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A review by lesserjoke
Petty Treasons by Victoria Goddard
4.0
This novella revisits and expands upon a slice of backstory previously mentioned in author Victoria Goddard's excellent fantasy doorstopper The Hands of the Emperor, when Cliopher Mdang first began service as His Radiancy's personal secretary. Except while that book was generally presented from Kip's third-person limited point-of-view, this one shifts to the perspective of his liege lord, and is interestingly told in both first- and second-person, as though the man is reflecting upon his private memories and drawing a distinction between "I" the individual and "you" the public figurehead of his recently-shattered empire. That's a device I don't believe I've encountered in fiction before, but it allows for great insight into his character, especially in those moments when he starts a thought with one pronoun but then switches in mid-sentence to the other.
The plot here is minimal -- basically just the protagonist meeting his new servant, sending that underling on his first big diplomatic mission, starting to fix the world's magic, and considering the limitations of his situation and the oblique things he misses from before he came to power -- but the careful study of a careful ruler waking up from his inadvertent lethargy (with a little bit of outside help and inspiration) is pitch-perfect. I imagine the story probably works best for an audience already familiar with / fond of both figures from the preceding volume, but it stands well enough on its own that I might recommend it to anyone tentatively interested in the Nine Worlds saga (or merely its Lays of the Hearth-Fire sequence focused on Kip) yet daunted by the length of some of the longer titles. As other readers have indicated, the series seems to be a rather forgiving, Discworld-style hypertext with multiple possible entry points that build contextually and enrich one another the more you explore. This is only my second read in this setting, and I am already itching to come at it again from some other angle altogether.
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The plot here is minimal -- basically just the protagonist meeting his new servant, sending that underling on his first big diplomatic mission, starting to fix the world's magic, and considering the limitations of his situation and the oblique things he misses from before he came to power -- but the careful study of a careful ruler waking up from his inadvertent lethargy (with a little bit of outside help and inspiration) is pitch-perfect. I imagine the story probably works best for an audience already familiar with / fond of both figures from the preceding volume, but it stands well enough on its own that I might recommend it to anyone tentatively interested in the Nine Worlds saga (or merely its Lays of the Hearth-Fire sequence focused on Kip) yet daunted by the length of some of the longer titles. As other readers have indicated, the series seems to be a rather forgiving, Discworld-style hypertext with multiple possible entry points that build contextually and enrich one another the more you explore. This is only my second read in this setting, and I am already itching to come at it again from some other angle altogether.
Like this review?
--Throw me a quick one-time donation here!
https://ko-fi.com/lesserjoke
--Subscribe here to support my writing and weigh in on what I read next!
https://patreon.com/lesserjoke
--Follow along on Goodreads here!
https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/6288479-joe-kessler
--Or click here to browse through all my previous reviews!
https://lesserjoke.home.blog