Story Pile: The Traitor, Baru Cormorant
The Traitor, Baru Cormorant is an exquisitely detailed book about a queer woman from a colonised people striking out to use her wits and her brains to try and topple that empire from within, and it is written very clearly and well to explore those ideas. You spend a lot of time with Baru herself, which means if she is a character that resonates with you you get to feel her emotional state very deep and true, the constant cleverness, the non-stop backbiting of things she wants to say but won’t because it’s not part of the plan, and her emotional depths when things go badly for her. She is a character who really writes in large letters the struggles of Designed Femininity, where society has mandated a way you can be, and she has to operate within those parameters, all while rankling against them. If you’ve heard me talk about living a life under surveillance, Baru Cormorant is a protagonist who lives that way and what she does to take command of her life. I need you to know this up front because that’s all I’m going to tell you before I start on the Spoiler Warning.
I’m not kidding. Yeah I know. I know! And I’m not even planning on spoiling much of the plot or anything. Yeah it’s that kinda book! Really! I’m going to discuss spoilers for the book, but not in the most specific of ways. Still, this is a book where being surprised is an important part of it, and if you’re the kind of person who wants to feel smarter than the book you’re reading by outwitting it, even knowing the kinds of spoilers can feel like I’m robbing you of some of your fun. I absolutely do not want to diminish the fun of anyone who aims to enjoy this book. And you might! It’s very raw, it’s very real, and it’s extremely high quality work that you should consider reading if any of that seems exciting to you.
I would really recommend reading the audio book, because a lot of the book is dialogue between two characters and I think a good audio book reader would be able to help differentiate those voices in a way that makes it easier to follow. No small part of The Traitor Baru Cormorant is people having important, ideologically loaded conversations with one another in reasonably similar character voice because they’ve almost all been trained to speak that way.
