| $@%&! level: None “Bedroom” level: None Violence level: Medium (very little right up until the climax) Back Cover: “When Shai is caught replacing the Moon Scepter with her nearly flawless forgery, she must bargain for her life. An assassin has left the Emperor Ashravan without consciousness, a circumstance concealed only by the death of his wife. If the emperor does not emerge after his hundred-day mourning period, the rule of the Heritage Faction will be forfeit and the empire will fall into chaos. Shai is given an impossible task: to create—to Forge—a new soul for the emperor in fewer than one hundred days. But her soul-Forgery is considered an abomination by her captors. She is confined to a tiny, dirty chamber, guarded by a man who hates her, spied upon by politicians, and trapped behind a door sealed in her own blood. Shai's only possible ally is the emperor's most loyal councilor, Gaotona, who struggles to understand her true talent. Time is running out for Shai. Forging, while deducing the motivations of her captors, she needs a perfect plan to escape...” |
It's a surprisingly interesting plot for something that takes place almost entirely in a single smallish room, not that I would expect anything less from Brandon Sanderson. It's also interesting that a lot of the plot is character development for a man who isn't even there. I mean, the story is about Shai, but it's sort of the story of Shai discovering the life story of the Emperor, learning what makes him tick. Her plans for escape seem as secondary to the plot as they are to her. What I really wanted was to see if she actually managed to Forge the Emperor's soul, which is also the thing that she wants even more than to get away.
And that's the second half of the character development plotline, because while Shai is learning about the Emperor, Gaotona is desperately trying to understand her (apparently out of an advanced case of curiosity). Her world-view is so alien to him that he can't even begin to understand why she does what she does, at least up until the end. He can't understand how Forgery is the greatest art for her, why she's determined to remain in obscurity and make perfect copies of other people's art rather than use her own great artistic talent to create new works and rise to fame. (Of course, it doesn't help that he's got a cultural prejudice against Forgery that keeps him from seeing any good in it.) It takes a careful scrutiny of her ultimate masterpiece for him to really get it.
I'd almost say that this is a book written for writers, because it really is almost entirely about the deep exploration and creation of character. Shai ends up building the Emperor as a fictional character just as much as Brandon Sanderson built all of the characters in the book. It's almost like a writer's guide to gaining a deep, intrinsic understanding of the imaginary people who inhabit our dreams.