Review – The Masquerade Series 1-3 [Baru Cormorant]

The Masquerade Series, Books 1-3

by Seth Dickinson

A rollercoaster of potentially deadly sapphic yearning

An epic fantasy, anti-imperialist, political, lesbian poc protagonist, gritty, thoughtful and thought-provoking unfinished 4 book series (book 3 was published 2020) by Seth Dickinson.

CW for this series: references to colonialism; racism; cruelty/death to queer ppl incl. trans, non-binary & poly people; torture; death; animal death; sexual assault (never on the page and not against MC); swearing; abortion; non-consensual medical procedures; body horror; child abuse; child death; drug use; alcoholism; cancer; deadly pandemic. Violence imo is never gratuitous nor excessively gory; racism and other slurs are challenged at some point by the text. YMMV. Sorry if I’ve missed something.

I first added this book to my TBR because people said it was about a public servant lesbian accountant. 

This is the truth. You will know because it hurts.

The Traitor Baru Cormorant

That’s the promise that The Traitor Baru Cormorant, Book 1 in this unfinished quartet, gives you on its first page. It’s tempting to assume the ‘it hurts’ part is just marketing hype trying to drive up the tension of the final act, but I can assure you it’s not.

Imagine being so gay
you have the hots for the woman
who’s vowed to destroy you.

This is Baru x [spoiler’s] vibe (book 3)

tl;dr

I 100% recommend these books to fantasy readers who are ok with the content warnings.

This series starts with buying you dinner where you exchange sexually charged barbs but then escalates to surgically removing and filleting your heart. 

The end of the third book puts you back together and cracks terrible and wonderful jokes whilst it sutures up the numerous incision points it’s made in your body. 

Get to the third book. Get to the aftercare. That’s all I can say for those of you still hurting from Traitor.

And if you haven’t read Traitor yet, try to avoid spoilers until the very last page, if you can.

Tropes and queer rep:

• Most main characters are poc and queer
• The main character is a total lesbian and she’s an adorable trainwreck of moral ambiguity
• Soooo many women who are aggressively competent, including the MC
• So many potential love interests, and almost every one has an enemies to lovers vibe. Any one of them could kill her. Any one of them could kiss her! It’s a rollercoaster of potentially deadly sapphic yearning. My fave, ngl.
• Problematic power imbalances in almost every relationship, platonic and otherwise
• Economics/fiscal policy implementation as the protagonist’s special power 
• A book 1 sword duel which was just perfection
• A major pov character in Books 2 and 3 is a non-binary leader/diplomat using they/them pronouns
• Several important side characters are mlm, though they don’t get as much screen time
• Several cultures, including Baru’s birth culture practise some kind of poly and accept non-binary people
• Several cultures define gender based on behaviour
• A complex world that feels steeped in history and research.

The political stuff reminded me of Octavia E. Butler’s works and the horribly repressed, self-loathing genuis useless lesbian reminded me a little of Harrowhark Nonagesimus. 

Overview

The Masquerade quartet follows Baru Cormorant, a girl with two fathers and one mother, whose home island gets quietly colonised by the Evil Empire. As a young child she joins the new school on her island built by the Empire, to learn where its power comes from so that she can successfully assimilate into its command structure and take it down from within.

This is a series about power, agency, systemic oppression, and intersections with race, privilege, sexuality and gender. But it’s also an intriguing, compelling and ultimately compassionate read about a young marginalised woman’s rise to power.

While these are serious topics, none of them were handled in a didactic way imo–these themes arise naturally from the narrative frame, and I never felt preached to or that the fourth wall was being broken to make a point. We also never have to suffer an undiluted pov from an Empire native, so every single imperialist statement is filtered through an outsider’s lens and challenged by the text.

Baru

When this is finished, I will remake the world so that no woman will ever have to do this again.

The Traitor Baru Cormorant

Some people find it hard to love Baru. I am not one of those people.

It’s hard not to love someone so fierce in their conviction. Yes, she does terrible things. Almost everyone in this series does terrible things? But I identify with her so hard. Her charming but then at times absolutely groan-inducing flirting game. Her violently suppressed sapphic yearning. Her earnest love of trade, numbers, and economic patterns (oh Himu, please let us have more numerate lesbians). Even her horrific self-destructive behaviour and self-flagellation are so, so relatable.

I really have to admire a girl who would do almost anything to get what she wants.

