Woohoo, thank you to Esme at The Weatherwax Report for her amazing book review!
Liberation has been entered in the 2024 SPFBO (Self-Published Fantasy Blog Off), assigned in the first round to The Weatherwax Report. I’m so so so happy to announce that Esme enjoyed the read. In fact, she couldn’t put it down despite running short on time during this first elimination round.
I may still be cut, as I have some absolutely phenomenal sister books in the same blog, but I am at least very pleased to know I have one more reader who enjoyed my book.
Check out Esme’s book blog here: https://weatherwaxreport.blog/2024/09/21/spfbo-10-review-liberation-by-r-m-krogman/
And, just in case, here is the full-text below. Again, thank you, Esme!!!
LOL okay, so I went from reading two books in a day that were under 300 pages to this one which is over 700 pages and it took me a week to do it. With books this long I really try to hit at least 30% read in order to get a genuine feel for the book, but since I’m more than halfway done with my batch I wasn’t sure how much of it I was actually going to read (spoiler alert, all of it). There were also some content warnings in the synopsis (which I appreciate) that included: “Physical and sexual violence, trauma, abuse, coarse language, war, racism, sexism, classism” so just be aware of that if you’re thinking of picking it up.
This is a huge sprawling epic fantasy with a bunch of different POV characters, some of which weren’t introduced until much later in the book and only had a chapter or two. This book is not a “light and breezy” read like my last couple have been, this one is as heavy as heavy gets both in literal heaviness if it were a physical copy, and the topics/themes that were addressed within. This is not a happy book, it’s violent, bloody, depressing at points, disturbing at points, so it won’t be for everyone.
We start with Konan in the prologue losing a father figure that had helped him survive his time in the mines. We time skip to three years later when Konan is still in the mines and living a meaningless life that he wouldn’t mind ending. He won’t do it himself, but he reasons that maybe he should let someone kill him if they threaten him. He’s a pretty different character since he can’t talk. He’s been so physically brutalized that he’s lost his ability to speak and so he uses sign language to try and communicate, but no one in the mines cares enough to learn it to speak with him. He has a very lonely existence until one of the other POV characters gets thrown in the mines with him and happens to know sign language.
Our second POV, Lyra, is a young woman who comes from a traveling people. They are not well liked by society at large and it’s easy for them to get abused by authority figures. Many times they just try and lay low and perform then get the fuck out before anything bad can happen. She says she was raised by a village, that most people in her caravan don’t know who the biological parents are, particularly the fathers, but that’s okay because they all watch out for each other. She’s considered very pretty and she has high hopes of catching the eye of someone of a better station in life and finally settling down and living in a house with a garden and a husband who’s gentle. Well, that does not fucking happen. She pisses off the wrong people and gets sent through a journey of pain and torture.
We’ve got this spoiled to hell princeling named Reylin who has two wives and half a brain. I thought I was going to detest him through the whole thing, but he got better throughout the book and I almost liked him by the end. He starts off with so much fucking angst, “why does no one respect me, I’m the prince, I deserve this and that” and I just wanted to smack him. His two wives really care about him, and in his defense, he does actually really care about him, too. One of the wives is actually a really decent person and the other I fucking despise. We of course the get the POV from the woman I hate and her chapters were a struggle for me.
Syrana is the terrible wife. She’s super jealous of the other wife because she’s pregnant and she thinks she’s barren and she thinks that Reylin would abandon her if she can’t get pregnant. He actually wouldn’t, he married her for love, and his first wife for duty even though he does care about and respect his first wife. He repeatedly puts himself in danger trying to keep his wives safe and I think that’s what eventually pulled me out of my hatred for him. This shit doesn’t matter to Syrana though, and she starts plotting against the first wife and her baby and it was just so gross and sociopathic. She made for an interesting, if easily hateable character. She dabbles in darker magics to try and fuck with herself and with the first wife and so we get to see a lot of world building through her perspective.
We aren’t done with the main POVs yet, because about a third of the way through the book we’re introduced to a mermaid type character who’s a warrior. She’s from a totally different sort of culture that rides whales and sharks into battle. This character really brings to life a huge part of the magic and world building to the forefront for the reader. It doesn’t happen until later so I was ready for an expansion on the world and it came at a good time. She’s able to shapeshift from human form to myrform and back again depending on her needs. She’s also expected to marry a regular boring land-human and she’s totally not happy about it.
There are other characters who get some page time but if I keep going this review will never end. I have to say that each character had a very distinct voice. I was never confused about whose chapter I was in, and they all felt like deeply developed and distinct people. That’s hard to do with this many characters but they did all get a lot of page time, lol.
So, what’s the plot of the book? There’s a strange illness going around that’s causing people to go insane. There’s reports of strange murders, cannibalism, uncontrollable anger, and a host of very strange reports. These characters each need to figure out what’s going on and how to stop the spread of the disease before it takes over everything. Even the animals are prone to becoming sick and people are being attacked and eaten alive by their own pets or livestock. If you’re thinking zombies, you’re not far off.
There’s a TON of world building in this and it felt like a fully realized living breathing world. There are nuances everywhere that add depth and realism without overburdening the story and bogging down the writing. The magic was really neat and felt like a natural part of the world rather than “window dressing.” There are all sorts of spells, potions, or “whispers” that can be sent on the wind. It can be categorized into things like red magic or green magic but it’s not a hard magic system like a Sanderson book. Witchcraft isn’t able to be done by everyone, but it’s common enough that there are books you can study to try and make it work.
The writing style was fantastic, this author has a polished style that reads easily. There’s great scene setting, character building, and tone consistency. I also felt like I was in a very different character’s head each time we switched POVs and it’s done subtly but clearly. I’d say the writing style is definitely one of the strengths of the book.
WHEW YALL. So, I went back to Mark’s post about which books are longest in the competition and guess which group got HALF of the longest books of the competition? ME, it was me. I am chugging along, and there are no super long books left in my batch so I’m hoping to get through at least 3 more books this weekend to read and review to still hit my mark of picking a finalist within the first week or two of October.
This book has been marked safe. I told y’all I was going to DNF quickly in the second half of my batch but y’alls books are so good I’m not doing that. STAHP, I need to pick a finalist and this is nuts.