One Sentence Summary: When Joe receives a mysterious postcard featuring a lighthouse after just as mysteriously losing his memory, it leads him on a journey into the past and attempts to change the future.

The Kingdoms is described as being genre bending with an alternate history and a battle between the French and the English. I'm not a huge fan of historical fiction, but I can't resist something called genre bending. I expected an interesting tumble through time and a dizzying adventure. Indeed, the back and forth in time kept me confused throughout the novel, but I think my brain pieced it together by the end, and I ended up falling in love with an unexpected love story.

The Kingdoms opens with Joe Tournier stepping off a train into a London that's become a colony of France. He speaks French and English, but speaking English is illegal, and, beyond that and his name, he doesn't remember much. A kind man takes him to a hospital, where it's determined he has epilepsy and that has caused him to lose his memory. Eventually, he is reunited with his young wife and his master, because, in this alternate London, slavery happens and Joe and his wife are owned by a kind older man who seems to love Joe very much.

Joe struggles with his memory loss, but the arrival of a mysterious postcard signed "M" with a picture of the Eilean Mor lighthouse sparks his journey into recovering his memory. Eventually freed, but still residing with his former master, Joe and his wife have an adorable little girl Joe becomes attached to. He also, led by the postcard, ends up working for the very man who supplied the machinery for the lighthouse on the postcard and ends up being sent to repair it.

Joe is reluctant to leave his daughter, but he's pulled by who the mysterious M is and believes going to the lighthouse will help him discover what's going on. It ends up leading him into the past, giving him the opportunity to set the timeline right, to reunite him with M, but it also comes at a terrible price Joe might not be willing to pay.

As a time travel novel, The Kingdoms actually leaves a lot left wanting. There were so many things about how it worked that just aren't explained. None of the characters really seemed to know how it happened either; they just knew it happened if you traveled through the wrong place. I'm still really fuzzy on how it worked, on how some of the things that happened were actually possible. While the beginning of Joe's adventures at the lighthouse were eerie and kept me hooked, the rest of the book never really addressed it. Actually, quite a lot never seemed to really be answered.

But I think the focus was split into two things: the history and the love story. Most of the story was poured into exploring the past, both the one Joe finds himself in and the one that came years before. There are a lot of different times to keep track off. The story goes back and forth at will to explore two distinct sets of characters and their stories. Somehow, they meld together, but my brain just couldn't wrap itself around the math required to check if it all actually worked out. I did find the alternate histories presented very interesting and couldn't help wondering how it would fix itself. But it was also confusing, especially since I'm not well versed in European history so had a harder time couching the story into the real historical timeline. Needless to say, I enjoyed it, but it felt like a wild ride I still don't fully understand.

So, I did like the time traveling and the alternate histories, but the unexpected love story stole my heart. The Kingdoms leaves a lot unexplained and probably too many loose threads. It was frustrating, unless I switched my perspective and looked at this book has a love story instead of a time travel and alternate history novel. The romance really snuck up on me, but, looking back, it was there from the very start. It ended up being quite a lovely love story and just managed to carry the weight of the rest of the story.

The romance was hard to see at first because I found the characters and their secrets and backgrounds fascinating and the alternate histories confusing. But I really did enjoy the characters. There's Joe who's just desperate for a life that's all his own. Because of his time traveling, he felt a little like he was bouncing all over the place and I truly struggled with pining him down. But Kite felt like a much calmer foil to him, though I often thought he was a bit crazy. He kept coming off to me as a quiet man and rather even keel. He also seemed a bit removed from everything, which was actually a little disconcerting. Outside of these two, though, while the supporting cast was fascinating and played their roles to perfection, most did end up feeling a little flat. They played their roles, but had nothing else to them. As a matter of fact, most of them felt, more or less, blase on just about everything.

Overall

As a time travel and alternate history novel, The Kingdoms does leave a lot wanting. I felt like I ought to focus more to really understand what was going on, but, in the end, I didn't feel I really should. There were too many unanswered questions and too many loose threads. However, as a love story, I felt it really did deliver. It was complex because of the back and forth in time and Joe's changing characterization, but it was much more straightforward than the rest of the story.


