The early parts of the secondary plot involve the appearance and evolution of life on the planet around the character, to give some impression of quite how deep that past is. That secondary plot in The Raven Tower is one of the brilliant aspects of the novel the narrator tells, interspersed into the main action of the plot, their own story, a story that goes into the deep past of the world. The resolution is simultaneously inevitable and expected but also completely new as what has, up until that point, looked like a solely historical, secondary plot, is brought fully into the present.

Without giving too much about Leckie’s textual inspiration away, the contemporary plot follows the beats of that story almost exactly, while retooling them to give the women more agency and less unjust punishment, and with a focus not on the central character of the original but on one of the side-characters as a lens through which to follow the action. The Raven Tower is a brilliant retelling of a classic story. So Ann Leckie doing big, political epic fantasy in the second person? Sign me up! I’m also a fan of big, complex, political epic fantasy that uses the second person (or rather, of The Fifth Season, the only book I know of which fits that criteria). This castle where he finds his uncle on his father’s throne.Īs has been well established here before, I am a big fan of Ann Leckie’s fiction, and hugely enjoyed her science fiction trilogy. My voice echoes through the stone of your master’s castle.

The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie