The Kingdoms: Natasha Pulley

Product Information

I’m hooked on Natasha Pulley’s writing, and I want to read all her other books as soon as I can! Not want. NEED. The Kingdoms was the second one I read, and I am in awe. Again. or maybe the sands of time are too powerful and love will slip through your fingers each time you think you’ve finally grasped it? maybe you should read the kingdoms and find out :’) 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! Joe remembers his name but nothing else from before arriving at the station. He is helped by a kind man and taken to an asylum where the doctors explain he is suffering from a relatively common form of epilepsy which causes amnesia. 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.

the first 20% or so is very interesting, if still shot through with some of the problems I'm going to go into more detail on below. The crumb trail of the mystery is satisfying and the prose is good and isn't getting sabotaged by extraneous POV changes. 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. Shortly after arriving, Joe receives a visit from a mysterious man he pulls from the water on a stormy night. He leaves Joe with a warning to leave the lighthouse and never return but the two soon meet again: this time in the year 1807 after he’s kidnapped by the crew onboard a ship looking for an electrical engineer to help them win a war and change the outcome of a future Joe had been taken from. he hadn’t imagined to, but all the way home, like an idiot, he’d been stitching a fragile cloak of half-imagined hope, barely with the substance of thule but there all the same. trying on hopes like what was no better than playing dress-up with her clothes.” Amidst the characters, we find a thrilling, at-seas plot that is riddled with dizzying action set-pieces that isn’t afraid to show the real toll of war upon human lives – sympathetic characters are brutally killed off, important characters are wiped off the chessboard altogether, and malignant presences rise to further power and prominence – all while Joe attempts to discover the truth about his missing memory, who he was before he awoke in Londres, and the series of truths at the very heart of The Kingdoms‘ elaborate game.The story starts with Joe arriving at a train station in late Victorian London, except it is called Londres, everyone is speaking French and the fact that Joe is speaking English is treated with suspicion. Natasha Pulley is a renowned British author of historical fiction and fantasy stories. She is well known for writing The Watchmaker of Filigree Street series. The first book of this series, having the same name as the series, has won the Betty Trask Award. Winning this award became the highlight of Pulley’s career as she got noticed by the who’s who of the writing world. Author Pulley made her debut in the world of publishing in 2015. She was born on December 4, 1988, in the United Kingdom. She completed her education in English Literature from Soham Village College, New College, Oxford. Thereafter, Pulley obtained her master’s degree in creative writing from East Anglia University in 2012. Following her graduation, Pulley began teaching English. She was employed in China as a teacher of English for 6 weeks. Kite and Joe—along with pretty much everyone else in this book—experience trauma in spades. People, including children, die suddenly and brutally, and the characters barely seem to react—this is understandable and almost expected given the hard realities of war. The book, however, doesn’t give you enough time to process what the characters have gone through and what they’ve done. I have no idea why the protagonist Joe, and his love interest Kite "fell in love". From Kite's perspective I get it: we are bashed over the head with how charming and handsome Joe is meant to be (though it hardly shows up in his actual actions, and really only when the plot demands he be charming to get something the plot needs for him). From Joe's perspective though, it seemed... proximity based affection? Otherwise, their love story got lost in the fugue that shrouds the rest of the novel. At some point it becomes a thing between them to (barf) give tattoos as expressions of affection. The Watchmaker of Filigree Street (hardcovered.). Bloomsbury Circus. pp.1–325. ISBN 978-1408854280.

the thing is, pulley doesn’t write romance per se: she writes books about love. at its core, everything that happens is because of the love that the characters have for each other. the whole idea of how home is a person, that soft but intense yearning. the epitome of fist fighting fate for a shot at reuniting with your person. Das erlebt nämlich der Protagonist Joe Tournier, der im Jahr 1898 aus einem Zug in Londres aussteigt und keine Erinnerungen mehr an seine Vergangenheit hat. London bzw. Londres ist ihm eigentlich vertraut, aber alles erscheint im völlig anders. Er zweifelt an seiner Wahrnehmung, an seinem Verstand und auch an sich selbst, bis plötzlich eine Postkarte eintrifft - aus dem Jahr 1805. A history-based time travel adventure/romance, taking place in Great Britain around the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Reviews

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.

Lots and lots of spoilers next, and plot ramblings, likely all very messy and some very shallow observations 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”. the kingdoms is soft gay magical realism at its finest. its woven with magic. magic that seeps through each word, wrapping around you. magic that wraps around elements of time travel and mysteries, guns and ships and sacrifice.

Now, I'm not going to lie, in the middle of this book I thought this just might not get 5 stars from me, because there was just so much hurt, and I didn't see how this could end in anything but devastation and heartache. But she did it! Natasha Pulley, you absolute genius!!! And apart from the factual issues, there are other problems. In several places, the plot relies on an unlikely sequence of events. As with the French plan to win the Battle of Trafalgar by killing Nelson and all the senior officers of the British fleet, which just seemed ridiculous to me. And then there's enforcing Naval discipline by putting names up on the 'Outstanding Idiots' board, rather than by flogging. Certainly more humane, but utterly inconsistent with the supposed time. Times, Los Angeles (10 July 2015). " 'Watchmaker of Filigree Street' is a magical tale of Victorian London". Los Angeles Times . Retrieved 2 September 2016. 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 hope this isn't a stylistic choice meant to be artsy because it's not. It's distracting and irritating, like when a gnat keeps flitting around your head.