2017 SF, third of its trilogy. Hailimi has to take back her Empire,
and think hard about the future…
The identity of the big villain is revealed, and I suspect any
answer would have been a disappointment after all the build-up. Yes,
this is a person who would plausibly become as irrationally obsessed
as is clearly necessary to go to the lengths they have, but I couldn't
help thinking… could they really have achieved all that? And they
turn out to have been personally responsible for all the bad things
that have happened, which feels a bit comic-book to me: give evil a
face, punch that face, and evil is solved. Didn't anyone plot against
either the previous or the current Empress without being manipulated
into doing so? The world seemed rather more believable when that was
what I thought had happened.
At the same time, Hailimi carries right on doubting herself, no matter
how many times her found-family and allies say "no, we accept that
some of us are going to die, but we carry right on with you because
it's you." There are a lot of scenes of that happening in this book.
One background character has become a tool for the author to
manipulate the plot directly. You need to stay alive, I'll bring you
back from the dead. You need to die, I'll prophesy that you'll die
so that you have some Big Feels with your friends first. Hailimi needs
to do something that seems on the face of it like a very bad idea,
I'll prophesy that this is a necessary action.
It gets repetitive and heavy-handed, and there's less character
development than I'd have liked, but if one can get past these
problems there's good solid action with both soul-searching and coming
through against the odds. Although Hailimi's forces are basically
winning all through this book, they don't have easy or costless
vicories.
This trilogy is followed by the "Farian War" trilogy, which may
account for the number of loose ends left flapping around here.