The Kingdoms

I can only describe this book as painfully, tragically beautiful. Is it possible to give it 6 stars out of 5? Or 10? I’m just gonna go with yes and do that. So 6 + 10 = 16 stars out of 5. Fight me.

I finished this in the early hours of the morning and well into the evening now can still feel the ghosts of those words underneath my skin. Other reviewers have captured the magic of this book better than I will ever be able to, but suffice to say that the top comments on goodreads are well-deserved and in no way embellished. First off, I’m in awe of how this book was put together. The interlocking and fluidly changing timelines are woven with such deft finesse that I had to put down the book multiple times and just stare at the wall for a minute while acknowledging that some amazing human out there has a brain that can come up with something like this out of thin air. Blown. Away. But beneath the richly realized historical setting, brilliantly intelligent time-shifting structure, and slowly flowering puzzlebox nature of this book lies the true engine: the characters. THE CHARACTERS. Rarely do I close a book feeling like I’ve been granted the privilege of seeing someone’s soul, but I absolutely did with this one. Missouri Kite was everything. It was impossible not to want so much for someone who wanted so little for himself. He was the beating heart of this book and I would’ve happily read about him until the end of time.

This book was poignant and moving. It snuck up on me. It crushed my heart to fine powder and then somehow reassembled it. I’m forever a fan of Natasha Pulley, all hail the queen.

From the moment I started the sample, I couldn't stop reading. I was caught up in the suspense of the alternative-history plot (will the British be able to re-create a world in which they won the Battle of Trafalgar?) & in the central human mystery of who Joe is / who he is to Kite / whether Joe will be able to return to his daughter. You'll probably figure out the answers to the Joe questions long before Joe does, but it makes human sense that he doesn't get there till very late, and IMO the fact that he doesn't makes the uncertainty all the more poignant.

Pulley's worldbuilding is superbly detailed. A great deal is implied rather than stated directly on the page, & I can well imagine that if you're not paying careful attention you might become confused. I sometimes tend to skim, but I wanted to bathe in Pulley's prose, it's so beautiful and insightful; I wound up rereading long passages because I wanted to fix them in my memory. (Well, how else are you going to respond to a book with memory and forgetting as central themes?) Incidentally, there is no version of Britain or France in this novel that precisely resembles the history we think of as real: our history is changed and gone even before the opening page. This gave me the shivers and I love it.

I've got to address someone's criticism of Pulley's grammar & sentence structure. Uh ... say what, now? Pulley absolutely knows how to build a sentence. I have absolutely no idea what that reviewer can have been thinking.

No detailed spoilers here, but please don't expect moral purity from any of the central characters. If you're looking for cinnamon rolls, this isn't your book.

And, actual semi-spoiler:

Natasha Pulley does not deliver a neatly-tied-up-with-ribbons-and-bows happy ending. The people who are meant to be together do wind up together, but they pay a stiff price. I wept through the last tenth of the book and though I was very glad by the end, it took me a while to stop sniffling. You've been warned.

I finished this some hours ago now and I am still dazed. What a staggeringly tense, emotional , perfect ending. Natasha Pulley is definitely now up there with my very favourite authors.

The Kingdoms begins in London in 1898 when Joe Tournier disembarks from a train apparently suffering from amnesia. This is London or Londres in an alternative history where the French won the Battle of Trafalgar and made slaves of the English population. This is exciting in itself for someone like me who loves a bit of alternate history but then it jumps back another 100 years when Joe accidentally travels back in time. Even better - alternate history AND time slip - what more to ask for?

Maybe many brilliantly written characters who step off the page and are memorable ever after. This is really Ms Pulley's forte. Remember Thaniel and Mori from The Watchmaker of Filigree Street and Merrick and Raphael from The Bedlam Stacks. Now we have Joe and Kite and a love affair which travels through time and survives even total separation.

There is also a constant thread of mystery throughout the book. Who is Joe Tournier, why does Kite know so much about him, what is the mystery of the lighthouse and most importantly how did the French come to win that battle? Add to all this historical battles at sea, the sad affair of the giant tortoises, and constantly having to figure out how the time travellers are affecting futures. It is not a book one can speed read.

And then that ending. Beautiful. One of those occasions where I closed the book, patted the cover and sighed contentedly. This is what reading is all about.

I was wary of this book when I started it because I had a feeling it would be another one of those "literary novels" that are beautifully written but where nothing interesting ever happens. This book turned out to be a pleasant surprise and I'm really glad I took a chance on it.

The story draws together several time travel tropes, such as people from the future changing history, a portal in time that allows people to go back and forth between two separate time periods, and a romance that spans the two different times. But it puts those tropes together in a unique way, with the protagonist, Joe, losing his memory when he travels back to his present day because of the timeline changes. He finds himself with little memory of his past (just vague random bits) and is a man searching for his past. That search leads him back to the time portal and into the middle of the war between Britain and France that was going on at the start of the 19th century.

The way this book is written involves bouncing back and forth not just in the overall timeline the book is set in, but also in the timeline of the individual characters. From seeing other reviews, I can see that there were readers who found that off putting, although I liked it and thought that it was the way this story needed to be told. In some respects, it made me think of the movie "Memento".

I'm trying to avoid any spoilers, but if you enjoy time travel and alternate history, this book may be for you if you can get past the way it jumps around in time to gradually bring together the threads that ultimately make the story so compelling.

