The Raven Tower

Ann Leckie has a gift for writing from unusual perspectives. In Ancillary Justice, she wrote from the first-person, and in this one she writes from the second-person.

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Like Ancillary Justice, I found it difficult to get into because of that, but I should trust the genius of Ann Leckie. About 60% of the way into this, the pieces began to fit together and I could see it for the masterpiece it is.

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The roof was, like the audience room, mostly empty. A few stone seats were placed at intervals along the wall, and in the very center of the roof a platform some four feet high, on which sat a tangled mass of twigs and sticks. “That’s it,” Hibal said to you. “That is the Raven’s nest.”

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She builds the world up slowly, weaves together storylines until they make a bigger picture, and then creates a hard, definitive ending that feels right.

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I had seen that god streak across the sky, felt the earth tremble when she hit. Her arrival left a crater in the ground, even below the thickness of ice she landed on.

Before she had fallen to earth, she had unceasingly traveled great distances and seen wonders. She had seen the whole earth, from far, far away, all its lands and its seas, round like a bilberry, but green and brown and blue and much, much larger.

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The main characters are the God of Strength and Patience and the aide to the heir of the ruler. We follow both of them through family difficulties, treachery, war, the death of gods, and deep change.

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Perhaps the length of one’s life was not important—except in the way it is to so many living beings, desperate to avoid death. Perhaps, long or short, it mattered how one spent that time. Perhaps, though change was inevitable, the specifics of that change might be something one could manipulate. Perhaps one could not prevent change entirely, but one could try to guide events so that things would be better, if not for you, then for some future being or beings whose welfare mattered to you.

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It's not her best work, but this novel is interesting because it’s written from an unusual angle, one we never consider.