SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Unbroken by C. L. Clark: https://t.co/svMZyJKGGT
— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) March 4, 2021
Short Review: 9 out of 10
1/4
Short Review (cont): When Touraine is sent back by the Empire to the homeland she was taken from as a child, to be a soldier, she finds a land she doesnt really know. But when she gets caught up in the schemes of a Princess, she finds everything falling apart into chaos....
— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) March 4, 2021
2/4
Short Review (cont): A tremendous story of Empire, of colonization, of romance between peoples of different power, of family, and well of oh so so many betrayals. This will be in the running for a lot of awards in 2021 for good reason.
— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) March 4, 2021
3/4
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 March 23, 2021 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 Unbroken is the epic fantasy debut of author C. L. Clark and one of the more hyped books I've seen among the authors I follow on social media for a while. It's an epic fantasy novel that deals heavily with themes of Empire and Colonialism, just like a lot of stuff I read nowadays (it's a pretty relevant topic), but it centers its story on a less usual area: conscripted soldiers from a conquered land, and the forces that tear them in so many directions. Add in the promise of a potential (F-F) romance to go along with it all, and The Unbroken was definitely on my TBR list even before I was lucky enough to land an early copy.
And The Unbroken definitely delivers a hell of a narrative, with an incredible central protagonist and a story that takes so many turns it will leave you dizzy. I'm still not quite sure whether the ending fully works - things get cleaned up a bit too tidy in the finale - but the story's turns and character developments had me gasping repeatedly in shock, and I was invested from the near start. So yeah, this is definitely one to watch for award consideration next year and - even though it has a satisfying ending - merely the start of a series which leaves a number of questions potentially open, which makes me eager to see where it goes from here.
------------------------------------------------------Plot Summary---------------------------------------------------
Lieutenant Touraine of the Balladairan Colonial Brigade (the "Sands") never wanted to return to El-Wast, the capital city of Qazāl, the city she was born. Touraine was taken from the city, from her long-forgotten parents, as a child and conscripted into the brigade, where she was taught by her Balladairan to be "civilized" and to fight for Balladaire and its Empire. But Touraine and the Sands are not treated the same as the rest of the Balladairan forces - the Sands are abused and made to take the dangerous assignments and treated by the normal army officers as little more than dirt. And now they're coming back to their original homeland, where the Shālan Empire once stood, in order to help the Empire police their own people and to snuff out any trace of rebellion.
Unlike her closest allies - her best friend Tibeau and her lover Pruett, her two sergeants - Touraine never had any dreams of the Shālans rising up against the Empire for a better future. Her goal has instead always been to rise up in the ranks all the way to General, where she can use authority to protect the only family she's ever known - not the Shālans or blood family, but the Sands she's fought and bled for.
But when an act of heroism puts her on the radar of the Shālan rebellion and threatens to end her military career - and any chance of helping the Sands, Touraine finds that her only way forward is to attach herself to the Balladairan Princess Luca, a woman who wants to prove her worth by negotiating a peaceful end to the rebellion...and wants Touraine to help her make contact with the people she left behind, people who would happily kill her fellow soldiers. And so, even as Touraine begins to be a little attracted to Luca, she faces a decision of how to act to save those she cares about....a decision that could throw the whole land into chaos.
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The Unbroken is kind of the story of two protagonists: Luca and Touraine, but Touraine is really the main focus. I've read a number of books with a similar basic setup as The Unbroken seems at first to have: two potential love interests from different sides of a colonial empire, one being from the colonizers and one being from the conquered people, trying to deal with the realistic situation of oppression and discrimination while also dealing with their own growing impossible attraction (in the most ordinary of those books, the colonizing love interest learns what her people have done and changes her ways to try and do what she can to fix it). And The Unbroken begins sort of in this same manner: with Luca wanting to try and remedy the wounds of colonization from the start - albeit for selfish reasons -
but it goes in a very different direction with her character and plot. And the book makes it clear through Touraine's eyes, the main eyes we see the world through, that Luca's actions have potential impacts far beyond what Luca can imagine, impacts that Touraine can't quite accept.
