Reviews
3.5 ⭐️
This was smart. Concept-wise, writing-wise, magic system-wise, theory-wise, time travelling paradox conveyed-wise, artilleries-war arts-history-geography-ship war history-wise, and of course plot-wise, romance-wise, angst-wise, and EVERYTHING-WISE. Natasha Pulley is a very very smart author. The plot is intricately build in a design so beautiful you would thought a dream come up with it. I can't really say anything about Joe Tournier as Joe Tournier, but he is alive enough, and Missouri Kite and Agatha Lawrence? CHEFS KISS. BEST CHARACTER EVER. 5/5. This book had the best relationship ever... It depicted both platonic and romantic relationship in a really really heartwarming and heartwrenching and just overall super angst way. Memory loss trope is a banger and Natasha Pulley made it even more like a masterpiece. In case you hesitated whether to read this or not, DONT. JUST READ THIS. Amazing novel that I stayed up late for lol. 5/5.
Hurts even more the second time around!! If you can believe it!
i seriously gave it a long thought how i would rate this one. it's unimaginable to give this less than 5 stars, eventhough i have thought about giving this in less than 5 stars [i hate myself for even just thinking it], bc one specific reason: kite murdered a child. without a reason. even if he had, it was SO weak. i hated him sm for that. tbh i would defend him anytime .. but the longer i think about this, i still couldn't find it.. acceptable? fred dying was useless to the plot, except that he just died. and leaving the fact that missouri kite, my dearest kite murdered a child. but other than that, this book is BRILLIANT. it is everything i want in a time travel stories and MORE. even though of course, the historical bits wasn't easy [it was hard], many things i still couldn't understand. but i don't find it uncomfortable? more that i'm glad to have excuses to reread again. Pulley's writing is pretty, and it's not arrogantly pretentious, despite the time background. also, pls writers! take note. this is how you write a love story.
i would die for missouri kite (if he didn't kill me first)
This is the kind of book that you have to reread again at some point after having all the information. It was a beautiful story with beautiful writing, I adored the setting and characters. The pacing and progression was absolutely perfect. The love story was frankly one of the best I've ever read.
This is a difficult book to form an opinion on for me because I tend to look at the craftwork of a novel in a very analytical sense. I’ve tried to watch and read a bunch of reviews on this before coming to an opinion, something I never do, usually. Mostly because everyone I know thinks of this in glowing terms. What I’ve come to realize with this is I think the authorial intent is atypical. For me, the concept of this book was excellent. More so than the granularity of sailing and war and military type fiction, which made the drama take place in a setting I couldn’t care a whit about. Then the characters felt somewhat discordioate with things until a few of the conceits are revealed. And this is where I think the people that disliked this book tend to focus. But I actually think the authorial intent is just different than people expected. It’s much more concerned with conveying something about history and maintaining an emotion. The craftwork bends to accommodate those goals, and that’s why it’s so polarizing. I actually thought of this as more a three star read until I thought on it for the day. Now I think it did exceed my expectations, which were subverted. In the end, I like that about it, though. When thinking about the central sort of tenants of the intent here, the issues I had make sense for what this book is trying to achieve. It’s queer, it’s trying to communicate something about imperialism and hegemony and a lot of things about history and memory. I think you have to pay attention to the strangeness of the dream, so to speak. And also just realize that there is a vibe that Pulley is trying to maintain throughout. So yeah, the protagonist reading a letter slowly, in parts, is a plot device. But it also says something about history as it relates to his memory. So if you have a gut reaction and don’t think on the primary themes, you really could miss the Forrest for the trees, I think. Had the prose work been there and I had been more interested in the myopic setting for around half of it, I think I’d be left with even more of a positive impression of it. And yeah, I realize this review is more about my thought process ON the review than the book. Much of the fun of this book is going in blind though, I think. It’s very difficult to talk about W what makes it interesting without spoilers. So I won’t. 🧐😬 sorry.
I don’t have words to describe how much I enjoyed this book. Suspenseful, heart-wrenching, beautiful writing. If you like slow-burn romances, alternate universes/time travel, mystery, and morally grey characters then pick this novel up.
I knew I was going to love this book based on its premise alone, because it has literally all my favorite tropes, but it still somehow managed to surpass my expectations. It's been a long time since I've had such a visceral, physiological response to a story to the point where I was alternating between yelling into my pillow and slamming my Kindle shut only to turn it on immediately in the last 20% or so of the book. I loved most everything about this work: from the sympathetic and charming characters to the densely layered world-building to its treatment of time travel to its story with the major twist (if you can call it that) that was easy to spot from miles (decades?) away but with enough deft turns and blind jumps to leave you guessing where it all would land. It was almost like Natasha Pulley wrote this book just ticking off items in my list of favorite things in fiction. My only real criticism would be that the language read anachronistic and verged on modern at some points, in both the prose and the dialogue. It didn't bother me too much, because it made the book more accessible without jarring me too abruptly out of its world and Natasha Pulley's character work and storytelling ability more than made up for it: you could feel the love threaded into every action, thought, and quirk of the main characters, but with the story hop-skipping through time, it was easy to get untethered if you didn't actively remember where and when you were in the plot. I loved that though: I love investing in a story to the point where I don't want it to end, because a bad ending is the worst pay-off that poisons everything that precedes it. Without giving anything away, it's safe to say that my rating is very much reflective of how I felt what I'd put into reading this book had been rewarded.
