Empire of Exiles
The Books of the Usurper series, Book 1
Erin M. Evans
Orbit
Fiction, Fantasy
Themes: Diversity, Epics, Fantasy Races, Girl Power, Magic Workers, Shapeshifters, Urban Tales
***+
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.