Reviews with content warning for Torture - The Shadow King

The Shadow King tells the story of the unsung among the Ethiopian armies who fought the Italians during the Second Italo-Ethiopian War in the mid-1930s. It asks: What is home? What is honor? What is owed? It’s an intimate look of the pain and glory of war shared mostly through the eyes of Hirut, a servant girl turned soldier. Hirut works for and fights alongside Aster and her husband Kidane. Each character is a person who buries their grief, sadness, and shame in anger, ego, or false ownership. Infuriating and all the more compelling because of it.

A portion of the story is also told through the lens of Ettore, an Italian photographer who has no business being in war. Ettore’s story revolves around his father, where his father comes from, and how that defines him. While I was interested in the layer Ettore’s father added to the book, I felt as though Ettore was here simply to carry the novel’s focus on photography as storytelling. Excerpts throughout the book are told as descriptions of photos. This worked well but made me question the role of Ettore as a central character.

This was my final read of 2020 and it felt like such a fitting ending. It’s epic in all of its forms. It left me reflective, cheering for the underdog, acknowledging pain in repeated history, and finding hope in moving forward.

Content Warnings

archytas's review against another edition

Go to review page

challenging emotional medium-paced

Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

This was a "wow" book for me. Mengiste achieves a lot in the novel, but it never feels unfocused or scattered. The book is certainly an introduction to Ethiopia's history, but it is also a meditation on war. Mengiste pulls apart the dynamics of both military and misogyny., and the ways that the violence they breed bleeds into the world. The book also meditates on the nature of history. It is not uncommon, of course, for every character to have their own viewpoint in a novel, but Mengiste plays with how this then constructs a formal History - a retelling of events that has more authority than other retellings, probing into the messiness that an individuals experience of that history and how it colours those stories.

But lest this all seem too distant, this is a story of fully realised characters - not only our two point of view characters, but the cast around them. In a story of symbols - the very concept at the heart of the book is about the power of symbolism - Mengiste gives us people who are never symbolic, but always messy and real, often desperate and scrutable only in earned moments of connection.

This book won't be easy for everyone. There is murder, torture and rape. These are described through the fear, shame, humiliation they engender - and, as you would expect in a book with a photographer as character, sometimes in frozen stills. It is a book as much about hope and the power of humanity as it is about despair and the depths of it.

Content Warnings

icfasntw's review

Go to review page

challenging dark emotional hopeful tense slow-paced

Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Content Warnings

More...