Thank you to NetGalley and Bloomsbury for a review copy. All opinions expressed are my own.

Thank you NetGalley, author Natasha Pulley, and Bloomsbury publishing for giving me a free arc of this book in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
3 stars
This book had an interesting premise which is what drew me to want to read this book.
I liked the world building, the mystery, and time travel.
This author did a great job creating an atmospheric setting with descriptions. I liked the concept of the events taking place around alternative historical events spanning across different time periods. I liked the concept of the blending of Fantasy with Sci-Fi. The mystery was well layered and kept me guessing until the very end. Some of the characters were not well flushed out and I had a hard time connecting with them. Joe was a very solid character for me until around the later part of the book and then started to lose my interest due to that fact there was a lot of tell and less show of his actions.
I think I would have liked this book more if it was less confusing in parts and had a more impactful big reveal behind the mystery.

I received a copy of this novel from the publisher via NetGalley.

I am not a science fiction/fantasy reader, but in the past I have loved other Natasha Pulley novels. I couldn't get into this one at all. I think I liked the others because they set up a seemingly 'normal' world, which then turned out to be anything but, whereas this one is completely alien right from the start, and since Joe, the protagonist has amnesia, he is unable to navigate it for me.

I'm not going to attribute stars (except here where I must), because I suspect for the right reader this is excellent.

I want to really love this book. Pulley's created a mysterious time-traveling saga that brings love, identity, and the moral and personal effects of time travel together. However, I found the story slow and hard to get into. I was intrigued by the world and Joe's amnesia. The alternative historical setting and learning as Joe did, kept me guessing and trying to figure out what was going to happen. But while I was intrigued with the mystery, when I put it down for the night I never had the burning desire to keep reading. It just wasn't a page-turner for me. I think those who like alternative history, Napoleon Wars, time travel, might enjoy this book. It just wasn't for me.

Natasha Pulley is an impressive writer. She's brilliant at creating an atmosphere in her books that's hard to describe but is certainly riveting. You can't put her books down! Loved reading this and can't help but want more from this amazing author soon.

Joe’s doctors assure him abrupt amnesia is a perfectly normal symptom of the new type of epilepsy that’s popped up in the past two years. Lots of people are briefly perplexed by wrong lives, missing relatives, and the fact that everyone in London speaks French. Joe’s amnesia persists while he tries to slot himself into an alien world. A postcard sent to him ninety-three years ago draws him to a Scottish lighthouse where things get properly bizarre. An alternate history wrapped around a heartbreaking tale of love and sacrifice you may need colored yarn to keep straight. Utterly impossible to discuss in any detail without spoilers.

My first 5-star read of the year. Like Natasha Pulley's previous novel 'The Bedlam Stacks,' 'The Kingdoms' is a sweeping adventure story with enormous waves of feeling built in. It plays with time and memory to prove that love endures (and takes many forms). As I wrote on twitter, 'I *just* read the last page of THE KINGDOMS, and I am wrecked. Been blubbering and sniffling for at least 6 chapters. Thank you. What a story! I might flip it over and do it all again right now.'

I have a review scheduled for my website on 27 May in my 'Weekend Getaway' feature. Thank you for the advance copy. I'm telling everyone I know to read this book (and to preorder it now).

I should also mention that when I finished reading the ARC, I preordered a copy of my own for future re-reads. That's how much I loved it.

This was an interesting adventure of a tale and I liked the mystery and the confusion. I liked the intro and discovering the world as Joe did. I had a lot of theories as to what was going on and I enjoyed trying to see if I was right or wrong.

But instead of being completely wrapped in the writing and story, I felt a held back. I think the writing style told a lot - Joe did this, Joe thought that, Kite went over here - that kept me from really feeling fully immersed. But I was as sucked in as I could be and I did enjoy this one.

<i>A huge thank you to the author and publisher for providing an e-ARC via Netgalley. This does not affect my opinion regarding the book.</i>

"If you remember, come home."

