A Desolation Called Peace, by Arkady Martine

[sophia_sol]

When I read A Memory Called Empire I absolutely adored it and was blown away by it, and so when this sequel came out I a) bought it immediately, and then b) failed to read it for a year and a half because I was afraid it wouldn't live up to the first one.

And.....hm. A Desolation Called Peace is an excellent book, a five star book, doing many interesting things. The kind of book I want to pick into pieces because it has so many pieces TO pick; it's doing lots of things, and it's interesting and compelling and I care very much about all the characters and what's happening. But I don't love it to the degree I loved A Memory Called Empire.

I think I'm more confused about the ultimate themes that underlie everything this one is doing, is part of the problem. The first book was, among other things, about what it means to always be an outsider for whom belonging and fitting in isn't possible; about degrees of assimilation and whether they're inevitable or not, desirable or not. The sequel both continues some of that AND seems to be trying to say that there are always connections and similarities between people, no matter how different they seem, and that sometimes assimilation is the way forward. And the way they're implemented in this book makes it feel to me like those two themes were working against each other, instead of building together.

I love the thing where everything a book is doing all works together so perfectly that it creates something that's greater than the sum of its parts, and I feel like the first book did that beautifully, and this one not so much, as great as all its parts are. And it's disappointing! I think if I didn't have the first book to compare it to I would be writing a much more gushing review of this book.

I did really love many things! The complexity of the relationship between Mahit and Three Seagrass, everything about Eight Antidote and how he relates to the people around him and to the kind of world he is ensconced in, TWENTY CICADA omg he's so interesting I want to know everything about him, the subversive comic Mahit picks up in Lsel Station (I want to know more about the political teen artist stationers!), and so much more! And Martine is also just really good at writing prose that makes you want to keep reading.

I don't know. Talk to me about this book! If you've read it, what do you think? Did the management of the themes work better for you than it did for me? Am I missing something or misunderstanding something? It's possible that I just haven't cogitated over this one enough, but the hugo voting deadline is end of day TOMORROW so I wanted to get my thoughts up asap!

Comments

[silverflight8]

I keep trying to read this but the *italics* are driving me up the wall. I don't remember it being a problem in A Memory Called Empire, which I really loved.

[sophia_sol]

yeah, the italics really are irritating! I was able to mostly tune them out, thankfully, but I'm sorry you're not finding that possible!

[hamsterwoman]

Ahaha, I can attest, the italics were also pretty bad in 'Memory', because they drove me NUTS there. Or, more accurately, nuts.

I don't know if they were worse in book 2 or not. They actually bothered me less here, probably because I was already braced for them.

[cahn]

The italics!! It was actually pretty bad in Memory as well (noticeable to me), but I noticed it more in this book and I think it was worse. In my review, I talked about how I demonstrated the italics problem to my spouse by opening the book to a completely random, non-pre-selected page and pointing to the multiple times they were used in that page.

[silverflight8]

I am so heartened by everyone else complaining about the italics, haha. I noticed, was annoyed, kept noticing, kept reading, thought maybe I was just noticing them because I was now attuned to them, but there was one on literally every page!! That is too many!

[lirazel]

I haven't read this one yet--do you think I need to reread the first book before I pick it up? I am notoriously bad at remembering plotty things if it's been more than 6 months or so since I read the book.

[sophia_sol]

Well I read it without rereading the first book and was fine, despite also being bad at remembering plotty things, so I think you should be ok too!

[lirazel]

Oh good! Honestly, I need to just stop reading books in unfinished series. I'm just bad at it!

[sophia_sol]

haha yes what a MOOD, it is a continual problem for me too! but I'm ALSO bad at not reading books that look interesting, and these days I'm much more involved in reading books that are Current, so it keeps being a problem

[lirazel]

It's really too bad that there's not some kind of website for adult fantasy series where they remind you of the pertinent plot points. And kind of "previously on _____." That would solve all of our problems!

