Review: The Grace of Kings

The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was an awesome book. It's not so much a novel as an epic saga rooted in oral tradition - a series of small stories all interlinked to a grand tale spanning time and space, each with enough fun to be memorable and subtle philosophical concepts to emerge on every telling, a curved mirror forcing you to look deep into yourself.
It's really, really long - covering a fairly eventful chunk of the lifetime of the protagonists - but it doesn't feel log, just eventful. You do see them grow.
The language is simple, almost childlike at times - adding to the easy readability and sense of verbally transmitted stories.
The cast is HUGE. hundreds, easily, and all of them unique, different, stereotypes and archetypes. One thing this did really well was the shades of grey in people. There are no absolutes, no good an bad - bad people did good things sometimes, and good ones did bad, and they switched it around, over and over. They felt more human than a lot of people I'd seen elsewhere. Also found a lot of people being casually killed off very GoT-style.
Also liked how the gods and men are on such familiar terms with each other and interacting while staying separate - that was an interesting dynamic. Not much magic here, except the very subtle magic of misdirection and illusion - even the gods interfere a lot less directly than you think.
An excellent read. Unputdownable, beginning to end.

View all my reviews