Battle of the 2015 Books, Bracket One, Second Round :: Fortune’s Blight by Evie Manieri vs. The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu

Our second match in the second round of Bracket One of the Battle of the 2015 Books features Fortune’s Blight by Evie Manieri taking on The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu. The winner will be the book I (Aaron) most want to continue reading after 50 pages.

Fortune's Blight: Tor, February 2015, 363 pages, cover art by Kekai Kotaki. Fortune's Blight is Book II of the Shattered Kingdoms series. Book I is Blood's Pride and Book III, Strife's Bane, is due out in December. Fortune’s Blight defeated Oathkeeper by J. F. Lewis to get into the second round.

Fortune's Blight deals with the aftermath of a revolution led by King Daryan of the Shadari, which has overthrown the rule of their telepathic Norlander conquerors. In the opening 25 pages, we've seen Daryan confronted with a populace struggling with post-war hardships and now nearing rebellion against him. The second 25-page section consists of chapters from the point of view of two members of a Norlander noble family, the Arregadors. Rho Arregador (owner of the sword "Fortune's Blight") left his home in the north, by his own account because he slept with his brother's wife. Now he travels by ship with the deposed governor of Shadar. They still have an ace in the hole, however: a young Shadari under their control with powerful telekinetic abilities. Meanwhile, Kira Arregador, the brother's wife in question, remains at home in frozen Norland. Her husband has died in battle, and she must negotiate a minefield of court politics, centered on a new Norlander king she holds in contempt.

The Grace of Kings: Saga, April 2015, 618 pages, cover art by Sam Weber. The Grace of Kings is Book One of the Dandelion Dynasty series. Ken Liu is a two-time Hugo Award winner for his short fiction, as well as accounting for a third Hugo by translating last year's Best Novel winner The Three-Body Problem. The Grace of Kings is his first novel. The Grace of Kings overwhelmed Infinity Lost by S. Harrison to get into the second round.

The Grace of Kings is set on the Islands of Dara, an archipelago with a culture similar to ancient China. In the opening 25 pages we met Kuni Garu, a clever but mischievous student, and Mata Zyndu, a huge young fellow bent on revenge against the emperor. The second 25-page section jumps us ahead seven years, focusing on Kuni. He has been expelled from school and now lives a life of leisure, relying on the hospitality of friends and tavern-keepers who appreciate that a crowd tends to follow him about. But his lifestyle may be about to change as he meets the mayor's spunky daughter Jia Matiza, who sees his true potential.

The Battle: Here we have two complex secondary world fantasies going head to head.

Through 50 pages, to me the greatest strength of Fortune's Blight is Manieri's vivid descriptions of the different landscapes in her strange world. Here, for instance, Kira pauses to consider the courtyard in front of Norland's royal palace:

She preferred the narrow streets and little courts; here, she felt like she was being watched from every angle: from the towers and apparently empty slit-windows of Eotan Castle; from the huge green-glass terrace on the western side, supported by two twenty-feet-tall statues of wolf-headed Eotan the Progenitor; from the worn faces on the carvings of the ancient monarchs lining the rise; from the top of the hewn steps between them to the headland's highest point where the beacon burned day and night to guide ships into the harbor; and where the skull of Gargrothal, last of the great sea monsters, gaped down at them.

Although I appreciate the writing of Fortune's Blight, I find the story rather slow to get moving. In the second 25-page section, nothing especially significant happens. Rho Arregador looks over the water and thinks about stuff; Kira Arregador goes to a dinner party and thinks about stuff. Part of the problem is this is the second book in a series, and there's a lot of background information to catch us up on, but we've seen other sequels in Battle of the Books that have managed to keep the action moving more effectively early on.

I also like the writing in The Grace of Kings, and I feel connected to the characters, particularly Kuni, a rogue with a heart of gold. In the same chapter, he gleefully talks his way out of paying his enormous tab at a tavern, then intervenes to help a stranger desperate to keep her son from being conscripted into civil service. The mayor's daughter Jia, herself a willful young woman, first becomes interested in Kuni when she witnesses this moment.

In contrast with Fortune's Blight, 50 pages into The Grace of Kings, the plot is already well under way. This doesn't necessarily require a lot of action-packed scenes (although there has been one of those), only that the scenes feel important to the lives of the characters. In Fortune's Blight, Kira goes to a dinner party where nothing much happens. In The Grace of Kings, Kuni goes to a dinner party where he meets the woman one suspects he will marry. The dinner party in The Grace of Kings makes me feel involved in the story. I want to keep reading, to see more of the interactions between Kuni and Jia, and to see how their romance will ultimately impact the future of the islands of Dara.

THE WINNER: The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu

The Grace of Kings advances to the semifinals to take on The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro.

To see the whole bracket, click here.

