I have very conflicted feelings about this book. One one hand the overall story is really good. There is a great tradition and history to Kaigen that I loved learning about. The main characters were complex and showed so much growth I wasn’t expecting. For those reasons I would recommend this book.

***“Wholeness, she had learned, was not the absence of pain but the ability to hold it.”***

The Sword of Kaigen reminded me of a Samurai type culture with the addition of some magic. The families that live there have a long tradition of fighting for the Empire against it’s enemies. They are the wall the enemy crashes against and have held back the tides of war for a long time. So long that most have forgotten the power of the families there.

Misaki, was once a fighter when she was away at school. She loved it, was great at it and gave it up to be a wife and have a family. She married Takashi, one of the greatest swordmasters of all time, who can make a blade of ice sharper than and man made blade. When we first meet her she is unhappy and a shadow of the woman she could be. The reader follows her on her journey to reclaim the power she set down and find a path to a kind of happiness that walks through so many tragedies.

This was a hard read for me. The Ranganese invade Kaigen and the atrocities are what you would expect in an invasion. It was so heavy and sad and places that multiple times I set down the book and didn’t pick it back up for a few days to clear my head. There are so many losses and some hit extremely hard, that I wasn’t sure I wanted to continue. I will give it to M.L. Wang that she created characters I really cared about and that made the happenings in the invasion and after all the harder on my summer heart.

Wang made characters with holes and bad judgement. I was rooting for Misaki to find the warrior she once was and I was not disappointed. Wang also made me care and forgive characters that I didn’t think I would. Like most relationship issues there are two sides and no one carries all of the blame. I didn’t think I’d come to like Takeru but in the end I loved his character arc. Sometimes you just need a good fight with your spouse to clear the air.

My small issues with the story came after the main battle, the pacing was off and there was a bunch of stuff thrown in about Misaki’s past acquaintances/crime fighters and what they are doing now. It seemed like maybe there were other books set in this world that the reader should have been familiar with to understand her past and those characters. I really didn’t see any though so it was just some fluff that didn’t seem to need to be there. I think Misaki’s closure with her past could have flowed a lot better, but my heart was rang out by that point so I might be a little to critical here.

Overall, if you want a story with some bite and can handle the ravages of an invasion this is going to be a great story for you. Filled with character depth and steeped in lore and culture so much of the story was fantastic if brutal.

Narration:

I’m so glad I listened to this book. There are so many Japanese type words and phrases that it was more enjoyable to have someone else decipher them for me. Andrew Tell was fantastic as a narrator. He captured every emotion, every horror and every tenderness so well. He was a new to me narrator but I could see easily why he has over 200 titles to his portfolio. His pacing, emotion and character separation were fantastic.

Performance: ★★★★★

Character Separation: ★★★★★

Diction: ★★★★★

Pacing/Flow: ★★★★★

Sound Effects: limited at the introduction