A postcard with that message and a picture of a Scottish lighthouse has been waiting for Joe Tournier for nearly a century, but shortly after he arrives in London with no memory of anything except his name, it is delivered. Though possessing written English has been illegal in French-occupied England since Napoleon conquered it in 1807, Joe hangs onto the postcard as much as he clings to the flashes of memory he has of his forgotten life. When circumstances give Joe the chance to travel to the lighthouse in the picture, he takes the chance and travels north- into unexpected danger, unexpected friendship, and through time itself as he struggles to remember the past life he’s forgotten and hang onto the life he’s gained since the day he arrived in London.

English novelist Natasha Pulley has become known for her genre-bending novels that feature unusual mysteries, odd experiences with time, and unexpected relationships. In her latest novel, The Kingdoms, she continues the trend. Joe Tournier is a man out of time and memory, whose travels rip him out of the world as he’s come to know it and send him headlong into a dangerous world in a radically different time, in the company of a mysterious brother and sister who know far more about Joe’s past than they’re willing to say.

It’s a formula that works for the first half. The back half of the book, however, buckles under the weight of its own setup and the questions the plot inspires, but never answers. What happened to the rest of the ship’s crew, for example? Why was it sailing so close to the rugged Scottish coastline in the first place? Who was knocking on the other side of the lighthouse’s wall? It’s one thing to have questions about a book’s plot; it’s quite another to have such questions about it that it knocks one entirely out of the reading experience. The first kind of question is fun. The other is frustrating.

So, too, is the question of Joe’s identity. Joe arrives in London on that fateful day with no memory of his past- just the occasional flash of this or that and a propensity for math and building machines. When he ends up with two people who know about his past, neither of them is willing to say anything about it. Why? Because reasons. And while yes, those reasons become known, this revelation doesn’t occur until long after the conceit of it has gone from being suspenseful to being maddening. Is it ever a good experience when dealing with adults who simply refuse to use their words, even when another adult is pleading for the critical information they possess that will help him make sense of his upside-down world?

A collection of flashbacks brings the main story’s momentum to a face-planting halt, too, and without adding significantly to the book’s tension. Do they add to Joe’s story? In a roundabout fashion, yes. But at what cost to the story as a whole? Some readers will find the banal and occasionally romantic asides to be interesting, but will the majority of readers be entertained?

Another frustrating element is a trope that often appears in young adult fantasy, but less often in adult speculative fiction: the bad boy with the heart of gold, who does terrible things because of his tragic past but is forgiven all his sins because the heroine finds him attractive. There is another of these bad boys in The Kingdoms, only he is a full-grown man with a long history of doing terrible things, and who is forgiven for his heinous crimes because he does a few progressive things and is charismatic. How often must we forgive the charismatic male character for crimes up to and including murder, simply because he is described as having a handsome face?

Speculative fiction is a rising genre that exists somewhere in the ether between realistic fiction and science fiction/fantasy. Pulley has pulled these stories off before, most notably in The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, but The Kingdoms stumbles badly in its second half, providing a story more frustrating than suspenseful, a host of questions that have no answers, major action sequences that rise into nothing, and an ending that is light on logic but heavy on sweetness and wedged into the story because it needs an ending of some kind, and a sweet ending is better than a sour one. But the whole of The Kingdoms is unsatisfying and will fade from the reader’s memory as readily as Joe’s past faded from his.

-----

Thank you to NetGalley and Bloomsbury for providing me with a free ebook in exchange for an honest review. This did not affect my opinion.

Time travel across three european countries - science, paranormal and mystery.

Strong world building, believable plotlines.

The teaser for this book really called to this reader. The Kingdoms by Natasha Pulley involves amnesia (meaning a mystery), time travel (partial historical setting) and three of my favorite countries (England, France and Scotland). I was drawn in as the book started with Joe Tournier being dropped off in at a train station in his current time of early 1900 England, but with people speaking French. However, he has memories of his native language being English. He is convinced by doctors that his situation is due to a medical condition and creates the life he can based on the evidence he has. But more memories pop up. Joe has a drive to find out who he is, where he is from, and who are his people. Then begins a highly detailed voyage for Joe, full of many characters and many storylines. I would have enjoyed a more condensed version of this portion of the novel. Some things just seem off or “extra” in the central part of this book. One of the main characters, Kite, is built as doing so many unlikable things but we are supposed to care for him by the ending? Some of the other side characters were very detailed, but did not help the ultimate storyline of the history of Joe. Were they to keep us guessing? In fact one letter that Joe read from another character (that had to be many, many pages handwritten and was supposed to fit in his pocket) described the sounds of a cushion when it was sit upon. Did people write that in letters back then? I must say the ending of the book was worth the read though, and not at all what I would have thought. It was wrapped up quite nicely and in a concise way. I liked Pulley’s writing and especially liked the time travel portion and its treatment but overall it was just too wordy for me. I am thankful to NetGalley for a free ecopy of this book in return for an honest review.

