I just finished reading Behind the Throne, by KB Wagers.

Quick summary: Gunrunner Cressen Stone is, actually, Imperial princess Hail Bristol. Hunted down by Imperial Trackers and returned home upon the deaths of all other heirs to the throne, she has to return to the royal life she abandoned twenty years ago, and try to keep her empire together in the midst of an insidious conspiracy against the throne.

There are some things I love about this book, and some that I genuinely hate. Maybe it’s just that I’m coming off of a couple of masterfully written novels, including the Broken Earth trilogy being some of the best writing I’ve ever seen, but…man. I have some issues with the writing here.

The bad: This book tells instead of shows a lot of the time. It skips over important scenes without any detail in order to elaborate on background minutia, seems to have a very poor understanding of how long a year actually is, and is full of dialogue that could generously be described as choppy. Also, the main character is a massive hypocrite and I’m astonished that no one ever calls her out on it.

The good: I like the space-palace intrigue melodrama. It wasn’t at all what I was expecting based on the book description, or even based on the sample I read on Amazon before buying it, but I do always enjoy that sort of thing. Conspiracy and intrigue and who-can-you-trust sudden surprises, I’m absolutely there for all of that. There’s something more powerful about sudden violence in a novel that is mostly about interpersonal relationships, bureaucracy, and intrigue, and there are points where Behind the Throne genuinely earns that sudden twist in your stomach as you try to shift gears into a new and terrible reality.

I want to be very clear about this before I continue: I’m going to be reading the sequel to this book. I liked it enough that I want to see what happens next. I’m going to rant about a bunch of stuff here, but seriously, don’t let it put you off reading Behind the Throne if you like melodramatic fantasy intrigue.

Now that I’ve clarified that, though…let’s start with the things that I suspect annoyed me far more than they’re going to annoy anyone else, and then move from there into more general things.

How has the protagonist been gone for twenty years and yet so much is still the same when she gets back? Everyone still seems to be operating on the same personality that they had when she was a kid, with no character development and no indication that her very extended absence has actually happened, other than the occasional colorful gunrunning story that she flashes back to. Twenty years is a long time. She’s acting like someone who was away for like…five years. Ten would be stretching credibility. Twenty is quite literally unbelievable.

And while we’re on the subject of time, let’s talk about the history of the empire. People mention at some point that the empire has existed for “thousands of years,” which is…unlikely. Based on what we see in the novel of the empire’s history and the way other actors on the political scene treat them, I’d have said that a few hundred years would be about right. Unless the “years” they’re using are dramatically shorter than the ones I’m used to, or there’s some other force dramatically slowing down both personal and social change in this setting, the history of the Empire and the history of this book’s main character really need to be compressed by half, at least.

Speaking of the history of the empire…it feels weird to me to complain about this, because I love world detail, but I think we could have done with a bit less history of the empire. That said, I’m honestly not sure if I feel this way because there was too much discussion of social structures and historical events, or because there was so little discussion of events actually happening in the novel. There were quite a few instances where important scenes were just…skipped over, in a sentence or two. Or just mentioned in passing, as though the reader should already know about what happened in them. I don’t really care that much about old coup attempts, the history of the different branches of service, whatever. Or, rather, I do really care about that stuff, I live for it in fact, but I also want to know what happened at the social event where the protagonist met all of her nobles for the first time. I want to know what happened in the firefight that starts off the novel. I want important, plot-relevant conversations about the book’s main intrigue to last more than three goddamn sentences! I want more relevant details! Stop skipping over things! Stop telling me what’s going on! Show me!

There is so much in this book that would have been really fun to read, that is just skipped over in favor of Hail having a melodramatic breakdown narrating something in her head, or making strong-sounding but non-specific claims of being a gunrunner and not a princess, or explaining that she dislikes certain characters because they were mean to her when she was twelve (and remember, literally nothing has changed in the twenty years that she’s been gone, so of course the mean kid hasn’t grown out of it and is still a snake now that she’s in her late thirties).