And that drives Touraine to make more and more bad decisions in a way that left me utterly breathless, especially due to how tremendously well done Touraine's character is in the story. As noted above, Touraine was taken from her homeland as a child, and any loyalty to it was essentially educated out of her....except that she and her soldiers still are treated like dirt instead of as loyal forces of the Empire. And so her first loyalty is not to her homeland or to the Empire, but to her soldiers, the Sands, who she considers her first and only family. A threat to the Sands is the quickest thing to driver her to act, and as she does act, she begins to see from the rebels point of view - how the Empire will never treat any of her people, loyal or no, with respect and dignity, how the Empire will seemingly never leave and how the Empire will simply take and take rather than truly act in friendship. Luca may want peace for her own ends, but she cannot understand that what she wants in return is to take something of Shāla, and Touraine can see that right on, especially as she sees more and more of what is going on in the homeland she left behind. And YET, despite these revelations, despite these changes in her sympathies, Touraine's first priority remains throughout with the Sands, her people, despite Touraine's actions often shifting her to other sides of the conflict potentially opposite them. They are, despite everything, her family - the Empire's actions have left her with nothing else at her core to believe in.
Luca by contrast feels the need to prove herself to take back the throne from her essentially usurping uncle. She has a bum leg due to a horse injury as a child she has worked to get around, and decides that peacefully ending the rebellion will show her worth to the Empire and allow her to take back the throne: oh she believes that the way the Empire treats the Shālans is often cruel and should stop, but it's less important to her than her future as an Emperor who could possibly stop everything. And so she can't see what Touraine explains to her about freedom, about the fact that she wants Shālan magic when it is not hers or her people's right to have it, even if she does have good intentions for using it. And so when her plans start to fall apart (and this is not a spoiler because you'll see that coming) and Touraine starts throwing things into chaos, she too finds herself making more and more bad decisions for both the Empire and most devastatingly, for Qazāl as a nation with its conquered people. Luca may be good at heart, but she comes from privilege and thus her attempts at doing good, for selfish and unselfish reasons, cannot escape that.
This all winds up as you might imagine with a plot that takes an incredible amount of twists and turns, with more betrayals than perhaps in any book I can remember (I kept thinking of the Baru Cormorant books, not because they're very comparable other than being books about Empire and Colonialism, but in sheer number of betrayals). The story as mentioned above deals heavily with the impacts of Empire and Colonization from the perspectives of practically everyone touched by it - the conquerors, the children of the conquerors who live in the conquered land, the conquered adults who remember the past, the children who live in the land who don't, and the children who were taken from the land by the conquered and taught only what the conquered want....etc. It's a fascinating examination of all that, and it does not provide any easy answers (Because there aren't any).
One interesting twist incidentally that this book contains that I don't recall similar books having is its emphasis on faith. The magic possessed by the Shālans and other rivals to the Empire is tied to their faith and religion, a faith that some like Touraine have trouble with after everything bad that has befallen them. And more interestingly, it is hinted that there once was Balladairan magic, but as the Empire reacted to its enemies' powers with a hatred of religion, they decided to suppress any religion within their own borders and may have sacrificed their own magic as a result, leaving them more vulnerable to the elements. The idea of a conquering land trying to suppress all religion instead of just promoting its own is more European (French particularly) than American and Clark uses this idea to argue it is a further weakness of Empire.
This book does end up in a satisfying ending as it seeds plot elements here and there for future books....although the final act ends in a way that is perhaps a bit too tidy and reliant upon deus ex machina. But I don't really care too much, and the book ends in a tremendous fashion - just don't expect a happy ending, even if what you get is certainly not the utterly tragic one I thought this had to be building to 80% of the way through.
So yeah, the Unbroken is an incredible story of Empire and Colonialism and the impossibilities of people trying to choose to move forward once touched by it to do so in a way that results in happiness and order. The past cannot be returned to, and I could talk a lot more about other choices of this book, the minor characters on both sides of the conflict for example and how they illustrate more of this theme, but well honestly you should just read this instead and think about it yourself. Definitely a highlight of 2021 to start.