Pulley has crafted a bewitching time-travel saga that, surprisingly, focuses on the aftereffects of traveling through time — intentionally or not.

The Kingdoms begins with Joe Tournier clearly experiencing some kind of episode after arriving via train to the station. Everything he encounters seems to fight with his memory of what he knows, which seems to be a shifting argument in his head. A man from the train helps him to the hospital where he is told many have experienced this phenomena they are dubbing epileptic amnesia. Joe spends some time in the hospital until he is claimed by a woman who says she's his wife and a man who says he is Joe's master — as it turns out that Joe is an enslaved man.

Despite having strong inclinations to the contrary, Joe tries to assimilate to life in a French-occupied London, now called Londres. For two more years, Joe struggles to fight these epileptic episodes that bring up strange hallucinations, as he also works hard to be a good husband and then father.

And everywhere he goes he carries with him a postcard that arrived in 1899 from having been held at the post office for ninety-one years, but which is addressed to him. On the front features the newly constructed lighthouse on Eilean Mòr in the Outer Hebrides. And the back has only a brief message: Come home, if you remember. Both the message and the lighthouse pull at his mind constantly. Joe was born into slavery, as so many British were throughout the French Empire, and after earning his freed status, he gets a job working for the very firm that constructed the lighthouse on Eilean Mòr. When the opportunity comes for Joe to travel to the lighthouse, he jumps at the chance and travels to the remote Scottish island.

What's wonderful from the beginning is the otherworldly quality to Pulley's novel — like the same undercurrent as a ghost story. She manages to create such atmosphere of distance and the allure of the foggy-unknown that I was mesmerized by her writing and drawn into this clashing world. Joe's story is filled with complicated emotions — even aside from his inability to reconcile where and when he is — and no part of the narrative's explanation is clean or simple. The story itself is really straightforward for a time-travel book, but the brilliant human study within is just so utterly reflective of living, breathing humans that it is achingly painful at times.

Now the inevitable add of Pulley's previous book, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, as this is my first by her, but not my last.

An excellent speculative fiction alternate history set during the Napoleonic Wars featuring a time travelling LGBTQ+ love story. Joe Tournier wakes up on a train station platform with no memory of who he is. He’s in London, but everyone is speaking French. When he is given a postcard mailed a hundred years ago, Joe journeys to the lighthouse pictured on the card and is kidnapped through a portal into the past by a mysterious man.

Pulley’s novel is at once both a romantic love story across time and space and a well-researched historical alternate history that examines how the use of future technology would change history, and how far nations would be willing to go for information from the future. This book is for anyone who has ever wondered what would have happened if the French won at Trafalgar, if the telegraph was invented fifty years earlier, or even what would happen if a sailing ship battled against a steam-powered battleship. The twisty, turny plot may be confusing or hard to follow at first, but the payoff is well-earned. Pulley does not pull her punches, either in the story or the action, but her take on naval ship battles is visceral without being over the top with gore. For anyone who loved Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell or Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series.
Look for the Kingdoms on May 25!

I went into this expecting more time travel, but that is really not the weight of the story. This is a book of alternate history and what would have happened if Napoleon had won the battle of Trafalgar.

This is really a micro look at the effect of that alternate history on two people, Joe and Kite. And what a great story it is. It is poignant and rollicking (as any sea story should be), and just a darn good tale.

I'd recommend this book to anyone.

