Thursday, November 17, 2022

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Empress of Time by Kylie Lee Baker

 





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 October 4, 2022 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 Empress of Time is the sequel to Kylie Lee Baker's phenomenal YA Fantasy novel, The Keeper of Night.  I really loved that novel (my review here), which featured Ren, whose father was a British Reaper and whose mother was a Japanese Shinigami, and who fled Britain with her fully Reaper brother after harming a noble Reaper family and attempted to find the home she never had with the Shinigami of Japan.  However, things don't go according to plan, and even though Ren attempts to complete the three tasks (and the Japanese Yokai she encounters along the way) the Japanese Death God Izanami sets her upon in order to be accepted into their ranks, she never really finds that acceptance...and her determination to prove herself at any cost leads her to a devastating ending.  It's a truly tremendous novel, which surprises often, and deals with both Japanese mythology and themes of fitting in, of love and family, and of the feeling of being a foreigner due to being not "pure" of blood or of not being the same type of people as the locals and how wrong such treatment is.  

The Empress of Time follows that book's devastating ending, and once again sets Ren on a quest through various parts of Japanese mythology, this time the myths of its Gods, and it works tremendously once more as it concludes the duology on an excellent note.  Once again we see Ren struggling with her failure to gain acceptance, despite all the power she has acquired, an her struggle with loneliness and regret as her worst enemies from her past, the British Reapers, finally come after her in Japan.  But this time, even as things once again surprise in ways I did not expect, we get a conclusion that satisfying finishes this duology and really hits the themes of how acceptance is something you find all around you from the family you make even if the society around you is too prejudiced to realize it should give it.  It's great, is what I'm saying, without spoiling.  

Note: I read the first few chapters in audiobook format, and the reader was excellent. And so while I didn't continue the novel in that format, I would recommend it to anyone seeking an audiobook.

MAJOR SPOILERS FOR BOOK 1 AFTER THE JUMP:  \

----------------------------------------------Plot Summary------------------------------------

Once Ren thought it possible to have the acceptance she craved - to have a place she could be accepted by the populace as one of them, and not some half-breed (either Half-Reaper or Half-Shinigami), where she and her beloved brother Neven could live together in peace and exercise their roles reaping human soles wherever that was...and where she could possibly even find someone to love, like Hiro, the Shinigami-esque being who once spoke kindly to her, helped her, and even proposed to her. But that was before she killed Hiro for throwing Neven into the Deep Darkness, before she became the new Japanese Death Goddess by doing so after Hiro killed the original goddess Izanami, and before she realize that even as a goddess, the Japanese shinigami would still not accept her as anything but a foreign usurper. Even worse, now that she is a goddess, Ren is blocked by a barrier placed by the supreme Japanese god Izanagi from entering the Deep Darkness to search for and rescue Neven. And so, for the last ten years, Ren has committed heresy, taking human souls before their time (evil ones if she can find them) in order to grow stronger, so that she can finally breach the barrier to the Deep Darkness to rescue her brother. But the barrier still remains strong and Ren is losing hope.

And then an impossible visiter arrives, Tsukuyomi, the Japanese God of the Moon, with a message for her: British Reapers have been sighted on Japanese shores, killing some of her Shinigami. Even worse, Ren's old nemesis Ivy, the reaper girl who abused her until she fought back that one last time, has ascended to godhood herself and now commands the Reapers...and is now on her way to Japan to get her revenge on Ren. To stop her, Ren needs the assistance of other Japanese gods, but they will only help her if she once again fulfills a task for them, to obtain an artifact long lost to time. Yet Ren only has so long to search for help among the myths of Japanese Gods and Yokai before the Reapers arrive, and Ren's past childhood and current relations continue to haunt her, and make her wonder if her quest is pointless, with only more misery at the end of her current path......

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Keeper of Night was a tremendous novel, not least because it refused to take the easy or traditional way through its posed questions and cliffhangers. Ren never did find acceptance among the Shinigami of Japan just as she never did with the Reapers, she never realized until it was too late how much she was ostracizing her brother - who himself was now ostracized as a foreigner for following Ren - and her actions resulted in her killing the man she kind of love and losing to a fate possibly worse than death that very brother, into the Deep Darkness from which she can't follow. It was a dark tremendous ending about the dangers of searching for acceptance at any cost, and it worked all the better because Ren never did turn away despite all the chances she was given from the extreme path she was being asked to follow, committing more and more dark acts until the end, when she was left seemingly with ashes.

The Empress of Time is in some ways a similar novel. Again Ren is forced on a quest to find a way to get what she seeks, the destruction of the Reaper fleet this time around, which sends her through Japanese mythology, although this time the mythology is more based upon the myths of the Gods and Goddesses rather than on the Yokai and other beings she encountered before (who mind you, are still very prominent in the setting). Again she winds up with a character whose advise and position is possibly questionable, who might be a love interest, in Tsukuyomi, and who the story hints heavily might be lying about parts of his past and could betray Ren or lead her astray....as Ren acquires several other companions (who I won't spoil) who conflict with him and his advice. And again Ren feels very much like she has to do anything to achieve her goals, even if now she's far less proud of it due to knowing what her brother might think of her. The Empress of Time does all this really well, developing Ren and the other characters in interesting ways, portraying the Japanese gods in ways that will work really well whether you know the myths the story is referencing or whether you have no clue about them at all (I'm somewhere closer to the latter, if not totally ignorant).

But like its predecessor, The Empress of Time zigs when you might expect it to zag, and the result is a novel that takes some really very different turns than its predecessor, with the characters learning from past actions and the story not turning out the same. We again have a story dealing with themes of acceptance amongst people who don't consider you to be one of them because of race or national origin, but here we find Ren figuring out how to deal with that isn't fighting constantly in a hopeless quest to impress such people, but to find love and acceptance among those you care about and who can learn to accept you; here we have a potential romance that goes far differently from how you'd expect; and here we have memories of abusive childhoods that a character learns to get past, and which leads Ren to discover the strength she never knew she had. I'm coming dangerously close to spoilers here, so I won't say more, but needless to say, this is a story that comes to an INCREDIBLY satisfying ending, which may not be as dark or unusual as the prior book, but which works just as well - that is so so well.

Just a highly recommended book - great characters, great setting and themes, and great plotting. Really loved this duology and recommend it highly, and this will again be on my Lodestar ballot for next year.
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)