THE SWAN RIDERS BY ERIN BOW {review}

Hardcover, 384 pages

Published September 20th 2016 by Margaret K. McElderry Books
Rating: ★★★

I spent the last 50% of this book raging in disappointment. The Scorpion Rules was excellent; an interesting premise, an engaging and strong main character, and a strong, sophisticated plot that brought you along at a slow but steady pace. None of that is present in The Swan Riders.

At the end of the previous book, to save her own life and that of her fellow condemned Prisoner of Peace Elian, the main character Greta willingly became an artificial intelligence. While the first bit of the book dealt with how she adapted to her new expansive intelligence and inhuman experiences, Greta quickly became a background character in her own story. She went from a quiet but compassionate and firm natural leader to a passive person who was largely reduced to saying character names in an admonishing tone. Taking away an aspect of a character needs to be countered with the elevation of another aspect, if it's not, you just end up with a shadow character. That's what we got in this book: a shadow character. Perhaps it was intentional, perhaps not, but it didn't engage me.

For me, the plot of The Swan Riders was weak for one reason: Talis. I found it very, very hard to care about an AI that had spent the last few centuries committing genocide, mass murder, and ritual child murder as ways to force peace onto a resistant world. I didn't care that he was in pain or his 'journey'. It's like how the Star Wars prequels tried to make Darth Vader a sympathetic character: sorry, but petulant fascism is not interesting to me.

The Swan Riders are young. Talis created an army of children to serve as beasts of burden when he wished to take a human form, burning them up quickly and painfully. In hundreds of years, he'd never thought to ask how it felt for them to be ridden. It's hard to care about Talis or Michael or whomever, when his entire ideal of world peace revolves around children dying.

Ultimately, the entire book felt far too slow to me, taking ages to get to self-evident points. It took until the end chapter to really get to the point: that peace through terror is not peace. That soldiers will willingly die for you if you give them respect. That blowing up entire cities over and over again, century after century, accomplishes nothing. Surprise.

A disappointing sequel all in all.