This year’s favorites are the books I went into 2020 expecting to love, but the ways in which they resonated in this unprecedented year was something I never could have predicted. Bleak middle books of favorite series conjured a strange hope, while an unambiguously happy ending made me question everything. Plague, or the deliberate absence of it, somehow calmed me because I got to witness how it played out at a distance in fictional worlds. And never would I have thought that Harrowhark Nonagesimus and Baru Cormorant would be the people with whom I would want to weather a life-altering pandemic, but misery loves company, and they proved the perfect literary companions.

The best books for me this year were the dense ones, whose familiar worlds I could sink back into, even if I had to work to reorient myself. Seeing Baru’s plot against the Masquerade extended from three books into four meant more time with The Tyrant Baru Cormorant, with her breathtaking budgeting of others’ lives and her gnawing self-doubt about her place within the cancerous empire. Seth Dickinson’s geopolitical fantasy series makes me feel like I’ve been let in on a wondrous secret, and makes me finally understand why my parents have been turning to binge-watching so many political dramas since lockdown started. I don’t think I could have handled Baru’s story ending this year, so I’m grateful for more time to watch her struggle to balance her personal ledger.

(from Tor.com Reviewers' Choice: The Best Books of 2020)

Admittedly, I struggled reading through this for about a week. I would usually abandon but so much effort went into this series -- it's very tightly plotted and continued. It just is so very dry for long periods of the narrative. While I wanted more emotion and involvement for the characters, it nearly concludes most of plotlines I’m interested in; feels like a natural end for both Baru and my read. I don’t really see the need for further continuance so I’ll exit the series here. Dense, political, light on characterization,

This kind of sounds like a cop-out but it's the truth: I won't be finishing this book because I originally signed for a trilogy and now with it being a quartet of books, I don't think I can do the series justice and finish it. With each entry being so sizable, I'm just not personally a fan of the length and time I'll need to finish the series. With that being said, the first in the series is still fantastic, and those who enjoy longer series should give it a shot. Dickinson is a fantastic writer.

I was so excited to pick this book up. Baru is one of those characters that I just love. In this book, she pulled herself out of the very dark place she went in Monster (the second book in the series). And dang. Does she do it in style. The twists and turns in this book had me on the edge of my seat. The world building is fantastic, plus in Tyrant we get flashbacks to see Heyschast and Farrier with Tau and company that sort of set all these events into motion. This series is huge, but it is SO GOOD. I would recommend to anyone who like political fantasy with fascinating characters.

I don’t really know what happened between me and Seth Dickinson’s The Masquerade. I thoroughly enjoyed The Traitor Baru Cormorant. It had a solid concept, with a great subversion of expectations, and an original theme. I should have put the series down, brushed off my hands, and walked away. But I decided to read the next two books, and they really weren’t for me. The Monster Baru Cormorant felt like Dickinson was going to end the series after book one, but couldn’t turn down the money for a sequel. It involves a major jumpstart to the conflict, an entirely new antagonist and plot to follow, and a mostly fresh cast. Monster isn’t bad, but it lacks the elegance and eloquence of Traitor and feels like a much weaker book.

Tyrant, on the other hand, was too much effort for me to even finish.

The Tyrant Baru Cormorant, or at least the half of it I read before I threw in the towel, seems to be a book about nothing that relies on your appreciation for the previous novels to get away with not saying anything. So much time in this book is spent building to things, and it exhausts me. It took something like 20% of the book for Baru to walk across a ship and have a conversation, and this is not a short book. Nothing happens; the characters just talk about how exciting the finale is going to be when it eventually happens. It is infuriating.

Previously, when I read and enjoyed The Traitor Baru Cormorant, I (and many readers) enjoyed Dickinson’s poetic, dramatic, and eloquent prose and how he wove it into his story to create a sense of drama and gravitas. The Tyrant Baru Cormorant reads like a soap opera had a child with a thesaurus. The verbosity is off the charts, and it makes processing even the simplest conversations a huge effort. It also helps hide the fact that, as I mentioned before, nothing happens.

There is also a lot of time skipping between the past and present, which adds additional confusion and difficulty in processing what was going on. All of this combines into a book that is a lot of work to read, isn’t fun, and doesn’t feel like it has a lot to say. I found it mostly tiresome, which is a shame because I really like Traitor and recommend you go read it. Just don’t pick up the sequels if you do.

The Tyrant Baru Cormorant is disappointing, to say the least. It reads like a modern-day case study about the hubris of trying to squeeze out every last dollar of something that performed well in the marketplace. The book uses an aggressive number of words to say very little, and there are better uses of your time than to struggle through its convoluted and overly stylized pages. If you like the book, I am genuinely happy for you - please come explain its redeeming features to me. I wanted to like it very badly, and I found that I could not even finish it. Do not recommend.

