The Tempered Steel of Antiquity Grey by Shawn Speakman: review

2/5 stars on Goodreads

The Tempered Steel of Antiquity Grey by Shawn Speakman

I picked this book because of its great title, The Tempered Steel of Antiquity Grey, and the wonderful cover. It’s the debut of its author, Shawn Speakman, and it starts a series of the same name.

In far future, the earth is nothing but a colony of the Imperium, people who have left the earth millennia ago and have become almost a different species called celestials. A century ago, a war between Erth, as its now called, and Imperium over natural resources ended with Erth losing.

The person held responsible for it is the great-grandmother of Antiquity Grey, a sixteen-year-old girl whose family have been ostracised as a consequence. One day, she stumbles on a truth about what took place during the war, and ends up bringing the wrath of Imperium on her and her three friends with whom she has to flee. Bent on revenge, she travels after clues left by her great-grandmother to find resources that would defeat the Imperium once and for all.

I wish I could say I enjoyed this book as much as I hoped I would, but I have several issues. First up, I think it was written by a mansplainer. Nothing else explains why characters regularly put words to other characters’ mouths, explaining their lives for them, persisting in this even after being told they’re wrong (along the lines of “In your culture women aren’t allowed to carry a sword.” “You know nothing about my culture.”). The dialogue in general was odd. Maybe it was meant to sound old-fashioned, but it came across as stilted.

I’m not sure either, why the author thought a teenager was a good protagonist for this story. Especially one who is wilful, annoying, and stupid, and remains so. She definitely doesn’t have the tempered steel the title promises. Manor (? I can’t remember his name) came across as even worse, considering that at eighteen he was deemed old enough to become a member of the leading council (all men, naturally, now that the pesky rule of women had been obliterated), yet he behaved like a child. The proposed marriage between the two was creepy and a full-on patriarchal assault, no matter the reasons given for it later.

The rest of the characters weren’t any better, but mostly they remained sketches, existing to serve the needs of the main character. It doesn’t give me much hope that the future of the Erth is in their hands. We’re spared of the YA staple of a romance, at least, though the seeds are there.

The plot read like an RPG, a quest from place to place to find clues. Not that the reader knew that that was the objective until at the climax when Antiquity suddenly puts together random facts she has noticed during her journey. There’s a lot of action, but it doesn’t really lead anywhere. However, unlike so often in YA, characters die too. I wish I could say that I cared, but it’s difficult to care for someone you know nothing about.

My biggest issue, however, is the handling of the other. First up, why does a far future earth still have cultures treated as the other, with the white ‘western’ culture as the norm? And why does a far future world that is so different from ours have a warmongering, zealous, religious sect called arabi? The author couldn’t come up with any other word for them? Persai as their more acceptable (inoffensive) counterpart wasn’t any better word when they only served as a way to emphasise how horrible the arabi were with their swords and beheadings, and when their otherness to the main character’s ‘normal’ (white) culture was constantly brought up.

That one of the characters was arabi didn’t help. The opposite. Like white colonists of the past, the main characters kept repeatedly judging her and her people to her face, refusing to accept her word about her culture. Moreover, these characters were constantly referred to as arabi and persai (in italics), as if that was the only thing that defined them; all the more pronounced because Antiquity and Manor(?), the white characters, were called by their names.

All in all, a disappointment. I didn’t care about the characters or the plot, the mechs weren’t as exciting as I’d hoped, and the promised dragons were a huge let-down. I don’t really see how Antiquity would be the person to lead the Erth to rebel against the Imperium. I don’t care to find out either.

I received a free copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.