Lemonade Book Reviews

It’s been too long since I read a book that truly featured lesbians and assorted queer people as the main characters. Realm of the Elderlings is a queer series in my opinion – the relationship between Fitz and the Fool is its lodestone, and there are canonically queer male characters in Liveship Traders and the Rain Wild Chronicles. The focus is definitely on men’s sexuality though. Most of the other books I’ve read recently just haven’t had any queer characters in general, which is very sad.

This book had the same amount of queer women as there are straight men in most novels. Both of our POV characters are queer with queer dating histories, their parents are queer, important side characters are queer (keeping things spoilers free here), villains are queer, good guys are queer, and most of the characters are women. Also, I think this is the first book I’ve ever read with more than one butch queer woman (unclear on the sexualities of everyone except Touraine and Luca). The world of the book is queernorm and seems to have relative gender equality. Captain Rogan is an (unconfirmed?) rapist, but that seems to have less to do with how women as a whole are treated in society and more to do with his power over people he sees as subhuman (still not a “good” reason to rape people, just one that frequently isn’t removed from sexuality in literature). Additionally, Luca is being kept from power by her uncle, but it doesn’t seem like Luca’s gender is a factor in why her uncle refuses to give her the throne. I really liked this because even though real life colonialism creates intersecting axes of oppression with race, gender, and queerness, the book isn’t set in real life. We can explore the horrors of colonialism and empire through the eyes of queer women on both sides of the conflict without them being oppressed for their queerness or gender.

Reading this book also made me realize that I had a really cool French teacher in high school. We spent a lot of time discussing French colonialism in Africa and America en français during class, and we specifically focused on the lead up to the revolution/liberation of Algeria in the 1950s and 60s as part of that lesson. I don’t remember all of it because it was years ago, and The Unbroken is clearly based in a technological time period prior to the 1950s, but it was nice to have a bit of historical context going in (not that it was necessary to understand the book). I think the themes of colonialism were really throughly explored, and I think Touraine specifically was really fantastically written. She definitely frustrated me at times, but it felt realistic that the girl who’s been brainwashed since age 5 to love her captor is going to have a difficult and confusing time unlearning that. She also didn’t exactly have kind mentors helping her through the process. I found Luca to be a very fascinating and complex character, though I like her less than Touraine and don’t think her brain and personality were as well explored. I think her character development in future books will make or break the series for me.

This book had a good plot and magic system and I liked where it resolved. I didn’t feel super connected to the main characters, which was a bit disappointing, but I think can be easily fixed in the next two books in the series. I also felt like the majority of the arcs introduced in the book had a resolution, which is something I’ve complained about other recently published books not doing, so kudos. I’m excited to read the next book because I want to see how what happened at the end of this book influences future events. I don’t think I can talk about much more before getting into spoilers, though.

I was glad that Luca left Qazāl utterly humiliated. At the beginning of the book, she was a white savior figure (in her own head, her actions were obviously extremely harmful to the Qazāli even if she didn’t recognize it). She commits increasingly indefensible crimes against the Qazāli she claims to care about as the book goes on and she has to cling harder and harder to power. I’m glad she doesn’t have an easy time making peace in this book, and I think it’s also interesting that feeling betrayed by Touraine, someone she expected to be loyal to her and empire no matter what, is what moves her from seeing the Qazāli as people to seeing them as threats to her rule. I didn’t feel like the text wanted me to see Luca’s fall from grace as because Touraine abandoned her, but that may have just been Luca refusing to admit it to herself.

The yuri definitely could have been more toxic. One of my critiques of the book is that Luca and Touraine are a bit difficult to get inside the mind of. Touraine I understood better because she shows more vulnerability as the book goes on, but Luca in the back half of the book is lying to herself a lot. We also mostly see her pining after Touraine, and in moments where she and Touraine are together after Touraine joins the rebels, we mostly get them from her perspective. For example, when Luca was taking care of Touraine when she had the laughing pox, we got that entirely from Luca’s perspective and didn’t find out that Touraine was also pining for her until much later. I think the relationship could have been written a little more strongly and I would be rooting for Touraine to go to Balladaire so that I could get even more juicy toxicity from out of her relationship with Luca. As is, it’s not bad and I think Luca and Touraine have good chemistry, but I was left wanting more. That said, I think this still easily counts as toxic yuri. I just wish it was more angsty about the toxicity.

