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language: English
country: USA
year: 2022
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy
dates read: 5.11.22-6.11.22
Evan Dicken’s To Chart the Clouds is the third standalone Legend of the Five Rings novel for the new canon, and I had a blast reading it. on a technical level, the writing is definitely the worst of any of the ones I’ve read (serviceable but not amazing), and the copyediting was…quite bad. there were typos, missing words, and/or punctuation errors on basically every page. in spite of this, though, the narrative is well-constructed, the pacing is good (although at times a little rushed), and the characters are fun.
Miya Isami is an aspiring Imperial Cartographer who’s rediscovered the forgotten skill of triangulation and been ostracized for failing to respect traditions. Otomo Shinpachi, a powerful Imperial bureaucrat, offers her a chance to redeem herself, and she ends up caught up in the middle of what could become an outright war between the Scorpion and Lion clans over a disputed area in the mountains between their lands. she teams up with two archivists and her rōnin bodyguard to prevent the war, resolve the territorial dispute, and locate a lost or hidden valley that isn’t shown on any maps but that her calculations show must exist.
it’s a solid mix of political drama, cartography, fight scenes, and poring over centuries-old documents in archives. I did wish that it had been a little lighter on the outright fight scenes and more focused on the cartography and political drama — things go south in Isami’s negotiations pretty quickly, and I think I might have preferred to see her having to handle diplomatic stuff for longer while she conducted her survey. but I enjoyed what it was, so it worked out okay.
the other standout thing here is that this it introduces the first trans main character — though still not a POV character — in any of the books so far, Ikoma Shinzō, a Lion archivist. I think it was generally thoughtfully done, and Dicken mostly does a good job putting his money where his mouth is re status and ability mattering much more than gender in Rokugan; the one moment where he implicitly reintroduces transphobia into the setting (when Isami asks Shinzō about his binder and his experience being trans) struck me mainly as an attempt to make transness meaningful in a way that would resonate with people — well-intentioned but slightly misstepping. also when Isami first meets Shinzō there’s a passing comment that kind of implies that there is a recognized transmasc haircut in Rokugan, which I think is very funny and is almost certainly NOT what Dicken intended.
edit: it turns out Dicken has an M.A. in history with a thesis on the development of cartography in Japan during the Tokugawa shogunate and now I really wish it had just been cartography and political drama. but probably between editors and self-awareness about not infodumping it was not to be, alas.
moods: adventurous, tense