The Traitor Baru Cormorant

I have such mixed feelings about The Traitor Baru Cormorant that I will just try to sort of paint the image to you…

It started really good, with the expanding empire of the Masquerade arriving in Baru’s home and setting them and their traditions away as unhygienic savages that need to be cleansed. Due to Baru’s intellect she is taken to an assimilation program to ‘ascend her heredity’ and become useful to the Masquerade. Young Baru however, swears she will wreck the system, from the inside out.

To do that, she becomes – an accountant. Yes, this doesn’t sound like a very exciting read, but seeing how Baru crushed rebellion by means of accountancy was actually way more interesting than I would have thought. However, after that the story fast forwards for another three years and here it got a bit dull. One of the major problems I had with the part was that there didn’t seem to be much character development in the whole three years that were skipped. Had I been told that it was only a month, this would have fitted almost perfectly as well.

Also, the rebellion for some reason felt very, very slow, and at this point I was loosing my interest a little – I have to confess. Baru is not an easy character to like. While you get where she is coming from she is putting the ru into ruthless, using people here and there to further her own schemes. One might call her manipulative.

So, after loosing stars in the middle part – it was down to about 2.5 at that time, the ending sort of turned it around again. Maybe, had I been more engrossed in the story at that point I would have seen it coming, but as such I didn’t. Needed some time to ponder on it, but now I think I will need to read the sequel.