Battle of the 2015 Books, Bracket One, First Round :: Fortune's Blight by Evie Manieri vs. Oathkeeper by J. F. Lewis

For the third battle of Bracket One of the Battle of the 2015 Books we have Fortune's Blight by Evie Manieri going against Oathkeeper by J. F. Lewis. The winner will be the book I (Aaron) most want to continue reading after 25 pages.

Fortune's Blight: Tor, February 2015, 363 pages, cover art by Kekai Kotaki. Fortune's Blight is Book II of the Shattered Kingdoms series. Book III, Strife's Bane is due out in December. In the first book, Blood's Pride, King Daryan led a revolution against the foreigner Norlanders, who had invaded and enslaved his people, the Shadari. The revolution was (spoiler alert!) successful, but problems still abound.

In the opening 25 pages of Fortune's Blight, we see the mercenary Lahlil (formerly known as the Mongrel), who was instrumental in helping Daryan to overthrow the Norlanders, but is now running from her past among a tribe of Nomas desert nomads. She has daily seizures she attributes to different gods competing for her soul, and in this universe she may be right. We also meet Daryan, new king of the Shadar, patrolling his kingdom with his Norlander love Isa, on a winged beast called a "triffon." Amid post-war hardships, both Daryan's people and Isa's band of turncoats are nearing open rebellion against Daryan's and Isa's leadership.

Oathkeeper: Pyr, June 2015, 377 page, cover art by Todd Lockwood. Oathkeeper is Book Two of the Grudgebearer Trilogy. The third book in this series, Worldshaker is due in August. In this series, a magical race called the Eldrennai long ago created a nearly immortal race of non-magical warriors, the Aern, as warrior-slaves to defend the Eldrennai against the reptilian, magic-resistant Zaur. The Aern were recently freed, and may yet come seeking vengeance from the Eldrennai, who are trying to make an alliance with the plant-like Vael against that scenario.

In the first 25 pages, we see Prince Rivvek of the Eldrennai, whose magical powers have been crippled by physical injuries, consolidating power in preparation for an anticipated attack by the Aern. It seems you need to have read the first book to know why he is in charge and not his father the king or his older brother. Meanwhile, a group of fierce and pernicious Zaur warriors launch an assault against a massive Vael "root tree." Prince Kholburran of the Vael sees his love Malli injured in the attack, but he refuses to abandon her and vows to heal her, which apparently means they must marry.

The Battle: For once in the Battle of the Books, we have a fair fight. Two second volumes in two epic fantasy series go head to head. After reading the opening sections of both, my guess is if you like one of these books, you'd like the other, so I'll have to do some hair-splitting here . . .

Oathkeeper seizes an initial lead because it puts us into the action quickly, showing an early skirmish between the vicious Zaur and the strange tree-like creatures the Vael, and introducing multiple kinds of magic (albeit magic with a retro feel, based on the "elements" of earth, air, water, and fire) and magical beasts. In contrast, Fortune's Blight has a bit of a ponderous opening, with understated fantasy elements (other than the winged triffons) and the only real action happening in a brief flashback.

But Fortune's Blight presses a couple important advantages to eat into that margin. First, I prefer the prose in Fortune's Blight. Evie Manieri's writing has a good flow to it, while Oathkeeper too often feels overdramatic, as if J.F. Lewis is trying to write passages to accompany trumpets and cymbals, with an unfortunate tendency to run-on sentences:

Sealing vents in active sections of the maze of underground passages that comprised Xasti'Kaur, the Shadow Road, made timing tricky at certain strategic phases of the plan, but it could also catch the Eldrennai by surprise and leave them gasping in the blackdamp if they figured out what the Sri'Zaur were actually planning before the shard-wielding assassins of Asvrin's Shades sowed confusion and death among those who had lulled themselves into a false sense of immortality.

This would be too much for me, I think, even if I had read the previous book and knew what the "blackdamp" and Sri'Zaur and Asvrin's Shades were.

Fortune's Blight's other major advantage is I'm finding it easier to relate to the characters. Evie Manieri does a very good job of taking large-scale conflicts and making them personal for her characters. For example, King Daryan faces resistance from his own people because he has enlisted help from some of the hated Norlanders. The prejudice against Norlanders is personal for him, because he has fallen in love with one, and the two of them can never forget their differences, which include a painful variation in the temperatures of their skin:

They both knew the risks of these trysts, however infrequent, but the urgency of satisfying their passion made everything else, even the constant pain of their touch, irrelevant. She pitied ordinary couples whose embraces cost them nothing, whose love-making came so cheaply that they could undertake it on a whim and forget it just as easily. They couldn't know what it was like to have a lover's arms circle around the small of their back like a pair of blacksmith's tongs straight from the fire, or have kisses rain down like a shower of embers.

That is a lovely passage, one which will stay in my mind.

THE WINNER: Fortune's Blight by Evie Manieri

Fortune's Blight advances to the second round to face either The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu or Infinity Lost by S. Harrison.

To see the whole bracket, click here.