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The Kingdoms von Natasha Pulley
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The Kingdoms (2022. Auflage)

von Natasha Pulley (Autor)

MitgliederRezensionenBeliebtheitDurchschnittliche BewertungDiskussionen
4612453,410 (3.85)19
Fantasy. Fiction. Historical Fiction. HTML:For fans of The 7 ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle and David Mitchell, a genre bending, time twisting alternative history that asks whether it's worth changing the past to save the future, even if it costs you everyone you've ever loved.
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Joe Tournier has a bad case of amnesia. His first memory is of stepping off a train in the nineteenth-century French colony of England. The only clue Joe has about his identity is a century-old postcard of a Scottish lighthouse that arrives in London the same month he does. Written in illegal English-instead of French-the postcard is signed only with the letter "M," but Joe is certain whoever wrote it knows him far better than he currently knows himself, and he's determined to find the writer. The search for M, though, will drive Joe from French-ruled London to rebel-owned Scotland and finally onto the battle ships of a lost empire's Royal Navy. In the process, Joe will remake history, and himself.
From bestselling author Natasha Pulley, The Kingdoms is an epic, wildly original novel that bends genre as easily as it twists tim… (mehr)
Mitglied:invisiblelizard
Titel:The Kingdoms
Autoren:Natasha Pulley (Autor)
Info:Bloomsbury Publishing (2022), 448 pages
Sammlungen:Deine Bibliothek
Bewertung:**1/2
Tags:fiction

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The Kingdoms von Natasha Pulley

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I really love Pulley's writing and I'm always quickly drawn into the worlds she creates. But this book really paled in comparison against Watchmaker, Pepperharrow, and Bedlam. I think it's really because I wasn't invested in the romantic relationship. I wasn't really buying it between the characters. I did find all the time travel elements to be interesting, as well as the implications. But the end seemed to jump the shark and I felt our main character was behaving in a way that didn't make much sense - I don't know, maybe he would have really been that reckless. It just felt like a rush to wrap everything up all neat and tidy. I think I would have preferred a little more drama at the end - something where everything didn't wrap up so perfectly. I'm happy I read it, but it's not one I'll revisit. ( )
  MillieHennessy | Sep 1, 2023 |
Bad book. I like the vivid and engaging premise and the strong beginning in Londres, though it seems completely unrealistic to me that Napoleonic France would enforce French on Britain and introduce slavery. Also surely people would still speak and write English in the US?

The haunted lighthouse is also kinda fun. But everything after that is a completely boring waste of time. ( )
  theoldlove | Apr 12, 2023 |
This is the fourth Natasha Pulley book I've read (having gone through her first 4 books in the order in which they were published) and I like them less and less as I go along. She's a great writer, but I feel her best story was her first (Watchmaker) and she keeps trying to duplicate that success. In this book she creates an alternate history-slash-time traveling tale that spans the hundred years in the 19th century and posits the question: what would the world look like if the French won the Napoleonic Wars; and, further, what if that victory was due to accidental time travelers who hopped back 100 years and gave the French a century's worth of technological advancements and historical information to help them succeed; and, even further, what if the time traveling business wasn't actually finished and the "future" was constantly in flux?

An interesting idea and an admirable task she set herself, to write all of this down and make a cohesive story out of it. Alas, sadly, in my opinion, cohesion didn't quite make it into the final draft. The nonlinear nature of her story combined with the time traveling and the way in which the future changes (sometimes) and people can forget things that just happened because history is constantly rewriting itself—I'm exhausted just writing all of that—leads to a great deal of confusion when reading this book.