I LOVED the magic system in the book. A small detail I caught near the end when talking about how the different magics in the world have different balances is that it seems like Balladaire has its own magic and their rejection of religion is the cause of their public health issues. With Qazāl and Briga, one believes in Shāl for knitting (healing) and one believes in Shāl for unknitting (exploding heads). Touraine offhandedly mentions

“The magic wasn’t a corruption itself, Djasha had explained to Touraine when the plan was decided. Every god had two sides, like a coin, and each gift had a price. Knitting and unknitting–which required animal flesh and human flesh respectively, the life’s blood. Other gods governed elsewhere, just as costly. Farming and plague. Hunting and husbandry. Wisdom and madness.” – Touraine, page 442 of the paperback first edition

Luca is trying to take Qazāl’s magic to heal her own people, but as we learn early on in the book, the Balladairans have their own magic that comes from spilling blood in the wheat fields (or something like that). From the phrasing, I wouldn’t be shocked if Balladaire is conquering the surrounding nations because it prevents pandemics at home. No matter what, it sounds like there’s a bloody price to pay to keep her people from getting sick, so the question is how will Luca pay it? There are a lot of ways this can play out, so I’m interested to see what happens.

Another aspect of the magic I like is that Luca’s bad leg doesn’t get healed at any point in the story. In the end, when Aranen touched her and she felt scorched inside, I was worried that Aranen was going to heal her on accident. Luca healing her leg is never brought up in the narrative, so I’m unsure if it’s because Luca is hiding from herself that she wants the magic for selfish and “selfless” reasons, or if it is an in-universe fact that having a leg broken like Luca’s is is the same as losing a limb. Jaghotai lost a hand and Aranen wasn’t able to reconnect it with magic, and Djasha is suffering from a chronic illness that Aranen can’t heal permanently, so it seems like there are some limits to the healing magic.

I’m also pretty sure we never went a single Luca chapter/POV without her mentioning being in pain, her cane, or feeling out of control of her body. I appreciated that she could fight with a rapier, but that it’s very difficult for her and something she has to constantly work on to achieve any level of proficiency. There is a lot of discourse around Fourth Wing, for example, with respect to the main character’s disability because of the way it’s written. I haven’t read Fourth Wing myself (people I know and respect think it’s poorly written while people I know and disrespect think it’s one of the best books ever), but I think this post on Just Geeking By does a really good job of dissecting the ableist tropes Yarros falls into. Personally, I don’t think Clark falls into the same traps when writing Luca.

Finally, there were two major twists in the story I wanted to talk about, the Beau-Sang twist and the way that Luca gets Touraine to surrender. I saw the Beau-Sang twist coming. As soon as the prisoners were returned to the city at the very convenient time of a hanging, I knew he had probably outright stolen them himself. I was expecting Paul-Sebastien to be in on it though, since he was the one who made Luca feel pressured enough about the situation to put Beau-Sang in power. I still think he could be working for/advancing his father’s interests, even in his disgrace. He’s written as pretty trustworthy, but I just can’t shake the feeling that he’s up to no good. I wasn’t expecting Aliez’s lover to have been one of the Qazāli Beau-Sang threw under the bus, so that was a fun twist. Unrelated, but naming the villain in the colonialism book Good-Blood is a bit on the nose.

Second, Luca getting Touraine to surrender by having Rogan hold Pruett at gunpoint was an evil genius move from Luca. She knows that Rogan doesn’t keep his hands to himself and that the Sands live in fear of being raped by him, so what does she do? She takes Touraine’s ex and puts her in a situation where she knows Touraine will assume Pru just went through a terribly violating experience to get her to surrender, and then tries to tell Touraine that it’s no big deal and Pru was never in danger anyway. This was one of the most toxic moments between the two of them in the book, and I am kind of obsessed with it. I am a huge Gideon the Ninth fan (it’s honestly a miracle I’ve gotten this far without mentioning it since there are a lot of similarities between Gideon and Touraine), so my standards for toxicity between queer women are high. This was the moment where I thought we might be able to get to Harrow-spending-all-night-burying-bones-around-the-Ninth-House’s-landing-field-just-to-prevent-Gideon-joining-the-army levels of toxicity.