The Unwilling
The Unwilling is the story of Judah, a foundling born with a special gift and raised inside Highfall castle along with Gavin, the son and heir to Lord Elban's vast empire. Judah and Gavin share an unnatural bond that is both the key to her survival...and possibly her undoing.
As Gavin is groomed for his future role, Judah comes to realize that she has no real position within the kingdom, in fact, no hope at all of ever traveling beyond its castle walls. Elban — a lord as mighty as he is cruel — has his own plans for her, for all of them. She is a mere pawn to him, and he will stop at nothing to get what he wants.
But outside the walls, in the starving, desperate city, a magus, a healer with his own secret power unlike anything Highfall has seen in years, is newly arrived from the provinces. He, too, has plans for the empire, and at the heart of those plans lies Judah: the girl who started life with no name and no history will soon uncover more to her story than she ever imagined.
An epic tale of greed and ambition, cruelty and love, this deeply immersive novel is about bowing to traditions and burning them down.
Author: Kelly Braffet | Publisher: MIRA Books
Goodreads | IndieBound (buy local!) | Amazon | Barnes & Noble
Rating: 4 / 5
Big thanks to the team over at MIRA Books (HarperCollins) for the advanced review copy of this book! It will be published on February 11, 2020.
The book is about Judah, who was adopted by the city’s royalty. The midwife called to deliver Gavin (the heir of the city) had just delivered Judah, and the Lady of the City couldn’t bear to let the parentless girl go. But shortly thereafter, it was clear that Gavin and Judah had an unnatural bond — the emotions and physical sensations one person feels, the other person feels as well. Most notably, if one is injured, so is the other. If one were to die, so would the other. And as she grew up Judah couldn’t be simply cast aside — she becomes a protected, but hated, member of the household.
The other main point of view character is Nate, a healer and Worker (magician, sort of) who’s been planted in Highfall by his people, after generations of planning, with a mission of getting closer to Judah and helping her fulfill the destiny she was literally bred and born for.
In her Twitter bio, author Kelly Braffet describes this book (her first foray into the fantasy genre) as “more unhappy people making bad decisions, but this time with magic.” That … is extremely accurate. And her bio on the back of the book says she wrote this as a lifelong reader of speculative fiction. So The Unwilling is not what many readers will be used to in the fantasy genre. It’s much more character-driven than plot-driven, and either there’s going to be a sequel that hasn’t been announced or the ending is meant to make you think more than to give you a sense of closure.
People who read predominantly fantasy novels may not like this as much, but I, as a person who also loves to read literary fiction — those slow-burning, character-driven stories with abstract endings — didn’t mind all these things. It was new and interesting to read a literary, speculative book, but “this time with magic.”
I took a fiction writing class recently, and the teacher spoke a lot about “debits and credits” in writing. A lot of stories are about suffering, yes, but you also have to give your readers something to grab on to, something that makes all that suffering worth it. You have to balance the debits you take from them with credits you give to them. The Unwilling was indeed about “unhappy people making bad decisions” — but without quite enough moments of happiness or light to make the story feel balanced.
That being said, Braffet still managed to pull me through this 600-page slow burn quickly and eagerly. She knocked me off balance at the end but in a way that made me think (and also hope for a sequel). And she did something different in the fantasy genre that I had never quite seen before.