With this trilogy, Wagers immediately became one of my favorite authors. This particular book is a fine example of what they do best: action and cliffhangers. And feelings. I generally am not fond of books that make me feel feelings, but I have readily begun each book knowing what I'm in for. The books are so enjoyable that it is worth it. As this review is long overdue and I've finished this trilogy and the Farian War trilogy, I must say I am both sad to see the maybe-end of books in this universe and hopeful in what new tales will be told.

Behind the Throne was one of those books I hadn't heard about and first checked out on NetGalley because the cover was so pretty and because it was under one of my favorite publishing imprints. I've noticed over recent years the covers on books have been getting less catchy and more generic - something that I am actually rather sad about because I love the cover art on novels.

I even took this novel on vacation with me, forseeing a great beach read filled with interstellar intrigue, strong female lead, kickass action and some zinging sarcasm. I mean, all the parts were there! They compare it to Star Wars! This was going to be perfect!

I think what did this in for me was the writing style and execution. We come in mid-stride to some seriously life changing action, and then immediately after our Trackers show off to whisk our heroine to a palace..and then a bunch of other stuff happens that matters but I didn't care about. I didn't really understand why the main character's family was so important, either - even though I feel liek this was explained early on in the novel. I don't know.

I just didn't click with any of the characters, didn't care about what happened to them and generally didn't "click" with the narrator which left this book lounging on my TBR list for almost a year (or a year?) and was generally painful to read. It makes me sad, because everyone else I know loved this book - so I think it was more me than this book that was the problem.

Behind the Throne by K. B. Wagers

This was outstanding! The story takes place sometime in the far future where an empire has grown from a colony world found by India. The empire is in disarray and the black sheep of the imperial family is thrust into the spotlight.

The matrilineal factor added some interest to the book. The characterization of men in historically stereotypical roles helped to show how ludicrous misogyny is. The heir, Hail, has left the womb of family to pursue justice or revenge on those responsible for her father’s death. The empire is being assaulted both internally and externally and Hail is dragged back to the family to assume her imperial responsibilities.

The character relationships are the key to this novel’s success. Wagers’ character building is terrific. She shows foibles and growth as well as two way loyalty. The re-immersion into family life and responsibilities is shown to be a daunting task.

Incidentally, I am fond of and support strong women and strong female protagonist, Wagers character is both!

Great book, as soon as I finish this review, I intend to find the next in the series.

Web: http://www.kbwagers.com/

Requested this by accident--I've already read it and own it myself. Love this series. It's just so much fun.

At least I can say I tried.

YA sci-fi is difficult, yes, but give me a questionable plot and an extremely unlikable protagonist and it's a recipe for disaster. If our lead character was more endearing, her language and behavior would be an asset, but I just spent the first quarter of this book hating everything and just decided to move on. There isn't enough time for me to be trying to make this work.

5 stars

This book was phenomenal, un-putdownable.

Hail is a gunrunner but she was a princess of the Indranan empire until 20 years ago when she left to hunt down her father's killers. Retrieved from the bloodbath on her ship by 2 trackers, Hail is brought the abrupt reality that her sisters have been murdered and she is the only heir. Driven by vengeance and the gradual realization that she loves her people more that her freedom, Hail may be exactly what her ragged empire needs, if she can survive until her coronation.

I could not put this book down. I am too old to read instead of sleep but I totally did that and there is not a shred of regret. (At the moment, talk to me 12 hours from now and I'll be singing a different tune.)

Hail is such a real character to me. She loves her family, even when she's fighting with them. She is afraid that what she is is not enough but she's going to give it her all. She's blunt and tough and ruthlessly sharp. Turns out that gunrunning has completely prepared her for the negotiations, bribery, underhandedness, and take no prisoners situations that her snake pit of an empire calls for.

I adored every second of this book and cannot wait to get my paws on the next one!

So I actually loved these books so much, I went and bought them in print.

First in a new series, no spoilers. Read this in one sitting because it was just that good!

I seriously loved this book. It is a space opera set in an empire with a matriarchy. The main character, a princess, left the empire as a teenager to try and find her father’s killer and in the process, became a gun runner. However, terrible things happen back home and she is drug back to become the heir apparent. What follows her coming to terms with her new role in life and trying to catch up with the empire. Oh, and not get killed in the process.

Hail Bristol, runaway daughter of the Indara Empire, is summoned home to become the heir apparent after her sisters are brutally murdered by forces unknown. For the past twenty years, Hail has been a gunrunner for the most notorious of men. Now she must use all of her gunrunner knowledge to attempt to keep the crumbling matriarch together.

