A Long Reign, by Victoria L. Szulc

Today I'm looking at A Long Reign, a book I picked up some time ago in one of the numerous kindle book deals that I see on Amazon. The book starts with an interesting premise, the world is ruled by an immortal Queen Victoria whose armies conquered North America after both sides had been exhausted by the Civil War. Lavinia James, a girl from the farmlands of Missouri, joins the Underground resistance to fight the redcoat armies, topple Victoria, and restore the world to its proper timeline.

As I said, the book started with an interesting premise, but unfortunately there is a lot that's wrong with this book. The result is it feels like a very, very rough first draft that desperately needed an editor to go through and help knock off the rough edges and polish it up. The writing just doesn't flow well and sometimes gets downright confusing so it definitely could have used a second set of eyes to improve it. This book also relies heavily on sex as drama and ordinarily am not a huge fan of that being done in fiction. This book has attempted rape, actual rape, and Lavinia having to seduce other people as an agent of the Underground and hates herself for doing it, so sex causes a lot of the drama in this book and because the writing is so rough it makes it very hard for me to read personally.

There are also a lot of plot points that don't make sense which makes this book feel even more like a rough draft. I assume that Dr. Carthage and Ebersol replaced Victoria with a humanoid robot but what they hoped to accomplish by doing this isn't made clear. They seem to be in control of the Empire but what they're planning on doing with the empire doesn't make a lot of sense. It's implied that they're strip-mining the entire earth for resources and creating an army of robots made from human bones and skin, but to what purpose remains unclear. I mean, once you've killed everyone on earth and have your own army of robots and a pile of all the world's resources, now what? Are you going to colonize Mars? If Szulc explained what the villains were trying to accomplish maybe it'd make more sense, but as the book is it's like they're being evil just to be evil.

And this doesn't get on the political and economic situation. At least in Missouri it seems like a large portion of the population has been enslaved to harvest farm produce that gets shipped off...elsewhere for the good of the Empire while they're controlled by the British garrison of soldiers. Now there's a point where they separate the men and women in the slave camps and say the slaves aren't allowed to reproduce anymore because it means more mouths to feed. So the slaves are separated. And then the garrison announces that the men need female companionship so once a year they'll select from the women who have reached maturity to serve as wives or paramours. Which implies that the soldiers will be reproducing because they'll be having sex with the slave women, which therefore defeats the purpose of keeping the slaves from reproducing in the first place. And even before the slaves start being harvested for skin and bones, the British keep working their slaves to death and bringing in more slaves from elsewhere. It just doesn't make sense to me and tells me that this book definitely needed an editor.

The result is a book that desperately needed an editor to help put it into shape. There are some ideas with potential, but the book feels very much like a rough first draft which could be expanded, edited, and improved. As the book is right now, I unfortunately can't say that it's worth reading.

- Kalpar