Reviews with content warning for Vomit - The Unbroken

Reviews tagging 'Vomit'

The Unbroken by C.L. Clark

16 reviews

taratearex's review against another edition

adventurous challenging dark mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

3.5 rounded up, this kind of fell apart for me in the last quarter, but I did really enjoy reading it I just kind of lost my ability to suspend my disbelief at the end as it went off the rails a bit.

This is a fantasy loosely based on French colonization of a North African country, I was on board from the start with that premise as I studied Arabic and lived in Egypt for a summer, so I really enjoyed seeing the fantasy elements that referenced this and I thought this worked really well and was really well done, the world felt real and the worldbuilding interesting and detailed. I enjoyed the absolutely messy characters in this, even if I was like WHAT ARE YOU DOING a lot of the time, I think the messiness also did make sense when you think about Luca's desire for power fighting with her desire to be a good leader, this gets very white savior too so it's hard to sympathize with her character at all sometimes, but her as the opposing character to Touraine did make for interesting dynamics. And then Touraine, oof, her being deeply brainwashed by the military and then being thrown back into a world she should have known and dealing with a lot of trauma trying to free herself and find herself, she's a mess and it makes sense why- but the in world motivations for why characters sympathized with her did get a bit hard to believe. BUT everyone in this book is deeply flawed and so messy I went with it, and they are all handled with care, even side characters have stories to make them fuller people. Also the disability rep was great and I loved that it was a queer normative world.

Where I think it goes off the rail a bit is just that there are a lot of loose ends that get left dangling as you go through the book and so when I got to the last quarter I expected to see some of those tied up and instead it went kind of more off the rails. Motivations of characters became even more murky, the magic that gets introduced doesn't really get much explanation or time so I'm still not really sure what happened in a couple of the last scenes, and there's an alliance that seemed crucial sort of disappears?

Knowing that this is a trilogy it's always hard to know if some things are just being saved for the next book, so maybe some of these will be explained more in the next book, and I do think I will continue with the series as it was really engaging - it was very dense though so I totally see where some people lost interest in the complicated military and political dynamics, but I thought it was all very interesting, sometimes I'd look up and I'd just read for an hour without looking up, which is kind of rare for me.

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