The Kingdoms: Natasha Pulley

Product Information

And so Joe’s quest to find answers for questions he can hardly form begins, taking him from the attic room he shares with his precious daughter and a wife he does not love to the seemingly haunted lighthouse on the Outer Hebrides.

Joe knows something strange is going on as the lighthouse depicted on this nearly hundred-year-old postcard was only built six months ago! Joe resolves to solve the mystery of Eilean Mor. He gains employment at a company responsible for lighthouse maintenance. When the Eilean Mor lighthouse fails, he is assigned to repair it. Leaving his family behind, he travels to Scotland and the remote lighthouse. From here on his adventures truly begin….

Ich hatte eigentlich eine Liebesgeschichte erwartet, die war auch vorhanden, unterschwellig, zwischen den Zeilen und ja, sie spielt auch eine Rolle, aber hier geht es um viel mehr, dass ich gar nicht weiß, wie ich das alles in Worte fassen kann. i also think about how this book has chaos and tragedy and the senselessness of war, how much trauma we get put through and how fragile every existence is. and yet there is so much tenderness. I can only describe this book as painfully, tragically beautiful. Is it possible to give it 6 stars out of 5? Or 10? I’m just gonna go with yes and do that. So 6 + 10 = 16 stars out of 5. Fight me. The postcard has been held at the sorting office for ninety-one years, waiting to be delivered to Joe Tournier. On the front is a lighthouse – Eilean Mor, in the Outer Hebrides. I have no problem with the mechanism of time travel itself. Time travel is such a paradox that why shouldn't the portal to another era go through two pillars rising from the sea off the coast of a remote Scottish lighthouse? One gaping logical hole in the narrative, however, is why travelling through the portals always lands the characters at the end of the 18th century or the turn of the 20th. Why not the 14th century or the Roman era? The dynamics of time travel appear to be driven by the needs of the plot.

Lots and lots of spoilers next, and plot ramblings, likely all very messy and some very shallow observations Wheeler, Sara (15 September 2017). "A 19th-Century Smuggler in the Peruvian Andes". The New York Times . Retrieved 29 December 2017. I was intrigued by the initial scenario. A man arrives in London, with no memory of the past, and his only clue a hundred year-old postcard of a lighthouse that has only just been built? And as the story develops, more mysteries emerge. For England is now ruled by France, the street names in London are all in French, and English is a banned language: history has taken a strange turn! To begin with, I have to admit that the beginning might be a little bit dense. You have to get used to situating yourself well in what time (period/date) each character is. He remembers being married to a woman named Madeline but after laying claim to him at the hospital, Joe’s French master takes him home where he lives as a slave with his wife named Alice.For fans of The 7 ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle and David Mitchell, a genre bending, time twisting alternative history that asks whether it’s worth changing the past to save the future, even if it costs you everyone you’ve ever loved. I haven’t even mentioned what the story is actually about yet (which I think speaks to how much my enjoyment of it was down to emotional connection, though that’s not to say the plot isn’t also great). It starts in 1898, as a man named Joe steps off a train and realises he has lost all his memories. He finds himself in a world that is unfamiliar – to him, naturally, but also to us, as this is an alternate history in which the UK is under French rule. The London skyline is dominated by massive steelworks, households still keep slaves, and Edinburgh is occupied by a terrorist group known as the Saints. Kind of slow. Much more heavy on the reflective, atmospheric and emotional side than the adventure one, though there is plenty of seafaring gore. You’re my family. You were family before any of them. I’ve missed you even when I didn’t remember you.

Dearest Joe, come home, if you remember. M.” says the postcard Joe Tournier receives in 1898; it has apparently been held at the sorting office for 93 years, so that it could be delivered to him on the date specified. The postcard has a picture of a lighthouse called Eilean Mor in the Outer Hebrides, but Joe doesn’t recognise it. He doesn’t even remember who he is supposed to be, since he lost his memory a while ago. Joe is told that he is a British slave in London, one of the many in the French empire. But he also gets flashes of a life he has supposedly never lived, in an England that’s not ruled by the French and where he can freely speak English.

Customer reviews

This also means that reviewing it is hard. I realllllly want to get all CAN I HAVE A MOMENT OF YOUR TIME TO TALK ABOUT OUR LORD AND SAVIOUR MISSOURI KITE, but my enthusiastic love for that character isn’t something I think I can articulate. Or that it would mean much to anyone who hasn’t yet read the book, even if I did. The character development in this novel is something that has to be experienced; Pulley does this amazing thing of very gradually making you become obsessed with the protagonists, so that you don’t even notice it’s happening until, boom, sad songs are reminding you of them. At least, that’s how it worked for me. Random observation, this is full of "rep": non-white people , women with agency and doing military things 200 years ago. It is fun, great, but if you think a bit about it it can feel a bit like wallpaper: the universes can be a bit inconsistent (more about it on the spoilers) and the women like tokens almost. There are 3 very strong women in this story (slight Agatha, Madeline and Revelation/Ray), two of which get some representation of their PoV, one is basically wallpaper (but awesome wallpaper) and I keep thinking they all deserved a bit more, rather than feeling they are just there are foils for the males in the love story. After Joe arrives at Eilean Mor the truth about what is happening is gradually revealed to the reader and Joe, although some of the people we encounter seem to know more than they are willing to say. I'm not sure if this was due to the fact that I'm reading an ARC, but most of the sentences do not start with a capital letter.

JadePhoenix13 on Reading The Wheel of Time: Taim Tells Lies and Rand Shares His Plan in Winter’s Heart (Part 3) 2 hours ago The story drew me in so I wanted to read faster to find out what happened but also to read more slowly so it would never end. Where to begin? I could say that this book, aiming to be a sci-fi alternative history, fails on those accounts, but at the end of the day the speculative genre is flexible. If I had to pinpoint my exact problem with The Kingdoms, it is that the characters are the most incomprehensible characters in pretty much any book I've ever read. Those conflicted feelings at the end—the warmth of love persevering despite the horror of the atrocities committed—left me conflicted as well. And maybe that’s okay—The Kingdoms, as I said at the beginning of this review, isn’t just one thing. It’s complex and conflicting and complicated, just like real life is. And so if I finished the book feeling relieved, unsettled, and upset, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It is, in fact, most likely what Pulley intended.After a while, having settled into the routine of his life Joe receives a postcard sent nearly 100 years previously. Somehow the picture is of Eilean Mor lighthouse, even though it has only been built a few years, and the message reads “Dearest Joe, come home if you remember me. M”. Dearest Joe, come home, if you remember. M.” reads the postcard which depicts a lighthouse in Scotland. It had been held at the sorting office for 91 years with clear delivery instructions. When Joe enquires, he discovers that construction on the lighthouse had just been finished. For those familiar with fantasy tropes it is immediately obvious we have an alternative history… but this is so much more. Leaving me WILDLY emotionally conflicted. Was the ending happy? Are we happy about this? Do we like both of the MCs? Like, I see it, but having some qualms about Kite's murdering a young boy just to protect the secret of his own love from Joe and the general faff about him murdering a decent amount of other people and not being fully stable seems justified if Joe is going to raise two toddlers with him. Also, Joe literally was married three different times and had two other sets of children, which is giving me pause.