Reviews with content warning for Murder - The Shadow King

I really didn't get on with the way this book was wirtten. Between overly written prose that made the most heartbreaking scenes quickly lose value, to the characters' daydreams which are apparently so rich and vivid in their mind that sometimes it was difficult to discern whether what was happening was real or imagined. I didn't like the whole *40 years later* sections that bookended the story, I don't think it was important enough to be how we enter the story, perhaps just at the end would have been better. I was so confused by Aster - does she like Hirut, does she hate Hirut, does she not know herself? Often her actions contradicted the way she verbalised how she felt about Hirut. It takes too long to understand why the book is called The Shadow King; you don't know until about half way through and although it's not a huge demerit it was frustrating as a reader (also The Shadow King, while a great title, is not completely representative of what the story is about... the women and not The Shadow King). Okay now good things! I liked the bones of the story, the plot was interesting, feeling somewhat like a car crash that you can't help but stare horrified at (in a good way!!) although imo it could have been at least 100 pages shorter, maybe even under 300 pages altogether (cut most of the earlier stuff rather than the later). Most importantly though the main character Hirut was very endearing and easy to root for. A low class young girl sent to be a maid for a rebel and his wife after the death of her parents, Hirut is confused, frustrated, defiant, and fierce, and we see her qualities that hinder her as a maid blossom as she becomes a soldier. Tbh I think it's a bit of an insult that the book isn't named after her.

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moriahleigh's review against another edition

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emotional informative tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

1.75

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paperquilt's review against another edition

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dark emotional informative medium-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

3.25

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arnorosenfeld's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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books_n_pickles's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional medium-paced

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

3.5

This book wasn't much like what I expected, and I'm trying to figure out how I feel about that. At least on my advanced reader's copy, the description focused on Hirut and her work to pass off the "shadow king" as the absent emperor, her work guarding him, and the contributions of women in war. All that's there, but the description gives these things much more prominence than they get in the text.

Yes, Hirut is probably the character who gets the most page space, but Ettore Navarra, a photographer with the invading Italian army whose Jewish ancestors are only now becoming relevant, gets a significant amount of page space as well. So do Kidane, Hirut's employer who becomes the leader of their branch of the Ethiopian resistance (and a complete !#$%$# to Hirut), and Carolo Fucelli, an absolutely horrendous Italian colonel with an odd mix of barbarity and civility. (

He has Ettore photograph each prisoner before and while he has them thrown off a cliff, but when Hirut and Aster, Kidane's wife, are captured, Aster is raped once and then both women are kept alive in prison, repeatedly photographed half-naked, but physically unharmed. I think Mengiste wanted us to have mixed feelings about him for the protective and paternal feelings he has for Ettore, but that never got to me--the guy throws people off cliffs and photographs their deaths. No, it was the fact that Fucilli kept Hirut and Aster alive and unharmed that confused me.

) Others who get some page time include emperor in exile Haile Selassie, who gets quite a few "Interludes"; Aster, Kidane's wife; Fifi, Fucelli's Ethiopian mistress; and a "Chorus" of Ethiopian women who try to reassure Hirut and Aster that they they have shared their domestic horrors, like wedding night rape, and who refer to the songs that they will someday sing about Hirut and Aster's roles in the war…though given that Mengiste starts the book with a foreword saying that she had no idea of her own great-grandmother’s participation, it’s hard to find these choruses that inspiring.

The structure of the book is interesting in its own right. While most chapters are given over to one character or another, as the book goes on (and especially in the battle scenes) the point of view will switch without warning from one paragraph to the next. This certainly speaks to the confusion of battle, but it feels more like a matter of convenience when it starts showing up in the quiet parts of the second half of the book. In addition to the emperor's "Interludes" and the occasional "Chorus", there are also several "Photo" vignettes describing in emotional as well as visual detail the photographs that Ettore takes of his surroundings, from innocent things like the camp cook and the Italian army on the move to horrors like Ethiopians on display before death, hanging from a tree, hurtling over a cliff. Photography and image-building are incredibly important to the story, so the descriptions aren't relegated only to these spaces, but the "Photo" sections do give space for the subjects to stand on their own, outside of the context of Fucelli's artistic interests and Ettore's (ugh) aesthetics. Ettore is one of those people who's "just following orders" but also enjoying his art even as he tries to hide behind his camera to wall himself off from what happens in front of it. (I did some searching and found out that the photo bits are inspired by Mengiste's collection of <a href="https://lithub.com/writing-about-the-forgotten-black-women-of-the-italo-ethiopian-war/">real photos from the war</a>.)

Oh, and there are no quotation marks around dialogue, which I'm seeing so much in newer books that it's starting to feel more like a sign of, "Hey, I'm being literary here!" and less like a thought-about choice. That's kind of rude of me to bring up here, because if there's any book where a lack of quotation marks is appropriate, it's The Shadow King. I already mentioned that battle scenes get split into multiple points of view, but there are also a few places where I think the reader is meant to confront their assumptions about who, exactly, is speaking--enough to interest but not annoy me, despite my opening to this paragraph.

The writing itself was beautiful but, I must admit, it felt overwritten in just a few places in battles and landscapes, where I had to reread a paragraph or a page to parse through the imagery to get to the substance. But overall it was much more lovely than purple.

So I got a fantastic, thoughtful, beautifully structured and -written book that, had I known what to expect, I would have appreciated much more. But I went into this expecting a story "by" and about the women who challenged their supporting roles in the resistance in order to do the actual fighting. Instead,

Hirut and Aster take part in only one battle, in which they are captured. They escape, but then there's a big jump to the end of the war when we're told that Aster had been leading the guerilla resistance with Hirut's help--but we see none of it.

I would have liked an author's note with some history. [HUGE caveat here--I'm reading an ARC, it's entirely possible one was added later.] I went to the Wikipedia page about the Second Italo-Ethiopian War looking for more information and felt a bit of dissonance. Some of the atrocities the Italian army perpetrated on the people of Ethiopia felt almost glanced over in the novel. Yes, we've got one Italian officer who's sadistic one-on-one, but the extent of the use of poison and mustard gas felt underplayed, there wasn't mention of the deliberate three-day massacre in Addis Ababa, and in real life there didn't seem to be as much of an organized resistance during the bulk of the occupation (skipped over the plot) as Mengiste suggests. Was the first big battle we read about the Christmas Offensive? Was there really a "shadow king"? Was there an individual officer who inspired Fucilli, or a place in Ethiopia that inspired his prison? Where can we learn more about the women like Mengiste's great-grandmother who fought in the war? There isn’t much to be found with a simple search so a little help would be nice.

Still, it's a rare book that makes me miss by subway stop, which I did in the last 40 pages of The Shadow King.

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angharadmiller's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad slow-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

3.75

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zoes_human's review

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dark emotional reflective sad

4.0

A beautifully written story of Ethiopia's fight against Mussolini's invasion. It is brutal and heartbreaking, but I don't think the truth of war can be told in any other way.

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