Series: The Lotus War (book 2)
Year Published: 2013
Source: LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers program
Publisher’s Summary: A SHATTERED EMPIRE
The mad Shōgun Yoritomo has been assassinated by the Stormdancer Yukiko, and the threat of civil war looms over the Shima Imperium. The toxic blood lotus flower continues to ravage the land, the deadlands splitting wider by the day. The machine-worshippers of the Lotus Guild conspire to renew the nation’s broken dynasty and crush the growing rebellion simultaneously – by endorsing a new Shōgun who desires nothing more than to see Yukiko dead.
A DARK LEGACY
Yukiko and the mighty thunder tiger Buruu have been cast in the role of heroes by the Kagé rebellion. But Yukiko herself is blinded by rage over her father’s death, and her ability to hear the thoughts of beasts is swelling beyond her power to control. Along with Buruu, Yukiko’s anchor is Kin, the rebel Guildsman who helped her escape from Yoritomo’s clutches. But Kin has his own secrets, and is haunted by visions of a future he’d rather die than see realized.
A GATHERING STORM
Kagé assassins lurk within the Shōgun’s palace, plotting to end the new dynasty before it begins. A waif from Kigen’s gutters begins a friendship that could undo the entire empire. A new enemy gathers its strength, readying to push the fracturing Shima imperium into a war it cannot hope to survive. And across raging oceans, amongst islands of black glass, Yukiko and Buruu will face foes no katana or talon can defeat.
The ghosts of a blood-stained past.
Why? I read the first one and while I wasn’t a huge fan, it definitely had potential. So when this one came up on Early Reviewers, I thought, “Why not?” and requested it. And so, eventually, I decided it was time to just read it and get the reviewing business over with.
My thoughts: Oh bother. For about the first half or even three quarters of the book, I was more than ready to say this was a much better novel than the first one. The plot was dense, complex, and full of machinations, but not at all too confusing or muddled. The multiple viewpoint characters were equally complex and yet mostly pretty sympathetic. Various characters’ ability to read animals’ minds was being used very nicely—and there was a really wonderful pet cat! Occasionally the violence was being described a bit more ickily than I prefer, but that’s probably “good,” since it makes this fantasy world more “realistic,” right?
Oh, God, I hope not.
Yeah, the last seventy-five or a hundred pages were not fun. The bloodletting increases exponentially in quantity and varieties of nastiness; characters went from sympathetic to awful and/or scary; I started losing track of why the heck some of this whole business was going on, probably while trying to skim over the more gruesome stuff. Oh, and that wonderful cat. You’ll never guess what happened to him. Yeah. I really hated that. I had to stop for a minute and give my Ralph some undesired kisses and chinrubbing. That helped, but not much.
Aside from the seriously unpleasant extended ending, I’d probably have considered this a pretty great book and been keeping a keen eye out for the third installment. Now, I’m torn. Kristoff has demonstrated his increasing novelistic abilities and managed to minimize the elements of exoticism and special-snowflakeness that had rather ruined the first one for me. So likely the third (final?) book will be even better written and more complex than these previous two, which is all to the good. But that ending . . . yeah. I still do care about the (surviving) main characters and am curious about what happens to them—but I’m definitely wary of emotional investment, and that’s problematic for me.
It’s not just than the characters may die more or less horribly (that’s pretty unpleasant, but I’ve still enjoyed books despite that, if their deaths serve a purpose); the problem is that they may all become so warped and damaged as to become untrustworthy or that their deaths won’t really do anything. I don’t mind flawed or even, occasionally, anti-heroic characters, but I like to be able to hope and expect that in the end they will have done the “right” thing when it really counts or at least have done a possibly wrong thing for a “right” reason. I’m not exactly sure of most of these characters anymore, and so while I still want to know what happens to them and hope they are satisfied in the end, I’m not sure, either way, that I will be.