Wednesday, November 17, 2021

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Liar's Knot by M.A. Carrick

 




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 December 7, 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 Liar's Knot is the second book in M.A. Carrick's* Rook & Rose trilogy, after January's The Mask of Mirrors (my review here).  I'm a big fan of Marie Brennan's work (Brennan is one half of M.A. Carrick, with Alec Helms), so I was excited to see how she and her co-author would take on a doorstopper epic fantasy trilogy.  And well, I liked the Mask of Mirrors, which essentially was part Fantasy of Manners in addition to Epic Fantasy, especially in its first two thirds, where its con artist heroine dealt with a city filled with treacherous nobles, a past of peoples conquered and still present, and conflicting magic systems.  But the book's final third didn't quite come together well for me, as it relied on things I didn't quite care about, even as the book ended on some very interesting cliffhangers.  

But The Liar's Knot is very much the book I was hoping The Mask of Mirrors would be.  The book leans heavily on its Fantasy of Manners elements, as protagonist Ren deals with what has developed into a quadruple life, while other point of view characters Vargo and Grey deal with their own agendas and secrets that bring them all together and apart.  And while the book does eventually get caught up once again in a conflict caused by antagonists using the series' not super well defined magic system, it works a lot better this time and is more directly tied to the series' themes of class, of heritage, of peoples conquered and otherwise living in the same city, and struggles for power, knowledge, and well, for a home.  The book even avoids some very typical middle book in trilogy problems, and that combined with its great characters makes this one a real winner, that has me eagerly awaiting the third book to come.  

Note:  This fantasy world is seemingly Slavic-inspired, including in the names of Places, People, Things, and Concepts, complete with letters with accents/carons on top of them.  As I don't have a slavic keyboard and my spanish keyboard doesn't quite accomplish the same thing, I will be spelling these names without the accent marks, and I apologize if that offends somehow.  

SPOILER ALERT, including one MAJOR spoiler, from book 1 are discussed below the Jump.

------------------------------------------------Plot Summary-------------------------------------------------------
This is an always has been a city of masks.  

When Ren came to Nadežra, it was to run a con - to fake her way as Renata into the seemingly rich House Traementis, con her way into the family register, and make out with all that wealth and safety for herself.  It didn't quite go as planned - and after the magical campaign of terror waged by the head of House Indestor, Ren finds her world shook to the core: finding herself caring for the two other remaining members of House Traementis, torn between that and another cover identity as a Vraszenian szorsa Arenza, and of course her old family Tess and Sedge, the only two people who know her for real.  And if her grief and struggle of identities wasn't enough, that magical conflict at the Wellspring of Azerais transformed Ren into a new identity, the magical Black Rose, which she has no idea what to do with.  

But Ren will not be given much time to rest and figure things out, as people in Nadežra have plans for all three of her identities - the nobles for Renata, the Vraszenian resistance for Arenza, and the Vraszenian clans for the Black Rose - that will find her caught up once more in the schemes of the powers of Nadežra....powers willing to use dangerous unknown magic for their own games, like that of the curse that nearly destroyed House Traementis.  And Ren's attempt to navigate all these schemes will find her once again clashing with two individuals with their own agendas - The Rook, the legendary outlaw known for hunting the nobles of Nadežra and Derossi Vargo, the former smuggler now elevated to noble....and who seemingly betrayed Ren to make that climb in the first place.  

Can Ren navigate the secrets of Nadežra without her own secrets being revealed in the process to the persons who could use them to harm the ones she cares about?  And as it becomes to much to bear alone, is there anyone she can trust to help her figure it all out?  And will any of that matter if the noble schemes destroy everything in their path?  
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Like its predecessor, The Liar's Knot centers around Ren, from whose point of view most of the chapters take place.  This is still her story in large part, as a young woman of multiple worlds - of Vraszenian blood through her mother and birthright (and in the forms of her identities as Arenz and the Black Rose) and of the noble world through her identity as Renata, which began as a con but now is truly a part of who she is because she's come to care for the Traementis family and of her identity as Ren, the former finger street girl who betrayed her sacred oath to her knot leader.  At the same time, the story spends a substantial time being told from the perspective of two characters who basically become co-protagonists by the end: Vargo and Grey/The Rook.  There are several other minor characters who get POV moments - Tess, Sedge, & Giuna and probably another or two I'm forgetting - but this book mainly focuses on this set of three.

