Book Review: The Unbroken, by C. L. Clark
Book one of The Magic of the Lost anticolonial trilogy inspired by French West Africa and Morocco
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Other analysis posts: Assassin’s Creed Mirage | Assassin’s Creed Shadows Preview Build (and the openings bonus tangent)
Warlords of Wyrdwood (Forsaken #2) , by R. J. Barker | The Hurricane Wars (The Hurricane Wars #1), by Thea Guanzon | Murtagh (The Inheritance Cycle #5), by Christopher Paolini
Character: ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆ ☆
Plot: ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆ ☆
Prose: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
World: ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆
OVERALL: ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆ ☆
Intro
I’d been looking forward to this book for a while and thought it was going to be a slam dunk favourite. A book inspired by French West Africa set in this world’s equivalent of our 18th century? The late-2010s/early-2020s anti-colonisation phase in publishing? Political fantasy? Yes please! I enjoyed the first quarter of this book immensely, but when it started to get into the weeds, The Unbroken started to lose its way.
I had similar thoughts about Promise of Blood, the first book in the Powder Mage world, when it came to how it handled its subject and setting. The Unbroken shines when it comes to the social dissonance as experienced by one of its two leads, Touraine, and the hardships that come with someone torn between two competing desires. However, the book stumbles on its political front, the execution of its rebellion, its investment and interest in details, and struggles to connect its absolutist, colonial 18th century setting with the 20th/21st century social attitudes which its messaging is steeped in.
The Unbroken tells the entwined stories of Touraine, a child taken by and turned into a soldier for an empire that has conquered and colonised her homeland, and Luca, the crippled imperial princess who must wrestle her throne back from an uncle who refuses to vacate the regency. Where Luca’s goal in Qazāl is to put down a rebellion threatening the operations of Balladaire’s colony there, Touraine doesn’t want to engage with the country.
After Touraine is dismissed from the army for a crime she did not commit, Luca sees within her the perfect envoy to the rebellion; if Touraine can establish a channel of communication, then the rebellion can be ended through peaceful negotiation. But Luca has a secondary goal beyond ending the rebellion. She believes that discovering the secrets behind Qazāli magic and seizing it for the good of the empire will bring her to her throne. If Touraine succeeds as her envoy, Luca will bestow upon her and her squadron the rights of citizenship, respect, and Balladairan success.
And just a bias disclaimer for the rest of the review: I really like the history of 18th century revolutions. It is has coloured many of my opinions on this book.
Characters
From a psychological perspective, I found Touraine much more consistent than Luca. I like how Touraine struggles with her Balladairan sensibilities, internalised racism, and grapples with the reality of her societal role and position — she sees the Qazāli as poor, superstitious, and uncivilised in comparison to the good opportunities and education afforded to her by the Balladairan empire. She doesn’t understand why others in her squadron, who have clearer memories of Qazāl, despise what has happened to them and the disconnect it has left them with regarding their home and people. She wrestles with not being able to speak the language, with the relationships she unexpectedly finds in the Qazāli people, and whether she wants to reclaim these things or keep pushing them away.
But whilst I like her psychological profile and think she is a good character study, I’m struggling to understand the catalyst of her arc, i.e., why her focus and goals shift over the book. What causes the gears to whirl in her brain? Why does she ultimately realise that the world won’t conform to her wishes, and that she must change in order to find a better life for herself? Things seem to happen in her story because that’s what the plot now demands, and just before the action set piece at the halfway mark, she starts to feel rudderless. She has a refrain throughout the story that her military unit, made of colonial conscripts like her, are her family, but after the quarter mark, the showing that they are family begins to be told instead. I want to see them bonding over what this shared experience of being stolen means. I want to see the factions that form in the squad that can be split along the lines of those who resent their pasts, and those who are glad for them. I want to see those who are relieved to return to Qazāl, and those, like Touraine, who can’t wait to leave. Any overtures that are made towards those feelings and that camaraderie vanish after the quarter mark, but I wish it was revisited or lingered on. The parts of her story that I liked were her reflections on the injustices that had befallen her and her squadron, but the other, more plotty parts seem to be driven by bafflingly stupid decisions, i.e., if Touraine made smarter, not-impulse driven choices, then the plot would not work.
Luca, on the other hand, was a frustratingly unbelievable character, given who she was.
She is the princess to the Balladairan empire, which includes its homelands and colonies with all their incomes, in a system that, given the book’s influence of French colonial power, is a crown that rests on the foundations of absolutism. As queen, she would have absolute power over government, over the people, over the colonies, and this should basically result in a person who is an entitled politician — someone who always gets their way, someone who cannot be told no (except at opportune moments by people in their trusted circles), and someone with whom all decisions about the state rest.
Essentially, a dictator.
