Review of The Unbroken by C.L. Clark

This book has fucked me up in subtle ways I might spend months if not years untangling. C.L. Clark has written a kind of book I have always wanted to write, a fantasy novel speaking to the present day even as its secondary world setting remains a colonial, nineteenth-century one. With unlikeable protagonists and unenviable no-win scenarios, The Unbroken is a deliberate hot mess. I didn’t love it. I didn’t even want to like it.

I can’t stop thinking about it.

Touraine is a lieutenant in the Balladairan colonial army. Kidnapped from her home country of Qazāl as a small child, she is part of the Sands, a unit comprised of her fellow foreign conscripts. Now the Sands have returned “home,” their unit accompanying Balladaire’s bloodiest general and Crown Princess Luca, eager to make her mark as a leader so that she can finally unseat her regent uncle and accede to Balladaire’s throne. Circumstances lead to Touraine and Luca starting as allies before becoming enemies and then allies (frenemies?) again. And then enemies. And then … look, you get the idea.

Let’s start with just how many notes The Unbroken hits perfectly. It’s a queernorm fantasy that’s nevertheless full of discrimination, conflict, and hatred. It’s a postcolonial fantasy that has a sympathetic monarch main character even as it critiques that entire institution without an ounce of clemency. It’s a story of never coming home, finally coming home, wishing you hadn’t come home, and fucking everything up trying to come home.

Purely by chance, I read this immediately following Empire of Sand. I’ll repeat what I said in my review of that book: we are in renaissance of fantasy. And I’ll add: that renaissance is largely driven by authors of colour, who have been hard at work reshaping mainstream fantasy from a fluffy, sanitized version of Europe into something with teeth. From N.K. Jemisin to Tracey Deonn, and now Tasha Suri and C.L. Clark—fantasy proliferates now with incredibly diverse voices that aren’t afraid to break down the status quo of the genre.

When I was younger, I had this whole idea for a fantasy novel—I won’t explain it here, mostly because one day I still might write it, but suffice it to say it included the protagonist plotting revolution against a queen who happened to be her best friend because, you know, democracy. At seventeen, I understood it was weird my favourite genre could tell beautiful stories about Good triumphing over Evil, yet they still always ended with a feudal society full of class divisions and ruled by a monarch. So it shouldn’t be a surprise I am loving postcolonial fantasy and how it gives zero fucks about pretending a functioning monarchy is a good place to live.

In this way, Luca is a difficult character to like in The Unbroken. As Touraine quite rightly says to her face at one point, she is the epitome of privilege in this world. Her complaint is that her power-hungry uncle isn’t giving power to her, basically. Clark expertly portrays her as a kind of well-meaning white saviour: she thinks she can “help” the people of Qazāl, but only within the framework of empire; her worldview doesn’t let her imagine anything different.

Touraine, then, becomes the perfect foil. A survivor of colonial abduction, deprogramming herself in her homeland even as her own people treat her with suspicion, Touraine seems like a natural candidate for heroine as well as protagonist. Except she sucks just as bad as Luca! To be fair, her flaws are probably more personal than political, but her role in the story means her personal flaws have massive political consequences, so it all comes out the same, basically.

It has been a long time since I have yelled at a book as much as I yelled at Touraine every single time she was at a fork in the road and took the worst possible path down each. Every. Time. She is the Jon Snow of this world, and like Jon Snow, she knows nothing. Also like Jon, she fails upward.

So with two unlikeable protagonists who mess everything up, why is The Unbroken so good? Because Clark clearly means it to be a mess. I’m sure there’s some readers who will ship Touraine and Luca as a disaster couple, but honestly, I don’t think we are supposed to read them that way. They are just disasters, full stop, individually and together. This is a fantasy novel that truly embraces just how chaotic the disintegration of empire is while at the same time telling a coherent story, and it works really well.

I don’t want to read the next book. But I also can’t look away. That’s what I am trying to say here: The Unbroken seared itself on my soul because it does so much right that even as I want to plug my ears and say, “Nope, not interested, give me the cozy fantasy again please,” I can’t help myself. I’m part of the revolution now. Let’s go.