Rating: DNF/10
-Andrew

The Tyrant Baru Cormorant picks up immediately from where The Monster left off. Baru has located the Cancrioth, with whose help she hopes to release the Kettling into Falcrest and thus bring down the Empire. With her is Tau-indi Bosoka, while Svir, Yawa, Tain Shir, and numerous other…currently antagonistic characters are on her tail.

The Masquerade series is a densely political fantasy series and book three of it is no different from the previous two in that respect. Only in this one, we get to the crux of the matter. Baru’s guilt, and Baru’s plan for revenge. If you could call any of the books truly action-packed (and I do not mean that negatively), this one is a lot more thoughtful in comparison. A good chunk of the book at the start is taken up with Baru confronting her feelings over Tain Hu, and subsequent chapters deal with the formation of her plan.

Interspersed with the main narrative – albeit one told in the past, since the present Baru is telling this story – are journeys 23 years back with the Mbo, continuing from The Monster in this respect, and interludes which take us to various other, currently bit-part, players in the world, including the Necessary King. But throughout, you get the sense of all the pieces slowly coming together across the two books.

Because this book, on the whole, felt a lot like a set-up for the final installment of the series. Not in a bad way, because it was a very slowburning set-up and got me so excited for book four, and it definitely wasn’t a filler book – plot strands were resolved in this, even as more developed – but everything in this book led to the start of Baru’s plan taking shape. There were times where I thought maybe a spanner would be thrown in the works, but everything came together smoothly. There were some big revelations at the end, but not on the same level as those in the first two books.

This sounds like a complaint, but it is not, I promise. I was entirely drawn back into the world and I couldn’t care less that this happened. All it did was make me even more excited about how everything would unfold. Namely, will Baru’s plan succeed? I mean, let’s be real, it wouldn’t be much of a conclusion if everything came off without a hitch. So, where will it go wrong?

All in all then, The Tyrant Baru Cormorant more than satisfied me as the third book in the series. I guess all that’s left to do now is wait impatiently for the fourth.

The Masquerade series holds a place on my shelves as one of my all-time favorite fantasy series. As such, The Tyrant Baru Cormorant was my most anticipated book of 2020. While the book goes a different direction than I expected and I'm not fully satisfied with the ending, I still very much enjoyed it and believe fans of the series will too.

The tone of Tyrant does a complete 180 from its predecessors. If Monster is  the lowest low, Tyrant is the manic high that follows. While I still wouldn't call this book (or this series really) "happy", the overall tone is certainly more upbeat. Baru has come to accept Tain Hu's death and is now on a path for revenge against Falcrest, revenge to make Tain Hu's death count. There's a new flame of determination that drives Baru, giddy with excitement that a plan will work. This is the first time we really see Baru in control of a situation and it's fascinating.

I was surprised by the humor in this book and it's a humor I vibe with. It's dry, sarcastic, sometimes meta in a way that cryptarchs would be, and often unexpected. Yet the jokes never felt out of place and served as a bit of tension relief in an otherwise tense scene. My favorite was a quick dig at pure mathematicians. Definitely saving that for future use. Likewise, there was an underlying sexual element that I didn't notice in prior books. Maybe it's because Baru needs to get laid without hating herself after. Maybe it's because Aminata just needs to get laid period. Either way, there's definitely an underlying element of horny. 

Of the other characters, my surprise favorite turned out to be Xate Yawa. We get more from her perspective. Her conflicts over keeping her brother safe, her determination to free Aurdwynn from Falcrest, and her friendship with Heingyl Ri made her a surprisingly compelling character this time around. I've apparently either ignored age or it wasn't really specified because I always assumed Yawa was way younger than she actually is. Also Tau is forty! Speaking of Tau, if Baru goes from depressed to determined With A Plan™, Tau goes from annoyingly cheerful to just full-on depression. I really have to give credit to Dickinson's character development because Tau sans trim was one of the most fascinating, yet disturbing character flips I've read in a long time.

Going to take a quick interlude to throw in that my man Apparitor deserves so much better. Please give this poor man his husband, his boyfriend, a ship, and some fat stacks of cash and let him go exploring.


Readers who complained that Monster was too slow-paced and introspective will be happy to know that Tyrant has a much faster pacing, and is generally more action-driven. Similarly, those that complained that Baru didn't use enough of her economic savant-ness should be happy to know that Baru flexes those skills here. In fact, one of my favorites parts of this book is how Dickinson addresses war as a means to expand trade, and the drive of trade and economics to those actions.

