Book review: The Steel Remains
★ ★ ★ ★ ☆
First off I will preface this by saying this is the best-written published m/m book I have ever read, but it isn't actually an m/m book. It is almost that elusive unicorn I've been looking for for a while now - a book where the characters are gay, are not subtly or secretively so, andtheir sexualities really have very little to do with the plot at all (welll sort of) and there IS a plot and that's what the story is about.
But it is only part of that elusive unicorn because there is not a relationship in this book. There's just manly fucking, pretty much. Like, super manly, and pretty much no real emotions between any characters at all. So in that, it's really lacking. The whole thing with the dwenda was...weird, and I saw it coming from the start, and expected it to pan out just about the way it did, so I wasn't disappointed since it wasn't really promising anything, but still. Just something that personally I would have liked, but not what this book was about.
A quick run-down of my main rating areas.
Plot: 3/5
There IS one. But it takes a loong damn time to get to it, most of the build-up is character build up and moving pieces around until suddenly in the last 20% (lol thanks kindle) everything kind of just explodes into shit HAPPENING. You follow three characters, who are not near each other at all but know each other, and their stories slowly converge but you follow each of them from a long time before the actual point of the book begins. Character 1, Egar, is just kind of hanging around in his village and banging a chick for like...almost ALL his chapters. And he gets visited by a creepy demon thing thaaat I never really found the point of overall except it pulled him into meeting with the other characters eventually. He was actually the most boring part of the book and I skimmed a lot of his chapters because there really wasn't a POINT to his, except that eventually he mattered to the other characters. But his backstory really didn't that much. Character 2 and 3, Ringil (yeah, I know. terrible name) and Archeth/Archidi are far more interesting, their stories are pretty much entirely relevant, although there is still a TON of lead up to the point of the book. Most of it, Ringil sort of spends searching for his cousin and killing people, and Archeth spends drugged or arguing with the emperor. So basically you have no idea what the point of annnnny of it is until, again, like 80% of the way through. Then it all comes together (although, like, I still have no idea what the dwenda were up to, what they wanted, or how they were going about achieving it. Ringil seems to have learnt it through osmosis and thusly didn't share with the readers, but he was real certain they needed to be stopped. clearly they did, but I'm still not sure WHY).
Overall the writing was really good, though. Some really nice interesting descriptions and turns of phrases, general observations and commentary, very easy to fall into. Fights were pretty amazingly written, and fights are HARD. And there was definitely sex as well, no "oh yeah he's/she's gay but you'll never see it", no, it's there a lot. Which is why this is still an m/m book, but it's not really a slash book. I mean, none of the people sleeping together actually make good couples.
Women: 4/5
Archeth is interesting and well-written! Also gay! Also black! Sort of. She's like half of an ancient mythical race with like, BLACK skin. Actual black, not human-colored black. But you know, I suppose it counts. While a lot of her story is her just getting high, arguing with the useless emperor, and being impatient with everyone else who's less competent than her (which is, well, everyone) her chapters are certainly interesting. She's actually treated like a person in the writing, SURPRISE, and gets agency and intelligence and faults and all that good stuff.
But I knock it a point because...she's the ONLY woman. And most of the book spends a lot of time talking about sluts and whores and useless women, and all the other women ARE useless, or crazy, or slaves, or plot-points. Ringil's original purpose in the start of the story is to find his cousin, and she's only a stepping-stone to finding the real plot. There is Ringil's mother, but she's literally another stepping stone - that leads to Ringil's cousin. I think Ringil's cousin literally gets one line and during it she's sobbing hysterically and then after she's found (the whole damn original POINT) she basically disappears. She's a plot-point sack to carry around after that.
LGBT-friendly: 4/5
Not bad, really. Plenty of homophobic characters and culture, but the book itself isn't supporting the idea, isn't making subconscious/conscious problematic references that makes it feel like it hates itself for being as gay as it is. And since 66% of the main characters are gay, and obvious about it in their own personal narrations, it's also not doing it subtle. Which is NICE for once.
Again, overall, this is really the best m/m book I've read. It just isn't about relationships at all. And that is fine as well. Though there is always that tendency to to the whole "gay people don't get happy relationships!" in media thing, which is why I think I was semi-sorta-disappointed just because there really is so much of that, with characters that are more obviously gay and more subtly gay. That's why this book is ALMOST that thing I've been looking for, but not quite. The dynamic between Ringil and Seethlaw (godddd these names, really) was really interesting from the start, and definitely a really well done part of the whole story and suitably weird and dreamlike and even the though it kind of happened out of NOWHERE, it didn't seem out of place. And the out-of-nowhere bit is actually kind of explained, later on.
World-building: 4/5
Pretty good! I mean, some of the fantasy names kind of blend together and sound the same and it's really not obvious who is what race by name, there's no real pattern to languages and culture because Morgan clearly just isn't a linguist. Even the mystical weird other-worldly races have names that pretty much sound like everyone else in the world. The steppe people seemed to have shorter names in general and a lot of them started with 'E', and there were some other vague patterns but mostly everybody and everything was basically 'generic fantasy name'.
But there was clear thought in a lot of it, like how parts of the world came to be the way they were and reasons for it, not like "this is a slum JUST BECAUSE", there felt like there was a history to everything. So the fact that the names weren't that imaginative (or were pretty hideous...Ringil) didn't really detract from anything because it still felt real, not like somebody had slapped a bunch of stupid names on things by slapping their keyboard a few times or listening to a baby gurgle and transcribing that into words.
So yeah, pretty much overall every aspect gets a 4/5. There's a second book which I did buy immediately after finishing the first, so that should say something a bit about it.