Took me a minute to get into it, but when I finally did! Oh man. Earns its David Mitchell comparisons, and made me want to read everything else Pulley has written. Delightful.

This is a book that you have to just stick with for the journey. Things that are very confusing at first eventually become clear.

Joe Tournier steps off a train into a London station and realizes that he has no idea what he is doing there or who he is. His memories are gone. After a kindly stranger takes him to the hospital he finds that he is one of a growing population of people who have lost their memories and much knowledge of the world around them. Joe's master (for Joe is a slave, it turns out) comes to claim him and he returns to his home, his wife and his life.

In Joe's world, France has beaten the British and England is a subjugated nation. Scotland is still free and anyone who seems suspiciously Scottish is suspected of being a saboteur or a terrorist. (It's just occurred to me that Scotland and France were very sympatico less than a century previously and I wonder about if this is how things would go?) Anyway, Joe, who has taught himself about lenses and physics, has to go to Scotland to repair a lighthouse there.

And that's where things get even stranger. Suffice it to say that this book deals with time travel and multiple realities, the impacts of technology on "past" Earth, loyalty and love. Many people wear masks or multiple identities and much of the puzzle is figuring out who is who, who is loyal to who, and when people exist as well. It's a twisty, turny book, and Joe's loyalties and beliefs about those around him change multiple times.

I didn't find the romance at the book as satisfying as some of the other romances Pulley has done. She's fascinated by people who do things that she finds monstrous and has a lot to say about the destruction of personality that must take place to make a soldier. Maybe I'm too socialized to violence myself, because some things that Joe found appalling I found to be good sense. Although some truly appalling things do happen.

But Pulley's research is always good, her characters are always interesting, and her settings are astounding. I'm on board with her!

This is is the type of book that is hard to get into, but pushing through pays off in the end for an overall interesting. There's a lo going on, a lot to follow, in terms of history and different timeframes going on and a plot that you have to pay close attention to. I would say this is a book for immersion, not a quick page turner, probably best in paper version or audio.

(thank you to netgalley and the publisher for sending me an e-arc in exchange for an honest review.)

a mind-bending fantasy that's, in my opinion, way too underrated.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for giving me a free advanced copy of this book to read and review.

4.2

Well I can say Pulley is one REALLY GOOD storyteller!

If you don't mind mysterious alternative time line plots that unfold slowly, you'd get a awesome payoff of engaging, tense, storytelling, with diverse, layered characters and a beautifully developed world!

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.

I finished this in the early hours of the morning and well into the evening now can still feel the ghosts of those words underneath my skin. Other reviewers have captured the magic of this book better than I will ever be able to, but suffice to say that the top comments on goodreads are well-deserved and in no way embellished. First off, I’m in awe of how this book was put together. The interlocking and fluidly changing timelines are woven with such deft finesse that I had to put down the book multiple times and just stare at the wall for a minute while acknowledging that some amazing human out there has a brain that can come up with something like this out of thin air. Blown. Away. But beneath the richly realized historical setting, brilliantly intelligent time-shifting structure, and slowly flowering puzzlebox nature of this book lies the true engine: the characters. THE CHARACTERS. Rarely do I close a book feeling like I’ve been granted the privilege of seeing someone’s soul, but I absolutely did with this one. Missouri Kite was everything. It was impossible not to want so much for someone who wanted so little for himself. He was the beating heart of this book and I would’ve happily read about him until the end of time.

This book was poignant and moving. It snuck up on me. It crushed my heart to fine powder and then somehow reassembled it. I’m forever a fan of Natasha Pulley, all hail the queen.

I’ve been curious to read Natasha Pulley’s historical speculative fantasies and jumped at the chance to request The Kingdoms on NetGalley before its publication in 2021. Now that I’ve finally read it (meanwhile having purchased a print copy), it definitely does live up to my expectations in the quality of writing.

The story positively trips along as Joe Tournier finds himself without memories in a train station of French ruled Londres. Diagnosed with “epilepsy” and turned over to his owner, Joe tries to go about his life but has flashes of images that feel real, though he is assured they are not. As he makes choices that take him from London, his adventure really begins as he slowly learns more of how time does or does not work and how real those flashes of memory just might be.