I think the way to enjoy it is not to think too much about (a) the rules of time travel that she employs and even goes to some trouble explaining early on, and (b) just accept whatever she writes and move on. My problem was I tried to keep it all in my head, and I think I would have needed to have taken copious notes from the start to keep all of the plot threads straight in my mind. Instead I kept getting confused about who was where and when because she kept bouncing around in time so much. Much of that, I feel, was unnecessary, and I'll explain why in a spoiler-rich segment below, so be warned:

Okay, she went to too much effort to hide the fact that Jem and Joe were the same person. When Jem returned to his present of 1898, his future had already changed completely due to France winning the war and basically occupying all of Britain, thus his own memory quickly faded and the person he was (Jem) faded with that and he became the person he would have been (Joe) had he been born in this new future, although with amnesia (?) such that he didn't remember any of Joe's history. Except his name. Okay, whatever, that's really confusing to me even after finishing the entire book. The point is: Pulley wanted the Jem/Joe reveal to be a big surprise twist toward the end, but it was pretty obvious early on. And frankly the story would have been better if she'd just told it from Jem/Joe's point of view in a more linear fashion. It would have read something like this: Jem, on board a scientific ship called The Kingdom, gets pulled almost 100 years into the past where the ship and most of her crew are captured by the French who use their knowledge to change the course of history, but meanwhile Jem meets Kite, a sailor in the British Navy, and they have adventures, but eventually Jem misses his family and wants to go back to 1898, so he does and brings Kite with him, but once there Jem transforms into Joe (see above) and forgets who Kite is, so Kite goes back to 1805, where he is seriously losing the war to the French, and mails a postcard to Joe to be held 90+ years and delivered on the date that Joe (who is a slave, by the way, I forgot to mention that) is freed, showing him the location of the very rip in time that brought Jem to Kite in the first place, and of course Joe investigates and goes back through the rip and (re-)meets Kite and they have more adventures, but Kite is sad because Joe still doesn't remember him and Kite literally kills people before they can tell Joe that he is really Jem, but this time when Joe (of course!) eventually goes back to his own time, all Kite has to do is follow him and tell him about his previous life/lives and he remembers all about it, which is the very thing Kite murdered people to keep from happening throughout most of the book. On second thought, while that narrative would have made a lot more sense, with no bouncing back and forth in time and hiding the truth of who Joe really was, it would certainly have pointed a spotlight on a lot of plot holes that were otherwise obfuscated by the convoluted way in which she laid all of this out.

Okay, that's the end of the major spoilers. One minor spoiler I'll give and I think it's fine to do so since I've seen it in many reviews I've read so far: it does have a surprisingly happy ending. For a book that leaves a shocking amount of carnage in its wake, she wraps it up on an optimistic note. Which is good because after 436 pages of time traveling chaos that I could barely make sense of, if she'd ended the book by saying, "And then everybody died," I would probably have thrown it across the room. At least I was able to smile at the end and say to myself, "Well, I guess that was nice."

Back to where I started with this rant: I don't think I'm going to seek out any more of Pulley's books. Not for a while at least. I got sucked into this one because the blurb on the back said it was "for fans of The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle and David Mitchell." Well, I'm a fan of both, quite seriously, and this book wasn't for me. At all. ( )
  invisiblelizard | Sep 10, 2022 |
Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: A time twisting alternative history that asks whether it's worth changing the past to save the future, even if it costs you everyone you've ever loved.

Joe Tournier has a bad case of amnesia. His first memory is of stepping off a train in the nineteenth-century French colony of England. The only clue Joe has about his identity is a century-old postcard of a Scottish lighthouse that arrives in London the same month he does. Written in illegal English—instead of French—the postcard is signed only with the letter “M,” but Joe is certain whoever wrote it knows him far better than he currently knows himself, and he's determined to find the writer.

The search for M, though, will drive Joe from French-ruled London to rebel-owned Scotland and finally onto the battle ships of a lost empire's Royal Navy. In the process, Joe will remake history, and himself.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review
: An exciting visit to the Aetherverse, to which we were introduced in The Watchmaker of Filigree Street (below)...or so it seemed to me.

It cost me so much to read this book, with its star-crossed lovers, its perception of time as layered and mutable, and its grotesque unfairness, the first time. It wasn't easy a second one, either, even though I knew what was coming.

Yes. I, testy oldster with less than two decades left to him, read a book twice.

There is that much to unpack. There is that much to process. There is that kind of thought put into the structure of the story. All that makes an investment of eyeblinks that big both desirable and at some level necessary.

