Reviews

The Monster Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson

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jellyparfum's review

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adventurous challenging dark emotional tense medium-paced

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

4.5

Content Warnings

notbambi's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional sad slow-paced

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

4.0

This series is going in some wild directions. I feel like it's weaker structurally than Traitor, but it's still pretty fantastic at exploring characters and creating a wonderful mess of intersecting motivations and geopolitics. As with The Traitor Baru Cormorant, the map at the front was very, very useful in keeping track of the political actors in this series.

The calculating Baru Cormorant of the first book is totally broken, and I am here for it. She is now laying in the bed she made, and it turns out that her actions have consequences beyond the borders of Aurdwynn. Everyone she meets either hates her because they see her as devoid of humanity for killing someone she supposedly loved, or hates her because she killed someone they care about personally. Everywhere she goes, her presence causes catastrophe, not because she's trying to destroy everything she touches, but because she's pissed off a lot of people and those people are perfectly happy to destroy the lives of a couple hundred hick islanders to get to her. The only person who actually likes her seems to be Farrier, who she's starting realized has groomed her for her entire life to enact his political ideals. On top of all that, she's discovered that killing her girlfriend has significant psychological effects and she can't just ignore it and pretend it didn't happen. She's also discovered alcoholism as a coping mechanism.

Traitor never leaves Baru's POV that I recall, but this book spends a lot of time giving us other people's perspectives on events. I'd say that this book has deuteragonist in Tau-indi, a non-binary prince who gets significant page time and flashbacks exploring his history and motivations. He's a firm believer in the power of interpersonal connection, which Baru finds exhausting at first, but honestly, she's so fucked up, she needs that kind of optimism about the power of relationships.

As I say, it's great, but not quite as strong as the first book. If you're expecting more of Baru's tactical genius and conniving, you'll be disappointed - she has her moments, but she's falling apart at the seams in this book, so the vibes are a little different. The book suffers a bit from being a middle book, as there are a number of plot threads introduced that are left open going into book 3 (the reviews say that they are resolved, so I'm trusting them). With the addition of many, many viewpoint characters, and many, many side characters, and many, many returning characters from Book 1, it can be confusing to keep track of names.

This is totally my jam, though, and I have to immediately get my hands on book 3 before I forget all the character names.

sourcherrysyrup's review

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adventurous dark 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

4.5

Baru she’s so flawed. She has the most flaws.

Content Warnings

emmeline790's review

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adventurous dark emotional mysterious 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

4.5

witch_dagger's review

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adventurous challenging dark slow-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

3.25

meghaha's review against another edition

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3.0

"Surely she could justify any sacrifice. To stop now would be to betray those lives she’d already spent … and the more lives she spent, the more reason she had to sacrifice even more …”

I remember being really captivated by The Traitor Baru Cormorant back in 2015. I haven’t re-read it since. This second book, The Monster Baru Cormorant, makes me wonder if I wouldn't care for the first book as much if I re-read it, or if this volume simply constitutes a sophomoric slump.

Baru is broken for understandable reasons (of her own making).

"It hurt like—how had she thought of it at Sieroch? Like glass powder in her cup. Like glimmering motes in the flesh of her throat, in the sponge of her lungs, pumped into her blood so glass lodged in the small joints of her fingers and the lobes of her ears. It hurt. But if Baru could just find a problem to tackle, a maneuver to plot, a precision to execute with all her life and work at stake, then she’d be too full of cleverness to grieve.”

The problem with having her mope and blunder about for 400 pages is that it isn’t very compelling, narratively speaking. This is true of any book that isn’t first and foremost a literary meditation on dealing with grief which has a plot that the main character doesn’t want to engage in. It simply dragged on for too long here, and I suppose we have to wait for the third or fourth book in the series for Baru to really get back in the game. Which is too long. (Upon googling, it turns out this series is now a quartet instead of a trilogy because the middle book was so long it had to be split into two, and this is the first half. Now everything makes sense. This book should not have been split into two— it should’ve been revised down to one).

We did get one example of her technocrat ruthlessness, when she takes over the Llosydanes. I never thought I’d ask for more content on accounting and banking in a novel but the day has come. Dickinson makes it all so fascinating, is able to say through Baru: this is how the world works on a geopolitical and financial scale.

"Banking was the most powerful weapon in the world, because people stored their wealth in banks, and the banks could loan that wealth out to fund great labors. You could tax your people dead to fund your armies, and they would hate you for it. But give them a bank and a fair interest rate and they would give you everything they had and let you do what you pleased with it and ask only to have it back when you were done.”

Baru is also very creepy in this book , so I suppose that’s a plus? As are the final scenes at the Embassy--pure horror material.

It took me some time to get used to Dickinson’s prose — the first few chapters had me going, ahh, was it always this overwrought? But I adjusted eventually and got into the rhythm of it and there really were some very good lines:

"If they learn what we do on distant shores to secure their safety and prosperity, I am certain they would hang us all. Not for the crime of what we did, mind! But for the crime of allowing them to know."

And:

"Make enough death, and like any other currency it loses its value."

And:

"Baru thought: What I see of other people is the output of a hashing function.

I’ll never know anyone’s true self, will I? Their thoughts and memories, the selfness of someone, the me-ness of me: that’s like a true name, a person in all their formless awesome grandeur. But we do not see that grandeur. We see each other only in the shapes we are forced to assume. Words constrain us, and also our laws, and our fears and hopes, and the wind, and the rain, and the dog that barks while we’re trying to speak, all these things constrain us.

We all force our true selves into little hashes and show them like passwords. A smile is a hashing function, and a word, and a cry. The cry is not the grief, the word is not the meaning, the smile is not the joy: we cannot run the hash in reverse, we cannot get from the sign to the absolute truth. Maybe the smile is false. Maybe the grief is a lie.

But we can compare the hash to a list, and guess at the meaning."

And:

"Was goodness still good if you hewed to it out of tactical necessity? Was there, Baru wondered, any difference between being good and pretending to be good for your own gain, if you took the same actions in the end? Was there any difference between telling the truth unconditionally, and deploying the truth in service of your agenda, if you told the same truth?

Maybe the Oriati thought so.

Maybe the difference between truth-for-itself and tactical truth was the only difference that mattered. Maybe the most crucial and subtle distinction in life was the difference between someone who was truly good and someone playing at goodness to gain power.

Could she distinguish those two tendencies in herself?"