The worldbuilding in this series is part of what draws me to is and Tyrant is no exception. In particular, the cancer-worshipping Cancrioth are an absolutely fascinating group of people. I believe it's best for the reader to learn about them on their own, so I won't say more about them. We also finally get a dive into Falcresti society, and in particular I enjoyed seeing the minds of their averages citizens. I do wish we got to see more of the Stakhieczi, but with the direction this series is going, I suspect they'll be a big player in book four. Having read this book, I still have absolutely no idea if magic actually exists in this world if or if it's all a case of psychology and science so advanced it seems like magic.

As always, Tyrant delves into some heavy themes, and at a 250K wordcount, Dickinson has plenty of time to explore them. There's a heavy exploration of colonialism, its motivation and effects. With Tyrant, the conversation turns to the aftermath: what happens ten, twenty years down the line, when a group of people and a place have been colonized. Baru, living off her childhood memories of Taranoke, slowly discovers how much she has forgotten of the culture she's trying to save. Kyprananoke, a discarded Falcresti colony, exists in dying embers, its past self forgotten. On the flip side, Xate Yawa lives in the consequences of an Aurdwynn forged in Falcrests views and even the Oriati Mbo, yet unconquered, have been forced changes to accommodate Falcrest. Secondary are discussions of rebellions, and the people behind them, feminism in Falcresti society and its intersectionality with the treatment of minorities or lackthereof, and the exotification of other cultures in the eyes of colonizers.

My one dislike with Tyrant is that I didn't like the ending. Not in a, ruined the series kind of way, but just, after the previous too, the ending felt way too easy. Too clean, one could say. It really can't say more without giving things away, but the last fourth felt rushed.

Overall, I rate this book a 4/5. Loved the characters and this new flip on Baru's POV, loved the worldbuilding and the tie-ins from previous books, and I was enthralled with the exploration of colonialism, rebellion against ones oppressors and those many facets. Fans of the series will not be disappointed

I have a lot to say about this book. TLDR: it was great.

Now for the long version.

I read *Monster* immediately before reading *Tyrant*. *Monster* had been lurking on Mt. Readmore since it came out, and getting an ARC of *Tyrant* finally pushed it to the top of the queue, for obvious reasons. So I basically read them as one big book, and I’m glad that I did.

*Monster* is about a broken Baru. Bluntly, I didn’t *like* Baru in *Monster*. I could certainly empathize with her, but I didn’t *like* her. She was simply in too dark a place. She was prepared to do anything that would punish herself (because she felt she deserved it, because of Tain Hu’s death) and she was prepared to do ANYTHING to further her goal of destroying Falcrest (because to do any less would have meant Tain Hu’s death wasn’t worth it). I can appreciate a character crossing a moral event horizon, but it’s not exactly pleasant when that person is the protagonist, she’s judging herself far too harshly, and you’re spending most of the time in her head.

Plus, she just wasn’t the same Baru as we had in *Traitor*. That Baru was clever, she was a problem solver. She was an *accountant*. Baru the would-be bioterrorist just wasn’t a good fit. There were flashes of clever Baru, but only brief ones. She was too absorbed in her grief.

I’m happy to say that we get the old Baru back in *Tyrant*. She’s changed by her experiences, certainly, but no longer shattered by them. She is still seeking the downfall of Falcrest, but she’s trying to cause it by means of economics and trade routes rather than unleashing plagues. She wants to dismantle Incrasticism without destroying the Falcresti people. She would like to preserve things like Falcresti trade routes and covered sewers without keeping things like Falresti eugenics and corrective rape. It was a refreshing, and uplifting, change to see her really come alive again.

Parts of this gave me the same feeling as watching *Memento* for the first time. Wheels within wheels doesn’t begin to cover it. We don’t know what Baru’s plans are in any detail, and the nature of her head injury means that Baru herself doesn’t necessarily know them either. We don’t know what Heyschast and Farrier are planning, we don’t know what Svir and Yawa are planning, and we don’t know if Baru is working her own will, or Farrier’s. As people remark more than once, for someone who is trying so hard to undercut Farrier and Falcrest, her actions do seem to always be just what Farrier would have liked her to do. The gradual unravelling is certainly a brain bender.

We get a frame story, which is new. The book begins with a confused, very clearly not-OK Baru recounting recent events to Farrier, who is both sorrowful and very, very proud of her. I’ve worried from the beginning of this series that Baru would end up lobotomized and on the Imperial Throne. Seth wasn’t making me feel any better about that literally from the first page. Been rather upset about it, in fact, which is not a commentary on how anything turns out. Just that Seth had me worrying over it.

