The Bone Shard Daughter by Andrea Stewart

Good morning, afternoon, or whenever it is that you read this. Earlier this year, my wife read M. L. Wang's Blood Over Bright Haven at my recommendation. While she was in the middle of reading it, she suggested the Bone Shard Daughter by Andrea Stewart. The Bone Shard Daughter is the first book of the Drowning Empire series. There's quite a few mysteries that drive the plot, making it difficult to make a spoiler free review. But that honestly is it's greatest strength - the book presents a tangled mess of threads that keeps you pulling and tugging until you see it all laid out. And even then, it leaves some knots bound tightly for the rest of the series. The story fits squarely in the genre of resistance fiction. The central, overarching challenge is the Empire, which is clearly depicted to be exploitative and extractive. The Emperor uses these extracted resources to create of constructs - golems created and programmed to fulfill the edicts of the emperor. An autocratic government…