I don't usually DNF after 100 pages (and especially not after I bought the book), but 157 in I just couldn't do it anymore. It was a chore to read. To sum up to the point where I got: blah blah blah I'm a gunrunner! blah blah green hair blah blah clothes blah blah but I'm a gunrunner! blah blah my life is sooooo unfair blah blah blah I'm a gunrunner! If you haven't got the gist yet, Hail talks about being a gunrunner a lot. Melodrama to the max. I love space opera, but ain't no one got time for a hardened criminal gunrunner princess who acts like a 38 year-old toddler. Theoretically she can "control her temper" and it's all a ruse, but honestly, I didn't see it. Unreliable narrator, much? Not well written or interesting enough to keep me interested. And not fast paced at all.

But hey. Maybe it gets better. Maybe something happens. Maybe Hail grows up and acts like a damn adult in the remaining 240 pages. I skipped to the last page . . . everything gets summed up nicely and it's not too hard to see what's going on in the in between phases.

The premise of this book sounded really cool, but as soon as I started reading it, I was really put off by the fact that it started with a lot of gore and swearing. I'm just not a big fan of gore and swearing, y'know? I decided I'd read to the fourth chapter to see if that stuff lessened, as the premise was just so cool and the main character so...dynamic. I'm glad I kept reading, even all the way through to the end, because it was a great read. Here's why:

It was pure science fiction, taking place on a planet far away with some really cool highly-advanced technologies, a matriarchal society, an Indian-like culture, and monarchical political structure. So much fun for the imagination! Also, the world building was awesome! Take this, for example:
 "Initially, I'd been [mad] about the body mod screwup that had left me with this permanently green curly hair. The color had grown on me and the rest of it--from my darker skin and my tall, rangy build to my narrow face with a pointed chin--was more than suitable. Now the thought of the hysterics my hair would cause at home made it worthwhile. Maybe I'd go home, hang around just long enough to see the look on Mother's face."

These few lines describe the kind of tech she has access to (world building), and her physical appearance and motives (characterization). This is good writing.

Haili, and the conflict she faced, was so interesting. Her transformation from crass gunrunner to...a less crass, gun-toting heir to the throne, is definitely believable and enjoyable to witness.
K.B. Wager's style is so strong and vibrant. While there definitely were plenty of swear words (over 200, to be exact), there weren't any sex scenes, and the gore dropped off almost entirely after the first chapter. Phrases like this:
"His words slammed into me, burning like the ten thousand volts of a Solarian Conglomerate police taser."

and

"Tell them, Hail" (talking to herself), "the voice in my head screamed. Just tell them to let [your cousin] to keep doing what she's doing and you'll get out of their way. You don't want to be the heir. You can go back to your life. Back to [your] life without Portis. My heart broke again, falling out of my chest and shattering on the rose quartz hearth at my feet."

There are a lot of characters and plot threads, which is appropriate for the genre but difficult for me to keep track of. I would have really appreciated a character glossary, a word glossary, and a map. I'd even go so far as to say they were necessary. It's possible, though, that I am just that forgetful; you might not experience this same difficulty when reading this book.

There is a sequel to Behind the Throne, called After the Crown, that I immediately bought after finishing the first book. There will be a sequel to After the Crown that will be released in November of this year. If you're one of those people who doesn't like the suspense of waiting for the next book in a series to come out, I would definitely wait until the last one comes out to buy the whole series. But then be warned that you might be bound to your Kindle or couch for a week while you finish all three books.

This book is not really SF, but it is an exciting read nonetheless. Told from the first person-of-view, Hail Bristol is a gun-runner who's made a name for herself in the galaxy as a badass, but she's actually a runaway princess from Indrana. Although branded a coward by her home world for fleeing, Hail left to search for the man who killed her father. When she's physically dragged back to Indrana, she finds out that her sisters and niece have been assassinated and her mother is drowning in dementia. The rule as Empress of Indrana falls to her, but she goes to it kicking and screaming.

I loved the snarky banter between Hail and her Bodyguards, most especially Emmory. I had figured out early own who was involved in the coup, but there were some surprises left I didn't see coming. The action is mostly Hail trying to survive attack after attack. The story moves along at a fast pace and Ms. Wagers had written a fascinating heroine--her doubts, her ambition, her loss and her grief. I'm definitely interested in reading the next chapter of this series.