[sophia_sol]

ooh yes that would be great! If the book is popular enough sometimes there will be a wikipedia plot summary that helps, but that's really not common. And some authors are good at naturally working in the "previously on" information into the opening parts of the new book, but that's ALSO not to be relied upon, alas!

[superborb]

I also thought it was weaker than AMCE! Possibly I read the AMCE in a sleepless haze so it was harder to keep track of all the foreshadowing, but ADCP felt more straightforward plot-wise? I thought it didn't have as many new and interesting thoughts on empire either.

(Also Martine clearly doesn't care about the physics and only a little bit about the biology haha. But I guess the politics is the draw.)

[sophia_sol]

Yeah I really think you're right about ADCP being more straightforward and without as many new and interesting thoughts on empire, and I think that's definitely part of why it didn't excite me as much as the first book! Which is really too bad, but I think sometimes second books are harder to write than first books; there's a different kind of pressure on the author.

I was definitely here for the politics over the physics/biology; I guess this kind of makes Martine the opposite writer to Andy Weir, lol, and for me as a reader at least I'm much more forgiving of getting physics wrong than getting human interaction wrong!

[cahn]

Yeah, I had a lot of problems with this book, which I talked about here. My big problem was basically that I felt all the characters sounded and kinda acted the same, which sort of negated the claims from the first book that the culture of the Teixcalaanli vs the culture of the other smaller entities were very different in important ways.

I mean, I liked it a lot! I just wasn't overwhelmed by it the way I was with the first book.

[sophia_sol]

Oh yeah, I do recall you talking about it! And now that I think about it, the similarity of the voices honestly might be part of what made me feel like this book has that tension of also wanting to say "people have more in common with each other after all, even across cultures" alongside its "you can never truly belong"

[skygiants]

Yeah, I felt similarly -- while I had fun with the Three Seagrass POV especially, I also kind of wished there had not been any Teixcalaanli POVs, since it made it much harder for me to believe the premise of the first book that some cultural differences of thought are genuinely insurmountable/alien.

[nnozomi]

(some spoilers follow) I really loved both books! (For some reason the italics didn't bother me; I hope that doesn't mean I habitually use too many italics in my own writing...). The two things that didn't work for me were what in a fanfic I would call untagged body horror (it wasn't wrong for the book, but now I know exactly what chapter I'm going to skip whenever I reread) and Nine Hibiscus' chapters. I liked her (er, italics, right), but found her so straightforward that there just wasn't as much there there as with all the other POV characters, and I wonder if it might not have been more effective to give her POV to Twenty Cicada himself, or even to her antagonist, what's her name, Sixteen Moonrise?
Like you, I love Mahit and Three Seagrass' relationship, and adored Eight Antidote (and will enjoy his chapters more on a second or third reread, now that I know he's not going to come to a horrible end) and I was fascinated by the subversive Lsel comic artists. I know some people have criticized the worldbuilding; for me regardless of the larger-scale worldbuilding issues, Teixcalaan and Lsel and surroundings feel well built in the sense of a world you could live in, with cuisines, various arts, languages and dialects, sports, different shades of beliefs, and so on, and that always does it for me. I'd like to read a series of ordinary novels, as it were, set there--nothing necessarily to do with empires or invasions or aliens or whatever, just a murder mystery or a YA novel about a sports team or a historical romance or whatever, among ordinary Teixcalaanli (whatever the plural is) or Stationers.
Sorry, I didn't mean to ramble at you!

[sophia_sol]

No please, ramble away, I love talking about books with people!

I think you're absolutely right about Nine Hibiscus and there not being as much there as the others. I liked her, but her sections didn't do as much. I'd have loved to see pov's from BOTH Twenty Cicada and Sixteen Moonrise! (I feel like from just Sixteen Moonrise's pov we would have seen much less of Twenty Cicada and that would be a loss)

I also agree about the worlds having that sense of being someone you could live in, which I always appreciate so much, and would love to read those ordinary novels too! Both about Stationers and Teixcalaanlitzlim and about people from other parts of the empire too.