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