We learn more about the Cancrioth, and Farrier and Tau and Heyschast’s backstory. The past gets filled in even as things move forward. And while there is one hell of an interesting sequel hook, I’d also be content with the story ending here.

All in all a great read. Comes out on August 11, and highly recommended.

The Tyrant Baru Cormorant is the conclusion to Seth Dickinson’s Baru series. I absolutely adored the first of those, and the second was no slouch either; a conclusion had a lot to live up to. And, to get the tl;dr out of the way: it does. Absolutely smashes it. There’s a whole lot of stuff I loved from the first two books - life-in-crisis Baru, looking at deep moral and ethical issues through a fantasy lens, some baffling magic, and rock-solid, multi-layered characterisation. And then there’s some new cool stuff too. Spending some time in the heartland of the Empire. Baru getting asked some hard questions. Some intriguing backstory (more on that later). And, of course the sort of byzantine power plays, personal leveraging and political machinations from unexpected angles that help keep baru the savant alive. This is all the things I loved about the first two books, and you can rest assured that if you enjoyed those, this one proves to be a worthy conclusion..

Baru...oh, Baru is the heart of this book. A woman absolutely determined to do what must be done to reach her goals. Ruthless, driven, focused. After spending much of the previous book deep in depression and being dragged out of it, it’s good to see her on task. Well, I say good. Baru is definitely paying the cost for her actions, mostly by watching those costs happen to other people. There’s a moral corrosion which she’s aware of, as everyone else bears the price for her decisions, and as she weighs up whether to let them continue to do so, or walk away and pay the cost of that decision too. Part of the reason I love Baru so much is her complexity, and her internal conflicts. In other books, she might be seen as a villain, and is..absolutely responsible for some deeply sketchy stuff. But at the same time, we can see Baru as a person with a strong moral purpose, trying to do the best for her people, and for herself. Do the means justify the end? It’s a question that the narrative is asking the reader, not just about the protagonist, but about her opponents. It helps that Baru is self-aware enough to question whether she is, in other people’s lights, a monster. And the emotional heart of the book, her relationship with her old friend Amanita, and the tragedy of her love for a now-dead revolutionary, ground Baru, keep her human. If she’s sometimes odd, febrile, prone to lashing out, and too focused on the board and not the other players, still she can be empathised with, understood, seen sympathetically. Baru is complicated, as are we all - and in trying to break apart forces both personal and systemic, she’s someone we can stand alongside, even as they do terrible things.

Anyway. If you’re this deep in the series, you know Baru. Know this: you’re going to see the costs of Baru’s actions paid. You’ll see her work through her understanding of who and what she is. Of what she’s willing to do. You’ll see love and family and professionalism and respect and madness and outright hate. It’s going to get emotionally messy. But it’s Baru, whose inner life (and trauma) is richly realised here, and who comes to us as a living, breathing person. Reading this is going to hurt. It may make you laugh, it’ll probably make you cry. It may rip your heart out of your chest...possibly literally. It will, to coin a phrase, be emotional. Be warned. But its also fantastic.

The world...well, we don’t spend quite as much time at sea as previously. But we do get to see some mind bendingly imaginative, and occasionally horrifying environments. Falcrest, the city, gets a look in, the towering spires of the shining city on the hill, mixed with the cold cells, and reconditioning rooms, and icepicks to the frontal lobe. There’s also some time spent with the Mbo, drawing us back into the past, looking at the reaching hand of Falcrest, and the rise of the Cryptarchs whose later presence has put such a weight onto Baru. We can see history at work here, the underpinnings of the modern tragedy in the heroics of the past. And the Mbo, its warmth and its reliance on intrinsic social bonds, and its reaction to threats...all those things stand as a fascinating contrast to the Falcresti model of industrial society. It has its flaws as well, and the text does not flinch away from those, but lets the reader think and draw their own conclusions from the options on the table, and from the people living within the systems. Quite whether any system can be good, or just less oppressive, is something I had to think about as the story drew to a close - but I was also thinking about the clinical efficiency and ravening energy of the Falcresti, and the hospitality, the warmth, and the stratification of the Mbo. It’s a difficult world, this one, filled with unknown terrors, and even the people we see are grist for the mill. But they are also, importantly, people, with faces, lives and names, and in the end, both the world and the people in it feel important, feel real.

I won’t go into the story, but will say that it kicks off very strongly, and only improves from there. As Baru drives forward, the story carries her along, a fast-flowing river that becomes a torrent of plays, counter-plays, betrayals, revelations and revolutions. There is, basically, always something going on, and that something always grabbed my attention and kept my eyes on the page. I wanted to see how this one shook out, see what Baru could do, what she would allow herself to do, and how the various seemingly unsolvable moral and ethical dilemmas (and their rather more immediate physical counterparts - threats of warm invasion or world-ending pestilence) would turn out. This is a story with bite, which stands before you unflinching and asks you to follow it through, and to think it through as well. It made me gasp, genuinely, more than once, and swear, loudly, more than once too. This is the ending I was hoping for, once which takes the investment I made in the characters and the world, and makes it worth it.

