The second book of a fantasy series of any kind often bears a very difficult burden. It is most often the place where the scope of the story grows significantly. A conflict which before was local to the protagonist's home and surrounding area may expand, often to the extent of the known world. New players are often added to the cast, bigger and scarier problems and challenges arise. The protagonist may have gone up in the world, wielding new power and influence, with new responsibilities. As a result, this is where many series lose their footing; a tightly-woven book or season 1 may give way to a muddled, watered down part 2 as the writers struggle to juggle this expanded focus.
The Monster suffers from none of those things. It is the place where Baru's story expands—in The Traitor, her focus was almost entirely on Aurdwynn; it was the full field of play and outside players mattered only as they influenced events on Aurdwynn. In The Monster, Baru has become a true agent of the Imperial Throne of Falcrest, and with these new powers, the entire field of the empire is opened up for her play, and it is fascinating to watch.
In The Traitor, Baru was narrowly focused on managing the situation in Aurdwynn; everything she did was to that end. In The Monster, Baru can do whatever she wants, and we get to see her finally on the open field. Even where she flounders and flails, it's delightful to watch the machinations of her mind constantly at work. Her cleverness rows against her bursts of sentimentality to produce some impressively chaotic effects, but she is as slippery as an eel to pin down, even when her rivals think they've gotten the best of her.
The new players added to the game—Baru's fellow agents of the Throne, various elements of Falcresti and Oriati society, and Farrier, now on paper a peer of Baru—never overpower the story, and it was really interesting to see Baru from more outside perspectives. She is certainly someone who generates strong feelings in others, and Dickinson doesn't shy away from the vitriol that many other characters hold for Baru—and understandably so! Baru played a magnificent gambit at the end of The Traitor--but it's marked her to everyone as a person who is incredibly dangerous and cannot be trusted, even when she seems entirely genuine. No one who knows the story of Tain Hu is willing to trust Baru as far as they can throw her, and that impacts her ability to maneuver. Force is her only way of getting through to many people now--fortunately, she still knows how to wield it.
The characters of The Monster are in most cases, even more morally gray or outright amoral than those in The Traitor, as Baru has now entered the big leagues, so to speak. No one gets to where Baru is without having been willing to spill a considerable amount of blood, literal or metaphorical, and most of her peers are just as bound by guilt and the threat of remorse as Baru.
As in The Traitor, the schemes of others are at play here too, and Dickinson does a particularly good job of showing how players of this great game think they've put together the situation, but they've done it wrong—yet you can fully track their logic and understand how they came to the wrong conclusion. There are simply so many factors at play here that it's very easy for someone to become focused on a specious truth, and many of them are acting on these false conclusions, which muddies the waters even more.
Baru is a mess in The Monster though, leave no doubt. Tain Hu's death has marked her forever, but Dickinson avoids becoming maudlin, with every page rife with Baru's laments for her lost lover. Hu is often in her thoughts, and acts as a kind of guiding light, but Baru is still consumed with her own plots and plans (and drinking ever more heavily). Another ghost of Baru's past is haunting her as well—Aminata returns in The Monster, and Baru's grief for her lost(?) friendship with Aminata plagues her almost as much as the memory of Tain Hu. I really enjoyed the weight their friendship is given, and that it is not eclipsed by Baru's romance.
I also enjoyed that Baru pursues other sexual encounters. It might've been easy to have her simply closed off to such things in light of what happened with Tain Hu, but it makes sense that someone at Baru's age, with her limited sexual and romantic history, is simply not ready to forgo sex, even in the throes of her grief. And given the intensity of the rest of her life, it also makes sense that she occasionally seeks respite in these things, in spite of her lingering fear over her own sexuality.
The tone of The Monster has shifted slightly. Baru is much more open about her attraction to women, both to others and in her own internal narration. In fact, the book is franker about sex as a whole. It also gives more POVs than The Traitor, including a historical glimpse at the Oriati Mbo, but I never felt that these things distracted from Baru's story. On the contrary, the perspectives here serve to give a rich and three-dimensional look at the world Dickinson has created and help us understand the field on which Baru is operating. The new characters are interesting as well—I really enjoyed watching the foibles of Tau-indi in the Mbo, even outside of how these events set the stage for present relations between Falcrest and the Mbo.
Baru is also questioning herself more than in The Traitor. As the costs of her crusade against Falcrest mount, she is more and more often asking herself if it's really worth it, if she even has the right. (Does she even know Taranoke anymore? she wonders in some of her more reflective moments. Would they even thank her for what she's trying to do?)
I enjoyed the extra bits of worldbuilding we got here too, particularly how Dickinson plays with gendered expectations within the Empire--for instance, it's explicitly stated what was hinted in The Traitor that only men traditionally wear make-up, and the scene where Aminata compliments her male companion on his make-up for the evening was a little delight in seeing a moment where men were expected to make themselves nice for the appreciation of women. Sure you can call it just a reversal of some of our own gendered norms--in this same scene, Aminata thinks to herself that it would be "unfeminine" of her not to pay for the meal of herself and her companion--but I still find it interesting how it subtly shifts the dynamics to something other than what they would be in our own world (and perhaps culturally appropriate, given, for instance, how much of Falcrest's navy elite is made up of women).
Dickinson is dealing with a great many more and larger moving pieces in
The Monsters, but he manages them deftly, and I was racing through the final chapters of the book, eager to see where we'd be left before
The Tyrant Baru Cormorant, book 3, which I will be picking up ASAP this Saturday. I
need to know how Baru's story ends...I have no doubt the wait for the fourth book will test my patience!
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