The Kingdoms: Natasha Pulley

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Agatha, you have to do something about Kite. He can't just go around murdering children. I don't care what the reason is." This is a mystery, woven together with time-travel, a story of the violence of war and terrible decisions compelled by love and duty. But most of all it is about love. Joe is the main character in The Kingdoms, but talking about him could give away a bunch of spoilers, so I’ll just say this—I loved him with all my heart and then some. As for the English navy officer Kite, he’s faced abuse all his life, so much so that he’s begun to turn into a bit of a machine, someone who seems incapable of natural human emotions. With a romance that involves a person who doesn’t know who he is, and another who’s barely holding up against emotional and psychological trauma while leading his ship into what seems like a losing battle, it’s understandable that this relationship isn’t one that’d give you unadulterated happiness. And yet, even as these two broken people keep fighting against time to find each other again and again only to lose each other every time, and even as you can’t shake the feeling that they were doomed from the start, you still keep hoping against hope for something good to happen. The Kingdoms is not an easy book, but in the end, Joe and Kite make it worth it.

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. Cliss, Sarah. "Natasha holds author's event at Ely and meets up with some familiar faces" . Retrieved 2 September 2016. The Kingdoms contains multitudes: it is a love story, a seafaring war novel, a time-travel mystery, an alternative history tale, and more. And while each description in the previous sentence is accurate, each description fails to capture all that the book encompasses. there is just so much i could say about the kingdoms. little things like “hey did you know that there was a point where i almost gave this book 4 stars out of sheer spite because how dare natasha pulley hurt me like this”.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. This historical time loop/travel story is mind-boggling. I wanted to piece all those snippets and timelines together so desperately that I had to stop racing myself through the book and put it away occasionally just to think. I remember this feeling while reading Shaun David Hutchinson’s A Complicated Love Story Set in Space. All those fragments from different times gave an insight into other POVs, too, Agatha’s and Madeline’s but mostly Missouri Kite’s—the officer in the Royal Navy, a multiple-layered man who I hated at times. I understood so well why Joe was furious at him. Those turtles and Fred! My heart broke. But I kept thinking of Laurent in Captive Prince and treasured Missouri’s kind and soft moments. Author Natasha Pulley’s perhaps most prevalent theme when you consider her list of works as a whole is the concept of time – whether it’s knowing the future, seeing the past unfurl before your eyes in the forms of ghosts, or in the case of her new novel The Kingdoms, seeing the web of timelines, present, future, and potential, unravel and reshape before your very eyes as a consequence of your actions.

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. cup loneliness. the type that stops you right on the verge of crying, so you're just left with a constant hum of wrongness and guilt

I've very rarely met books that were written specifically for me--there are a handful, yes, and I will be very glad to have this book join their ranks. During his time in the asylum Joe has the opportunity to learn some basic facts about Londres and how he is expected to behave. After a few days a kindly French man answers the asylum’s advertisement and claims he is Joe’s master. Joe, like most English people in this French colony, is a slave. 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. Ultimately, The Kingdoms succeeds on a number of levels – it is an entertaining yarn, a beautiful character study replete with a human streak and beating heart, a pulse-pounding action-adventure, and a twisty-turny science-fiction thriller about the power of our choices and of the consequences that those same choices must bring. One of the best novels of 2021 and one well-worthy of revisiting again and again, The Kingdoms solidifies Pulley’s presence of one of the UK’s best young writers and a major voice to look out for. The novel begins with Tournier arriving in London on a train, with no recollection of who he is, where he has been, or where he is going. A helpful stranger on the platform at Gare du Roi helps orient him and he finds himself, temporarily, in a hospital. Diagnosed with epilepsy that causes amnesia, Tournier and the reader are both allowed to discover this alternative London in which the French have conquered England, together. Tournier's education includes the discovery that he is a slave, married to his brother's widow, and is a knowledgeable engineer. These discoveries, along with a tattered and mysterious postcard featuring the Eilean Mor lighthouse, eventually leads him to abandon his wife and daughter to take a posting at the isolated lighthouse and try to determine what happened to the lighthouse keepers who had gone missing.

Wheeler, Sara (15 September 2017). "A 19th-Century Smuggler in the Peruvian Andes". The New York Times . Retrieved 29 December 2017. What I know is : atmospheric books so quietly heartbreaking and full of yearning will always find a path to my heart. The Kingdoms is no different. This is alternative history with a time-travel twist, but really this is a character-driven story about longing and love. I adored everything about it. I had already put some pieces together, but when I got to the last two parts of the story, my heart started to melt and beat faster and faster at the same time. What a glorious ending! I have to restrain myself from reading another of Natasha's books right away, and I can't wait for her new book (sci-fi, the blurb reads like Winter’s Orbit) to come out in March 2024! this year i discovered the voice of natasha pulley and oh goodness, what an enchanting voice to know. singing a siren song, spinning a rich golden tale, an undercurrent of tender magic wrapping around and pulling you under. where has this been all my life? 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.

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People generally agree that it’s harder to review books you’ve enjoyed; that it’s harder to find the words to describe all the ways in which you loved a book, than it is to explain why you hated it. This statement, for me, has never been more true than right now.

Codega, Linda H. (19 February 2020). "Peering Into The Lost Future of Pepperharrow by Natasha Pulley". Tor.com . Retrieved 24 May 2021.

This book is not for everyone. It's...complicated and horrible and aching, it's full of sharp edges and burn scars and murder, it's about history and love and what those two concepts do to people. It's about ships. And telegraphs. Lighthouses and time travel. Tortoises. Abuse and the decisions that lead to it. There are a lot of reasons why people will not like this book.