Raven Stratagem

"You've got to get over that Kel thing where you offer to commit suicide just to prove a point." I'm going to hide some of my review behind spoiler tags, but the tl;dr up front is that I enjoyed this book just as much as or maybe even more than the first. I know. I'm shocked too. Middle books of trilogies are usually so mediocre. (view spoiler)[The author buries the lede in this book from the very beginning, with the vast majority of things taking place from the points of view of everyone else except Cheris/Jedao. Is she Cheris? Is she Jedao? Who knows? The author certainly isn't telling, and I appreciated being pulled along through the story and trying to figure it out alongside the other main(?) characters aboard the bannermoth of their fleet. Cheris/Jedao has a sneaky plan to get back at the hexarchate, but goes through the motions of investigating a Hafn invasion while doing so. We also get other points of view from people removed from the fleet, chief among them the Shuos hexarchate, Mikodez, who also harbors no great love for the system he works within. The ending, while no great space battle, was still satisfying (and a bit sad). While the first book started us off in the middle of things and I had to figure things out as we went along, this book took a much slower pace and felt more character-driven. I appreciated that. I also didn't feel nearly as beaten over the head by crazy terminology as I did from reading the first book, which helped me keep pace with what was going on and really develop feelings for some of these non-MCs. I had some real feels near the end. (hide spoiler)] If you've read the first book and are here to see if you'd enjoy the second, I highly recommend giving it a try. It's clear the author cleaned things up a bit here, and things feel tighter, more cohesive, and incredibly satisfying. I'm absolutely going to move onto the third.

Ninefox Gambit, Yoon Ha Lee's astonishing debut novel, was a breakout star of 2016, and is rightly nominated for ALL OF THE AWARDS. The sequel ups the ante, expands the universe, and marks The Machineries Of Empire as a trilogy on par with Ann Leckie's Ancillary books. These two series have raised the bar for space opera, and the sub genre may never be the same again. And that, my friends, is a very good thing. As this is a sequel to a novel some of you may not have read yet (fix that!) I will say nothing about its plot. It's spoilers all the way down, you see. But I will say it is a worthy followup that you should read.

I wish Goodreads had half-stars - I'd rate this a 3.7. I really enjoyed this book, though not as much as Ninefox Gambit. What made it very subjectively not as great for me wasn't any slight in the writing, overall plot, or character building, but purely my own personal preference for the Cheris/Jedao dynamic of the first book. (view spoiler)[I thought having them as two very distinct characters and entities in one body was much more interesting than the consolidated entity. One of the things I enjoyed the most in the first book was the interaction between the two, and that was essentially gone in Raven Stratagem. (hide spoiler)] Having said that, there were other interesting characters and relationships in Raven Stratagem. I also thought the book got better and better towards the end. Too often I'm impatient toward the end of a book due to the end being a bit predictable, or the most exciting part of the book being over, or just being excited about some new book, but Raven Stratagem made me more interested and invested as it progressed. Even though I preferred the first book, I will go on to the third in the series.

The opening chapter of Raven Stratagem lacked the ball-busting insanity of Ninefox Gambit but instead served as the opening sonata of an incredibly complex symphony that delved deep into the political gamesmanship that holds the Hexarchate together. With every chapter you can just feel the tempo of the story slowly but surely picking up the pace until you're hurtled head-on into the Big Reveal & the major twist in the final third. Absolutely captivating sci-fi!

This was "okay" (two stars), which represents a huge disappointment considering how much I loved the first book. Its main weakness was a misguided choice of focus and POV, as well as the resulting lack of plot development over the first 3/4. Instead of staying with the engaging pair of Cheris and Jedao, who are the ones who actually have a goal and an intricate plan for reaching it, we are denied this POV entirely. Instead, we're put into the heads of various other characters who seem to merely be boring copies of Cheris and Jedao, just for them to get the exact same development (=realization that Jedao isn't a crazy monster) that we already went through in the first book. In addition, we get long chapters about a hexarch who's probably supposed to seem old and wise, but comes across more like a creepy teenager who's made his sister become his lookalike brother - an exact copy of himself so they can serve as a bodyguard and replace him in boring meetings. Oh, and they also have miserably unhappy incestuous group sex for no discernable reason? At no point is this utter erasure of someone else's identity and independent life questioned in any way. Even their parents approve. The POV characters also lack proactivity: e.g. we have a Kel who spends the entire book being moved from one prison cell to the next and then being put on a ship with an assassination mission. Upon arrival, other characters make him give up that plan. That's his entire plot, he's being moved around by others the entire time. This is a pattern all over the book: whenever there's a chance to be in the head of someone *to whom something is happening* while they are passive and without any plans of their own, or drifting along in a confused/sleepy/hallucinating state, that's where the reader is put. Or whenever someone is having an irrelevant conversation about something. This does allow a "surprise ending" when the plans of the actual movers, planners and shakers are revealed - except it's no surprise at all for the reader because they've read Ninefox Gambit and know all of that already, it's only a surprise for the characters! The big reveal worked wonderfully in the first book, since the reader didn't know the truth, either, and because we were always where the actually interesting things were happening - here, most interesting stuff happens off-page somewhere else while we're literally spending an entire chapter in the head of a sleepy character who is dozing through a boring meeting! And the "exciting space battles" (there's only one at the beginning) suffer from the fact that nothing about the magical tech being used is ever explained to the reader, so that they never understand why one formation would be better than another, what the purpose of this or that tactic is supposed to be, etc. It becomes pure magi-babble without any tension, when it could easily have been turned into a tense battle of wits. The ending finally re-establishes some good stuff and puts us back on track, so maybe the third book will be good again? I'm not in a terrible hurry to find out, though.