The nature of Time (as the Tenth Doctor called it, "wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey...stuff") and the nature of family feature heavily in this tale. Two men whose fates...whose lives entangle across timelines of startling "points of divergence" or "PoDs" but never forget each other. Imagine loving someone enough, with so much of yourself, that you remember them when you don't remember yourself.

That is the definition of the stakes in this alternate history/time travel novel. There's a weird place, in Scotland for once, where time doesn't behave as we think it should. This remains a weird, slightly underexplained, phenomenon throughout the iterations of the story. In every timeline, Man A meets Man B, falls in love with him, then for Reasons leaves him. Man B doesn't change much, if at all. His name is Kite. His past isn't fixed, though it's the little things that change. For Man A, the one who does the leaving, the past, the present, and the nature of each is...mutable. The world is, oddly, full of people like him who come to themselves in a place where they have no memories and no trauma to explain that lack.

We, readers, know what it is. We know because there is a man, red hair, terrible burn scars, and Man A...call him Joe, call him Jem, what you will...recalls him with love. He doesn't really know why. He isn't happy anywhere. He can't find connection to anyone around him. He floats, unanchored, away from Kite. Who is a Napoleonic-Wars naval officer with a bad past. He's building a better future, he hopes, by letting Jem/Joe go through the Scottish time gate. But it's at his own expense. He's so used to that, to doing hard and painful things, as a result of his bad past.

What came through to me most strongly was the nature of Love. There is a scene early in the book where Joe, as he was at that time, was raped. By his wife. Who should've been his sister-in-law. And she gives birth to his daughter Lily, whom he adores. He struggles against his love for Kite for several years to stay with her. In the end, he can't fight it and they reunite...and Lily is never born. Yet always alive to Joe, Jem, Man A.

What the hell! A man getting raped by a woman?! What's the old lunatic talking about? My own life: It's happened to me, perpetrated by my mother. And that is how I know that Author Pulley got the sensation, the misery of that kind of coercion, exactly and precisely correct. It was shattering to read. It was the very first time in my over-sixty years on this planet that I have read anywhere my private and unshareable truth. It healed and soothed me in a way I didn't anticipate ever experiencing.

If that is not enough to convince you to read the book, then how's this? These men are very dishonest with themselves. They can't afford not to be. But neither man has ever, for a single moment, lost his love for the other.

Come for the wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey...stuff. Stay for the family that only love can form. Revel in the struggles of true lovers to live their truth. ( )
  richardderus | Aug 25, 2022 |
This was a very interesting book, from the characters to the action to the settings and the plot, and I enjoyed reading it. I might've enjoyed it even more if I'd been able to keep straight the jumps in time and alternate histories, but I believe that was more due to the type of novel and not the author's skill. Having "discovered" Natasha Pulley, I will now have to take a look at her other works. ( )
  MarkLacy | May 29, 2022 |
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Natasha PulleyHauptautoralle Ausgabenberechnet
Mann, DavidUmschlaggestalterCo-Autoreinige Ausgabenbestätigt
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Fantasy. Fiction. Historical Fiction. HTML:For fans of The 7 ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle and David Mitchell, a genre bending, time twisting alternative history that asks whether it's worth changing the past to save the future, even if it costs you everyone you've ever loved.

Joe Tournier has a bad case of amnesia. His first memory is of stepping off a train in the nineteenth-century French colony of England. The only clue Joe has about his identity is a century-old postcard of a Scottish lighthouse that arrives in London the same month he does. Written in illegal English-instead of French-the postcard is signed only with the letter "M," but Joe is certain whoever wrote it knows him far better than he currently knows himself, and he's determined to find the writer. The search for M, though, will drive Joe from French-ruled London to rebel-owned Scotland and finally onto the battle ships of a lost empire's Royal Navy. In the process, Joe will remake history, and himself.
From bestselling author Natasha Pulley, The Kingdoms is an epic, wildly original novel that bends genre as easily as it twists tim

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