Sakura of DOOM

(Individual books: The Broken Crown and The Uncrowned King)

I am not precisely sure, as this is the type of fantasy series where the books do not stand alone, but the overall plot of this seems to be helping the last member of the Leonne family take back the throne while also thwarting a demon invasion.

The world has two main countries: the Empire, to the north, and the Dominion, to the south. The Leonne family was Tyr'agar (king) to the Dominion. The Dominion is coded as vaguely Asian; the women wear sari and the titled men have harems. However, I can't tell if the people of the Dominion are POC or not. West describes one of the main characters as "ivory" and "white" extremely frequently, but she also notes once or twice that Southerners may be darker than Northerners. And then there is more of the "ivory."

I personally found the world of the Dominion to be fascinating. I was originally very unsure about the inclusion of harems and lesser wives and etc., but I love how West positions it as a space where women feel safer and more comfortable, where they frequently bond with their sister-wives. The Dominion itself is extremely misogynist, but West writes the story mostly from the women's points of view, showing how they wield power in a world where they are frequently stripped of power, and it's fascinating. Diora di'Marano is the main character for most of the first book, and she's supposedly the perfect woman: beautiful, graceful, modest. But she's also extremely smart, and I love that she uses her femininity as her weapon. She's a character type I don't see that often in fantasy: a very feminine woman who is not mocked for being feminine and who gets a lot of agency.

Of course, it also helps that there is a lot of intrigue and things unsaid, which is right up my alley.

I was also extremely excited when the book opened up with four different women influencing the life of the just-born Chosen One, and I was even more excited when the Chosen One was female! I loved what the seer said about the woman who chose to mother the Chosen One, that it would seem like a small and thankless task, but that it could tip the balance when the final decision had to be made. That seemed like a perfect encapsulation of so many women's roles in books and life—underappreciated yet vital.

However. I got less and less enthusiastic about the books the more I saw of the Empire, particularly how the Empire was contrasted with the Dominion.

( tl;dr )

That is a very long way of saying that I find the storylines about the Dominion, particularly the women of the Dominion, about a billionty times more interesting than the storylines set in the Empire. Part of it is race, and part of it is that the tropes in the Empire storylines are far less interesting to me because I've seen them much more often.

Also, Jewel annoys me because she reminds me of the clumsy shoujo/YA heroines who have big hearts, a trope I am much more willing to accept in shoujo than in epic fantasy. I was thinking why I found Jewel more annoying than Diora, who is described as "perfect" every other sentence, and I think it is because I rarely do see "perfectly" feminine women who are three dimensional, whereas there are many fantasy heroines who come from rough backgrounds and rise to prominence with special seer powers. I am glad that Jewel is 30-some in this series; I think I would have thrown something if I read her as 16. The other reason I dislike her is because I assume she played a large role in a previous series, and all the carryover affection in the books from that don't affect me.

So. I loved the first book a lot until the last arc set in the Empire, and the second book bored me to death because it was all Empire all the time. (I love Serra Alina, but sadly she is not in that much of it.) Given this, is it worth it for me to try to finish the series?

Links:
- wistfuljane's review of The Broken Crown