My big issue with her is that she does not act as someone raised to the right of rule. I am very interested to see an arc of a ruler whose booksmarts are in no way enough to deal with the reality that is being a leader, especially when the culture those booksmarts are trying to be attached to are severely mismatched, but in the end, Luca came off as unbelievably naive about her position as both a governor and a candidate for the throne, neither of which she has the hunger for. Her lack of appetite for her Balladairan throne unfortunately manifests in how she encompasses Qazāl and its people in her thoughts. Like so much of this book, I like the idea behind it. Luca wants to be a good queen for all of her people, but the way she approaches it is … liberal. Which, as I have mentioned already, does not fit well with the period’s attitudes and Luca’s position as a queen-in-waiting. It makes her less morally grey, which was the intent, and instead indecisive and inconsistent.
Finally, Touraine and Luca had no chemistry, romantic or otherwise. I was left extremely confused by what was happening with it, and it felt kind of tacked on because sapphic fantasy was what was selling in the early part of the decade. It ended up, if anything, being distracting. Great overtures are made towards these two making choices for their burgeoning love for each other that carry great consequences, but it felt confusing at best, and psychotic at worst.
Plot
One thing which I am kind of embarrassed to admit about this book, but I was having such a difficult time remembering what was going on. So I would read a chunk of it, put it down for the day, and completely forget what had been going on when I next picked it up; I mean, shit, I was forgetting what was happening between me closing my Kindle to get on the bus and then opening it back up a minute or so later. That this kept happening, and that the book took me an annoyingly long time to finish, points to some problem that I’m still trying to put my finger on. But ultimately, know that I had a tough time getting invested in what was happening. This is not a problem I have with other books — it is just this one.
The prevalent thing I noticed about the book is how it struggles with scale, both on the macro and micro levels. It struggles with the scale of the setting (as the activities of the colony and rebellion seem to be concentrated on the fate of a single city), the politics and priorities (Luca’s focus on the wrong groups in comparison to what her position should be focusing on, as discussed above), the rebellion (which seems to hinge on a group of less than ten characters), and the consequences of colonial entanglement (which are reduced to the ramifications faced by people like the colonial conscripts, and economically, the trade of ‘goods’ (it doesn’t get more specific than that, and if it did, I think it’s just food and like, one guy’s quarries, or I missed it)).
Touraine’s story involves the choices she must make to keep her soldiers safe, be that in the fight against the casual racism they experience, or in keeping them as far away from the conflict brought about by the rebellion as possible. But she kept making these head scratching decisions that I can see the logic behind, but due to the character work as discussed above, it rings hollow. There is a large section in the latter half of the book which involves her figuring out if she wants to fight for the empire or the rebellion, but her choices of who to talk to and where to go feel dictated by which party outside of the two POVs needed to provide exposition. It felt random and like the narrative didn’t know how to get to the next part of the story. It was disappointing to say the least.
(And how does Touraine get away with how much she casually visits the leaders of each side it is RIDICULOUS —)
Luca’s plot revolves around her attempts to end the Qazāli rebellion, and discovering and seizing Qazāli magic that will stop, and bring reversal to, a crop blight called the Withering that is ravaging Balladaire … but like Touraine, she makes some bizarre decisions in pursuit of these goals. I like the idea of Luca’s arc taking a darker turn when her preconceived notions are challenged and/or smashed upon arriving in Qazāl, but stuff just seems to either happen or be forgotten as needed. And these inconsistent decisions, desires, and goals are why I kept forgetting what was happening. I had so much trouble tracking the emotions and states of mind of the cast, and … yeah.
But my biggest disappointment in the book was how it felt uninterested in its details; immediate problems are introduced throughout the narrative and are solved within a few hundred words, sometimes plots are just forgotten (for instance, Luca never mentions trying to get to the First Library after her failed attempt to get to it the first time) and it made the book feel very stop-start. One of the book’s particularly bad habits was dropping off-screen changes onto the reader, such as characters switching sides being conveyed in an off-hand sentence.
Prose
The prose is very contemporary. It is functional and clear, and I don’t have a problem with any of it in isolation. I think it is very middle of the road. But, I do have two notes.
The first is, the language is contemporary. The dialogue could have been plucked from the street today, and I would have liked it to make the attempt to sound more like a period piece, be that in how it cuts out words like “okay”, to sentence structure.
The second, it is couched in modern concepts of social justice. Luca reflects on how her racism is “called out”, Touraine talks about the privilege of Luca and the Balladairans as we would talk about the effects of colonialism in our history. Their recognition of the harrowing effects of colonialism, over the period of time this story takes place, is impressive. It jerked me out of the story because it felt like switches were flipped in their heads (especially Touraine’s). And even so, I don’t think they would be talking about it like this.