This story is written in a way that makes speculative fiction so very approachable, and the history and bending of time conventions are quite fun to contemplate. And while some of the events and subject matter are life and death, the story moves buoyantly, trippingly along and never seems truly to lull or rest. But for all that, as a reader I found no connection and began skimming as nothing truly grabbed me, so I cannot fully comment on the story, plot, the characters. And while I’m not sorry to have spent the time reading The Kingdoms, I can’t say that I’d rush to experience it again.

This review refers to both a purchased hardback copy and a digital galley that I voluntarily requested and read via NetGalley, courtesy of the author. A positive review was not required and all opinions expressed are my own.

<B>I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review</b>: It cost me so much to read this book, with its star-crossed lovers, its perception of time as layered and mutable, and its grotesque unfairness, the first time. It wasn't easy a second one, either, even though I knew what was coming.

Yes. I, testy oldster with less than two decades left to him, read a book twice.

There is that much to unpack. There is that much to process. There is that kind of thought put into the structure of the story. All that makes an investment of eyeblinks that big both desirable and at some level necessary.

The nature of Time (as the Tenth Doctor called it, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2nNzNo_Xps&ab_channel=MariaVarda">"wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey...stuff"</a>) and the nature of family feature heavily in this tale. Two men whose fates...whose lives entangle across timelines of startling "points of divergence" or "PoDs" but never forget each other. Imagine loving someone enough, with so much of yourself, that you remember them when you don't remember yourself.

That is the definition of the stakes in this alternate history/time travel novel. There's a weird place, in Scotland for once, where time doesn't behave as we think it should. This remains a weird, slightly underexplained, phenomenon throughout the iterations of the story. In every timeline, Man A meets Man B, falls in love with him, then for Reasons leaves him. Man B doesn't change much, if at all. His name is Kite. His past isn't fixed, though it's the little things that change. For Man A, the one who does the leaving, the past, the present, and the nature of each is...mutable. The world is, oddly, full of people like him who come to themselves in a place where they have no memories and no trauma to explain that lack.

We, readers, know what it is. We know because there is a man, red hair, terrible burn scars, and Man A...call him Joe, call him Jem, what you will...recalls him with love. He doesn't really know why. He isn't happy anywhere. He can't find connection to anyone around him. He floats, unanchored, away from Kite. Who is a Napoleonic-Wars naval officer with a bad past. He's building a better future, he hopes, by letting Jem/Joe go through the Scottish time gate. But it's at his own expense. He's so used to that, to doing hard and painful things, as a result of his bad past.

What came through to me most strongly was the nature of Love. There is a scene early in the book where Joe, as he was at that time, was raped. By his wife. Who should've been his sister-in-law. And she gives birth to his daughter Lily, whom he adores. He struggles against his love for Kite for several years to stay with her. In the end, he can't fight it and they reunite...and Lily is never born. Yet always alive to Joe, Jem, Man A.

What the hell! A man getting raped by a woman?! What's the old lunatic talking about? My own life: It's happened to me, perpetrated by my mother. And that is how I know that Author Pulley got the sensation, the misery of that kind of coercion, exactly and precisely correct. It was shattering to read. It was the very first time in my over-sixty years on this planet that I have read anywhere my private and unshareable truth. It healed and soothed me in a way I didn't anticipate ever experiencing.

If that is not enough to convince you to read the book, then how's this? These men are very dishonest with themselves. They can't afford not to be. But neither man has ever, for a single moment, lost his love for the other.

Come for the wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey...stuff. Stay for the family that only love can form. Revel in the struggles of true lovers to live their truth.

For me, this was unnecessarily convoluted and tedious. I liked the concept and the alternate histories, but the story often dragged and I detested Kite. I don’t feel like he was ever redeemed and don’t feel that he got the ending he deserved.

It probably would have been easier to follow all the time jumps in print, but the pacing was so slow and filled with extraneous detail, I know I would have bailed before the 1/4 mark. I’m struggling to find something positive to say, so you’d think I hated it, but I didn’t. It’s left me feeling melancholy, but like Joe, I’m not sure why.