This is a novel that I dearly wish I could mark up and send back to the author for revisions. Here’s some improvements we could make:

  • Get rid of the amnesia in the first scene. I’m of the opinion that the first scene would have been way better if we’d opened before the shootout, and gotten to know Hail’s crew a little bit and understand how her life as a gunrunner actually worked so that we have a better feel for the seismic change her life undergoes when she’s taken back to the Empire, but if we have to start in the immediate aftermath of the firefight then for fuck’s sake drop the amnesia. It doesn’t affect the plot at all, it gives us a very different impression of who Portis is to Hail than is actually the case (it took me ages to figure out that she even liked Portis, much less was in love with him, because the opening of the book threw me off so much), and it gets resolved within a chapter and is never mentioned again. This temporary memory loss is pointless and only serves to confuse the narrative.
  • Have someone call Hail out on her hypocrisy when she’s back in the Empire. I actually kind of like her being a hypocrite, it feels like a good character choice for someone who’s spent most of their life as a gunrunner and is just now getting used to being royalty again, but for fuck’s sake when she tells her bodyguards specifically “I never want you to be scared to share your opinion with me” and then, bare pages later, yells “If I want your opinion I’ll ask for it” to shut one of them down in a conversation in front of some important people, someone should call her out on that and she should have a genuine bit of character development. This sort of thing really isn’t justified by the fact that this bodyguard she’s yelling at is the one that the author wants us to dislike.
  • Also, let’s have a similar acknowledgement of the moment when she, after making a lot of passing mentions about wanting to give more power to the people and reform the empire and stop oppressing her male citizens as much under the official state matriarchy, viciously browbeats and threatens the life of an elected official.
  • I’m not going to mention specific scenes here, but there’s a lot of places that the dialogue could have had more, you know, dialogue. People don’t usually have conversations this short about topics this important, and their emotions don’t change that quickly in the middle of a conversation. This is especially weird after the book’s opening scenes stressed how much people in the Empire don’t say what they mean and have euphemisms for a lot of uncomfortable concepts (“gone to temple” instead of died, etc). When we actually get to the Empire, we learn very quickly that none of that is true at all, and that everyone seems to say exactly what’s on their mind in the most direct manner possible. This makes sense in Hail’s case, because she’s supposed to be the outsider, but when even the high matriarchs of the Empire talk the same way I honestly forgot until writing this review that the Empire was supposed to be this place of misdirection and intrigue.
  • Also, as mentioned before, there’s a few scenes that could use some fleshing out in general, even outside of dialogue. If you’re going to include an important social event and have the protagonist stressing over how they’re going to handle it, then skipping over the event itself in a few sentences is something of an anticlimax.
  • While we’re expanding things, how about we specifically give more detail to the investigations of the various assassination attempts on the main character, and the investigation of the conspiracy that drives the main plot of the novel? We never seem to learn anything new about the assassins, how they got past security with knives and guns, who they were, anything like that. There isn’t even a short comment like “He was a fired laborer who’d fallen in with the wrong crowd” or “he was a recent hire who wasn’t screened properly” or anything like that, it’s just…forgotten about, I guess. Or handled by someone telling the main character “We’re investigating,” and then never bringing up what they find out. The absolute worst offender is a moment in the book where Hail demands that someone give her their list of suspects in an attack, and declares that they’ll go over the list and make some decisions, and then the book immediately cuts to a new chapter and a new scene and never gets back to that list of suspects or investigation in any way, shape, or form. When that happened, I had to page back and reread a few paragraphs to make sure I hadn’t missed something. Turns out I hadn’t; the book just skipped over this interesting scene that it had been building up to, and moved on to something else. I was incredulous.

…Okay, so I guess I had a lot to talk about with this novel.

Honestly, I’m not trying to pour gallons of hate on Behind the Throne. I really did like the story. Similar to my review of Blade of Tyshalle, I’m writing this much about Throne because I can see the book that it could have been so clearly behind the book that it is. The story is actually quite interesting, with a lot of twisty mysteries and genuine intrigue and royal melodrama. I’m not happy that I had to put that story together in bits and pieces between the novel talking about unimportant stuff, but the twenty-year space conspiracy that seems to be going on in the background here is going to make a hell of a series plot, if it’s handled well.

The two other books in this series seem to have better average reviews on both Amazon and Goodreads, so I’m optimistic. Maybe the sequel will turn out to be the book that this could have been.