Friday, September 8, 2023

Empire of Exiles (Erin M. Evans)

Empire of Exiles
The Books of the Usurper series, Book 1
Erin M. Evans
Orbit
Fiction, Fantasy
***+ (Okay/Good)


DESCRIPTION: Ever since the changelings, shapeshifters without souls that could mimic anyone, sowing chaos and destruction, chased the people of the world to the land of Semilla, the many races and nations have struggled to live together, but the steadying hand of the imperial family managed to keep the peace - until the War of the Brothers, when a royal Duke went renegade and nearly succeeded in overthrowing the rightful heir and seizing the crown in a terrible civil war of destructive magic and deepest treachery. It has been twenty-three years since those dark days, and the peace still feels fragile, particularly for those who lived through it. Still, time must move on, and wounds must be healed. After all, those who did not repent their participation in the coup have been imprisoned or executed, and nobody wants to destabilize Semilla again - not when there's literally nowhere else in the world left to go that isn't overrun with changelings.
When apprentice scribe Quill comes to the Archives in the capital city, he thinks he's just on another tedious errand as part of his tedious training for a law career, fetching some old artifacts at the behest of one of his master's well-to-do clients. The Archives, at least, are fascinating, repositories of treasures from every nation that fled behind the salt wall that protects Semilla, much of it still uncatalogued. The archivists themselves are at least as interesting: specialists with magical affinities for select elements or items, but whose powers wax and wane on unpredictable cycles that carry great risks if they spin out of control, up to and including death. When he witnesses a terrible tragedy that evening - a fellow scribe and his one-time best friend apparently murdering someone in cold blood before uttering a cryptic phrase and slitting his own throat - he can think of nowhere else to run for help but the Archives... and finds himself entangled in a dangerous plot with roots in the failed coup and beyond, a plot that wakes old memories in those who have done their best to forget those dark days... and hints that the threat posed by the usurper brother may be far from over.

REVIEW: I'd heard decent things about this one, and it was available on Libby, so I figured I might as well give it a try. If I'm being honest, I nearly gave up on it early on; even for high fantasy, the story is a name stew, people and races and places and more, and I found the characters tough to care about, not helped by some of the choices of the audiobook narrator that turned them into exaggerated caricatures in my mind's eye. But I was low on alternate options, and I figured it would pick up eventually, given the aforementioned decent things I recalled hearing.
It does, eventually pick up... somewhat. Unfortunately, the story throughout is burdened with excessive flashbacks and repetition - telling me something or having a character think a particular thing, then telling me again (almost word for word) later, often in the same scene... then, just in case I wasn't paying attention before, often telling me the same information or have the same character think the same things yet again - that kept bogging down my interest. The narration also leans far too hard into setting the mood with vocal variations, low urgent murmurs or brash over-the-top accents or singsong trills or sharp snarking or marble-mouthed mumbles or (my personal least favorite) breathless and gulping tremulous quavers for one particularly spineless person who spends far, far too much time fretting and hemming and hawing and cowering and otherwise consuming page time avoiding agency and action. It was the vocal equivalent of an encyclopedia of "said-bookisms" jackhammered into my ears, the delivery distracting from the dialog and story. The plot and cast of characters both get too convoluted for their own good, with a subplot involving the magical "affinities" of the archive workers that starts to feel less like an interesting quirk of the world and more like an author being a bit too on-the-nose and in the reader's face about addressing Important Issues about mental health spirals and cycles with magic as a thin lampshade. (Not to downgrade the importance of representation and addressing those things, mind you, but when it feels less like an organic element of plot or character and more like one of those after-school specials or "very special episodes" of a TV show, it gets a bit irritating, like using someone's important issue for a ratings bump.) This, too, often drifts into time-eating repetition of minimal plot or character progress. Eventually, things trundle and bump along toward revelations and unmasking of culprits - all mired by yet more flashbacks and hesitations and repetition, most of which the reader already knows and the rest adding little to justify its word count - and the expected dangling threads and threats to set up the longer series arc.
Some of the late revelations and twists were indeed intriguing, though by then I'd given up on connecting to the characters, some of whom I wanted to smack or shake or otherwise shove to get them out of their own heads and doing something already. I also saw potential in the magic systems and cultures, and wish I hadn't been too distracted by the irritating narration and characters so I could've enjoyed them more. I found myself thinking I might've been more absorbed if I'd consumed it in written form, all of which helped pull the rating back up to three and a half stars. While I have read (and listened to) worse, this is another series that can go on without me.

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