I received a copy of this ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

4.5 stars, and I'm going to round it up. Why? Because even after I worked all week and had a lot of things to do around the house last night, I stayed up until 3 am to finish this book. I could barely walk to get to the bed after I finished, but I did it. And really enjoyed the whole experience.

This wasn't as detail-rich or epic scope as most of the top ratings I give, but when a book hooks you from the word 'go' and keeps you racing through pages and unable to put it down, that counts for something. I mean, that's why we read to begin with, isn't it?

Definitely looking forward to the next book(s) in this series.

This is great space opera. Hailimi Bristol is anything but the heir to the throne but when her sisters are killed she is forced to come back and be just that. Notice something different. It seems that the women rule the planet and gender roles are reversed. Not everyone is happy to see Hailimi back and her life is in constant danger. She has a great group of characters who are helping her stay alive. A fun and hard to put down story. I really liked this book and am off to get book two, After the Crown, which is already out.

"Spoken like a consummate politician, Highness. One would think you've been doing this for years."
"I have, Caspel. It just involved more guns."
Whatever your expectations may be, I suspect Behind the Throne will probably defy them. When I first started reading, misled by the flowery descriptions of eye colors and muscle definition, the careful note of each time the characters touched, and the derogative-yet-highly-descriptive portraits of the protagonist's beautiful clothing, I was quite worried that I had picked up a romance. However, for those of you who are also not fans of that genre, never fear: while the flowery description may occasionally give you pause, the book is absolutely devoid of love triangles and passionate glances. In fact, thematically, it's a thoroughly enjoyable mix of space opera and worldbuilding scifi flavored with a taste of mystery. I'm a huge fan of detective fiction, and even when they're less "whodunnit" than "whatyagonnadoaboutit," I still love the structure and focus on character that I think a mystery component brings to a story.

Despite an ongoing obsession with urban fantasy, noir, and heist stories, I'm paradoxically conservative when it comes to characters, and I was never really quite sure how I felt about the protagonist. Hail escaped her royal upbringing to become a gunrunner. The book focuses only on the badassery of the career and never really questions its morality. However, I personally couldn't get over the opening scene, where we see her in a room of corpses of her making. Gunrunners profit by inflaming wars and selling death. By their very nature, are rulebreakers who show a disdain for law and life. Personally, I'd want someone who is vying to be leader of a constitutional monarchy to question their past of illegality and pure bloodthirsty villainy. Hail isn't an honourable rogue. She punishes those she likes without trial and without due process, and yet her stalinesque savagery in a world of laws is never questioned.

The most controversial and memorable aspect of the book is probably going to be the creation of a female-dominated society. I found it thought-provoking, but not in the way the author intended. Personally, I think this book does a disservice to a discussion of sexism because the sexism here is so superficial. We're told that in Hail's world, the equal rights movement was taken "too far" and men are now considered inferior and forced into a lower role in society. That's what we're told, but in reality, men show absolutely no subservience or deference to their female "superiors" and are utterly unlimited by legal chains or glass ceilings. In our era, most of the sexism we encounter centers around objectification, tokenization, and glass ceilings, but this story supposedly happens in an even more sexist pre-lipservice era that would probably be more comparable to our 1890s. So where are the enforced gender roles and vicious stereotyping based on faulty pseudoscience? The characters occasionally make (forced, artificial) asides such as " men are not capable of the kind of responsibilities ", but they don't add any analogues to the specious biological arguments that cast women as smaller-brained, logic-deficient, emotion-driven, hysteria-prone weaklings, not any arguments that men are subordinate because they are biologically suited to be subordinate. Sure, I appreciated the occasional touches like describing a woman as " chatter[ing] like a schoolboy " but apart from a very few artificial attempts at creating a culture of ingrained sexism, I think the author mostly forgot about her attempt at a reverse-sexist culture.

In fact, even the gender gap itself was missing. Even though we're supposedly in a female-dominated world, women still seem to be caregivers and child-rearers. Men seem to be able to take on any career they desire, and they're often casually mentioned as the breadwinners. The attempts to demonstrate ingrained sexism were absurdly artificial. Take one conversation where Hail's male bodyguard accuses her of suspecting one man "Without any proof? Why? Because he's a man?" Well, I don't know, maybe it's because he's a man, or just maybe it's because they've just watched him attend a secret meeting with dissidents and killers. Within the book, the Director of Galactic Imperial Security, an admiral of the military, the prime minister, the head guard for the empress, the most elite of trackers, and even business owners such as a successful restaurateur are all men. The head of the resistance and the ruler of a rival empire are both men, yet no one objectifies or dehumanizes or attributes sexist stereotypes to them. Seems like the only thing a man can't do in this world is become emperor, and considering there are additional non-egalitarian genetic requirements for that anyway, I wouldn't consider an inability to become emperor much of a glass ceiling. Men of the society don't seem limited to me, and describing this as a sexist culture discounts the much more virulent sexism that women of our world have faced and even continue to face.

