The Blurb:
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.
The Review:
What. A. Book.
If I could, I’d leave the review there. But I can’t, really. Not because anyone is forcing me to write something more, but because this is the kind of book that I really have to talk about.
The Unbroken is a book that unabashedly embraces its tropes, but in a way that doesn’t skip over any of the complexities that come into play as a result of their existence. If you’ve seen any of the chatter about the Unbroken on the internet (and how could you not? bloggers are going wild for this) then it’ll be no surprise to you that this is a sapphic epic fantasy novel. The romantic subplot centers around the familiar naive royal & practical soldier trope. Here though, rather than shy away from any implied power dynamics and ugliness, C.L. Clark puts them under a magnifying glass.
Touraine isn’t just a soldier. She’s a soldier that was stolen by a colonising force as a child to be trained in warfare, returning to her home country (Qazāl) many years later as part of the colonising army. Luca isn’t just a princess, she’s the potential queen-in-waiting of the Balladairan Empire, who seeks to prove her worthiness by quelling rebellion in the colonies.
As a reader who lives for these kind of complexities, I loved this. I loved that the book wasn’t afraid to get down and dirty. It’s not exactly a secret that I generally despise royal characters — mostly because I feel that their existence implies a lot of suffering on the part of other people, and a lot of fantasy novels tend to gloss over these aspects — but The Unbroken is a novel that confronts all of this! It does the work. It makes it central to the story. Sometimes it’s subtle, sometimes it’s overt, but it’s always there.
The best part is that it refuses to make compromises to allow for this confrontation. The romantic aspect is still there, it isn’t diminished in any way, it still gets a lot of spotlight, and I found it really well-handled. The book just makes sure that you’re thinking about the context, first.
And look, this book made me feel a whole lot of emotions. I really cared about these characters. It becomes clear very quickly that Touraine feels trapped between two worlds — the world that she was born into, and the one that stole her — yet neither accepts her. Her position in either comes with an asterisk. The only place she feels really at home is with the Sands — her martial division of colonial soldiers, stolen as children and indoctrinated just like her. And so what does C.L. Clark do? They take Touraine’s Sands away from her. Simple. Devious. Brilliant.
Luca, too, has complexities of her own. The most pressing of these being that she’s a piece of shit garbage human that needs to go deep-sea diving with a stone backpack.
Okay, maybe a bit harsh. Really, though, I thought Clark did a fantastic job with Luca’s character, too. There were aspects of her character that made me truly despise her. She shares some similarities with Seth Dickinson’s Baru Cormorant, particularly in how she tends to see other people as pieces on a game board to be maneuvered. She has no qualms about dressing up Touraine and the Sands as hollow symbols to promote “unity”, and continually tries to justify “just a little bit more oppression” in order to secure her crown. And yet, she does have some admirable qualities. As someone who suffers from fatigue issues and has to walk with the use of a cane, her determination to continually push herself is commendable. She does also, at times, genuinely seem to want what’s best for the people of the colony… insofar as they are willing to remain a colony.
It was the interplay between all of the above aspects that made me love this book. Touraine’s struggles with identity and sense of belonging felt so poignant. While I (clearly) despised Luca, her relationship with Touraine really felt like it was meant to be — for at least a while. And even I can’t deny that having Luca in charge would seem to be vastly preferable to the uncle that’s trying to usurp her throne while she’s away from the capital.
Like all books, there will be aspects that some readers won’t enjoy. There are some truly terrible decisions made by certain characters in the middle portions of the book, and while the reasoning behind these decisions is easily deduced from context, I do feel that some more on-page reflection could have tightened things up. As it stands, I think some readers will feel there’s a degree of “idiot-ball” in certain scenes, and so anyone sensitive to this should be aware going in.
There is also a marked difference in the pacing of the first third and the middle third, and so some readers may feel that the beginning is “too slow” while others may feel the middle is “too fast”. I would preemptively disagree with the former, because I loved the opening chapters and how Clark set the scene. But I have to admit that the use of some time-skips in the middle chapters did throw me a little, as some relationships and situations develop “off-screen” where I’d have preferred a few more chapters to flesh those things out. There was also one seemingly-major character moment that happens and is then never mentioned again, though there’s every chance that this is addressed in the sequels.
And speaking of those sequels… Where the hell are they? I need them. I need them like I need air and sunlight and more space in my bookcases.
I can’t stress enough how much I enjoyed The Unbroken. I adore books that confront the complicated shit, and this is all that and a whole lot more. C.L. Clark and their Magic of the Lost series are posed to be something really special. I can’t recommend this book enough.
I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for a fair and honest review. Thank you to Orbit UK for the review copy!
Right?!?!?!? Soo good