This book is amazing! I adored the way the history was told from the character's perspective. It's a unique. It realy has a beautiful writing. I can't wait to read more works of this author.

The Kingdoms was a well written execution of time travel and what happens to people who are impacted if history is changed (which is of course usually the big important factor of all time travel books - never change history because of what happens in this novel). In addition to time travel this novel includes the trope of an unreliable narrator and I think the Pulley does a great job at setting the scene and leaving me guessing for whether or not I could believe what our character is seeing or remembering. I was pulled in by Pulley's writing and the blend of fantasy with historical fiction. Time travel books can be hard to do well, and The Kingdoms is a novel that does it well. As a reader you are left wondering at times the motivations of the characters and the development of the plot slowly fills these in as the pieces fall into place. This is my first Natasha Pulley novel and I will be sure to read more. Overall I really enjoyed this novel. It is not fast paced, but the content and writing still kept me engaged. Thank you NetGalley and Bloomsbury for this eARC in exchange for my honest review.

A mind-bending mystery, alternate history, and queer romance rolled into one. In the new time-slip novel from The Bedlam Stacks author, Napoleon conquers England in the Battle of Trafalgar and a stone portal in the sea serves as a passageway between centuries. When Joe steps off a train in the city of Londre, 1898, he has a postcard in his pocket written in forbidden English, with a postmark dated 1805 though it inexplicably bears the image of a recently-constructed lighthouse. “Dearest Joe, come home if you remember,” says the postcard, signed simply “M.” Joe’s search for M leads him to the Outer Hebrides and back and forth through the stone portals many a time on his dangerous quest to reunite with his family without changing the course of history—or erasing his own existence.

Usually I love this genre but unfortunately I couldn't keep interest in it. I wish I liked it more as the synopsis was more interesting then the book itself.

I received a copy of this story from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Reading this book was such a rollercoaster. I spent the first 1/3 of it trying to decide if I was going to keep reading. Then it hooked me - yes, it really took that long - and I had to know how it all tied together. By the end, I felt weirdly attached to all the characters, despite having not felt much for them for most of the story.

There are some obvious flaws. I hope the grammar and sentence structure (and Kindle formatting) were fixed before publication because it was very bad in my version. It made it incredibly difficult to read because things like names, proper names, weren't always capitalized. It was very strange and annoying. If it's a stylistic choice, I didn't care for it.

The story drags in a lot of places. I skimmed bits because I knew they wouldn't really hold my interest and I wanted to keep going. It has a ridiculously slow beginning!

I didn't have a problem with the time travel in and of itself. It's actually pretty straightforward. My problem was that it only seemed relevant as a plot device. It was never explored or explained or anything. I prefer my time travel books to get into the mechanics a little and this didn't do that.

There were bits of plot that I figured out LONG before Joe did. And there were bits that I had a hunch about but I kept following Joe down the wrong path. Kite and Revelation and Fred and Jem were all interesting characters, in their own ways, but I didn't care much for Joe. I didn't have much of a connection to him until the end.

The reason I rated this so highly is because despite all the flaws, this is a masterful bit of storytelling. It's a fantastic study of how small and large changes alter history and the future. It's an epic exploration of what it means to love someone. And what it looks like when duty/loyalty to one's country and love conflict. I wish these parts were amped up because that's where the true beauty of this story lies.

I'm very interested to read more of Natasha's work!

Natasha Pulley’s The Kingdoms describes two kingdoms linked by a time portal. In one, England has won and it’s 1807, in the other France won and it’s 1907. There is a way for some ships to travel between the worlds, with all the attendant complications, since the travelers don’t actually realize what is happening. Several very compelling stories of love lost in one Kingdom and found in the other, and the background of the ship’s crew, keep you engrossed in this multiple world story.

Natasha Pulley is one of my favorite contemporary authors and this is my favorite work of hers so far! It was one of my top two favorite books of 2021 and one of that I've been recommending to anyone who will listen. Please see my full review in the following video (4:30 - 7:38): https://youtu.be/QAHR4ybljs0

Thank you for the advanced copy of this book! I will be posting my review on social media, to include Instagram, Amazon, Goodreads, and Instagram!

