Acacia: The war with the Mein

By David Anthony Durham.

A great big sprawling epic fantasy book, picked up in the collapse of Borders, and only just got round to. There's a lot of 'only just getting round to' coming up in this blog I think. I'd never heard of the author, but I'd seen a vaguely positive review on Tor.com a couple of days before. And it was 70% off, so when I get round to giving it to Oxfam, they'll probably get more for it than I paid.
The basic premise that that there's a great big Empire uniting the known world, with a fluffy emperor who loves his kids and his people, and imagines that they all look at him as a benign father figure, except they don't. The empire's actually built on a whole host of inequities and evils, most notably, the annual exchange of child slaves to unknown forces beyond the oceans in return for the opium that keeps the empire from rising in rebellion.
Happy complacent daddy emperor is quite keen on the opium himself, and so to no great surprise winds up with an assassin's knife in his belly, his children scattered and hiding, his murderers sat on his thrown, quite happily carrying on the opium trade.
The kids grow up, become stock fantasy characters in their own right, unite the empire against the assassins and so on. A pirate, a priestess, a master hunter, a captive princess.
All that makes things sound terribly dull. And that's a little bit unfair. It's a well written book, even if it's over long. That seems to be a very common with this kind of tome.
The first third of the book, setting up the collapse of the empire really does drag, but I suppose it is setting things up. The more interesting remainder, in which the children mature and the villains start to seem more desirable than the empire they overthrew, and at least some of those that would overthrow them does remain engaging, and does throw up at least some surprises, with at least one of the over perfect characters turning out as flawed as they come.
Still. It's taken me two years to get round to reading the book, and I'm not exactly rushing to get the sequel. At some point it will be on Amazon for shipping plus a penny, at which point I might well get it. Vaguely nice to find out what happens next, but I'll live happily enough without doing so.