And the twisting ties of these three characters and their masses of secrets works really really well, to keep this story going with momentum from beginning to end.  With the addition of the new Black Rose identity to her ranks, Ren finds herself even more torn between identities, especially as she becomes closer to the Vraszenian people (both the Stadnem Anduske resistance and the ordinary people trying to live with their culture and religion in a prejudiced city) and finds herself wishing she can simply be one of them.  But Ren can't let herself be so - not just because they would traditionally not like her as a half-blood, but because of her betrayal of her knot as a Finger, even justified as those actions were.  And then there's the fact that so many people are starting to know multiple of her identities, like the Rook who knows all of them (and Grey who she knows as both Arenza and Renata, even if she doesn't know he's the Rook), or Vargo, who has met both Renata and Arenza and who she thought she could trust, except she found out he betrayed her at the end of the last book.  The stress of all this juggling of identities, of not knowing who to trust, and of not knowing who she is and where she can feel safe eats at Ren throughout this book, especially as she gets drawn further into conspiracies of power.  

And then there's Grey and Vargo.  Grey - who the last book revealed in the end to be the current Rook - actually does know all of Ren's identities...but he's not supposed to, and he doesn't want her to know she's the Rook either, which makes him have to juggle his own way around her, especially as he encounters her as Grey as both Renata and Arenza, who he's not supposed to know are the same person.  To make matters worse, the identity of The Rook isn't just a costume, it's a role with a power and mind of its own, which conflicts with his own personal desires for vengeance for his brother at times against Vargo.  And Vargo himself is conflicted in ways that surprise - while he's guided by the spirit in his spider Alsius in a quest to do something to the nobles, now that he's risen to their ranks he finds himself perhaps out of his own depth and losing touch with his allies in his street gang, and hating himself all the more for all the people who have gotten hurt due to his mistakes.  And so when Ren is tricked into revealing how she now hates him for his betrayal of her, he finds himself even more alone and disgusted with everything (even as he finds himself encountering the Rook and Black Rose more and more for various purposes).  

The above are a great trio of characters, all dealing with various guilts, identities, and secrets, and the plot continues to place them in a setting and circumstances that challenge their attempts to do what's right.  Even more than in the first book, the Liar's Knot very much focuses upon the issues faced in Nadežra by the fact that this is a city that was conquered and remains held by peoples who weren't its original people, the Vraszenians.  The Vraszenians are hardly all innocent, and the resistance movement of them is now led by bloodthirsty people who would do more harm than good, but their culture and traditions and wish to live in their own ways do not deserve the way that the Liganti nobility treat them - and the removal of one prejudiced noble has only given rise to even worse ones, who are now creating their own police force to oppress the Vraszenians for their own purposes.  

Each of our main trio has some connection to both the old (Vraszenian) and new peoples (Liganti), and the story's magic systems shows how the Vraszenian magic system of Pattern (a form of Tarot reading) is more connected to the Liganti system of Numinatria (number and sigil magic) than any of them realized.  And as the plot moves forward, with the main trio investigating a secret society devoted to the study of Numinatria magic in ways that were not thought possible before, they discover that these connections are very dangerous and tied to forces and past beings who were long thought past.  

I'm sort of babbling here, which I do with books I really like that have themes that do come together really well in the end, which is very much the case here, as the themes of Empire and peoples living on top of each other with different cultures explode into a finale that forces each of our main characters to make choices, a finale that works much better than the first book's finale, which didn't really feel as connected to the conflicts of scheming and plotting and the characters' conflicts - an issue that is not the case here.  And in a surprise for a second book, this book does NOT end on a massive cliffhanger, although plenty ends unresolved, and the main trio's secrets are mostly revealed by the end of the book,, something that I expected to be drawn out into the third book.  And this book works all the better for it, and winds up a very satisfying package.  

If you like epic fantasy and fantasies of manners, with schemes and fun characters and dialogue to go with some serious themes, well The Liar's Knot is basically almost everything you could hope for.  The book has some flaws - there are SOOO many characters, especially among the nobles who represent potential major antagonists, that I found myself often losing track of who was who among them.  And yet the main characters and themes were so strong that I didn't really care too much.  A Strong recommend for me.  

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