by C. L. Clark

Messy infuriating disaster sapphics

destabilising colonialism 

in a North African-inspired setting

Also Clark and Tasha Suri are currently doing an AMA on r/fantasy, in case you missed it!

My rating: 4/5

I feel like my relationship to this book, like the one between its main characters, is more complicated than my rating can suggest.

The Unbroken by C. L. Clark is the first book of the Magic of the Lost fantasy trilogy. It’s about home, belonging, imperialism, race, and both the terrible and beautiful things human beings can do to each other.

One of its comp titles at some point was A Traitor Baru Cormorant, and y’all know how much I loved Baru. I think I could love this book too, although I’m saving my final verdict for when the trilogy is all out.

Official blurb

EVERY EMPIRE DEMANDS REVOLUTION.

Touraine is a soldier. Stolen as a child and raised to kill and die for the empire, her only loyalty is to her fellow conscripts. But now, her company has been sent back to her homeland to stop a rebellion, and the ties of blood may be stronger than she thought.

Luca needs a turncoat. Someone desperate enough to tiptoe the bayonet’s edge between treason and orders. Someone who can sway the rebels toward peace, while Luca focuses on what really matters: getting her uncle off her throne.

Through assassinations and massacres, in bedrooms and war rooms, Touraine and Luca will haggle over the price of a nation. But some things aren’t for sale.

Tropes 

(I’ve forgotten a bunch, I’m sorry):

• Military butch lesbian
• Noblewoman ward/bodyguard reluctantly pressed into service
• The unromanceable superior officer
• Implicitly hot for teacher
• Unwinnable sword (ish) duel
• Mistress buys her servant new clothes (I loved this part sooo much since we rarely see this with a butch)
• Nerd confronts mean girls gossiping
• Tragic family backstory.

Characters

Touraine

Butch, military, lesbian(?), Black MC and the gal on the cover. Touraine is a conscript who was taken from her home country (Qazāl) as a child and raised in fantasy France (Balladaire). I was fully sympathetic with Touraine even when she makes somewhat iffy decisions. She’s just doing her best and sometimes that’s not good enough but like she’s trying ok and I appreciate that.

Luca

Bi/pan?, white, royal, physically disabled (traumatic injury). Luca is our other viewpoint character in the conflict between Qazāli and the Balladairan colonisers; she’s nominally heir but politics means she has a vested interest in ensuring the Qazāli colony succeeds (from the Balladairan point of view).

I’m ambivalent to Luca verging on dislike; I think she will get more woke as the series progresses but right now she is honestly painful to watch. She’s written sympathetically and I get it, she is a product of her circumstances like everyone else, but emotionally I don’t like her right now and I think that’s intentional.

There’s a great scene with her that demonstrates the intersectionality of privilege, in that her understanding and lived experience of disability doesn’t mean she automatically understands the experience of disability + class disadvantage + racial discrimation. (And in fact that her experience leads her to assume she would understand but she doesn’t). 

Secondary characters

Let me just say how much I loved Cantic, Touraine’s superior officer. She reminds me of Knight-Commander Meredith (Dragon Age 2): a military leader and woman of conviction, the sort who should be able to break Touraine like a twig. She’s sadly, like Meredith, also non-romanceable because of hierarchy and so on.

I also loved the Jackal, for spoilery reasons.

The relationship

There is not a huge amount of romance in book 1, it’s mostly all angsty yearning. I’m honestly unsure if the next book will get me to say yes, I ship Touraine/Luca–because right now that whole mess is toxic af. And I desperately love fictional sapphic toxicity but I feel like Touraine could do better, emotionally speaking. Part of me wants her to find a nice gal who doesn’t come with so much baggage, but that is the entire challenge of this series, I think–how can we love the person who was once our oppressor? How do we acknowledge the scars of the past and heal?

How can we love the person who was once our oppressor?

It’s a lot. It’s a lot that Clark has taken on, and I’m eager to see what they do with it.

At one part of the book it feels like Touraine and Luca have so many chance meetings that I wished it was more acknowledged by the text and called out by other characters; it felt like they had a red string of fate joining them and I kind of expected/wanted that to be more, like, remarked upon.

Other

The absence of heteronormativity

Heteronormativity and homophobia is more-or-less absent, even in the Balladairan elite. There are a number of queer side characters of varying privilege (the only ones I can think of right now are F/F couples but it’s been a while since I read this book and I’m probably missing some rep) and no one seems to care either way. I really appreciate the lack of homophobia, especially in a text like this that explores other forms of discrimation.

The space between the text and the reader

I’m a Third Culture Kid (grew up as an immigrant) and also a racial minority in my country of residence. So when Touraine, in the opening chapter, visits her birth country for the first time as an adult, I felt like I grokked her mixed feelings completely. But my first reading of this book gave me the impression that the reader wasn’t expected to understand, and for a few pages our hand is held as we walk through Touraine’s complicated feelings.

It was a brief impression that only applied for the first chapter, and on a re-read I’m not even sure if it stood out to me that much again. But that first impression is so important and I’m still thinking about it. Like, who is expected to be a reader, how to balance the goals of comprehension without othering. And I wonder if that was a publisher/editor/non-authorial decision, as part of making it more relatable to a wider audience, and the trade-offs involved in those kinds of decisions.

My rating

4/5, and I plan to read the rest of the series.