Sins Of The Father

Time to review Bitterblue by Kristin Cashore.  It has taken me a while to put the review for this one together, because I am still trying to figure out the best way to review it.  I don't think I will go overboard with the synopsis in this one, because there is so much to it that I would just muddle it all up.  So let's start with a bare bones summation.

As always some Spoilers for all three books ahead.
Bitterblue has been the official Queen of Monsea one of the Seven Kingdoms for 8 years now.  At present her biggest struggle is to find a way to break free from the oppressive council of her advisers.  Bitterblue was thrust into the ruling of her country at the tender age of 10, when her mother was murdered by her father Leck, who had been using his Graceling power of mind control to keep a horrifying grip on the country.  Leck was killed during events in Graceling and Bitterblue assumed leadership of the broken country. While the people helping her run her country while she was still a child mean well, they have forgotten that children grow up, and Bitterblue is now an adult.  To try and learn more about her own kingdom, Bitterblue decides to go out at night in disguise among the people of her city.  Here she meets up with a clever thief, a Graceling with unknown talents and his printer friend.  Through these two Bitterblue learns that the reports she has been getting from her advisers have been falsified for some reason.  Bitterblue also starts to learn just how much havoc her father wrought upon the country.  The majority of the book is a mix of Bitterblue trying to find out who is trying to squash information from the past from being reveled, trying to become an

independent ruler, juggling her feelings for her Graceling thief, and missing her friends.  After much searching, Bitterblue finally discovers some truths about her fathers past. At some point in time Leck and his father had lost their way in the mountains that cut off Monsea from an unknown country and ended up in the Dells (which is the setting for Fire) which is more advanced then the Seven Kingdoms.  Leck spent most of his childhood in this country of Monsters and medical advancement, honing his Grace of mind control.  In a fight with Fire, the human monster, he was sent tumbling back down the mountain into Monsea where he used his powers to get adopted into the royal family.  Missing the Dells, Leck tried to recreate what he could, building his castle in the glass roofed style of the Dells, commissioning sculptures and artwork incorporating the landscape and Monsters, and terribly trying to bring about scientific advancement through experimentation on humans.  It is this last thing in particular that made Leck so horrifying and perverse.  He would use his mind powers to not only torture and kill his people, but he would compel his own advisers to do the actual harm to people.  It is the memory of what they were forced to do under the kingship of Leck that has made Bitterblues advisers (who were all around when Leck was king) to try and bury any breath of what happened during his reign. Rembering what they had done, drove most of them mad.  This cover-up was wide spread and included arson, and even murder as a way to keep the heinous past hidden.  Eventually Bitterblues friends find a tunnel that leads from Monsea to the Dells and Fire from the previous novel comes to visit Bitterblue.  The young Queen realizes what it was her father was doing and decides to spend the rest of her reign trying to heal her country through revealing the history and then addressing the problems.  There are side plots, and love stories, and all that good stuff scattered throughout the novel as well, but this is essentially the gist of it.

This is not a happy, fun-filled story by any means.  It is fairly dark and I have heard many people complain about the brutality featured in certain parts.  I understand that some people are more affected by this then others, and certain experiences may make this a painful book to read.  I did not find any of the descriptions gratuitous  I thought any mention of violence, rape and torture where done only when the story needed it to point out certain aspects of Leck's mentality.  There is also the after effects to deal with, and Bitterblue herself is border line depressive on occasion.  All this together makes it a bit of a difficult book to get through.  This book is also much less action packed then the other two book were.  The whole of the story takes place in one city, and most of it is driven by discovery and conversation   There is a heavy dose of politics and enough hemming and hawing to drive a person crazy. It seemed that most of the characters had forgotten to take their happy pills and were constantly snipping at each other in very childish ways.  The level of the arguments usually amounted to "nyah nyah nyah" which did get a tad tedious after a while.  All this being said it is not a bad book.  I actually liked that the author was willing to take us to a bit of a darker place.  The realistic after math of such a twisted leader would be pretty bleak.  The idea that some people

would just like to bury the past and try to move on, versus the people who need to have answers before any healing can properly take place is one that rings true.  The notion that people would go very far, even to the extent of murder to try and cover up a shameful past is also something we know happens in real life.  I also really enjoyed getting some insight into Leck's head.  He was a monster of epic proportions  he used his powers to hurt everybody else, and even worse took great pleasure in it.  His true talant lay not so much in mind control, but in his ability to know what would utterly break a person.  You see where even with this power Leck was unhappy, you see glimpses of a person trying desperately to get back to a time and place where he thought he was happy.  This does not give even the slightest excuse to the atrocities he perpetrated, but it makes his character that much better and gives him a motive for his cruelty.  Bitterblue herself was a decent character.  I wanted to shake her sometimes and say "You are the Queen you dummy, just do what needs to be done, you don't have to ask permission!", but when you have had guardians watching over you your whole life, it is not as easy as that.  She retained some of her sassyness from previous books, and is of a different cloth then either Katsa or Fire, so it is nice to see an author not reusing the same hero mold.  The author tries to bring in a lot of politics from the real world into the books (gay rights, education, ruling styles, etc.) to varying
degrees of success  a few of them seemed forced into the plot.  Some of the plot got muddled and confusing, I'm not 100% sure I actually understood everything I was supposed to, and the ending came on fast and disjointed. Over all I would say it was a decent book and fit into the world the author created in the previous two books very well.  It was a nice link between Graceling and Fire, which when first read do not seem to have a lot in common. This book also has some cool illustrations and maps, and a fun tongue in cheek type of glossary included, which I really enjoyed.  I give the book 6 out of 10 monster statues.
What did you think of this book?  Did it help tie the first two together?  Do you prefer action or intrigue?  Do these darker books make you think, or just cringe? How awesome was the cover of this book!?!