The Traitor Baru Cormorant, you say? That's a new name to me. So it's worth a look?
(with the caveat that there are some pretty heavy themes and plenty of potentially triggering content, especially related to colonial exploitation, eugenics, various types of institutional bigotry, and (more in the second and third installments) traumatic injuries including non-consensual medical procedures and torture. also, body horror.)
the books (three out now, final fourth installment in the works) are usually classified as fantasy, though that's debatable imo, as their supernatural elements are rare, ambiguous, and all are real-world concepts exaggerated to their extremes. i'd call the genre speculative colonial age/pre-industrial fiction set in an imaginary world instead of our own.
the driving force is the protagonist's desire to understand the world and use her knowledge to reverse the colonization of her home island that starts when she's a small child. she believes her best chance of achieving this is to work within the empire's system, to gain both skills and power to execute her goals. she experiences a lot of opposition, both because of the prejudice of her colleagues and the natural hostility against the system she's serving.
but the main conflict is internal, an ever-present fear that she will lose herself and the ties to her home, that she will cross a moral point of no return by continuing to work for the imperial power, that she will ultimately fail - or take too long - and make both her sacrifices and the suffering she has inflicted on others pointless.
Baru is also a lesbian, adding to her character's conflict and the stakes of her story, because the system she is part of is extremely homophobic at its core. the series shows many different attitudes to gender and sexuality, between individual characters and between cultures - including settings where queer identities are normalized, or considered utterly unacceptable, or those with roles unlike the western world but restrictive and discriminatory in their own way.
i love the novels' imaginative and thorough world-building, whether it comes to cultural norms, history, myth, economics, linguistics, demographics, or geography. the author thinks deeply about various social topics and presents them in intriguing ways through the perspective of a deeply unwell sapphic nerd with a terminal case of identity crisis. what more could i want.
germansingergirl
yousharknotpass
dailybridgerton
kianamaiart
dededos
jacobvanloon
turnnoffyourmind
snowghoul
discoholicmusic
