The Grace of Kings

The comparisons to Game of Thrones are inevitable and mostly beside the point, what Ken Liu is actually doing here is closer to a dynastic history retold as myth, silkpunk technology, an East-Asian-inspired setting instead of the usual medieval European default, and a pace that mirrors chronicle more than modern fantasy convention. The exposition leans heavier toward Tolkien than Rothfuss, long stretches of scene-setting and context before the plot machinery engages, and I’ll admit there were chapters where that density worked against the momentum more than for it.

Two things stayed with me past the last page. First, Liu isn’t ashamed of sentiment the way a lot of literary fantasy tries to be, there are genuinely tearful moments here and he commits to them fully rather than undercutting them with irony, which I found refreshing even when it occasionally tipped into melodrama. Second, despite the door-stopper length, the pacing sometimes feels closer to a short story writer’s instincts than a novelist’s, scenes compress and expand in ways that don’t always match how epic fantasy usually breathes, which might be why some chapters felt rushed relative to others.

The characters are the one place I’d push back on the praise this book usually gets, a few of the secondary cast stay fairly stereotypical, and there’s a stretch in the middle where I wanted more interiority from people the plot was clearly asking me to care about. What kept me going was the scope, and the fact that even in its cruelest passages the book is arguing something hopeful, that the world can be remade into something better by the right people trying hard enough. I’ll read the sequel. I went in expecting to love this more uncomplicatedly than I did.