Worldbuilding
Most of my worldbuilding notes for The Unbroken are about its cultural decisions. It has chosen not only a socially complex setting, but one whose real life counterpart still colours our world today, and so requires some degree of delicacy (especially if the author is keeping one eye on how the book will be received by the Internet). The world of the story is experiencing active, occupying colonialism, but due to a layer of hows, whys, and consequences not being present, it ends up being overly simplified, and for a book that wants to take big swings at complex topics, it needs to have more meat on its bones.
My two big cultural problems with this are how the Balladarians think about the Qazāli, and how there is little in the way of rigid social classes that would redefine how every character reacts to every other character throughout the book. If you look into any of the real life European colonial projects, you’ll quickly, quickly come to the realisation of how complex the relations between the worlds of Europe and its colonies were. People were swapping sides and allegiances, fighting who we might instinctively group together as allies, and exchanging cultural ideas and practices that might surprise you. So for this fictional colonisation story, its simplicity is doubly disappointing for how it closes doors on potential arcs and conflicts. An interesting decision I thought the book made, however, is that it takes its inspiration from the French colonisation of Morocco and West Africa in the late-1800s to early-1900s, but has the aesthetics and technology of 1700s Colonial America.
So, I wish the book leaned into its period setting. It is aesthetically the 18th century, but culturally, it resembles something closer to our 20th. This is a recurring theme (problem?) I have found across the recent slew of anticolonial books I have read. Which is fine, because these books want to address contemporary points in our world, but it does beg the question … why use these historically inspired settings, but shy away from embracing it? I was expecting The Unbroken to be a historically inspired novel in all meanings of the word — and that includes the 18th century’s colonial attitudes, from both European and colonised perspectives. Both Touraine and Luca express something in the way of them at various points, but not consistently.
I’ve already mentioned that the book struggles with a sense of scale, and so the rebellion feels like it is confined to the fate of a single city. Well, one of the other problems of scale includes how the rebellion is organised, and it is perfectly summed up by one of my least favourite subplots of the book.
At one point, the Qazāli are haggling for guns from Luca via Touraine to trade for magic, and the tension is in if Luca is going to make the decision to give them weapons that will be used to rebel against her, but it’s such a strange object to settle upon because like, how don’t they have guns? Does Balladaire have really tight gun laws at the same time they’re struggling to put down a rebellion in their colony? Make it so the rebels want cannons or something! Guns should not be this hard to get your hands on! A real-life example of non-Europeans getting guns can be found in Colonial America, where during the early 1600s, an English law made it illegal for colonists to trade them with Native Americans, yet it didn’t stop Native Americans from acquiring so many guns through a variety of channels (black markets, robbery, bartering, English desertion from colonial townships, guns coming in from other areas of European contact (Spanish and Dutch particularly), slaving, etc. (x)) and so it quickly became impossible to put the genie back into the proverbial bottle. And, as Luca rightfully points out, a hundred (slow loading) guns won’t do anything against an army. So it evokes this reaction in the reader of “Huh, what are you talking about?” and “What is the point of this?”. And like, this is my most egregious example, but there are more through the book (like the hostages that are missing for a single chapter).
Finally, for this review, there is the frustrating problem of people not giving a shit about social classes. I’m going to use royalty as an example here because it is a huge problem across so much contemporary (American) Fantasy and it drives me insane, and it is in this book too. Europe loves their social classes! And Luca, who is “French”, is royal! People should be aiming to please her every waking moment of her life because she is power incarnate, and one of the consequences of this is royals don’t get pushback outside of their close personal and class circles (i.e., friends and peers). Touraine speaking to Luca as she does, and the subjects she speaks on, should shock her, but it never does. I don’t know if it’s people not being aware of historical social classes or not knowing how to write them, but what ends up happening is these royal characters are written like the Western, urban middle-class.
(This is a pet peeve driven by a lot of books, sorry CL Clark.)
Final Thoughts
I’ve read a lot of disappointing books over the years, and have unfortunately had more misses than hits this year (some self-inflicted, some poor luck on my part), but this might shake out as one of the most for me because I wanted to like it so much. I can moan about The Hurricane Wars and not dwell on it as much because it’s a silly book, or I can be bummed about Warlords of Wyrdwood because it didn’t reach my expectations as a sequel to a book I enjoyed, but The Unbroken is a different beast. Its topics are heavier than those other books. It's steeped in real world conversations I care deeply about, set in a historically-inspired era that I have high expectations for, and to find these elements lacking has taken a lot out of me.
What this book does well is Touraine’s emotions. Everything else is simply not thought through enough that it leaves an unsatisfying taste in the mouth, and I can’t help but think that this book was written primarily for The Message.
I’m still looking for a book that is interested in the minutiae of colonial rebellion — the setbacks, the difficulties, the victories — that don’t have to do with battles. I want a story that is interested in the psychology behind it all, and I thought I would find that in The Unbroken. But like so many books proceeding it, The Unbroken concerns itself more with the aesthetics of revolution, and the contemporary after effects, rather than exploring it in capacity.