Guns of the Dawn (Adrian Tchaikovsky)

Guns of the Dawn
Adrian Tchaikovsky
Tor
Fiction, Fantasy
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: When the nation of Denland murdered their rightful king and set up a parliament of commoners to rule them, the people of Lascanne could only look on in horror - then in fear, as the Denland armies, not content with destroying their own monarchy, turned toward their neighbors and one-time allies. Surely such a rabble of commoners would be easy to put down, when Lascanne still had the best cavalry in the world, not to mention their royally-appointed warlocks and the will of God as embodied in their king, on their side. But somehow year followed year, both sides dug in, and more and more men were needed for the war (which, of course, must nearly be won, only needing a few more soldiers to button the whole unpleasant matter up). When there were no more volunteers, the draft took all men and boys between 50 and 15... and, when they were gone, the draft demanded a woman from each household - even the noble houses like the Marshwics.
Emily Marshwic and her sisters had already given to the war effort, first a brother-in-law and then a young brother, neither of whom send much in the way of letters back home. When the women's draft called, many high houses sent servants in their place, but the Marshwics had always served the king proudly. Thus Emily dons the red uniform and takes up the musket, confident in the righteousness of her nation and cause. But war is nothing at all like she could have imagined, and her old ideas of right and wrong and noble causes are the first in a long list of casualties.

REVIEW: Tchaikovsky is quickly becoming one of my go-to reliable authors for a solid, engaging story. Guns of the Dawn is by no means the first story to expose the horrors of war, especially in the musket and pistol era, but it successfully depicts one woman's awakening to those horrors and the gray areas that ultimately govern politics and life. She starts as a woman of a minor yet old noble line, convinced of the privelege of her rank and righteousness of her king without being excessively uppity or unlikeable; she takes to heart the idea that those of her rank should be caretakers of their lessers. She and her sisters carry a bitter grudge against the local acting governor Northway, a commonborn man with known shady dealings whose rise to power coincided with the fall of their father's fortunes, ending with the old man putting a bullet in his own brain. Emily and Northway's clashes - over class, over policies, over everything - become her first lessons in how far the real world is from noble ideals, for all that she does not recognize it for some time, and the war strips any remaining idealism from her as comrades in arms come and go, the latter often in rains of bullets from Denlander guns. Along the way, Emily grows from genteel middleborn noblewoman to true soldier, from mindless follower of propaganda to a more jaded viewer of events, through backdrops ranging from the aging family estate to a royal ball to the spirit-crushing swamplands where she spends the war. Action can explode from nowhere just like surprise gunfire from the swamp mists, though always Emily is moving and growing as a character, enduring setbacks and tragedies and battles that leave wounds physical and psychic. There are teases of romance along the way, but nothing like the idealized kind she might once have entertained, and her choices are nowhere near clear right up to the finale. The end feels just a hair abrupt, but brings Emily's journey and the story as a whole to a satisfactory and earned conclusion. While the world of Lascanne and Denland and the characters introduced could possibly carry a sequel or spinoff, things wrap up well enough here in one book, a somewhat rare phenomenon these days. I enjoyed it more than I expected to.

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