Beware of Scottish standing stones! It was true in the Outlander series and it’s true in Natasha Pulley’s new novel, The Kingdoms. This book might be Pulley’s most complicated story yet. It crosses history with alternate history, love and suppressed love, characters blinking in and out of existence, amnesia and shifting identities, and lots of conflicting motives. This sounds confusing. I’m not going to lie; parts of The Kingdoms are confusing. But I was hooked on figuring out what the heck was going on and the charmingly bewildered main character.

Joe wakes up on a train somewhere in England in 1891. He doesn’t know where he’s going. He’s not entirely sure what his name is. And when he learns that the train has just pulled into the Gare du Roi in Londres, he suddenly gets the feeling that something is seriously wrong. On arriving at the station, Joe is whisked off to the new Salpêtrière and told that he, like many other Britons, has a kind of epilepsy that has caused him to lose his memory. Readers with a dollop of French and a smidgen of history will know that this London—now Londres—is one where England was successfully invaded by the French, instead of an England that won at the Battle of Waterloo. Joe has no idea what’s wrong; he barely knows what his name is. So when two people show up at the hospital and claim him as an escaped slave, he has little choice but to go with them and try to settle into some kind of life.

The feeling of wrongness doesn’t go away in spite of Joe’s efforts. So, when he has the opportunity to travel to a lighthouse that has some link to his lost past, Joe finagles a trip to the wild, unconquered north. And then The Kingdoms starts to get really weird. Joe is kidnapped and whisked through time to 1807, finding himself in the middle of a very different version of the Napoleonic Wars. The strange stones off the coast of Eilean Mor in Scotland is where everything went wrong. It’s where, in 1797, a steam-powered ship blundered through from an England that won the war against Napoleon. It’s also where a man named Jem fell overboard and the ship and the crew were captured by the French. Not only does the ship, The Kingdom, represent a lot of advanced technology for the French, its crew is also a wealth of knowledge that the French can use to manipulate the future. Poor Joe and his engineering knowledge are caught in the middle of all of this. It’s not until much later that he learns how he got involved and just what his connection is to the disturbing and invincible Captain Missouri Kite.

The Kingdoms is the kind of time-travel/alternate history story that fascinates me. I love to think about historical what-ifs and might-have-beens. I like to follow chains of events back to moments that might be turning points. If this happens instead of that at just this moment, what will the downstream effects be? And, on top of that, what’s the “right” version if there is such a thing as “right”? After all, we wouldn’t think anything was wrong if the French had won at Trafalgar. It would just be history as we know it. Why should Joe help Missouri and the English win? He has no idea which side offers the better future.

Pulley’s other novels—and I’m thinking specifically of The Watchmaker of Filigree Street here—had whimsy to leaven the heavy moments. The Kingdoms, on the other hand, is a very serious book. There are several moments of surprising violence that stunned me and I completely lost track of the number of explosions. If anything lightens this book up, it’s the hints of love between Joe and Missouri that appear in the brief, quiet moments. The hope that Joe might finally recapture his lost memory and the hope that he and Missouri will be able to be together are what pulled me through this twisty, turn-y, exciting novel.

The book starts off with the main character, Joe, stepping off the train and immediately forgetting where and who he is, aside from his first name. The only clue he has to his identity is a postcard sent to him featuring a derelict lighthouse, and signed by someone who goes by “M.” What follows after that is equal parts strange and unbelievable, while still being believable at the same time.

This is my fourth read by Pulley and while I missed a lot of the steampunk elements that are usually present in her novels, it was still an interesting plot with interesting characters, and I always love the representation in her books as well as the subtle love scenes between the two main male characters that none of the other characters seemed to bat an eye at, despite the time period of the story.

The scenery is painted well, from the cold Scottish lighthouse, to the Navy ships, and at times you feel like you are aboard one of these dark, damp ships and want nothing more than to get off. The time travel element is also done very well, since time travel has always been tricky to convey in any form, but it works here, especially when you get to the part where everything falls together and starts making sense.

Pulley’s writing definitely has a distinctive quality to it, and while it’s lovely ninety-five percent of the time, the other five percent usually leaves me scratching my head as I try to determine from lack of context and details who is speaking and what exactly just happened. This is still the case in The Kingdoms, but the plot and the characters help me look past this, as they do each time I read one of her books.

