Book Review: The Goblin Emperor
So I needed a feel-good book for this hell year, which means I reached for one of my favorite reads from last year: The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison. I sadly didn’t get to review it then, so once again, we’re diving into a reread review!
The youngest son of an emperor who views him and his deceased mother as a mistake, Maia has grown up in political exile under the thumb of an unhappy and abusive cousin. Imagine his surprise, then, when a messenger shows up to inform him of tragic news: the emperor and all Maia’s brothers are dead in an airship explosion, and Maia is now the emperor. Thrust into an imperial court where everyone seems to have a reason to hate him, Maia must shed his naivete and learn what it means to rule — before his new enemies take matters into their own hands.
After reading this twice now, I can see why so many people absolutely love this book. It’s a story about someone thrown into a terrible situation who manages to hang in there and endure. It’s easy to see yourself in Maia, out of his depth and confused, and we’d all like to think we could find a way to thrive like he does. It resonates on a very intimate, personal level, because we all know what it’s like to be in over our heads.
The Goblin Emperor is a heavily character focused book, so be warned — if you like action-packed romps with battles and fighting, you might need to go somewhere else. This is a quiet and introspective book, deeply concerned with and focused on Maia’s inner and outer turmoil, and as such, it feels notably different from most books in the fantasy genre. The best comparison is probably the Wayfarers books by Becky Chambers, which also highlight characters instead of focusing on plot.
Maia is, then, the core of the book, our unexpected emperor, and how he grows from uncertain, timid, and abused to the beginnings of a kind, just ruler warms my heart. Maia is an everyman to some degree; he is not particularly smart (though he’s not stupid), and he’s not particularly talented (though he isn’t unskilled). But what he lacks in these areas he makes up with compassion, genuine interest, and a willingness to do the right thing. He has been shaped by great tragedy; indeed, the healing of abuse is something of a theme in The Goblin Emperor, and while Maia is the most central example, he is far from the only one. Most importantly, Maia is thrust into circumstances beyond his ken, but this only forces him to rise the occasion. He is everything you could want in a protagonist, and Addison writes him so beautifully, allowing all his best qualities and his flaws to shine as he learns.
Though the story is most concerned with Maia, our good emperor has some excellent help. Maia’s steward is perhaps the best side character and gets small moments to shine as he helps Maia navigate the court. Maia’s nephew and heir is vastly more intelligent than anyone (except, perhaps, Maia himself) gives him credit for, and displays the same quiet love for those around him that Maia does. Maia’s two primary bodyguards are strong, stalwart presences who provide what comfort they can to someone so above their station, and it’s a joy to watch their loyalty build from reluctant honor to proud defenders.
As I said above, the plot is not the focus here. It meanders here and there, delivering the circumstances to prompt Maia into growth; it has the feel of a series of vignettes, even though some threads (like the investigation into the emperor’s death) run the the entire novel. But this is not to say nothing happens; indeed, Maia survives several attempts to depose him, and ends the novel on a far surer footing.
Addison takes her worldbuilding SUPER seriously, and it shows. If you’re not into books that introduce a lot of world-specific terms or have an almost fully-constructed language built in, this may not be for you. For me, personally, I LOVE it. The world has so much internal consistency, and the conlang words combined with their various meanings add a lot of depth. It feels lived in, in a way that many fantasy books don’t quite reach. There are customs, traditions, honorifics, nuances — it’s everything I want when I crack open a door to a new world.
I also love that Addison chose a non-traditional take on goblins for this story. That’s not to say there’s no prejudice — in fact, Maia faces a lot of prejudice for being half-goblin and taking after his mother — but goblins aren’t evil. They aren’t inherently bad. They’re more or less the same as everyone else, a distinct culture with their own values. It’s a take that will likely become increasingly popular, given the strong push in the fantasy and TTRPG communities against “evil races,” and this is one of the best subversions of the old trope I’ve seen.
The Goblin Emperor is the book you return to when you need to see a genuinely good person succeed, when you want to see quiet determination and competence overcome poor governance and violence. That makes it the perfect book for 2020, frankly.
Grade: 5/5 stars
Memorable Quote:
“He rested his hands on the balustrade and took a deep breath to steady himself; he began to pray, repeating silently the prayer of compassion for the dead he had heard Mer Celehar say that afternoon, trying to say it each time as patiently and sincerely as Celehar had. Compassion was all that he could hope for. He could not pray for love or forgiveness; both were out of reach. He could not forgive his father, and he could not love his brothers whom he had never met. But he could feel compassion for them, as he did for the other victims, and it was that he sought more than anything else: to mourn their deaths rather than holding on to his anger at their lives.”
