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Michelle West's The Broken Crown is the first book in The Sun Sword, A Big Fat Fantasy Series. Cons: it has severalt of the flaws common to the Big Fat Fantasy Series. Pros: it has some merits that are not at all common to the Big Fat Fantasy Series. Also, said series is actually completed!

The flaws: First of all, there are a lot of characters. They have a lot of names. Many of these names are very similar. A lot of them involve the classic Fantasy Novel Apostraphes. I had a lot of trouble remembering who was Amara and who was Amaya and who belonged to the one region but had a noble last name that had nothing to do with that region but was unfortunately similar to the noble last name from the other region. Also, the author has the bad habit of often taking time to remind the reader of events that happened right in the previous chapter. Those are not the things I was confused about! And much of the book is pretty clearly setup for Dramatic Things That Will Happen Later In the Series, and the first hundred pages are setup for the setup with characters that we will never see again, which is why it took me a hundred and fifty or two hundred pages to get into the book at all.

The merits: The thing that makes this really stand out from other Big Fat Fantasy Series that I have read is how much of the plot is spurred by, and centered around, relationships among women. And I don't just mean the kind of badass sword-slinging women that you get in most fantasy sagas these days. Most of the plot in this book takes place in a very strict and regulated society where the standard family unit is 1 nobleman::1 head wife::small harem of secondary wives/concubines - and instead of being fetish-y and creepy, as these setups often can be, the book really focuses on the bonds that grow up between the women of the household, how they form intense relationships and a community that is as or more important than their relationship with their husband, and how despite not being recognized as having any authority they can wield power in a number of subtle ways. Also, though there is sort of a destiny thing going on, it is all about choices! Many times choices that women make that quite often do not have anything to do with who they will sleep with! Which is, overall, kind of awesome. I am sure that some would accuse Diora, the main character, of being a Mary Sue - seeing as she is the most beautiful woman in the country and also possessed of secret magic powers! - but I really like her relationships with other women and her difficult decisions and the ways in which she manages to manipulate her status. And the author does a very good job of showing a society that is completely different from ours, and involves a lot of things that we would consider terrible injustices, without vilifying it. By which I mean that there aren't any people running around with suspiciously modern sensibilities all out of tune with their cultures going 'this is all wrong! FREEEEDOM!' as happens in so many fantasy and historical novels.

Which is not to say that there are not ass-kicking women also - there are many different kinds of strong ladies involved in the plot. The more overtly ass-kicking ones live in a different culture that is not as much focused on in this book, although I suspect it will be in later books in the series, and many of them are also very cool and strong and interesting authority figures also. (And one of the protagonists reminds me a lot of varadia's X-23.)

So basically, though I have not yet fallen passionately in love with the series, I am definitely interested enough, and admiring enough of a lot of what the author is trying to do, that I will be reading more. Once I overcome the minor dilemma that neither local library system has the second book. NYPL, for once you have failed me!