The Masquerade Series, Book 1
by Seth Dickinson
A truly grimdark political anti-imperialist epic fantasy
with a sapphic protagonist wielding fiscal policy as her superpower
The most brutally calculating sapphic heroine I’ve ever met. I LOVED her.
Also the closest I’ve seen to a MC personifying my day job. Personally I found her blunt use of monetary policy unfettered by having to go through a committee so fun (possibly the most fantastical part of the book, but joyous to watch). Honestly I could have used more scenes of her flexing her mathematical genius. Maybe there’ll be more in the rest of the series.
Baru’s also a consummate manipulator, despite her youth and (to begin with) inexperience. She’s utterly competent and devastatingly sympathetic. It’s easy to think she could shade into being a power fantasy with the wrong author, but to me she remained absolutely relatable.
The narration seemed a bit dry some times but there was a loooot in terms of geography, time period and scope to cover so it was maybe inevitable. Also Baru is horribly repressed and exerting such tight control over her every expression, action and emotion that it’s exhausting and suffocating and eventually, heartbreaking.
I really cannot express how special and precious this book, this character and her relationships are to me. It’s a truly different read, a difficult read, but one that’s immensely rewarding for the right kind of reader.
CW: a lot. It’s grimdark. It’s established early that the evil empire has a big hard-on for eugenics and that they torture, mutilate, correctively rape and/or kill people suspected of marital misdemeanours (anything outside of Empire-sanctioned marriage). “For sodomites, hot iron; for tribadists, the knife.” There’s a lot of death, violence, and animal death. Nothing gratuitously gory on the page but YMMV. The series itself has been like one long heartbreak, but it’s so so worth it.
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