of conspiracy and court intrigue, as Michael desperately tries to get back into the good graces of the High Nobles for a plot that can restore his family.  For all my complaints about this book, it drew me in incredibly well, and I tore through it from start to finish.  The book takes number of twists and turns that often do not go how you'd expect, and Michael is a compelling narrator as we go through it.  It does do what I hope for in starting trilogies to some extent (see below) in that it does conclude one arc before setting things up for the future, which makes it also quite a bit satisfying by the end.

Still, I had some other issues.  One of the bigger issues with this book, aside from all the setting up it does that don't lead anywhere yet, is that it teases the ideas of corruption in the nobility and class and perhaps race conflict and then never bothers to tackle them.  Now, not every book has to tackle these ideas, but the prologue which starts at the end has Michael, our narrator, essentially making claims about how the Nobles have ruined the city without his family in a way that implies its a major cause behind his actions and other plot events in this book.  It is not.  We visit the slums once, for an aside that mostly goes nowhere, but other than that the book just doesn't care about such ideas even when once teased.  I guess some of that is just showing how unreliable a narrator Michael is, since his noble claimed goals are gainsaid by his own actions, but it sets up an expectation that isn't met.

In a lesser version of this problem, the book sets up a number of mysteries, especially in the fantastical realm, and basically solves none of them, leaving them up for the sequel.  So the mysterious Mercenary known as "Dark" possesses at least two types of magic which is a major mystery which just isn't addressed other than through a cryptic remark.  The motivations for the revealed bad guy remain completely a mystery, and his defeat at the end of this book happens really abruptly and leaves things wide open.  What the bad guys were truly looking for years ago?  Not Answered.  And a particularly curious piece of the setting - why did the moon break part years ago and why do its fragments whisper things to their bearers (and what exactly do those whisperings mean) is completely left unanswered in the end.  It's typical of a trilogy to set up plot threads for future books in book 1 while concluding only one major arc at the end of that book (and I have complained when they don't) but there are a LOT of threads here opened up and then never bothered with.

In short, The Kingdom of Liars is a solid debut novel and starter of a trilogy and I am intrigued to read more, even if it also seems to have been overly ambitious for the story it wound up telling.  Hopefully these concerns will be mollified by book 2.
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