Oh, darling how I wanted to love you, with your slick cover, interesting bug people and rave reviews, but you let me down. Maybe if I wasn't expecting so much, I would have loved you more.



Bug people, well sorta bug people. Sounds awesome, right? People who share the aspects of bugs is a pretty cool concept and one that I haven't seen done before on this scale. This was cool and done really well. I was actually expecting just a couple of different types of kinden (bug people, which are as far a

Oh, darling how I wanted to love you, with your slick cover, interesting bug people and rave reviews, but you let me down. Maybe if I wasn't expecting so much, I would have loved you more.Bug people, well sorta bug people. Sounds awesome, right? People who share the aspects of bugs is a pretty cool concept and one that I haven't seen done before on this scale. This was cool and done really well. I was actually expecting just a couple of different types of kinden (bug people, which are as far as I can tell all people except they do refer to humans sometimes in a sense that included the kinden but doesn't actually clarify if there are non-binding humans, this ambiguity is one of the things that did bother me) but there were a ton of different types. (Maybe too many if it's considered taboo to have a child with someone who isn't from your exact kinden; I mean the population of a given city can't be all that large considering the setting so I would expect everyone to have a pretty high inbreeding coefficient.... of course the author never describes the size of the population of the various towns and cities so who knows.) I didn't have an issue with the author’s vague descriptions of the characters that some readers did, I assumed humanoid except in the cases where the text explicitly mentioned bone spurs or claw hands. I imagined wings as not always there, but appearing and disappearing as needed. Tchaikovsky does a great job at making the various kinden unique, giving each species/race different abilities. Mantids (Mantis kinden) are superb fighters that take glory in battle with bone spurs on the forearms they can use as weapons. Wasps can fly (though not as gracefully as moths or dragonflies or other kinden), have dangerous tempers and can shoot energy beams (this is Art, not magic) from their hands, yeah they were the coolest. Ant kinden could link together like a hive mind, etc etc. This was probably the coolest concept in the book, as well as the best executed.Apt vs Inapt, or able to use technology and not able to use technology. This also sounded pretty interesting when it was first mentioned. Unnnnfortunatly it was taken way too far. Basically, certain kinden (as a whole except for the extremely rare exception) are able to use technology but not magic, and other can use main but not tech. Magic is different from Art; Art consists of the abilities that you have from your kinden: flying, ants mind speech, climbing walls if you’re a spider... The abilities and limitations of magic are not really explored in this book, although magic does play a role. Those who are Apt don't believe in magic anymore and many of the Inapt don't either. So yeah, I thought this was pretty cool, up until Tynisa (Inapt spider kinden) got locked in a room and laments how if she were Apt, she'd be able to take a piece of metal and jiggle it around in the lock to open it. So she looks at the lock and doesn't understand it and thinks about how spider’s don’t have locks and just have curtains with guards instead of doors because the Inapt are incapable of using a latch or key or apparently a doorknob.... (0_0;) WUUUT? I had to put the book down and go on a mental rant, especially since it was mentioned that spiders make the best mirror and that then Inapt also make good swords. Ummmm, I hate to break it to the author but making glass and swords requires the use of technology more advanced than a latch. Just to smelt the metal for the swords you need a bellows. Maybe he meant they use magic to make them, but if so he should have mentioned that. It would have been super cray cray easy to just say the spider magic made mirror instead of just the spider made mirror. =_= But then, a few pages later Totho (apt) asks Tynisa to pass him crossbow bolts in the middle of a battle and he doubts that they can do it, because ya know crossbows are technology. Even though the Inapt are really good archers and passing someone an arrow is really the same thing as passing someone a crossbow bolt. Luckily (for the author) she is capable of this. Still as a result, what started off as an intriguing idea ended up feeling flat and forced.I almost quit here, I didn't really like any of the main characters introduced so far, I didn't feel a sense of urgency for the trouble the characters were in and I didn't really care what happened to them. But, I liked Tisamon in his 30 second scene in the beginning, and I totally researched the rest of the books and Thalric sounded interesting, and I paid 10$ for this ebook, dangit! So I forged on. Eventually Thalric and Achaeos were introduced, both of whom were at least mildly interesting. I don't know how this author managed to make his main characters so boring/unlikeable. They were whiny, angsty, dramatic, unnecessarily secretive, and immature when they all should have been pretty cool. They all had characteristics I should have liked, but I just didn't. They felt bland and 2D. So, Thalric and Achaeos the most interesting of the bunch. Unfortunately, Thalric casually rapes a women a little over halfway through the book. She's a slave so she doesn't protest but he's "sourly aware that her responses were born of a need to appear willing, and that the pleasure, such as it was, was all his." He then turns around and asks her to help him and this is all couched in very bland "this is perfectly normal" language. And yeah, Thalric is an antagonist, but I'm fairly sure the reader is supposed to like him. And, now I feel guilty for liking him, because he apparently has low respect for women (actually I wonder if this scene was only in there so he could think about how the wasp empire treats women) but he is still the most interesting character. Ugh!Pacing, structure, narrative, grammar, or things that made me double check that this wasn't self published and that I really paid 10$ for the kindle book. Many of Empire's problems could have been fixed by thorough editing and restructuring of sentences. The author uses odd sentence structure, as if trying to make the text more interesting and instead does the opposite. Events, and actions are filtered through the viewpoint character removing the urgency or immediacy of the situation. Each one on one fight is formulaic. Action, "but" this is why action failed, counter action, "but" counter action was avoided by doing this annnd back to action. They are clunky, the literary equivalent of Flynning and unfortunately used seriously. And yes, the "buts" are there. I could have removed a zillion "buts" and "ands" from the text to improve the flow. I don't mind breaking grammar rules and using conjunctions to start sentences (as the astute reader might notice), but Tchaikovsky does this way too often and it is way to drama-drama and breaks the flow. Speaking of drama, he makes things that should be exciting boring by couching them in stilted passive voice phrases like “For a sheer height of over one hundred yards the side of the mountain had been worked into a city.” Yes, that sentence us missing a comma, and wow does it make a city carved into the side of a freaking mountain, boring! Also, one hundred yards – not really that big of a distance. For reference, the Statue of Liberty is about 102 yards tall. Small city. A few pages later he breaks into the most vomit inducing purple prose like, “She was so full of love for him that tears ran down her cheeks until he kissed them away,” and “he had given her a gift beyond counting- and love as well.” Barf.Annnd, I am realizing this review is getting kinda long and other people have covered some of the other issues I had so, I’m gonna wrap this up. BTW, I didn’t actually hate this book, like it might sound – I mean, I finished it after all. It was just not anywhere near as good as what I was expecting. If I had paid 5$ for it instead of 10$, I wouldn’t be nearly as disappointed – and I might even give the second book a chance. At least I had fun reading excerpts aloud to my mom and watching her reactions.