Historical fiction, time travel, and LGBTQ+ themes play a major roll in The Kingdoms, so if you like all of those elements, you will definitely enjoy this book. Though if haven’t read any of Pulley’s past works, I would recommend giving those a read first, to get acclimated with the way she writes.

The Kingdoms is a fantastic book with it's alternative history, time traveling and high seas adventures. Joe Tournier has amnesia and has to rely on others to fill him in on his past in a London ruled by the French after they bested Britain during the Napoleonic wars.. So why does he keep having conflicting memories and how can he explain receiving a postcard which was sent to him 100 years ago?
I love Natasha Pulley' s writing; she always creates such a lush world with a wonderful sense of place and evokes an array of emotions from the reader. The awkwardness, hesitancy and tenderness between the characters is palpable. I would recommend this to readers who enjoy David Mitchell and Claire North.

I received this from Netgalley.com.

I'm not a huge fantasy reader. This is my first time reading this author, and probably my last. So, when I says "it's me not you" .. I'm not exaggerating.

There was so much going on in this story, I had a hard time keeping track of all of it and lost interest.

2☆

"There was a special place in hell for people who pretended to be your friend[s] while they were holding a whip over you."

Let me start this review by saying that I don't know why the blurb compares this book to The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle; it's definitely not that. This is a book that has some serious Outlander vibes. A few key differences being that time travel here can, and does, change history as we know it, resulting in an admirable work of alternate history and that our protagonist is gay.

Since I began with comparing this book to Outlander, then it'll suffice to say that, likewise, there's a time gate tucked somewhere between two pillars near a lighthouse in Scotland called Eilean Mor. Apparently, crossing through it causes partial amnesia, in which our protagonist, Joe, experiences his past life beyond the gate as a sort of hallucinations or a series of persistent Deja Vu's. Joe's main struggle is whether he should remember or not, and believe me the book makes a compelling case of this struggle.

The timeline alternates between early 20th century England, which has become a French colony after the French won the battle of Waterloo and subsequently invaded England, and the turn of the 19th century where the events leading up to the battle of Waterloo, and its outcome, veers off the course of history as we know it when a ship from the future inadvertently crosses through the portentous pillars.

"None of us can swim. Isn't it absurd, how what is usually a negligible aspect of a person's character becomes a deciding feature of his fate? "

Getting into the book, mystery and intrigue envelop the plot from page one. When Joe is found in a train station, lost and confused, he's taken by a stranger to a mental facility in which they abhorrently convince him that he is suffering from a form of epilepsy. You know something has happened to him, you feel sorry for him, you want to help him, but he doesn't give you one solid memory to build up your own version of events with. Joe lapses into "his" current life as he is being told what that is by others. All that feels his are very thin memories that he cannot work out if they were real or just figments of his imagination. A turn of events leads Joe to Eilean Mor and there he crosses back through time and finds himself tangled up in a desperate attempt to control the course of history. There was something refreshing about not knowing how events will turn out. I did not mind the time jumps, nor the frustrating memory lapses.

But there were times when Pulley's narrative plummeted into verbosity on minor details and turned scarce on points that begged an explanation. There was also the issue of casual violence and killings that sowed a lot of confusion and discomfort, especially when it is portrayed as casual as a character's idiosyncrasies. Add to that the many names sprinkled around the chapters as this sailor or that officer. What was most confusing about the names was that a name can be mentioned once, disappear, and then reappear much much later in the book and I had to go back to know who that was and how he affected the story. To my dismay, the answer on a couple of occasions would be not much. The ending also left me a bit distraught. There was a huge gap before a huge decision was made. I was left wondering: Should we accept that decision? Was that ok? Does that make anything better or worse?

I admit it's an inventive story. Really ambitious, so much so that I wanted to like it even more. But the truth remains that I did not like the execution of this book as much as the idea of it.

Many thanks to Netgalley and Bloomsbury USA for my eGalley.

Not sure about this book. I'm a fan of time travel stories (Tim Powers' Anubis Gates is one of my favorite novels), but I found this one difficult to get into. I'm willing to give it another try though.