Stars 3.5 out of 5

This was a very interesting take on time travel and on what happens to people when history changes. The idea of the deja vu and the fact that people would suddenly forget who they were for a few moments wile reality rewrote itself is something I never saw before.

What would have happened if the English lost the battle of Trafalgar? How would history have changed? What kind of world would have emerged from that crucial change? I was delightfully along for the ride for that. And I certainly wasn't disappointed. That alternate reality was well-thought out and rather fascinating. 

It is actually a very sad book, if you think about it. Especially considering that all those people Joe vaguely remembers in his deja vu episodes existed in the previous versions of reality, but are gone from the surface of the Earth now. 

Having an unreliable narrator who struggles with his own memories (and lack of there of) as well as with his identity add to the confusion of the situation. We are on that train station with Joe when he first realizes that he doesn't remember anything but his name. We experience that terror and sense of being utterly lost. I was happily along for the ride on his journey to find his identity and discover who sent him that postcard 100 years ago. 

This is also where the problematic part of the book is for me. I understand that the author wanted to keep the mystery of Joe's identity for as long as possible, so none of the characters ever tell him what they really know. But that also makes for a very frustrating read. 

First of all, it seems that a lot of characters are withholding information just because the author decided so. I understand why Kite would do it, but what stopped Agatha from revealing Joe's identity? Or the other marines and sailors he'd served with before? It makes no sense and it feels more and more forced the further in the book we get. The other problem is Joe himself. He is way too passive as a character. His only real act of rebellion and self-definition was to go to that lighthouse in the beginning of the book, after that, he just kind of floats with the current. You could argue that his status as a prisoner doesn't give him much choice, but there is also this passivity in him that gets infuriating the longer you read the book. I understand why he was like that at the beginning, when he had no memories and everything around him was foreign and scary, but he never grows a backbone until almost the very end of the book. It's' very hard to root for a character who is a voiceless victim of circumstances for most of the book.

Another problem I have is character motivation. Why bring Joe back into the past? Yes, after finishing the book, I understand the selfish reasons of why Kite wanted him there, but historically speaking, it makes no sense. Kite said himself that he didn't want to restore the English rule because he despised that system almost as much as the French did. And honestly, building one small telegraph didn't change matters all that much. Or at least the author didn't show any of those changes. History was changed by people, not an invention, in this case. 

I also didn't particularly like the ending. I thought it was a cheep trick on the part of the author to basically have most of Joe's current family vanish overnight just to justify his decision to go back. It would have been more emotionally rewarding if he had to say goodbye and choose between his new family and his found family from the past instead. It would have given Joe's character growth a deeper meaning. As it stands in the book, it's a cheep cop out. 

These problems notwithstanding, I really enjoyed this book. It's a fresh idea and a mostly enjoyable execution. I would definitely recommend it for those who enjoy books about time travel.

PS: I received a copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Despite the lovely writing, I had a hard time mustering much enthusiasm for this one, especially when compared to Natasha Pulley’s previous work.

The Bedlam Stacks is an all-time favorite, I liked the first watchmaker book and loved the second, and have greatly enjoyed some of Pulley’s short fiction. Thus I expected this book to be a hit with me, and it just wasn’t.

Pulley’s writing is beautiful of course, and it’s certainly not a “bad” book by any standard.

Some of my indifference to the plot relates to the time-bending stuff, which isn’t a favorite theme for me, though I’ve certainly liked many books that used it well. The atmosphere in the book wasn’t great no matter where the characters were in time, and the characters themselves, while perfectly likable, failed to interest me much.

A lot of historical fantasy is set during or partly during the Napoleonic Wars, which is unfortunate for this book since there’s a lot of superior material to compare it to. H.G. Parry’s The Shadow Histories duology comes to mind immediately, or even the early books in Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series.

I have no doubt that the tremendously talented Pulley will give us many more great novels in the future. But this one was a miss for me.