The Love Interest

“A people can only bear the lash so long in silence. Some things are not worth being within.”

The Traitor Baru Cormorant

Tain Hu is a contender for one of the best sword lesbians ever.

She’s Baru’s moral compass, a delightful and remorseless rake, a duchess whose sense of nobility and loyalty is unimpeachable. Every single one of her interactions with Baru sizzles with sexual tension and unsatisfied yearning.

She makes me long for someone to write a regency AU fic: Auditing the Duchess. Someone, please.

The Evil Empire

Part of the empire is like that kid from psych 101 who’s just learnt about evolutionary psychology and now takes it upon himself to mansplain that everyone would be oh so much happier if they just went along with their biologically determined gender roles, but with a side serving of the motivations behind phrenology and other racist bullshit. It offers trade, healthcare, peace, security with one hand and decimates local economies and culture with the other, occasionally dipping into genocide.

For sodomites, hot iron; for tribadists, the knife.

The Traitor Baru Cormorant

I’ve read some readers saying that the Empire is so outrageously evil, it’s unbelievable anyone would follow them. 

But it’s really not? If you’ve ever read a primary source from a colonial government, they absolutely are that fucking awful (and worse) in using pseudo-science to very earnestly argue for racial inequality, and for being paternalistic and cruel towards the populations they invaded. Eugenics, ethnic cleansing, every single thing bad and good committed by this Empire has its basis in reality both past and present.

I also appreciate that the Empire isn’t quite a Euroclone, that their impossible beauty standards are not exactly the same as our world’s white beauty standards.

This was the first impression Baru had of the Falcrest people: stubborn jaws, flat noses, deep folded eyes, their skin a paler shade of brown or copper or oat. 

The Traitor Baru Cormorant

Choices

This is a series about agency, who gets to have agency, who sets the context in which a choice can be made. To what degree should we assign individuals responsibility for their actions, given the state of the world they were born in? Can the end ever justify the means? 

Baru makes many decisive choices, and the fun thing about this narrative is that Baru is surrounded by so many shadow selves (sooo many, the girl is haunted) that we don’t have to guess what would have happened if she’d made x or y choice–because the other characters have done it for her, and the trajectory of their lives reveal the outcomes of those choices she didn’t make.

There’s one character in particular whose motivations make little sense unless she’s using Baru as her own shadow self, and through steering Baru onto the right path, finding her own kind of redemption.

The way this story is framed, the only way for Baru to achieve her goal and live to see it is to walk the path she’s on.

Privilege, culture

Everything ends. Everything will end and you cannot fear that. But you must decide what the endings will mean.

The Tyrant Baru Cormorant

This series pressed so many buttons for me I try to forget I have (which I realise is a privilege in and of itself).

It made me so acutely aware of my many various privileges, both broad (gay marriage is legal where I live) and intimate (being straight-passing). Not to mention being so damn grateful for electricity and anti-biotics.

The fact that every micro-aggression is called out somehow forces you to reflect on everything that’s happened and continues to happen and how that’s not okay. And sometimes it’s a lot, but you always feel like the text is on your side. 

And just the feels of, from my pov as part of the Chinese diaspora, Baru’s sense that you can’t go home–home has moved on without you–are you (birthrace) enough to fit in with the people who’ve raised you? Is just. It cuts.

Maybe the story won’t have the same fishhooks for you, but I’m still bleeding.

Writing

Honestly I sometimes struggle with long sweeping epics, but I didn’t find it particularly difficult to keep up with the various factions in this series. Also, for such increasingly long books with so many non-standard terms (I honestly love ‘isoamory’ for samesex), the prose was freakishly clean, it was almost uncanny. Whoever edited this is a saint. And sometimes the phrasing was so damn beautiful.

My hopes for Book 4

Book 3 concluded on a satisfying note, although of course there are a lot of loose ends, it’s not the cliffhanger of Book 2 so I feel like the wait for the final book isn’t going to be as agonising as, say the wait for Alecto.

Spoilers

Conclusion

I’m obsessed with Baru and I wish there were more sapphic characters who are just as brutally calculating.

I might as well say it again–if you’re still nursing a wound from Traitor, there is hope! Monster has a massive tonal shift from repressed gay to disaster gay, but she digs herself out of the mire of self-loathing by Tyrant.

You’ll be okay, I promise. ♥