Behind the Throne is definitely intended to be the start of a series, and Wagers has left herself a lot of worldbuilding to explore. The story takes place in a planet-spanning empire: I want to know more about the industry, the tech, the exports that keep the lifestyle we see afloat. How do the colonized worlds feel? Do they welcome the Saxon empire? Do they seek true independence? How much say do they have in the government itself? I was rather fascinated by the blending of Hinduism and Catholic traditions, and I'd love to hear more about the religions of the world. I really appreciated the various same-gender couples throughout the book, which should have been particularly interesting given the supposed sexism of the culture, and I think this is worth further exploration in future books. We're briefly introduced to an alien species who have incredible healing capabilities, and while they mostly turned out to be a plot device in this story, I think they deserve deeper examination. The worldbuilding may have felt a bit flat for me, but on the other hand, this leaves a lot to expand on in the sequels. The true power of the story is its compulsive readability. No matter my criticisms, it was genuinely difficult to put down. If you're looking for something fast and fun with a bit of worldbuilding thrown in, Behind the Throne is definitely worth a look.

~3.5

A brilliant, fast-paced adventure! I can't wait to read the rest of the series!

Give me books like this every day

No, it's not perfect, but Behind the Throne is better than most SF you will read today and it is the kind of story I like: A pirate with a secret identity and serious training in self-defense.

I received a review copy of "Behind the Throne" by K. B. Wagers (Orbit) through NetGalley.com.

This was a fun debut! Accessible soft sci-fi very much in the same vein as Star Wars, but with more diverse characters! Matriarchies in space! Definitely more fun to read than the regular run-of-the-mill stuff, and is a treat for any and all readers that read for the characters. Hailimi is a great no-nonsense MC who experiences a whole host of emotions & faces a plethora of problems head-on. Even the side characters (in particular, Emmory and Zin) are written with care & it's hard not to get attached by the end. ;~;

I'll certainly be following up on this series for more Hailimi!

Good book! I enjoyed the fish-out-of-water aspect of the former princess turned gun-runner turned queen. I expected more of the outlaw aspect of the story, but I got more of the outlaw trying to be queen. I enjoyed the interplay between the characters, especially the loyalty of the hunters sent to retrieve Hail and the interactions between her and her mother.

I wanted to think this might have been a vast empire-building SF epic, with spaceships galore and an underdog rise from the dregs, but no. Even the SF portions feel kinda tacked on, focusing more on taking a bit of world-building along the cultural lines and making a matrilineal succession the focus, instead, with an almost obligatory strong female cast to "round" it out.

In actuality, this is not really an SF except in the fact that it has cut and paste SF space-operatic featured over a very old "Princess-Turned-Pirate Returns to Court and Has Intrigue" Fantasy plot. I swear I've played this over twenty times in Japanese RPGs. But yeah, this is supposed to be SF, not Fantasy, right?

So what has the novel going in its favor? Bright first-person snark, fairly claustrophobic conflict, and decent interpersonal angst.

What could I have done without? A truly tired plot that is really just a slightly dressed-up fantasy in SF rags.

But what about the action? The intrigue? Wasn't that fun?

Um, yeah, it was okay. The action is something you have to wait for, and if you don't mind ferreting out traitors and dealing with the absolute terrors of being next in in line to a monarchy with all your siblings dead and mamma nearly so, then perhaps this is exactly the right kind of fairly-well-paced novel for you.

For me? I love my SF really juicy with ideas and innovation. This one just felt like it was a repurposed manuscript from the trunk of a paint-by-numbers Fantasy, sadly, with a politically-correct allocation of women and pasted-on cultural bits that were interesting in themselves but didn't leave me all that much to hold on to within the grand expanse of the novel.

Maybe I'm being too hard on the novel, and maybe not. It was very readable, but I just didn't enjoy it all that much. Maybe I've been spoiled by way too much truly good SF to be swayed by something like this, that feels flashy but doesn't have all that much real substance or courage.