If you’ve reached this point in the series, I can only urge you to finish it - because this is a book i was sad to finish, and a book I couldn’t stop reading. It’s a fantastic ending, and one that delivers on the promise of earlier installments - so go read it.

I cannot provide verbatim review until it is published in Booklist when The Tyrant Baru Cormorant is available in stores. I recommended it for a starred review.

Baru Cormorant is back for round three! In The Tyrant Baru Cormorant (which, in-keeping with the rest of this series' inexplicable name shortenings, is being published as "The Tyrant" in the UK) everyone's favourite provincial savant returns for another round of high-stakes political drama against the empire of Falcrest: the empire which colonised her island, killed one of her fathers and tried to cut her off from her own culture as a child, and also the empire which now counts her as among its most elite operatives. The first book in the series captured my heart and then broke it into a million pieces, and while I don't think I'm the same reader as I was five years ago, I still consider new releases in this series to be a significant event, and I'm especially glad we haven't had to wait too long between the previous book and this one.



When we left Baru at the end of The Monster Baru Cormorant, she had been captured by the Cancrioth, the secretive cancer-worshipping society which had been secretly influencing the Oriati Mbo confederacy and which could provide a political opening for Falcrest to conquer that society. It's safe to say that Baru wasn't in a great place for any of that book, as she steps up into her new position in the Empire while coming to terms with the death of her lover Tain Hu and the blame she carries for it, having watched the execution and refused to stop it and allow the Empire to use Hu as a hostage against her. The fight that led to Hu's capture and the end of the rebellion she led also gave Baru a major head injury which has led to lasting hemineglect. These consequences reverberate throughout Monster, and the while the ending of the book offers some interesting context as to how the hemineglect, in particular, has influenced her actions, it leaves any emotional healing from these events largely unrealised. Thus, it's a still rather static Baru who returns for Tyrant's first act: Falcrest's political situation has changed around her, but not much has changed from the opening of the previous book for her.



The first third of Tyrant deals directly with the fallout of her capture by the Cancrioth, and the introduction of their different leaders (all of whom carry a different hereditary cancer which apparently bestows ancestral memory as well as... y'know, cancer) is combined with a ton of body horror and outright torture. Baru survives their tender loving ministrations, only to become caught back up in the different factions of Falcrest and Aurdwynn (the country from which Tain Hu hails, and where Baru started her illustrious career) who have been hunting her down. The switch from the Cancrioth's visceral biological horrors to Falcrests ultra-sterile unpleasantness is effective at underscoring their respective awfulness and how tenuous Baru's position is between them, but it's a lot to get through, especially as there's no clear escape route or game plan for what might happen once Baru is out of immediate danger.



What a relief, then, that Dickinson has this all in hand. Once Tyrant gets off the Cancrioth ship, Baru's story gets a lot zippier, with certain spoilery but very precious events helping her regain faith in her abilities, enabling her plans and her scheming to return in force. For me, this was an enormously refreshing change: while the grief and stress of Baru's recent past never leaves her, her breakthrough lets her reconnect with some of the more engaging aspects of her personality (including the youthful arrogance!) and start rebuilding relationships with those around her, establishing trust with some rather unexpected players to start moving things along. In renewing this confidence, Dickinson makes it a lot easier to get behind the twisty and mysterious schemes that drive Tyrant forward - and that's trust we very much need, as the plot navigates the complex political situation which the first two books have set up. On that front, it also helps that Aurdwynn and Taranoke are now firmly back into the picture alongside the Oriati Mbo, though unfortunately, the sections involving the Mbo still feel like the weakest parts of this story. It's just hard to invest in the characters here, particularly when the main action of this thread takes place in the form of flashbacks to the characters' past, compared to other, more immediately pressing, plot strands. There are other diversions too, notably to the small island nation of Kypranaoke, a former Falcrest colony now left to its own devices with a deeply dysfunctional post-colonisation political system and an experimental infection of a new deadly disease called the Kettling. A lot of the time, though, Tyrant is a homecoming for many of its characters, particularly Baru herself, and it feels the stronger for it.



