The Grace of Kings and the General They Wouldn't Give Me Enough Of

Took me most of a slow week, six minutes here, twenty there, and it held up fine to that kind of reading, which is not nothing. This is silkpunk, airships and bamboo and books that talk to each other in a way I still can’t fully picture, a rebellion story with two guys, Kuni and Mata, at the center who I liked less than everyone orbiting them. Decades pass mid chapter. People age out of the frame and new ones age in. It reads less like a novel and more like a history somebody’s telling you at speed, which some readers apparently found cold and I mostly didn’t mind.

Jia, the herbalist, is the one who got me. There’s a bit where she’s asked her favorite plant and picks the dandelion, hardy, adaptable, roots for your fevers, leaves for your belly, the whole plant useful in a way that felt less like garden trivia and more like a small thesis on how to survive. And then there’s Gin Mazoti, a female general who shows up and just, is better than everyone around her at the thing she does, and I wanted three times as much of her plot and got maybe a third. That’s my real complaint. The book keeps introducing people worth following and then summarizing past them.

Somebody else pointed out the audiobook narrator is the same guy who did Wheel of Time, which apparently made every scene briefly feel like Rand al’Thor was about to walk in. I read it on paper so I dodged that one. Worth the time even so, the setting alone earns it.