My favorite decadent spies are back! Though they’re a little worse for wear…. Around this time last year, I reviewed Lara Elena Donnelly’s debut novel Amberlough. Set in a fantasy world resembling pre-WWII Europe, the first book delved into the entangled lives of government agents and cabaret dancers as they sought to navigate the sudden rise of a fascist regime. Its sequel, Armistice, came out last month and deals with the aftermath of these events. Under the scorching sun of foreign lands, Aristide starts a new life for himself while Cordelia scrambles for safety. They both soon learn that you can flee the country, but you cannot escape your past.
Armistice picks up three years after Amberlough left off, and things have changed drastically. Aristide Makricosta has left his crime lord days behind and carved out a comfy niche for himself as a film director in the India-inspired country of Porachis. His celebrity status has kept him safe from the retribution of the fascist Ospies, but all the fame and glamor in the world won’t heal his broken heart. Former caberet stripper Cordelia Lehane has become a prominent revolutionary—or terrorist, depending on which view you take. Though hardly more than a thorn in the Ospies’ side, the railroad bombings she orchestrated have given hope to the resistance. Unfortunately, they have also made her a prime target and Cordelia must be smuggled out of the country to lay low for a while. Cyril DePaul, Aristide’s lover and the double agent the Ospies used to leverage themselves into power, has been presumed dead for the past three years. Instead, we get a new point-of-view character: Cyril’s sister. Lillian DePaul finds herself reluctantly representing the Ospies as the press attaché for the Geddan embassy. Though her job is ostensibly just to smooth things over with the press, her boss ropes her into doing a bit of espionage on the side, using her young son as leverage. Though these three characters start off the book with completely different goals, they soon find themselves joining forces in a precarious scheme to topple the Ospie regime.
There’s a lot going on in this book, but one of the main things that stood out to me were the opposing themes of trauma and trust. Most of the characters in this story have suffered trauma of some sort in the preceding years. Aristide is grieving his loss of Cyril, and spiraling into self-destructive alcoholism as a result. Cordelia was physically tortured by the Ospies at the end of the last book, and her years on the run have left her jumpy and paranoid. For both these characters, their trauma has made them want to close themselves off from other people so that they cannot be hurt again. But they both have to learn that sometimes opening yourself up and trusting others is the only way accomplish your goals. Every character in this book is faced with the constant dilemma of who to trust and who to hide from, when a single wrong decision could mean death. Yet, the number of times that they still choose to trust, despite the risks, was surprising and refreshing.
Speaking of trust, my favorite thing about these books is Lara’s trust in the reader. You have to work to read this book, Lara doesn’t spoon feed anything to you. But the mild stress of trying to parse cryptic dialog, adjust to unfamiliar cultures, and keep track of whose allegiances are where only adds to the immersive quality of the book. As the reader, you’re put in the same boat as the characters—though, luckily, your life isn’t on the line.
One last thing: I spoke about this more in depth in my review of Amberlough, but I love the way that Lara has created a world with completely different gender norms from our own. In this book, we get to see how these play out in some new cultures—particularly the various gendered taboos in Porachis. But my favorite thing was a relatively small detail: the surprising amount of ship captains, chauffeurs, and other background characters that were women. It takes seeing some ladies in these roles to realize how often fictional worlds are mainly populated by men—especially in these public spaces and gender-stereotyped professions. I’m a firm believer that fantasy should not mindlessly replicate the ingrained inequalities of the real world, and Lara Elena Donnelly is one of the few authors I’ve seen interrogate our institutions of gender at this level of detail.
Armistice is available now at your local retailer or online. Go out and get it! And if you haven’t yet, I highly recommend that you read Amberlough first. You can buy Armistice online and support both indie bookstores and The Gothic Library in the process by clicking on this Bookshop.org affiliate link.