The other sea change here, which began in Monster but is even more notable now, is Baru's increasing acceptance of her own queerness and her ability to be open with a wider range of characters without fear of retribution from the enforced "hygiene" of Falcrest itself. Although Baru does pursue sexual relationships in Monster after the death of Tain Hu, the discussion of these relationships and her categorisation of them starts to change significantly here, as she starts to recognise which connections are offering her positive connection, which are not, and which might but come with emotional and moral baggage that's higher than she's willing to pay. The introduction of certain characters with some loud, teasing but supportive opinions on Baru's entanglements is also a refreshing change (and I wish I could tell you who they are, but suffice it to say you will probably be delighted). While Tyrant recognises that Baru is still the product of conditioning, and her tendency to self-sabotage is far from gone, there's still welcome undertones of hope and levity piercing through the misery. There's still plenty of setbacks and horror, and some of those hopeful moments exist in the narrative only to make subsequent punches land a bit harder, but having ups with the downs nevertheless makes a huge difference in the reading experience, allowing us to hope alongside Baru that a victory against this all-powerful, overwhelming foe just might be possible.



The Traitor Baru Cormorant was a brutal gem of a book, one which pulled out all the stops (particularly the one labelled "queer misery") to tell its story of a young woman trying to go up against the empire which has destroyed her homeland, outlawed her sexuality and culture, and is now destroying the land of the woman she loves. Monster, its sequel, picks up where the first book leaves off, but in widening the scope of Traitor's story it becomes a rather different experience, one without much space to advance Baru's emotional state on the path towards healing. Tyrant begins as more of the same, but once it comes around to making good on its young hero's growth, it won back any trust I might have lost over the previous volume-and-a-bit. I understand there is one more volume to go before Baru's journey is done, and although Tyrant ends on a positive enough note for the characters that it doesn't strictly feel like it needs one, if it comes to it then I am ready to take down the empire with this terrible young woman, once and for all.

This is not an easy series to read and only makes a claim to being fantasy since it is about an entirely invented world, but it's fast become one of my all time favourites. It's incredibly nuanced and complicated. It makes intelligent points about colonialism and delivers hard truths about sexism, homophobia, religion and racism. There is more tragedy than joy in each book and I'm always left devastated after reading the newest instalement, and yet I love them. I am so glad that there is a fourth book on the way!

Pros: lots of intrigue, thought provoking, nuanced

Cons: /

This is the third book in the Masquerade series, with a 4th book on the way. If you haven’t read the previous two books recently, it’s worth doing a reread as there’s so much nuance that you’ll be lost if you don’t remember the details of all that’s happened.

The book is told from several points of view including: Baru, Xate Yawa, Aminata, and Svir. There are scenes set in the ‘now’, contrasted with a direct continuation of the events from book 2 as well as scenes set 23 years prior, continuing Tau-indi’s story of when Cosgrad and Farrier stayed with the Mbo princes.

It’s not a quick read. There’s so much going on and so much nuance that I often had to stop to process what the characters were doing and what that might mean for their future. It’s easy to fall into Baru’s trap of forgetting there are other players on the board when she acts. Each time I assumed things would go the way she’d foreseen because she’s a savant, but everyone in the story has their own motivations and few align with hers, so there’s generally a mess of consequences you don’t expect.

It’s a book filled with hard truths about colonialism, racism, sexism, and what people and nations will do to gain power over others, and what they’ll do to keep that power. As such, it’s very thought provoking, forcing you to see people and ideas from varied perspectives. In several instances the author uses reversed language to get these ideas across, so ’matronize’ instead of ‘patronize’, ‘anti-mannist’ instead of ‘feminist’, etc.

I was surprised that I still found Baru a sympathetic and likeable character after all she’s done. I still want her to succeed. With all the horrors going on (and there are a lot of them) there’s still a sense of hope to the story, that in the end things just might work out the way Baru wants. I even started to like Yawa, which was kind of a shock given her previous actions. I really enjoyed seeing Tau-indi’s growth, overcoming what happened to them at the end of the last book. It felt like the various characters were all growing as people, learning more about the world and themselves and really taking a look a the world they were making and deciding if their choices had helped or not.

While this isn’t the series end, this book does tie up several plot threads into a satisfying climax. I can’t wait for the final book to wrap up all the remaining loose ends.

Awesome! I highly recommend this book. After reading a few chapters, I realized that there is no way that I could put this book down, and that I would will be finishing it in one night. I really enjoyed reading it! It is worth noting that I read the other two books in this series and thought that they were great. I had high expectations going into this book, and I was not disappointed.

I will recommend that my library buy a copy of this book.

Thanks to Tor Books and Net Galley for providing an early copy for me to review.