Content warnings: (view spoiler)[slavery, war violence (mostly on ships), ableism, homophobia, misogyny, grief, sexual assault, violent death (including that of children), animal death, drinking (hide spoiler)] What I know about the Napoleonic wars could fit into a thimble, so I was honestly surprised by how much I enjoyed this book. It’s thought-provoking and heart-wrenching, and has a bit of a romantic subplot (though it’s most assuredly not a romance). “Come home, if you remember.” Joe disembarks from a train in London with no memory of how he got there or who he is. Taken to the hospital, and then later an asylum, he finds out that his isn’t the only case of complete amnesia, but there’s nothing to be done about. Joe, who finds out he’s a slave, returns to live with his master and his wife, neither of whom he has any memory of. But he can’t quite rid himself of the feeling that something isn’t right, and a postcard of a lighthouse with a mysterious inscription only fuels his hopes of one day rediscovering his memories. When the opportunity comes to visit that lighthouse, Joe hopes it’ll finally give him answers… but what he discovers there is worse than he could possibly have imagined. The plot is delightfully twisty. It’s obvious that something traumatic has happened to Joe, and his inability to remember anything except a few snatches is terrifying, as well as everyone’s insistence that he simply fit back into his “normal” life as if nothing has changed. It’s hard to talk about the other twists without going into spoilers, but the majority of the story is Joe trying to figure out who he “really” is and why he lost his memory, while the characters around him manipulate him and refuse to answer his questions. Missouri and Agatha were fascinating characters, morally complex in ways that left me questioning whether I was rooting for them or not. And while there’s a few naval battles (a good chunk of the book does take place during a war) most of the book is slowly paced. Joe’s emotions are really front and center in the book, and the way the author conveys them and how they influence his decisions was particularly well done. For instance, there’s a particular plot twist that I thought was painfully obvious, but that Joe remains oblivious to for most of the book. The build-up to it – watching Joe make decisions from one point of context while knowing he’s horribly wrong – was one of the things that kept me turning pages. Overall, this book was absolutely fascinating and I will definitely be checking out the author’s previous work. I received an advance review copy of this book from NetGalley. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
i spent yesterday reading the last half of this book and felt like i was going a little bit insane with how much i was ACHING. i love a time travel plot, i love an amnesia plot, i love yearning, i love how painful and harrowing and touching this story was. every minute i have spent thinking about this book since finishing it has made me want to start a reread immediately. so good
I told myself to take The Kingdoms slowly when I picked it up a few days ago but I ended up finishing the whole thing in one day because it was so good!! Natasha Pulley always have a very clever skill of blending science and humanity in an emotionally engaging way. In The Kingdoms, Pulley moves out from the more moralistic topics explored in the previous novels into something more ambiguous and and mind-bending. By imagining an alternative history of Great Britain during the Napoleonic Wars and incorporating seamless speculative elements to drive the storytelling, this ended up being a very hard to put down read. Beneath the well researched context and the intriguing concept, this is a very clever story of self-discovery and making difficult choices. I deeply believe that this is a book that's best enjoyed with as little spoilers as possible. If I want to give a few heads up about the writing, it's that the prose is quite experimental and the pacing is slow so this might not be for you if you are looking for something more action-packed. That aside, I think the choice of prose and pacing is intentional. I actually think it helps execute the concept well as I found the clever plot twists pretty surprising but also makes sense (once everything's pieced together). It's one of those books where your mind works in the background figuring out the clues as you slowly make sense of it. Disclaimers aside, I really enjoyed The Kingdoms. It's a different sort of character-driven novel that I usually read but I loved being surprised by the way Pulley revealed the secrets and pieced together the timelines. And the concept of self-discovery is beautifully done without either the relationship nor the speculative elements overwhelming it. N.B. This book contains following content warnings: slavery, loss of loved ones, grief, and mental illnesses
Okay I hate giving a rating to a book that's under 3 stars but I just lost interest in the book the more it went on. I was hooked at the very beginning and loved the concept. But after the half way point I began to lose interest. Honestly near the end I just wanted to finish it. I'm not saying this is a bad book because it isn't but when I finished it I just said okay this is an okay book. I'm glad to have read it but was dissapointed by the half way point with how I felt it became less interesting to me. I just don't think it was for me or I wasn't in the mood for it. Maybe I would have enjoyed it more if I'd been in a better mood for it. I'm sad that I felt this way because I did enjoy it at first. That being said I'm happy to have read it but I won't be reading it again.
