The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson (5 stars)

This is a spectacular book, mostly just because the approach is fascinating: it's a political/economic fantasy novel with a female accountant as the protagonist?! I've never read a book like this: imagine A Song of Ice and Fire but replace magic, dragons, and some of the violent battles with economics and trade. Dickinson moves quite quickly but with substance: if GRRM covered the same content it probably would have taken three books.

When conquering an enemy or building an alliance Baru studies the patterns of trade, money lending, and at times uses her position in control of the central bank to change the balance of power. It's a great demonstration of how trade, currency, and debt can be used as tools of political and social control. Sure the Masquerade has an army and a navy, a Nazi-like system of eugenics and secret police, but much of their power comes through the economics of trade.

and in those eyes she glimpsed an imperium, a mechanism of rule building itself from the work of so many million hands. Remorseless not out of cruelty or hate but because it was too vast and too set on its destiny to care for the small tragedies of its growth.

Baru becomes a cog in this giant wheel, initially hoping to change it from within, but she knows it will require her to be ruthless in the pursuit of power.

“The tide is coming in,” he said. “The ocean has reached this little pool. There will be turbulence, and confusion, and ruin. This is what happens when something small joins something vast.

From day one in Aurdwynn she had to be the Masquerade:

You are a word, Baru Cormorant, a mark, and the mark says: you, Aurdwynn, you are ours.”

Where the novel is weak is in Baru herself. I had a hard time believing that this teenager was a) a mathematical savant, b) an applied economics genius c) a skilled negotiator and d) the most politically skilled operative of all time. Of those I think only a) and maybe b) are actually plausible, the rest are very people-oriented skills that typically don't exist in mathematical savants, and even if they do, they are the type of skills that are built through decades of experience and many failures. She basically only has a few years of formal learning from a frontier school.

So she is somewhat of a Mary Sue, but she isn't without weakness: she isn't a strong fighter, and she makes a number of real mistakes with grave consequences for the war. A bit of Deus Ex Machina does creep in since she never needs to struggle with a problem for more than a day before hitting upon an amazing solution.

Also we don't actually get to know Baru very personally, but Dickinson has good reason to hold this back. A lot of the intrigue for the reader is in trying to decipher where her loyalties truly lie, but this doesn't keep me from being disappointed that we didn't get below the surface of her next strategic actions or her attempts to decipher the web of loyalties surrounding her.

There is a very strong feminist (so refreshing to see so many women in positions of real power) and pro-gay thread through the entire novel. Homosexuality is one of the core social dynamics the Masquerade wants to stamp out, and Dickinson has many characters fighting against that as a core part of their resistance, many seeing it as a fundamental fact of human existence:

“Men used to marry men,” Tain Hu told her, as they crouched together over a fire pit to cook their venison. “And women once took wives. It was done by the poor, the starving, the desperate, by those who needed a business pact or a shared roof. By soldiers on campaign with no one else to turn to. Mostly it was done by those without needs or troubles—done for love. The words tribadist and sodomite, the things they mean and define, came later. Before those words there were only people.”

 A fascinating novel, couldn't put it down.

5 stars.