Treason's Shore [Hardcover]

I picked up the first volume, Inda, at a MythCon a couple of years ago, was immediately hooked, and rushed out to find the second book, The Fox, and then had to wait for the third book, King's Shield. When I finished rereading them all earlier this summer I had a feeling it might be time for the fourth, and was delighted to find it available for pre-order on Amazon.

The Inda books are everything you want from a fantasy series--an interesting, fully-developed world with several languages, environments, and cultures that are evocatively described, a complex but not confusing plotline with a number of unexpected twists, really well-written action scenes, and above all characters whose lives you follow and whose fates you care about. She includes all the elements needed for a good solid fantasy, and deals with all of them in original ways.

In Treason's Shore, all the favorite elements from the earlier books come into play. There are scenes at the training academy and a long sequence with the (ex)-pirates. Sherwood does great sea-battles, something you don't often see in contemporary fantasy. There are no cop outs and no easy answers, but the ending satisfies. What makes this book a worthy conclusion to the series is its focus on character. "Character-driven" too often means a preoccupation with the internal drama of people who weren't that interesting in the first place. In Treason's Shore, the developing conflict between Inda and Evred, two characters whom we have come to care for, transcends the physical conflict with the enemy, and we realize that even more important than winning the war is winning the peace. In the end, the real victories come not through physical strength but through communication and love.

I was so ready to like this book. The first book hooked me, the second one compelled me, the third one worried me, but hell, I thought, plenty of series work that way, I'm sure it'll be fine. She'll pull something out at the last minute, she'll streamline down the plots and viewpoints; everything will fall into place.

Well, I've been trying to finish this book nobly for a week now, but I'm done, because right there in the middle of my Kindle edition we have this gem: "Inda resolutely stayed silent. No one had ever called him a liar before; there was a disturbing sense that every word he spoke somehow twisted in the air, turning into some other word before it reached her ears."

It's an evocative description that is deeply, deeply indicative of everything that has gone wrong with these books. First of all, as far as I can tell, Smith wrote the third and especially the fourth books of these series without rereading the first two and possibly without any set of references at all except the map at the start. Because the entire plot of Inda and The Fox was that people called Inda a liar, starting with the Harskialdna and the entirety of Iasca Leror's legal system, continuing through Ryala Pim and Wafri, sailing madly on past everyone Ryala Pim ever talks to, which -- due to the way Smith eagerly connects every single character to every other character -- ends up being almost 100% of the cast. He really ought to be used to it by now. This is the worst factual divergence, but there's also the fact that Durasnir and his men "all knew that dags were mostly useless in war, in spite of those rumored death spells" when the whole third book is one long distillation of the idea that dags are terrifying weapons when used as weapons, and that's why they shouldn't go to war; the way that Evred goes white-hot with rage when he hears Inda and Tdor call Tenthen home, three to five years after they've moved into his castle and devoted their entire lives to defending him and his; the way that Taumad spends the first three books torn up inside because he can't find his mom, and then sees his mom and is like "okay cool bye". In some cases she devotes pages and pages to re-explaining something that worked fine the first time around (the time she's forgotten about). Cap'n Han and the Andahi castle people can't figure out how to keep prisoners because Marlovans never have, for instance, even though in the first book Cherry-Stripe and the scrubs won't shut up about how they have to decide whether or not to keep prisoners in their war games because it's soooo much wooooork. My personal, meaningless favorite is the way that Smith can't decide whether or not a specific set of scroll cases have been lost, broken, tampered with, discarded, set aside due to misuse, or none of the above. When compared to you Connie Willis looks like a friend of easy, trouble-free communication, you have done something terribly wrong with your magic Facebook.

Second of all, EVEN IF NONE OF THAT HAD EVER HAPPENED, Inda is 27 at this point (he's 32 in Earth years, but we can ignore that if you want.) He has a wife, a child, a lover, a king who is creepily devoted to him, years and years of teaching experience, and the long practice with duplicity that being a PIRATE KING has given him. And yet emotionally processing lying like it's a new thing? I mean, if you want to give him a pass because of his (stated to be autistic-spectrum) difficulties with social interaction, and I invite you to do so, compare it to the way Evred, for example, thinks about the letter Taumad writes him as his spy. Evred, an adult king with years of governance under his belt, spends two or three pages puzzling over the concept of having his trade spy communicate with him in referential code. I don't care how "straightforward" and "direct" you think Marlovans naturally are -- this is a far, far cry from the first book, where Tdor at the age of eleven is communicating in multiple levels of metaphor and subterfuge with Hadand in the city and Farlas-Iofre at home. Hadand, who trained Evred herself in statecraft. This is the second trend: a backsliding into YA. Look, I love YA. I am totally down for it. But this series supposedly isn't YA -- and it makes absolutely no sense for these characters to be less emotionally intelligent in their twenties and thirties than they were in their teens. It certainly doesn't make any sense at all that Evred, Hadand, and Tdor are experiencing the pangs of hormonal jealousy and crushes more intensely at the age of 30 than at the age of 14. At the age of 14 Evred deals with the grief of losing Inda -- perhaps not particularly rationally or well, but hell, he deals with it. At the age of 30 he is incapable of dealing even a little bit with the obviously vitally important rage produced by Inda using the word "home" about a place that isn't Evred's bedroom. At the age of 14 Tdor can think with nuance on the fact that she'll never consider her birth family to be her real home again; at the age of 30 Tdor's narration awkwardly shoves it aside by saying that Iofre's her mother figure (we knew that) and that she'd just stopped writing to her actual mother (we certainly didn't know that, since last time we heard anything about her mother, she was the only person in all of Tdor's family who still gave a crap about her.) This would be just barely acceptable in the first book about these characters, if it was written for twelve-year-olds. Under the circumstances, it's exhausting.

There are other problems. The pacing is aimless and weird. I really do not understand what the heck happened that Smith thought it was appropriate to describe the Chwahir as "platter-faced" almost every single time any one of them is mentioned. I also don't understand why Smith has developed some kind of allergy to resolving love polygons. (No one has ever, outside of middle school hate books, cared THIS MUCH about anyone's jealousy.) But I could've put up with pretty much anything else if I hadn't been asked to believe that the characters I've been reading about for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages are suddenly much younger, totally disconnected from their previous history, and punting the idiot ball back and forth like they're playing an enthusiastic game of soccer.

TREASON'S SHORE is the rich and satisfying conclusion to the epic fantasy Inda quartet. It is totally recommended that a reader start at the beginning rather than jump in with this book.

Exiled from his homeland when little more than a child, Inda has grown into a brilliant military strategist. Upon his return home he was appointed as the Shield Arm to his childhood friend, Evred, now king. They faced a horrific battle against the invading might of the Venn Empire... and survived. The Venn withdraw, having internal problems of their own, but the threat they pose is still in place.

Inda has some little breathing space to try and become reacquainted with the life he left years ago. There are also friends and enemies and political and personal machinations that continue to operate beyond the borders of his kingdom. The myriad people and places that have figured in Inda's life have destinies that need to be sorted out even as Inda's own future is determined.

Naturally, the respite from death and danger for them all is brief and Inda is again called into action to try and save not only his country, but those lands and people bordering and buffering it, from the relentless return of the Venn. Inda needs to call upon all his knowledge, experience, and relationships if he even has a hope of success against the overwhelming forces against him.

Those who have been caught up in Inda's adventures will find this last book a must-read, full of the detail of many fascinating characters and many lands and societies that have been maintained throughout the entire wonderfully long and rewarding series.