Review: A Crown for Cold Silver

A Crown for Cold Silver by Alex Marshall
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Hoo boy, am I conflicted on this one.

Summary: Twenty-five-ish years prior to the start of the novel, General Zosia stormed her kingdom with five captains (called "Villains") and took the throne. Then, she secretly abdicated, letting the world believe that she had been killed and usurped. She spent the next 20 years living a quiet, anonymous life with a man she loved, until her husband and her entire village were killed. She believes that the current queen - the only one who knows that Zosia is still alive - destroyed her happy life, and begins a campaign to take the kingdom once again. *Minor spoilers start here.* She discovers that someone is using the name of her old army - the Cobalt Company - and has taken on Zosia's trademark blue hair and already fighting the battle Zosia wants to fight. Most of the novel is concerned with each character's journey to join up with the Cobalt Company - each of Zosia's villains end up there for reasons of their own, and even characters who are seemingly unrelated get there, too. This is convenient for Zosia, who now has an army that's doing what she wants (and she doesn't even have to lead it!) and all of her old, powerful buddies.

Things that are relevant to the plot:
The Burnished Chain - a religion whose pope seems to share equal power with the queen. While they seem to revile the devils and the "weirdborn" - people who are born weird, with fangs or beaks or claws - they may actually be using all of these mystical things to their own end.

The kingdom, called the Star or the Diadem or the Crimson Empire, has a lot of little sub-kingdoms, two of which were destroyed long ago in a battle involving mystical weapons. One is the Sunken Kingdom, which now lies at the bottom of the ocean, and one is Emeritus, that stands empty but just as it was on the day that it was attacked, with food still warm.

The mystical elements include Gates that were probably at one point intended to take people to other Gates, but no one knows how to use them. They seem to be gathering points for devils (which can be bound into animal bodies and forced to serve humans - and if you free them, they grant a wish) and are somehow related to the weirdborn people.

Opinions:
I have a lot of feelings about this book. First of all, I think it was an excellent example of how to do gender and sexual equality right. There is no discrimination in this world, except against the weirdborn. Which, I think, makes sense in a magical world where the mystical elements are accessible to anyone, therefore anyone can be equally powerful. So the fact that characters desire characters of either sex, or that women are mentioned just as often as men, seems natural in the story, and there aren't even any hints of the sexual/gender norms of our own world. So A+ there.

I love the plot. I love the setting and the worldbuilding. I'm very much interested in hearing what's going to happen next, and finding more about the world.

But I kind of hate the writing. There were definitely long chunks of reading where it was fine and I wasn't bothered, but for a good portion of the book I was frustrated by the ham-fisted characterization, dialogue that was all over the place, and strange prose in general. Which is interesting, considering that this book is getting a lot of buzz because of the unnamed but apparently successful author; I expected the prose to be a lot better. A lot of the characters really just boiled down to a few traits or idiosyncrasies repeated over and over again. Younger characters talk like modern-day fourteen-year-olds, with uncomfortably modern slang. The dialogue in general was kind of terrible, phrased in a way that the author obviously thought was cool and clever, but came across as clunky and indulgent (and while there's a place for indulgence in high fantasy, this did not do it well). And I got too fucking tired of every fucking character using 'fucking' all the fucking time, and cursing in general - not just in the dialogue, but in descriptions. The book is generally in close 3rd person, though that breaks when the author feels like it, and the curse words show up in description that isn't specifically attributed to any character which is frustrating.

The book also seemed really confused about who the main character was. Theoretically, it was Zosia, but I feel like Maroto - her drug-addicted former Villain who is totally in love with her - got both more page time and was the best attempt at a well-rounded character.

And as a final complaint, though another reviewer mentioned this, the "main" kingdom's civilization is pretty solid and original (though definitely influenced by medieval European kingdoms), but the "foreign" kingdoms are all stolen directly from "foreign" (to the West) lands in the real world. Indian names are used to evoke foreignness in one kingdom, Korean names and Asian architecture in another. This pushes the line between lazy and disrespectful. It took me out of the book, making me super aware of the real-world influences, and was confusing - did the author do this intentionally? Is this supposed to be an alternate Earth, or a future Earth? And it makes the story seem more shallow, because instead of having a culture that results from factors in the story and the world, the author cut-and-pasted as a shortcut to "foreignness."

So who is my guess for the author? I don't think it's someone who has written high fantasy before. There were a few big problems with the world-building that made me feel like it was someone just getting into the genre - too many Proper Nouns, a disjoint between the depth of the story and the superficiality/simplicity of the prose, and a tendency not to subvert tropes but to use them in just slightly the wrong way. I initially wanted to say it was someone who has written primarily for teens, because of the prose style and the showing-not-telling, but when they got two teenagers in a room together I almost threw the book across the room it was so painful. Obviously, Rowling is a good candidate because she's written under pseudonyms before, and while she's written fantasy, it's never been this style (and she can write teenagers without making them sound like idiots). My boyfriend finished China Mieville's "Perdido Street Station" at the same time I finished this, and interestingly, we both had strikingly similar complaints about the prose styles and characters, so I'm tempted to say it's Mieville but that's just my own circumstantial bias. It's trying so, so hard to be George R. R. Martin, but it's definitely not. Maybe David Weber? It's got a strong military bent, a military female leader with a crew that all gets together by the end of the book, and gates to different parts of the world. Basically, I don't know, but I would love to find out.

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