The Game of 100 Candles, Marie Brennan

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language: English
country: USA
year: 2023
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy
series: sequel to The Night Parade of 100 Demons
dates read: 5.8.23-7.8.23

Marie Brennan’s The Game of 100 Candles continues the story of one of her previous Legend of the Five Rings books, The Night Parade of 100 Demons, as its two protagonists, Ryōtora and Sekken, find themselves reunited at a politically contentious winter court, where a hyakumonogatari kaidankai catches them up in a new round of supernatural machinations, this time involving the Realm of Dreams. it’s as delightful as The Night Parade of 100 Demons — probably more so, since Night Parade featured a bunch of brutal ghost murders.

it suffers, of course, from the same ideological problem that most L5R fiction does, namely that it rests on the idea that feudalism functioned in reality the way it functioned in romance — that samurai are always effectively bound by the tenets of bushidō and, when push comes to shove, will make the “right” choice within that framework. I think there’s a reading of this book that focuses on the ways it presents the in-world moral framework as first and foremost a system of post hoc “moral” justification for decisions motivated by other factors, but while it’s an important aspect of the plot, it’s not the main focus.

the main focus is on Ryōtora and Sekken’s relationship, which is fascinatingly tied to their physical well-being: after the events of Night Parade, each of them is left with, effectively, only half a soul, and much of the book’s attention is devoted to the both personal and political implications of the fact that both of them now suffer from, essentially (but, Brennan is careful to point out in her afterward, not actually), chronic fatigue — fatigue management, the reality that it can only be managed and not “cured”, political maneuvering to conceal their disability. this was really interesting and, I thought, well executed, as was the revelation of their condition’s underlying etiology, although I’m a little suspicious of the extent to which this was narratively/thematically resonant, marking it as clearly not a real-world medical condition. you could probably read this alongside Sami Schalk’s discussion of speculative (dis)ability — certainly I think it has some similarities to the treatment of blindness in The Broken Kingdoms. the resolution was obvious a long time before it was actually proposed, but that didn’t bother me — there’s something to be said, sometimes, for the inevitability of romance as a narrative structure, in the realm of samurai political drama, at least.

the supernatural mystery is fun, although the book is more focused on the ways the mystery intersects with and disrupts the political maneuvers of winter court. Brennan does a good job balancing the two, keeping the focus on the politics (as a nice change of pace from Night Parade) and the interpersonal relationships without the supernatural mystery feeling like an afterthought. the return of [REDACTED] was a nice touch — I admit I teared up at the revelation that her instinct was to return home even after having been absent for several hundred years.

all in all, a fun (and quick) read!

moods: emotional, lighthearted, mysterious


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