I’ll confess up front I’ve struggled mightily with Seth Dickinson’s series that started with The Traitor Baru Cormorant and continued with The Monster Baru Cormorant. I’ve found lots to admire in the first two books, especially intellectually, but I can’t say I actually much enjoyed them. So it was with some trepidation that I picked up book three, The Tyrant Baru Cormorant. Unfortunately, it turned out to be my least favorite of the three, though again providing some meaty moments.

I’m not going to do much recapping or summarizing as one, you really need to have read books one and two before trying this one and two, the plot is pretty baroque, filled with schemes within schemes, reversals of fortune, and betrayals within betrayals. Suffice to say that Baru is continuing her attempt to destroy the Falcrest Empire from within and that attempt involves some expected and unexpected allies, some expected and unexpected foes, and some (if you’ve read the first two books) expected switching of those roles. Baru also has to come to terms with just how far she will go to destroy Falcrest (what personal price, what sacrifice of others) and how much of a tool she is, unwillingly and unknowingly, of the Throne’s agents.

The plot, as noted, is labyrinthine, but I’m not sure a lot really happens in terms of action. It reminds me a bit of those hugely costly battles in WWI that lasted weeks and ended up gaining/losing a few yards of ground. There are a lot of time formulating plans, a lot of time discussing plans, a lot of time arguing over plans, but not so much doing. At least, that’s how it seemed to me. Tyrant is a long book (600+ pages), and for me it felt every bit of its length and more. To contrast that, my prior read was David Mitchell’s Utopia Ave, which though also 600+ pages felt more like 400 and which I breezed through in two days, as compared to the week it took me to finish Tyrant. And where it all leads felt quite anti-climactic, both in its resolution and its presentation.

Like the other novels, Tyrant is a very “talky” book, with the occasional pages of action feeling more like a perfunctory bit of work to set up the next conversation. If characters weren’t talking to each other, they were talking to someone in their head (trust me, it makes sense in the book’s context) or they were having interior monologues with themselves. Some of these monologues or conversations were, as noted, intellectually stimulating, as Dickinson explores empire and imperialism and other broad topics (many with clear analogues to our modern times). Others were less so, such as the mini lectures on banking and joint stocks (again, context). It isn’t that those things can’t be made interesting—Daniel Abraham wrote an absolutely great series with banking at its core (THE DAGGER AND THE COIN), and David Liss has written some wonderfully entertaining books involving 18th Century stock ventures (no, really). Unfortunately, the execution wasn’t here to the same level.

And while Baru is an intellectually interesting character based on situation, I’ve never felt engaged by her as a person or by nearly any of the other characters except for Tau. I know I’m supposed to care about who is imprisoned or held hostage or dying or being brought back from seeming death or having/not having sex, but I just didn’t. And though I’m told constantly the characters care about those as well, it never felt that way for me. That distancing has been probably my major stumbling block to the series and while in the prior book the intellectual stimulation balanced it enough to garner a half-hearted recommendation, Tyrant didn’t have quite the same amount of stimulation and that diminished positive combined with the issues of plot and pace and length made this a far less enjoyable read. I love what Dickinson is looking at in this series, but it’s hard for me to recommend the series, which feels a bit buried under its own weight.

5★
I just finished an ARC of this book 30 seconds ago and I swear this is going to be the best book of 2020. Mark my words. I know that Stormlight 4 is coming out and another Malazan book I believe but this book was just that good!

So I have a lot to say about this book. First off, I'm excited to say I think we're getting a 4th book?! I was under the impression this was a trilogy but maybe not.

So what I liked about it:
•Seth Dickenson is clearly an incredibly intelligent guy. His series has a ton of really amazing themes throughout it. We see these two great cultures' polar opposite philosophies, we talk a lot about the power of trade, power structures and systems to keep other people down, we see racist eugenics, and we talk about decolonization.
Seth had a lot to say about all of it and he made some very cogent points throughout this book and the whole series.

•The stakes! The stakes in this book were SO high and it truly kept me on edge, filled with fear of almost everything that happened, just waiting for the other shoe to drop. There were so many terrifying moments in this book, from the constant threat of lobotomy, to the Kettling, to the Cancrioth.

•The Cancrioth. Jeeez, they are soo scary. Honestly as a people they were all actually very sympathetic and well characterized but as a concept, they terrify me with their practices. Nothing scares me more than 1) Immortality 2) Sharks and 3) growths, tumors, protuberances. What are the Cancrioth but an immortal cancer cult with a murderous cancer whale that acts like a shark!

•Baru's character begins to grow in this book. In book two she's kind of an unrelentingly bad person, even if she feels bad about it. But in this book she really starts to make some changes and we get to see her happy.

•The other character work in this book was really good. I feel like I got an amazing sense of who everyone was, even people we hardly see from.

