The Unbroken by C.L. Clark is a heart-wrenching tale of revolution, politics, and star-crossed love set in a vivid North African-inspired fantasy world.
2021 is shaping up to be a stellar year for fantasy novels, starting with The Unbroken by C.L. Clark, the first book in her Magic of the Lost trilogy. Despite this being her first book, Clark writes with the nuance of a seasoned veteran. The Unbroken is one part story of revolution, one part complicated queer romance, and one part political fantasy that will leave any fan of Game of Thrones happy. But unlike that sprawling series, the scope of The Unbroken is more compact, making the story’s conflicts feel deeply personal to its two main characters.
The first is Touraine Sand, a soldier of the Balladairan Empire stolen from her homeland as a child and pressed into service. Balladaire is a nation known for conquering other nations and forcing them to become colonies, and Touraine’s homeland of Qazāl is teetering on the brink of open rebellion. The Unbroken begins with Touraine’s return to her ancestral homeland as an adult, where she must navigate being a woman born of one nation, kidnapped and raised in another, and treated for the most part as though she belongs to neither. Within literal minutes of setting foot in Qazāl, Touraine’s loyalties are put to the test. The way Touraine navigates the slippery terrain between the Balladairan and Qazāli factions while trying to keep her fellow conscripts safe is one of The Unbroken‘s juiciest elements. She sometimes trusts the wrong people and makes the wrong calls, but her unrelenting struggle to carve out a place for herself and the other Sands (as the conscripts are called) is so powerful that you can’t help but root for her.
The second point-of-view character is Luca Ancier, heir apparent to the Balladairan Empire. Luca has come to Qazāl with the aim of forging a lasting peace there, mainly to make herself look good in order to prove she’s ready to take over the throne, which has been usurped by her uncle. Luca often means well, and does genuinely want to improve the situation between the two nations. But, her actions are usually tinged by self-centered thoughts of how they will reflect on her image as a ruler, and she can be somewhat naive to the true extent of her country’s brutality. This give and take makes Luca a fascinating character, and her development only gets more intriguing once her path crosses with Touraine’s and their conflicting worldviews collide.
To say more would be going into more spoilers than I want to give you, because this books is highly unpredictable in the best way. There are numerous plot twists that send the story pivoting in an entirely new direction. The Unbroken is one of the only books I’ve read in recent memory that kept me guessing right through to the final pages. Yet the twists always felt organic and never once jarring, despite how layered things became.
That brings us to the gushing portion of this review: there is a lot that is absolutely fantastic about The Unbroken. First and foremost is Clark’s writing. The author has a gift for expertly walking the line between lyrical prose and dark fantasy grit, and I often found myself re-reading certain lines because they were just so beautifully written. At the same time, the action scenes were riveting and brutal. This is definitely not a novel where the characters are protected by plot armor, which is much to its benefit. There are plenty of emotional gut punches and gasp-out-loud moments. Considering that this is only the first book of a trilogy, we can hope that bodes well for what’s still to come.
The romance elements are also handled exceptionally well. Touraine and Luca come from very different walks of life, yet their chemistry is undeniable and always interesting. Their scenes together were a joy to read, and were among my favorite parts of the book. However, their relationship is also a microcosm example of the struggle happening between Qazāl and Balladaire. Factor in Luca’s ambitions and Touraine’s loyalty to the other conscripts, and things get really complicated, really fast.
And all that is layered on top of the political divide between Qazāl and Balladaire, which was another highlight. The Qazāli wish to be free from the empire that has subjugated their nation and conscripted a generation of children, but things aren’t that simple. By the time the story begins, Qazāl has already been a colony for a couple of decades. Trade dependencies have developed between the nations. People native to one have been born and lived their entire lives in the other. The Qazāli city of El-Wast, where most of The Unbroken is set, is a powder keg of tension as the Balladairans try to assert control over their vassals by bringing in a large military presence. There are also rumors that the Qazāli have magic, which the Balladairans greatly fear.
The magic of The Unbroken was yet another strong point; it lands somewhere in the middle of the spectrum between the rule-oriented Sanderson-style magic systems and the more vague, A Song of Ice and Fire style. The result is a magic system that feels refreshingly unique, even if some of the powers — like healing and communicating with animals — are fairly standard.
If there was one thing I wished for more of in The Unbroken it was to see more of the world. Clark hints at the wider conflicts and other nations, but since this novel takes place almost entirely in El-Wast, we’re left to wait until future installments to see those other locales.
Which, really, if your main complaint about a book is that you wish you could see more of the world it invents, that’s a pretty good sign that the author knocked it out of the park. The Unbroken is an epic feat of fantasy storytelling that feels both fresh and familiar, and I’ll be eagerly looking forward to Magic of the Lost book 2.
The Unbroken is out today, March 23, from Orbit Books.
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