I was scrolling through my inbox when a “read now” showed up that intrigued me. Kingdoms by Natasha Pulley (Bloomsbury Publishing) is a story with several mixed race, LGTB characters that never stoop to caricature and had me plowing through the story with a map in hand. (I am in the US, I do not know English coastal territories well enough to know where the ships are in the ocean beyond where France and England sit on the globe) I have seen the cover and it is both stunning and eludes to the time warp nature of the story. My electronic galley of this book is one giant PDF, so I can not say if the parts are divided up in a way that makes sense but you Will need to pay attention to the dates and places of each part. Otherwise it can get confusing as you are switching time lines back and forth with greater and greater frequency as the story progresses. Onto the story. This is a wonderful time travel story mixed with a jumble of racism, ships, senseless violence and death, murder, slavery, and a love story spanning 100 years. The beginning is confusing as you try to figure out why our main character and sole point of view can not remember what he is doing standing on a train station in Londres (London as it was conquered by France 93 years previously). In fact, the Main character Joe (a half Chinese man) must piece together his life as he has No recollection beyond that moment. We come to find out after a brief stay in a public hospital that he is a slave and his is not alone in this rather strange epilepsy that brings vivid sense of wrongness and false memories. He goes back to work at his master’s house with a wife he feels nothing but antipathy for (he can not remember her, or why they are married) and lives in a sort of dull haze. The Story picks up when he is freed, and goes to work in a mechanical shop and has the opportunity to go to a lighthouse. He has a postcard from 100 years ago with a picture of the lighthouse delivered to him that says “find me if you remember”. What follows is War at sea, ships and timeline warfare between France and British. Woven throughout is a love story that spindles slowly between several people, and Joe’s desperate attempt to remember his past and not mess up the future. There is a lot of bloody death and murder, but then the story is a war story and battles on ships in the 1800s was a nasty dirty affair. The other main character Captain Kite is the only reason I did not rate this novel five stars. I just could not like him. I agreed with one character when they said he needed removing. I do not think he is sympathetic and had trouble seeing him as a worthy love interest. And he shot a sea turtle just to test a theory. I like sea turtles and I think it was that moment (and what followed) that turned me off to him. I know it is silly, it is a fictional character, and a fictional sea turtle but I truly went Why did he do that?! And I Did want to like him. I really enjoyed Joe’s point of view, and his dogged determination to make it though to the end. Thank you Bloomsbury and Netgalley for providing me a book free in exchange for an honest review.

The premise of this book is intriguing: what if the French had won the Battle of Trafalgar and occupied France for most of the 19th Century? Pulley paints a vivid picture of Britain under French rule and the battle scenes are truly outstanding, especially the brutal French conquest of London as the King and his cowardly entourage flee for Edinburgh. The scenes of the hardships of life on board a 19th century battleship are equally riveting. Pulley has clearly done her research.

I have no problem with the mechanism of time travel itself. Time travel is such a paradox that why shouldn't the portal to another era go through two pillars rising from the sea off the coast of a remote Scottish lighthouse? One gaping logical hole in the narrative, however, is why travelling through the portals always lands the characters at the end of the 18th century or the turn of the 20th. Why not the 14th century or the Roman era? The dynamics of time travel appear to be driven by the needs of the plot.

My big problem with the novel, however, is the writing. There are too many sentences that are grammatically incomprehensible, leaving the reader scratching his head. Add to that the author's tendency to linger on internal monologues that make no sense, and the narrative becomes, at times, a slog.

Finally, a number of critical questions simply aren't answered clearly enough to sustain the plot shift in the final 100 pages. Most importantly, how did the British wind up winning the Battle of Trafalger so that the final chapters take place in the Britain we know, rather than the French-occupied Britain that Ms. Pulley so deftly depicts in the first 300 pages? Was it knowledge gleaned from traveling through the portal, was it the use of futuristic technology or good old-fashioned strategic genius? The novel never tells us so the reader is, once again, left burying a critical question.

Despite these criticisms, I had a hard time putting the book down. I've read enough time travel novels to know that even the best of authors sometimes slips on a metaphysical banana peel.

The Kingdoms has been recommended to me about a million times over as a book that I would very much enjoy. It’s got the male x male romance, it’s got time travel, it’s got historical events. All things I’m extremely fond of. So why didn’t The Kingdoms work for me as much as I wanted it to?

One — I think I read it way too fast. This is a known problem for me, because I tend to zoom through a book and not savor it. I think if I had savored this one a little, I wouldn’t feel so entirely lost. I was having a great time with The Kingdoms until about 80% of the way through, and then I was LOST. I mean, I have no idea what was going on. I think perhaps if I do a reread I would catch things a little better, and maybe understand what was going on with the time-travel.

Another problem I had with The Kingdoms is that I really didn’t feel the romance between the two leads at all. They had chemistry together, sure, but there was no real…longing until the very end of the book. I didn’t feel romantic love between them for a long, long time in this book, and when I did it felt very out of nowhere? Maybe I’m the only one who feels this way. Who knows.

I did, however, enjoy seeing the historical elements of this book. Watching naval battles through Joe’s eyes was horrifying. The Napoleonic Wars happen right there on page, and the descriptions are both macabre and terrifying. It’s all really well done.

I love time-travel books, and I love when they include love in them, but The Kingdoms — as of my first read — has left me wanting some clarity. I’m not giving up on this book, though. I do plan to reread it and give it another go.

First off, let me say, "I am a fan of Natasha Pulley." I read 3 of her books prior to this book and couldn't wait for the next one to be released. The Kingdoms was a disappointment. It took months of picking it up and putting it down to finish. I couldn't engage with the main character and the switches between time periods was, for me, hard to follow. I stuck with it out of fealty to the author desperately hoping to be hooked at some point. But sadly I never was.