•The humour! This book was surprisingly very funny. It was the kind of humour that subverts your expectations of what's going to happen by just throwing a shocking non sequitur of a joke that just takes you by surprise. There were honestly a few moments when I just burst out laughing in public because a joke caught me so off guard and I really loved that. When Baru is caught with Iscend in what should be a really serious moment and suddenly ______ who caught them comes out and says the funniest thing. That literally had me just cackling for like 5min. So Dickenson really came through with some good jokes in this book! I wasn't expecting that.

•That last chapter. It was sooo intriguing. We get a new continent full of lightning? What does it mean? Will Baru's story have anything to do with it or is that final chapter simply there to intrigue us about his next book set in the same world? I have no idea but I'm excited to find out.

There's really only one thing I didn't like about this book and that was the writing style in the beginning.
If you've read the book Nevernight you'll truly feel what I'm about to describe. For whatever reason, the writing style in the first maybe 50 or 100pgs of the book had some very purple prose. There were a lot of lines that just had me scratching my head trying to figure out what they meant.

"Their eyes meeting like summer sun through a loose slat"

Like that really doesn't make much sense. And there was a lot of that going on throughout the first chunk. The other issue with the writing style was the way some information was I guess supposed to be implied? I'm honestly not even sure how to describe it other than to say those first 100pgs made me feel very stupid. I just constantly felt like things were going over my head. I was confused with the story at all but I felt like there was a lot of context and nuance I just couldn't see for some reason, even having reread Monster before starting Tyrant. It just made me feel like a child when your parents are talking about something and you have no idea what they're talking about because you're missing out on the necessary context.
Thankfully this only persisted for the start of the book and soon enough, he decided to leave that behind and go back to his normal writing style from the last two books.

All in all though, Tyrant was an amazing continuation of Baru's story and with some of the hugely cathartic moments we get at the end, I can honestly say, I'd still feel satisfied even if this was the end of her story and that last chapter was just set-up for another series Seth plans to write in this world. I love the book so much and I am truly convinced this will be my favorite of 2020! You have to read it!

<!-- wp:paragraph -->
<p>Review copy provided by the publisher.</p>
<!-- /wp:paragraph -->

<!-- wp:paragraph -->
<p>This is the third in its series, and you absolutely should not read it without having read the first two. There's enough to keep track of here if you have a fighting chance of knowing what's going on from having actually read it; having to guess and fill in why people care about Tain Hu and who Aminata is anyway and...look, there is an entire thread of magic/social connection that's based on how people relate to each other, you're going to want to know what the heck is going on before you dive in here.</p>
<!-- /wp:paragraph -->

<!-- wp:paragraph -->
<p>If you <em>have</em> read the other two books, here's what you need to know here: this book does not ease up on disgust or treachery. If anything it doubles down. And...there's a plague that is made much worse by people behaving foolishly. Actually there are several plagues. The plague element is not lessened here. At all. For some of you, that will feel comforting, like the thing you're living through is being validated by the book; but if you're otherwise interested in this series and think, oh God, not that, not now, then I advise you to get your copy and hold off a bit on reading it, because there is no dodging a certain contagion-related theme here.</p>
<!-- /wp:paragraph -->

<!-- wp:paragraph -->
<p>Does it stick the landing, though. I would say yes, yes it does. People behave like themselves, actions continue to accrue consequences at an alarming rate until the very end. Could there be more told in this universe? absolutely. Is this particular story left unfulfilled with pieces hanging? not at all. The empire and its denizens and outliers are all going somewhere in this book, not just wandering indefinitely. The title character has several quite large revelations about herself and her world, she is proven right about some things but not everything, so if you're a person who hates it when series just ramble on indefinitely, fear not, this is not one of those.<br></p>
<!-- /wp:paragraph -->

The Tyrant Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

After the first two books in the Masquerade, the third would have to pull off a miracle to outdo what has already been done.

I mean, seriously, I've never read a more grimdark tale of friendship and betrayal in the name of a cause. The second one already blew my mind with a certain bloody scene, so I was frankly a little worried that this one would be yet another huge build-up and betrayal.

Strangely, I got the feeling that the author was worried about the same thing. And, indeed, he went out of the way to surprise and delight me with the kinds of twists and turns in this book.

What other books would have me sit on the edge of my seat with SEVERAL lobotomies?

What? The book lobotomized me? ;) Perhaps, but I feel all the smarter for it. Tons of economic theories, lots of time on the sea, and even more time building alliances. And I was amazed almost the entire time.

Few books go all out to worldbuild the way this one has, and few do it with genetics, gene warfare, unique mutations, economic warfare, and naval battles.

This read is not for the faint of heart, but it is a very worthy sequel. If you've come this far, don't miss out on this one. :)