Touraine is a soldier. Stolen as a child and raised to kill and die for the empire, her only loyalty is to her fellow conscripts. But now, her company has been sent back to her homeland to stop a rebellion, and the ties of blood may be stronger than she thought.
Luca needs a turncoat. Someone desperate enough to tiptoe the bayonet’s edge between treason and orders. Someone who can sway the rebels toward peace, while Luca focuses on what really matters: getting her uncle off her throne.
Through assassinations and massacres, in bedrooms and war rooms, Touraine and Luca will haggle over the price of a nation. But some things aren’t for sale
Welcome to the Fantasy Inn’s stop on the Unbroken’s blog tour. Thanks to Orbit for inviting us!
I knew from the moment I first heard of The Unbroken that this book was going to hit a bit too close to home. Military fantasy inspired by the French colonisation of North Africa? I am Moroccan, so I was planning for it to be a raw sort of experience and it was.
Touraine is a conscript soldier. She’s been kidnapped by Balladaire as a child, grew up fashioned into the perfect weapon of the empire, sent as cannon fodder in its gruesome wars, and shipped back to a home she doesn’t remember to help keep the peace against a rising rebellion. My heart ached for her. Her loyalty was torn – who is she supposed to follow? The empire that taught her all she knows, or her homeland, her people, the country she never really belonged to? Does she really belong to the empire, in other ways than simply being a tool it can use and discard? Following the soldier as she figures out who she is, who she should fight for, was the highlight of the book. She came to Qazāl with simple enough goals: do her job as a soldier and protect her fellow conscripts, whom she considers as family. I felt like shaking her when she parroted empire propaganda, when she believed in an illusional meritocratic system where if she fought enough and bled enough, she’d be Balladairan enough. Empires do not work this way, Touraine.
Then there’s princess Luca, the future queen of this empire. Under the regency of her uncle, she is in Qazāl to learn the ropes of ruling. She is a scholar, fierce, always trying to find the right thing to do, to reach a balanced decision. She saved Touraine’s life and took her under her wing. The two women, despite who they both are and who they both could be, get close. Words cannot possibly express how much I hated Luca. It led to some surreal conversations with friends who talk about the book saying “hey I’m 30% into the Unbroken, what did Luca do? She seems ok”. I hated her from the first time she appeared and I never let go of this delicious hatred while reading the book. Cherae is truly a genius for creating this character.
I am trying not to transform this review into a Luca rant because the book is so much more, but I am going to explain. Luca has a different vision for the empire and its colonies than her uncle and most of the nobility has. She doesn’t believe in violence. She wants to reach a compromise with rebels. She wants peace. She reads books about being a fair ruler. Ain’t she great? The problem is, there is no such thing as a good colonizer. Ideals are cheap and empires are gluttons for blood. She can be the benevolent type of colonizer, speak the language, want to understand the customs, she’ll always be a colonizer first and foremost. So whenever Touraine, as her envoy, was getting annoyed at the rebels’ reticence for a compromise, I wanted to yell that there is no possible compromise between “I want to stay in your country and bleed it dry of its resources while erasing its culture and kidnapping its children to feed our military” and “I want you to get the fuck out of my country”. I am getting angry again.
Luca’s interest in Qazāl also lies in its magic. Healing magic, more specifically. The colony hasn’t entirely forgotten the ways of old, even with the empire’s enthusiasm in crushing religious beliefs in the name of rational thought (“religion yucky, rational thought TM is where things are at” is basically the position of real France as well). In an empire shaken by plagues, magic can come in handy. Amidst the turmoil of a colony in the verge of open revolt, Luca and Touraine also try to figure out the source of these powers and how to harness them in the service of an empire that cannot possibly let go of even the idea of an additional resource to wrongfully appropriate.
The story is a journey paved with torn loyalties and spattered with blood, and I loved it. I loved watching Touraine grow and see past her brainwashing, I loved her interactions with the rebels and her fellow conscript soldiers. The Unbroken manages to be an inflinching book about the ugliness, in all its forms, of colonization, while at the same time putting at its heart people that feel real and with whom you deeply sympathize (not Luca, though). There’s much more to learn about the magic, and the ending of the book clearly signals a new beginning. I am looking forward to more.
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