"Talis's first rule of stopping wars: make it personal. And that, my dear children--that is where you come in."
HOLY SHIT, THIS BOOK, YOU GUYS.
I tried describing the plot of this book to a friend of mine over the weekend and she pretty much did the driving-a-car equivalent of giving me an askance look of "Why would you read something like this?" To which I was all, I know, I know, but it's fascinating and I can't think about anything else right now, and I had to drive for over 2 hours and was pissed off I couldn't read the book while driving and I have been up in the wee small hours of the morning reading it because it's freaking compelling. As Donald Maass (author of the best writing book I've ever read, Writing the Breakout Novel) would say, there's tension on every page.
Which of course is quite reasonable when your main characters are waiting to get murdered.
Here's the plot: we're living in a world where the environment started going to hell and humans can get uploaded and turned into artificial intelligences, but most of them don't survive the process. But one of them, Michael Talis, gets assigned the job of preventing humans from going to war. Talis does a spectacular job of this by (a) taking over the world and all the nukes and weapons, (b) zapping cities out of existence, and (c) insisting all leaders--even if you want to be lord high dogcatcher--have children. Which (d) he keeps as hostages in little country farm schools in the middle of nowhere until the kid turns 18. If your country goes to war, your kid will be murdered. Period.
So yeah, this has cut down on wars for the last 400 years, but wars still happen and kids get murdered by Talis's Swan Rider soldiers. The book starts out with one getting killed, of course. However, our narrator, Princess Greta of the Pan-Polar Confederation (basically Canada) knows she's highly likely to die before she hits 18 because her land has water and the attacking force, the Cumberland Alliance (basically the deep south of America) needs water, and the Pan-Pols don't have enough to provide for both countries. The previous hostage just died for it, after all. But they've all grown up knowing this fact, Greta deduced on her last visit home that it was likely to be her last visit home given how her mother the queen was behaving, and she's fairly well resigned to going out with bravery and dignity when she has to.
So when the new hostage for Cumberland is brought in--Elian is the general (uh, more or less that's her title without saying that's her title)'s grandson--he hasn't been raised to be a hostage his whole life, he's not reacting well to his change in circumstances, and he keeps quoting Spartacus a lot. The other Children of Peace know they're being watched at all times and behave, but Elian is generally rather freaking out and uncomfortable and getting electrical zaps constantly whenever he says the wrong thing...and Greta can deduce that it's probably because she and he are likely to die together very soon for their families' actions.
And of course, things get worse when Elian's grandma gets the bright idea to attack the school where her grandson is being held, which pretty much dooms almost everyone involved to insta-murder in their future because Talis isn't going to stand for that--and he comes out to visit personally by borrowing a body. This leads to the awkward question of "how do we force the queen to give us her entire water stash when she's probably accustomed to the idea of her kid dying," so....they torture Greta on camera instead. (Don't says I didn't warn you that this happens, but it's not super awful, or at least could have been much worse.)
How is Greta going to survive this situation? She can't, right? Well...we'll see. The intensity of this is high and fascinating. And yet in between potential wars, there's still some moments for silliness, mostly involving goats. Lots of goats. Especially the use of goat pheromones, heh heh heh.
Greta's never-cut hair, which earns her the nickname of Guinevere, is a symbol of her queenliness--if she ever makes it that far. Elian's the kid of sheep farmers who's way over his head in a situation he's never had to deal with before. And then there's Talis, who is a mostly amoral TOTAL SMARTASS that kind of wins you over strictly from the horrible/true/snarky/funny things he says. He's also amusing when he makes pop culture references the reader will get, if not his audience in the book.
I should probably mention the love interest situation, because there's always got to be one of those. You probably reasonably assumed that Elian becomes a love interest for Greta--well, yes and no. I believe by the end that they do care about each other fiercely, but .... there's also Xie, Greta's roommate and best friend, and yes, turns out the two ladies are bisexual and Greta clues in that Xie's also interested in her as well. So props for that. Either way, Greta's relationships with these two are very sweet. However...I'm gonna hint to readers that "who ends up with who" is not gonna be a major focus of this tale.
As a character, Greta's really got the "noble royalty" thing down, as does Xie, and they think about things far differently than you or I. They haven't the faintest idea how to plot anything and have learned lots of obedience, so coping with death is a different thing to them--it's their duty if need be. Greta knows at heart that her mother may love her, but she WILL let Greta die, period. It's what she's been trained to do, "take it,"--but can she go through with that? Or is there a third option of sorts?
Anyway, this book is epic and gets five stars for holy shit factor. Damn, what a journey.
Other really amazingly written reviews of this book can be found here and here. And a Q&A with the author is here.
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