And that drives Touraine to make more and more bad decisions in a way that left me utterly breathless, especially due to how tremendously well done Touraine's character is in the story. As noted above, Touraine was taken from her homeland as a child, and any loyalty to it was essentially educated out of her....except that she and her soldiers still are treated like dirt instead of as loyal forces of the Empire. And so her first loyalty is not to her homeland or to the Empire, but to her soldiers, the Sands, who she considers her first and only family. A threat to the Sands is the quickest thing to driver her to act, and as she does act, she begins to see from the rebels point of view - how the Empire will never treat any of her people, loyal or no, with respect and dignity, how the Empire will seemingly never leave and how the Empire will simply take and take rather than truly act in friendship. Luca may want peace for her own ends, but she cannot understand that what she wants in return is to take something of Shāla, and Touraine can see that right on, especially as she sees more and more of what is going on in the homeland she left behind. And YET, despite these revelations, despite these changes in her sympathies, Touraine's first priority remains throughout with the Sands, her people, despite Touraine's actions often shifting her to other sides of the conflict potentially opposite them. They are, despite everything, her family - the Empire's actions have left her with nothing else at her core to believe in.
Luca by contrast feels the need to prove herself to take back the throne from her essentially usurping uncle. She has a bum leg due to a horse injury as a child she has worked to get around, and decides that peacefully ending the rebellion will show her worth to the Empire and allow her to take back the throne: oh she believes that the way the Empire treats the Shālans is often cruel and should stop, but it's less important to her than her future as an Emperor who could possibly stop everything. And so she can't see what Touraine explains to her about freedom, about the fact that she wants Shālan magic when it is not hers or her people's right to have it, even if she does have good intentions for using it. And so when her plans start to fall apart (and this is not a spoiler because you'll see that coming) and Touraine starts throwing things into chaos, she too finds herself making more and more bad decisions for both the Empire and most devastatingly, for Qazāl as a nation with its conquered people. Luca may be good at heart, but she comes from privilege and thus her attempts at doing good, for selfish and unselfish reasons, cannot escape that.
This all winds up as you might imagine with a plot that takes an incredible amount of twists and turns, with more betrayals than perhaps in any book I can remember (I kept thinking of the Baru Cormorant books, not because they're very comparable other than being books about Empire and Colonialism, but in sheer number of betrayals). The story as mentioned above deals heavily with the impacts of Empire and Colonization from the perspectives of practically everyone touched by it - the conquerors, the children of the conquerors who live in the conquered land, the conquered adults who remember the past, the children who live in the land who don't, and the children who were taken from the land by the conquered and taught only what the conquered want....etc. It's a fascinating examination of all that, and it does not provide any easy answers (Because there aren't any).
One interesting twist incidentally that this book contains that I don't recall similar books having is its emphasis on faith. The magic possessed by the Shālans and other rivals to the Empire is tied to their faith and religion, a faith that some like Touraine have trouble with after everything bad that has befallen them. And more interestingly, it is hinted that there once was Balladairan magic, but as the Empire reacted to its enemies' powers with a hatred of religion, they decided to suppress any religion within their own borders and may have sacrificed their own magic as a result, leaving them more vulnerable to the elements. The idea of a conquering land trying to suppress all religion instead of just promoting its own is more European (French particularly) than American and Clark uses this idea to argue it is a further weakness of Empire.
This book does end up in a satisfying ending as it seeds plot elements here and there for future books....although the final act ends in a way that is perhaps a bit too tidy and reliant upon deus ex machina. But I don't really care too much, and the book ends in a tremendous fashion - just don't expect a happy ending, even if what you get is certainly not the utterly tragic one I thought this had to be building to 80% of the way through.
So yeah, the Unbroken is an incredible story of Empire and Colonialism and the impossibilities of people trying to choose to move forward once touched by it to do so in a way that results in happiness and order. The past cannot be returned to, and I could talk a lot more about other choices of this book, the minor characters on both sides of the conflict for example and how they illustrate more of this theme, but well honestly you should just read this instead and think about it yourself. Definitely a highlight of 2021 to start.
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